The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk - 688: Dr. Henry Cloud - The Difference Between a Dream & a Vision, Why Revenue Is Not a Goal, the 5-Step Model for Achieving Any Goal, and Why the Highest Performers Seek the Most Coaching

Episode Date: May 17, 2026

Go to www.LearningLeader.com/Becoming for my new book, The Price of Becoming This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver. Dr. Henry Cloud is a clinical psychologist, leadership consultant, and New York Times bestselling author whose books have sold nearly 20 million copies worldwide. His titles include Boundaries, Integrity, Necessary Endings, and Trust. For three decades, he has worked with leaders, helping them close the gap between where they are and where they want to be. His newest book is Your Desired Future: The Five Essential Steps That Take You Where You Want to Go. Key Learnings Henry's five-step model for getting from here to there: Vision (clear and compelling) Talent (engaging the right people around you) Strategy and plan (how you'll win) Measurement and accountability (how you'll know) Fix and adapt (course-correcting in real time) At the age of 16, Henry's daughter asked, "Dad, how do people become singer-songwriters?" Henry went out to the garage and brought in his whiteboard. Lucy rolled her eyes. He gave her the five-step model. A couple years later, she published a song called "Crash and Learn" that got bought by CBS, the CW Network, and featured on Spotify and Apple Music. We tend to create departments and businesses in our own image. Of the five components, we're going to be good at two, maybe three. But the others still have to happen. That's where most leaders fail. Only humans can picture a desired future state. Finley is Henry's Doberman. When the FedEx guy comes to the door, she runs to it, and barks every time. Henry has never seen her stop and ask herself: "I wonder if that barking will help me get to where I want to be on Thursday." Most leaders are operating like Finley. Working hard. Doing what they've always done. Never stopping to ask if any of it is getting them where they want to be. You need an observing ego. The worst thing you can do is hit the accelerator harder when you're going down the wrong road and you don't even know where you're going. Tony Blair, while Prime Minister, spent half a day a week sitting by himself next to a pond in reflection. Warren Buffett spends an hour and a half a day at his desk staring out the window.  A revenue number is not a vision. The single worst vision statement Henry ever heard: "We want to be a $50 million company." It provides no clarity of what the company is going to do.   A vision is a compelling picture of a future state that makes people want to sacrifice for it. If your vision wouldn't inspire anyone to get out of bed early, it's a metric, not a vision. Will Guidara created a "dream maker" role at Eleven Madison Park. Their job: listen for clues from guests, then create a personalized, unexpected, memorable experience the guest will never forget and tell everyone about. Trust Fuels Investment. People invest in leaders who feel like they understand them. You're taking your team into a war. They've got to have deep trust with you. The first thing a leader has to do is develop deep, deep trust and let their team know that they understand the pressure they're under. "A vision can die without a plan or without people." Alan Mulally's weekly 7:00 AM Thursday meeting at Ford. Every VP had to give every project a red, yellow, or green status. When Mulally first arrived, the company was hemorrhaging money. Everyone was holding up green. He said: "How can you be holding up green when here's the reality over here? I need some reality in here." When one VP finally held up red, Mulally moved him to sit next to him. The wrong view of accountability is looking back to spank somebody for what they didn't do. The right view of accountability is a tool to make sure we reach our destination. You get what you create or what you allow. Henry was working with a global CEO whose team had cultural problems. Henry kept asking, "Why is that?" After a few rounds, the CEO finally said, "I guess I am ridiculously in charge, aren't I?" If you are the one actually in charge, you are ridiculously in charge. Either you're creating it, or you're allowing it. Accountability answers two questions: Did we do what we said we were going to do? If not, why not? Don't just tell people to "do better." Run a root cause analysis. Maybe they don't have the tools. Maybe you gave them competing goals. Maybe it's a leadership problem. If we executed perfectly, did we get the result we expected? If yes, pour on the gas. If no, go back up the model and adjust your strategy. Most leaders measure goals, not activities. Goals are lagging indicators. You can measure them after it's over. It's too late. Measure activities. Did we do this week what we said we were going to do? Micro drivers matter. Henry worked with a CEO who built multi-billions in valuation from a one-office company who was excellent with micro drivers. It's an atomic compression of the 80/20 rule. He knew the specific activities at each level of the business that actually moved the needle, and he made those objects of extreme awareness, focus, training, and deliberate practice. Peter Drucker said, "Nothing's worse than perfectly executing the wrong things." The number one thing the greatest leaders share: character. Not moral or ethical character. Your makeup as a person. How you're glued together. Integrity comes from the word that means wholeness. The great performers are drivers of tasks and relationships. The highest performers utilize coaching the most. Henry expected the disastrous leaders  to be the ones calling. It was the exact opposite. The ones crushing it are the ones who reach out. The struggling ones rarely do. The greatest leaders reverse the law of entropy: things get worse over time. But entropy only applies to a closed system. Open the system to a new energy source from the outside plus intelligence to organize it, and you can reverse it. That's what coaches, mentors, and advisors do. A leader is a closed system when the only voices they're ever listening to are the ones in their head. The greatest leaders embrace negative realities. They move toward problems. Not to nuke them, but to either resolve them or transform them into something better. Reflection Questions In how many areas of your life are you just barking at the door, working hard at activities without ever stopping to ask if any of it is getting you where you want to go? Is your current vision a metric, or a compelling picture of a future state that would make people want to sacrifice for it? Where in your life are you a closed system? Whose voices outside your head could open you up to new energy and intelligence? More Learning #229 - Dr. Henry Cloud: Be So Good They Can't Ignore You #050 - Dr. Henry Cloud: Integrity is the Wake You Leave Behind #682 - Will Guidara: Adversity is a Terrible Thing to Waste Podcast Chapters 00:00 The Price of Becoming – Pre-Order Now! 01:13 Meet Dr. Henry Cloud 02:40 The Leadership GPS: Where Are You Going? 04:54 Step 2: Building the Right Team Around You 06:09 Steps 3-5: Strategy, Measurement, and Adapt 10:45 Why the Best Leaders Carve Out Time to Think 15:50 Why a Revenue Number Is Not a Vision 18:20 Crafting a Vision People Will Sacrifice For 23:12 The HVAC Story, Joe Girard, and the Dream Maker 27:38 Trust: The First Thing Every Leader Must Build 30:04 Alan Mulally's Red-Yellow-Green Meeting at Ford 32:38 How to Run Status Reviews That Actually Work 34:26 Accountability Should Be an Immune System, Not Autoimmune 38:18 Measure Activities, Not Goals 43:10 Micro Drivers: The Atomic 80/20 Rule 45:14 The Voices Outside Your Head: Peers and Accountability 47:47 The #1 Trait of Sustained Excellence: Character 50:39 The Greatest Leaders Reverse Entropy 56:17 EOPC

My next book, The Price of Becoming, will be out in a couple of months. In the meantime, I have sent it to a few authors who I deeply admire and look up to. One of them is Jack Carr, the incredible Navy SEAL who's also written a number of New York Times bestsellers. And this is what Jack said about the price of becoming. Quote, The Price of Becoming is a clear-eyed look at transformation. and the cost that comes with it. No hype, no shortcuts, just the truth about change,

and the discipline required to sustain it. This is a must read if you are serious about doing work that matters. Buy it, read it, then go forth and crush. Again, that's from Jack Carr, United States Navy Seal, a number one New York Times bestselling author. I would love if you would pre-order the price of becoming right now. You can do it at learningleader.com or go straight to Amazon and order the price of becoming. Thank you so much.

Welcome to The Learning Leader Show presented by Insight Global. I am your host, Ryan Hawk. Thank you so much for being here. Go to learningleader.com for show notes of this and all podcast episodes. Go to LearningLeader. Now, on to tonight's featured leader. It's Dr. Henry Cloud, a clinical psychologist and bestselling author of boundaries, Necessary Endings, Integrity, and Trust.

His newest is called Your Desired Future. Henry has spent the past few decades in the room with some of the most demanding CEOs and leadership teams in the world. During our conversation, we discuss why most leaders are operating like Henry's dog Finley. They're working hard, doing what they've always done, never stopping to ask, though, if any of it is actually getting them to where they want to be. Then he shares the difference between a dream and a vision and why a revenue target is one of the worst vision statements a leader can have.

And then Henry shares what the best leaders he's worked with all have in common and why the highest performers are always the ones most eager to seek out coaching. So good. Ladies and gentlemen, please enjoy my conversation with Dr. Henry Cloud. Let's start with your daughter, Lucy.

You thanked her in the acknowledgement section of your new book for her early adoption of the model to publish her song Crash and Learn. Can you tell me that story as well as what the model is? And then I think we're going to dive a little bit deeper. Well, the model is.

a long time ago, you know, working with high performers in a lot of fields and leaders and executive teams, I'd go to an executive team and say, okay, you guys are leading this company. You're the leaders. What is leadership? I give my three by five card and I'm asking right down, what is leadership? And I would get eight different answers. And all of them would be true. But what I started to feel the real need for a number of years ago was if we could have a simple

model that kind of factor analyze the essence of what leaders have to do to move something from here to there, that would be helpful, have a little GPS for that. And so did a factor analysis as best I could, all the leadership stuff, and on, on, on. And long and the short of it is, develop this model and have been using it with leaders and companies for a long time. Lucy, our youngest, who, you know, I mean, she's been a singer since she was three years old. You know, and she would always, when she started writing, have a little book, or she was writing songs. Then one morning, she comes into the kitchen, and she'd be at about 16 at this time.

And she said, Dad, how do people become singer-songwriters? I said, oh, is that what you want to do? I mean, I kind of knew it, but she never had stated it. Like, she goes, yeah, that's what I want to do. And I said, well, Lucy, I got the path for you. I went out at the garage. I brought in my whiteboard, and she rolls her eyes and going, here's another psychologist, lifeless.

I said, all right, I'm going to give you the way it happens. First thing I put up there, you got to know what you want. You got to know it clearly, and we call that a vision. What's your vision? I mean, it was unbelievable. It was so clear and compelling that we did not spend any time on that. I mean, she even named three or four people that are doing exactly what she wanted to do. I said, all right, Liz.

So the second thing is, engaging the talent that you're going to need to get you there. And she looks at me and she goes, well, you and mom said I have talent. I said, Lucy, I'm not talking about your talent. I'm talking about the talent that you've got to bring around you to become a singer-songwriter. Because knowing how to sing and write songs is not all you're going to need to get you there. And she said, oh, and she instantly got it. She said, oh, I need a new guitar teacher.

I said, why? She said, because I've gone as far as I can go. I mean, I have to look up stuff on YouTube, learn chords. We just keep doing the same thing over and over. I said, you got it. And so we started talking about that. I said, what do you think you need? She said, well, I need to do some auditions.

I said, all right, well, let's find some people know how to get in playhouses and all that. And she says, and I don't know how to record, I mean, really, or produce. And this is where she got fortunate. it, Kevin Jonas, senior who produced the Jonas brothers, whose sons, heard her sing, and he said, oh, my gosh, I haven't heard that since Timmy Lobato. I want to manage her. And so she brought those, the point being that she put her team together

with the right talent. All right, well, the third thing is, how are you going to get there? How are you going to win? That's the strategy piece, and the strategy has a plan. So we developed the strategy of the plan. And then next thing you got to know is, how do you know you're working the plan and you're getting there? It's called measurement and accountability.

So what are we going to measure and how we're going to hold everybody and you accountable to that? And then when you find things, when you measure things and they're not right, you've got to quickly fix and adapt them. So that's kind of the model, Ryan, and long story short, it was only a couple of years later that she published a song called Crash and Learn that got bought by CBS Television and the CW Network when featured Spotify. and, you know, Apple music and, you know, new artists to watch, and she's kind of on the path. But the lesson in there is a lesson that I find, you know, for all of us, really. We tend to do things in the way that we're wired, and we'll put our best efforts and do everything we know to do.

But we tend to create departments and companies and businesses in our own image. So what that means is, of the components it must be present, we're going to be good at two, maybe three of them, but we still have to make sure the others are happening. And that's a lot of when you get in the depth of how this works. And everybody's heard those components before. There's nothing new about the components,

but what the book does is I go into the neuroscience and the anatomy and the physiology and the model of the human body of how it's wired to get anything from here to there. And when you start looking at that and what your brain actually does to accomplish a goal, it is unbelievably instructive.

And that's kind of where the book goes. We all know those components, but why do some of them fail and why do some of them not fail? Another family member that you talk about, you said, you provided the perfect metaphorical guide for this book, keep doing what you do so well.

And that is Finley. Who's Finley? Yeah. So I've always loved big working breeds. I've had five German Shepherds and Rottweiler. And now we have Finley, our Doberman. What I love about him, you know, I love training them. I got trained to train them, right?

So I love dog training. And they're a lot easier in people, by the way. But the thing that Finley showed me was, you know, Finley, the great thing about these big working breeds, first of all, they're lovers. We call Finley Velcro. I mean, she's just got to be like that all over you. But they're wired to do work,

and they're wired to do a mission, and they're wired to do a task. So the FedEx guy or somebody comes to the front door, and I'm telling you, Ryan, you don't want to be that guy unless that door is secure because she does her job. She runs through a crap. And then we go up, and if it's friend,

we say, okay, family, your ears go back, she'll lick your face off. But if it's a stranger, she'll stay there and sit. But here's the thing. I've never seen her run to the front door and bark and then stop and say to herself, I wonder if that was helpful. Did I bark the right amount? Did I bark at the right time?

And here's the bigger question that applies to what all this is about. I've never heard Finley say, I wonder if that barking will help me get to where I want to be on Thursday. That capacity is reserved for the human species. You know, Dobermans do what they're wired to do and train to do, and they run on that wiring. Well, we run on that wiring as well until we get above that wiring. We're the only ones that can picture a, I call it, desired future state that does not exist. and then organize the chain of activities and expenditure of effort and energy in order to bring that

result about. And so that's the difference between us and Finley. As great as she is, she will never sit in the living room and go, you know, Thursday, I'd really like to go to a butcher shop, you know, and get some of that steak before anybody else has chewed on it. And so that's my vision. I'm going to figure out how to get that. She didn't do that.

She just goes like she's wired. But we can do that. Did you see that video recently of Mark Andreessen talking about reflection and being a reflective person by chance? I think I did see a clip of that. So, I mean, without getting into all of it, essentially he's stating that the people who are leaving a dent in the world are just kind of plowing forward. They're getting after it. They're doing work. They rarely look back.

They don't reflect. They just go. And I'm maybe butching part of it. But that's essentially the gist of it. He got a ton of pushback. And I think he even kind of fought back against the pushback and it's like, just go. They're busy thinking. We're busy doing that type of thing.

And like most things in life, I'm guessing the ones who leave a dent, it's a combination of both. They're both reflective and their doers. But since you're a thoughtful dude and you've written this about vision and you've left a very positive dent in the world and you're still kind of in the prime of your career, what do you think about that? That reflection and doing and impacting others in a positive way and his kind of mindset of just. go and do, just go and do, forget about the past, just move forward. What do you think? Well, I think it's one of the hallmarks of the greatest performers. He had the opportunity to do an interview with Tony Blair when he was prime minister.

And he told me that while he was prime minister, a half a day a week, a half a day, he would go by himself and sit next to a pond and just think. half a day a week. This dude's super busy. Warren Buffett, I think, said that an hour and a half a day, he sits at his desk and stares out the window. Now, we can get into the science of that. I give you another example.

One of my golfing heroes, and as is everybody's, our heart goes out to him right now. He's got some struggles. But when Tiger hit the tour, I mean, he was, what, 20 years old, maybe 21, his first effort as a professional to play in a major, he plays in the Masters. Nobody ever even qualifies that early. He did. Nobody ever makes the cut if they do. They're out there on the weekend. Not only does he qualify, make the cut. He wins the Masters. And not only did he win it, he won about like 14 shots. All right. The very next week, I think it was the next week.

he calls a coach, swing coach, and he says, I will never achieve my goal if I don't correct some things that were going on all week, if I don't get better in a certain area. Really, I think it had to do his hip speed or something like that, and he said Augusta was forgiving with its wide fairways. But the point is, the capacity to sit and observe one's ways, sit and observe the way that one's ways are or are not getting us to where we want to go, that's the essence of what psychologists call an observing ego.

I mean, you know, you look at all the emotional intelligence stuff, and what's number one, awareness of self and awareness of other. That's not doing, that's reflection. And we have to look back for two reasons. There's some stuff we want to take forward. I mean, some stuff worked, but getting to the essence of what was it in that context that worked that applies here. And there was some stuff that didn't work, or maybe some stuff that doesn't apply here.

And that reflective process, what we want to take forward is DNA, and we don't want to let the mutations go forward. And so the observing ego, the eye above the eye is able to do that. It's very, very, very important. You're talking about doers, doers, doers. I don't know what the pushback was about. to hear it. But the worst thing you can do is hit the accelerator harder when you're going down the wrong road and you don't even know where you're going. Your brain doesn't do that. Your brain

knows where it's going and it's able to guide that. The pushback was from the statement is just false. I mean, to say that history's greatest entrepreneurs or leaders or people who've left the dent in the world, the claim was that they weren't reflective. They didn't look back. They just pushed forward constantly. And that just is a, it's just false. So, I mean, rightfully, there was pushback because it wasn't really an opinion. It was someone claiming to state a fact and that fact is sometimes people make things up, I guess. There's a reason we have a phrase ready, aim, fire. And people that are fire, ready aim, you drive everybody crazy and impulsive. Sometimes that works, though, doesn't it?

Well, of course it works sometimes. But I tell you what, when it works, it's because of deeply ingrained pattern recognition that has become intuitive, it feels like, to you. And it's automatic. But there was a past that created that. Yeah. Okay. I want to get into vision. An example you write about the book, what you call the single worst vision statement.

You ever heard a CEO who said the vision was to hit? I've actually worked with the leader like this. And he wasn't a bad leader, but this was very, his business. good a leader as he could be if he had a different. Yes, that's for sure. You said this specific CEO, they set a vision to hit a specific revenue number. And there are other leaders who do this where they're like, this is what we're going to do. By this point, we're going to be a $10 billion or whatever.

Well, there's nothing wrong with a goal. Yeah. And there's nothing wrong with a metric. Yeah, yeah. So why is that a bad vision statement? Well, I asked the whole team. I said, what's your vision for the company? They said, we want to be a $50 million.

company. And I said, that may be one of the worst vision statements I've ever heard. Because it provides no clarity of what that company is going to be doing. As important as that, it provides no clarity of what's going to be different for whom. And that's a big deal in a vision. When Martin Luther King said, I see a day when a man is judged by the quality of character and not the color of his skin. I mean, that tells us where to go and what it's going to look like. And it starts, and when your body says,

I'm here and I want to be over there, there's a lot of clarity to what that means, but what your brain actually does is as soon as the vision is clear, it goes to work in activating these other systems of the path that are going to help you get there. A vision just doesn't sit by itself. It starts working.

right then. And another thing it does, a $50 million company, is that compelling enough to somebody give their life to? Changing civil rights, that's compelling enough to suffer for, to get up in the morning, to delay gratification, and a result that is so rich, that's very different than $50 billion. I mean, for some people, you know, And the ones that see life is all about money, they're going to get to the end of the ladders when it gets the wrong building. But it doesn't get the brain and the organization and the people beginning to get organized to get where you want to go, nor does it provide the fuel. So let's say you're working with a leader and Henry, my vision is fill in the blank and it's a dollar amount, a revenue target. What do you say? What questions do you ask? How do you help them get to a more compelling vision statement?

I would want to get them to a place where whatever they came up with, it clearly defined a desired future state that did something specific that was going to make something different for whoever they're trying to make a different for. And I would begin to get them into a compelling kind of nature of that and begin, well, what, what compelling? compels you about $50 million, and does that compel the guy on the factory floor? Does that compel your customers? Does that compel your investors? And there's a whole section in the book on what desire actually begins to do to the system into even the neurobiological of activation of learning modes and a bunch of other things that simply the constructive desire does.

And we got to get to how desirable this really is. And that can be positive or negative. We got a great desire to end something negative or a great desire for something positive. So it would go on. Now, the thing about the $50 million, I go, you know what? That may be a great metric to tell us if we're getting there or not in one dimension. I'm not against smart goals. I mean, that's sort of like a smart goal, right?

But having a thermometer or, you know, a tachometer doesn't tell you whether or not you're going to be the Olympian that you want to be or get to the destination that you want to get to. I was working at one of the largest HVAC companies in the U.S. And they're the ones that go fix the big box stores when they break, you know, if you're in Oklahoma in August and your air conditioner goes down, that's a bad day because customers, you know, and leaving, people can't work. So that's what they do. So we're doing an off-site with their service people. And I gave them the question, when you go on a service call,

what's your vision for that call? And they said, well, you're going to get it up at running? And I said, come on, guys. We can do better than that. And all the stuff we just talked about. By the end of our work, their vision for a service call was that when we get done, Home Depot or Target or wherever it is,

they are going to be glad their air conditioner broke down so they got to deal with us. Now, that's a little different path. Certainly it includes that things are going to be working, but it's way more than that. What that led to was, you're talking about customer retention? Well, the managers of stores, when they move over to the other brand or the competitor,

they don't move into X, Y, Z company and call their air conditioner guy. They go back and call the one that they love and move them to a new company. I mean, you're getting into a lot of really, really stuff that matters. Man, that reminds me of Joe Girard. Have you ever heard of Joe Gerard? Probably not. Do you know who Joe Girard is, the car sales guy? No.

Okay, maybe. He said a Guinness Book of World Records for like most cars sold in a day, a week, a year, whatever. And here's what made him good. This is exactly what you just talked about. Joe will get done selling a car and he'll say, hey, I hope you get a lemon. And they go, what? He goes, I hope you get a lemon. Lemon's a bad car, right?

A car doesn't work. And they go, Joe, what are you talking about? Why would you hope I get a bad car? And he goes, because then I get a chance to show off. I am going to go so above and beyond for you if the thing doesn't go right. And after I go so above and beyond for you to fix it and to make it right and to get you in the right car, you're going to tell all your friends. And then they're going to tell all their friends and they're going to tell all their friends. And that's why I'm the greatest car salesman who ever lived. And so, again, there's a lot more to that story.

But my point is you, like working with them, got to them to an actual real vision as opposed to just saying, well, when it breaks, we fix it. Right. Like there's so much more compelling to that. And so I'm curious, what's that process? process like for if you're going to work with any leader of something that's basic of, well, we just fix the air conditioner when it's broken to something that's a grander, bigger vision. Like, how do we get there? What are the steps we can take so that all of us could implement a vision statement like that for whatever it is that we do for work? Well, one of them is to get deep into your own heart. Why are you doing this? Because one of the things we notice, you know, all the research is shown is purpose really

loads on not only thriving but on performance. And if people aren't sensing a higher purpose for what they're doing, that their actual work loads on and moves the needle on, then the vision is less than optimal. In the book, I tell a story about a researcher that went in to visit a friend who was in a coma at 11 o'clock at night in ICU, and obviously he's in a coma. He's just, want to sit there and pray for him and just kind of, you know, be there. And when he was there, the night janitor comes in. And, you know, he's got this big bag with him.

First of all, he kind of sweeps up. But then he goes to this bag and he pulls out a painting, you know, a print and puts it over here on the wall. And he pulls out a vase with some flowers and these straightening up and doing all this. And the researcher goes, what are you doing? Because he's a janitor and he's doing all this other stuff. He said, what are you doing? He said, oh, what I do here is very important.

I'm helping Mr. Jones get well. He said, oh, how are you doing that? And he said, well, what the scientists tell us is, when he wakes up, if he notices a bright and inviting and warm and clean and beautiful environment, it stimulates his body to heal faster. And when the doctors and nurses are in here working and making decisions, the environment around them really makes their brains work better.

See, what I do here is very important. I'm helping Mr. Jones get well. That's bigger than my vision is to have a clean hospital. That is so cool, man. Or look at our buddy Will Godera. Yeah. What about him? Well, you know, he had the number one restaurant in the world.

And when he was number 50, he goes to the awards thing, and they don't know what number they're going to be. You know, he started with the last, and he gets called first, which was last. And he's sitting there going, I'm in the top 50 restaurants in the world, but how do you get to number one? And then he had a realization. Now, this is where Vision comes in to play. He knew that every one of those 50, their food is not going to be a big differentiator. I mean, every one of those, their food, is the best in the world. How do you get one micro calorie better than the, and who's going to notice that? So he said, how can we win? He came up with something as everybody knows if you've read the book, and if you hadn't read it, you should. We're going to have unreasonable hospitality.

And so then you go through the sale, you know, there was a strategy and a team and all that to get there. So what he did was he created a strategy and a position. I think he called the Dreammaker. And the Dreammaker, a few people would be in the restaurant. This is Love in Madison, I think was the name of it in New York. And the Dreammaker was on call. Okay. The servers, when they were around the table, they would listen to conversation.

And if they heard something from the guests that they could lateral off to the Dreammaker, to go turn into an unforgettable moment emotionally for them, the Dreammaker would go do it. Here's an example. This couple was eaten there, and they said, I can't believe the flight got canceled. We're not going, and they started talking to it. What happened?

Well, we were going to Tahiti or somewhere, or the Caribbean saved up for this beach vacation, and it's our anniversary around and other particulars, but they're headed to this beach thing. Passes it off to the Dreammaker. The Dreammaker goes out, gets bags of sand, they got a special room over here, they wouldn't be in use, makes the whole thing into a beach, brought in some palm trees, blew up air swimming pool, a couple of beach chairs, took them in there and served him in their dinner.

They're never frigginger forget that. That's a different vision than, you know, we want to have great fit. Yeah, how would you apply that for, let's say somebody, Henry is a SVP of whatever at a huge company in America, and they got really aggressive goals and a very demanding CEO, and they're really money-focused. Hit the goal, hit the goal, man. We've got to grow X percent, whatever.

Nothing wrong with that. Right, right. Agree. I've been in that environment. For that person who's facing that pressure and thinking about that and trying to hit that and hire good people, how would you help them cast a vision, create a vision that's inspiring for their people to help exceed their goals that are being

set by the CEO of the company? One of the things that I would want them to do is I wrote a book called trust. Now, trust fuels investment. And the first big dynamic in trust is we trust somebody and we engage and we invest in people that we feel like understand us. oh, my VP gets me. We're in this circumstance. We've got to hit these goals, all this.

He understands what that's like for me and what I've got to deliver and the pressures I'm under and all that stuff. So the first thing, the first thing I would say to that person is, I think you need to really work on that your team who's got to deliver all this stuff for you and for them,

for the CEO who's demanding. You've got to develop deep trust because you're taking them into a war and they got to follow the platoon leader into that war. And they've got to have deep trust with you and they will follow you. So the first thing I would do with that person is say, you know, we get this vision and goal or whatever it is. But his microvision for that team is I'm going to develop a deep, deep sense of trust

and let them know and have them experience that I am here to help them thrive. in reaching this goal. And de facto, you're already serving the big goal when you do that. So, you know, vision can die without the plan or without people. But it's so important. And a lot of times a vision statement is just a placard on a wall. It has nothing to do with the real stuff that's going to make it happen. One of the other elements of it is accountability, which is a part of this, to keep the plan going.

You write about Alan Malalley's weekly 7 a.m. Thursday meeting at Ford with the color-coded scorecards. Can you tell that story of how that worked from an accountability perspective? You know, I go through a lot of the science of how your brain works and how people's brains work and how we get from here to there. Leaders have to lead people in a way in which their brains can follow them. And that's a big deal. So when you talk about measurement accountability, the human brain, if I, I say, I'm going to, you know, I'm sitting here and I want to go over there. It's already begun to figure out the strategy and the plan to get there,

but it's also developed a measurement and accountability system. You don't even realize this, but if something you've done before like that, or your brain knows how to do, it's already said, you know, that should take about 15 steps and a step every second. and on this direction, and you start to walk. Well, what if you get distracted, and your phone rings, and you stop for a saying? And you really got to get over there by a certain time,

and you stop, at some point your brains are going to go, hey, dude, you've got to get moving, and it gets you back on trial. Think of an airline pilot, okay? They have a vision, and we're going to fly from L.A. to New York. The next thing they do is they engage the talent that's going to help them get there. So they've got the co-pilot and the fuel people and all that.

And then they got the strategy and the plan. They have a flight plan. How are we going to get there? We're going to find an airplane. But what's the plan? Well, certain heading, certain speed, certain altitude. Then you get to the measurement and accountability. A pilot would never take off without their measurement and accountability relationships.

Because the wrong view of accountability is looking back to spank somebody for what they didn't do. the right view of accountability is a tool to make sure we reach our destination. So that pilot takes off, and the first thing that happens in that is her first accountability relationships are instrument panels. It's supposed to be at 40,000 feet. She gives it beep, beep. You're 38,000, and she knows I'm burning too much fuel, got to get up to 40,000, and she quickly fixes what the measurement and accountability systems told her. So if you go back to Malali, what he did was he had all of the VPs and the people that had the different components of what they're doing on a red, yellow, green kind of system.

Every week, they had to go around the table and they'd talk about a specific project, and they would have to give it a red, yellow, or green. And if it's green, we're on track, everything's fine. if it's yellow, okay, so what are the issues? And what he did? And accountability is a big, you know, it sits on some stuff. And part of that is real psychological safety, that it is an environment where we want you to tell us the problems.

And we're here to help you solve them, not shame, you, spank you, fire you, or whatever it is. And it's like in an operating room, you know, if a nurse notices a reading itself or an instrument is off to hold the team account of, oh, we didn't do this, or are we doing this or that's wrong? That's to get to the goal. It's not to make anybody feel bad.

And so what he did was he developed that system. I think the way he tells the story is when he first went in there, they're hemorrhaging money and everything's bad and all this. He goes around the table and everybody's holding up green. He's going, how can you be holding up green when here's the reality over here? He said, basically, I need some reality in here. And I think one guy came up to say, well, I was. probably read, and he asked the guy who said next to him to move and brought the guy that said,

we got problems, said you sit next to me. And it was a great model of your brain's accountability is not afraid of data, and it's not going to flip into an autoimmune disease where it starts eating the body because it doesn't like what the body's doing. Your accountability system is the immune function of your body. And this is why the body as a model for this is so unbelievable. Right, if I've got an infection, what happens? Well, the immune system first sends out what's called a marker cell,

and it names that infection, and it gives the genetic coding of it and the construction of it, so the rest of the body knows what the problem is. And then it sends the T cells to contain it. We're going to let this spread. That's what accountability does. but an autoimmune disease eats the body. We don't want your accountability systems to be eating people. We want your accountability systems to be aiding people.

Thank you for the help. I brought this problem. Now we're getting there. That's what it's for. You told me last time we talked years ago, I've probably repeated it a thousand times to leaders since then. You get what you create or what you allow. I just love to go back to that again

because it's such a useful phrase. As a leader, you're going to get what you create or what you allow, especially when it comes to accountability. And I found that average to decent leaders, they allow things that then lowers their standards and then their eventual results follow, right? We'll talk about leading and lagging in a second because you also write about that in this book. But can you just go more back on that classic line? I learned from you a long time ago as a leader you're going to get what you'd create or what you

allow. Yeah, it came from a conversation. I was having the CEO of a global entity that everyone would know. And there were some issues in his team and sort of the culture of the team and the morale and some division and blah, blah, blah. And so I said, well, why is that? And he said, well, you know, because I brought in so and so from another company. And, you know, he had some, I said, well, why is that? And he said, well, you know, then he started to net sort of spread and they created, you know, the meeting after the meeting.

I said, well, why is that? And every time he would give me a reason, I'd say, well, why is that? And finally he looks at me and he said the best sign. He goes, I guess I am ridiculously in charge, aren't I? I said, yeah. If what's going on in your team and the morale, either you're creating it or you're allowing it to exist. when you're talking about leadership, if you are the one who's actually in charge,

you're ridiculously in charge. And this gets back to when I saw him at the whole model here, and I said, none of us are good at all five. You know, the strengths movement showed us that. But that doesn't mean that all five aren't necessary. Your lungs can't pump blood. I mean, the body has different. Yes, but your prefrontal cortex has a system to make sure they're all doing their job and they're all present.

So if you go back to the accountability and you said people allowed things to go on, and I've seen this many times, you know, great visionaries and they're great in engaging talent or they may be great strategists. But what if their conflict avoidant? What happens to the accountability system? They avoid it. or what if they're overly zealous about accountability? Maybe they should have been an attorney and not a CEO. You know, they want to litigate everything, and they're rushing there and, you know, blow everything up.

That accountability system is broken. They're not good at it. And so it's very important. If we would just look at these five things, am I every day? Is it clear why we're here and what we're doing? even about a sub-goal, clear and compelling desired future. What's going to look like by when?

Have I brought the right talent to what it is I'm trying to do? Are we clear about the strategy and the plan that has who does what by when the activities that drive the strategy and move the needle on that? And are we measuring those activities to answer the question, am I doing what I said I was going to do? Are we doing what we said we were going to do? Are you doing what you said you were going to do? If not, then why not?

Let's do a root cause analysis and figure out why not, and then fix it. Because what accountability does is it answers two really important questions. Did we do what we said we were going to do? That's what measurement does. And you've got to be measuring. activities, probably more so than even goals. Goals is a lagging indicator.

It's after it's over, you know, it's too late. Measuring activities, did we do this week what we said we were going to do in the activities that move the needle? If the answer is no, what most leaders do is, okay, guys, you got to do better. You got to go do that, you know. They never ask the question, well, why not a lot of times? Because what you might find, they don't have the tools they need. or you've given them competing goals or competing activities.

Or, or, or, you know, this could be a leadership problem. That's a root cause analysis. Or it may be a performance problem. You may have somebody that they need to hear, you know, get up and do better next week and we'll let you do that. But if we don't, you know, we're going to find somebody like that. But you got to know why it didn't happen. A.

B, if the accountability said we executed, perfectly. Then you've got to ask a second question. If we did, did we get the result that we expected? If the answer to that is yes, pour on the gas, baby. I mean, this is working. If you're getting a three to one return on ad spend, let's spend more money, right? It's working. But if the answer is we executed perfectly and we didn't get the result, you know, Drucker said nothing's worse than perfectly executing the wrong things. And a lot of people do that because they feel good about how well I did doing this, but it's not getting you anywhere.

And so if the answer is, no, we didn't get the results, then you go back up the model and you've got to look at maybe we need a strategy adjustment. Talking about leading and lagging, you actually write about this when it comes to your own weight loss story. Can you get into leading and lagging and how all that worked with you personally? Yeah, now you've gone from preaching to meddling, as I say. So it's been a few years now, but I went through a rough patch with, I had two total knee replacements in spine surgery. And I was basically in a wheelchair for three years.

I had to travel with a wheelchair, you know, and I sat for three years. And it was a lot of reasons. But I got fat. I mean, I got fat. There's, you know, that's the nice way to say it. And at the sort of when I was getting mobile again, I go, gosh, I got to, I have got to do something about this because I'm a competitive golfer. And I mean, my swing speed, you can kind of get that body around. And I was carrying a, you know, you're supposed to have a six-back.

I had a keg. And I just couldn't move like I was supposed to. So I said, all right, well, you know, how do you lose weight? Well, you eat less and move more. So that's my plan. I'm going to eat less and move more. And I was. I thought.

I mean, I really was. I was eating less and moving more. And I really thought that. And I was really trying. Well, I'm not getting the result I should be getting. So then I'd say, well, I must have a thyroid problem or something because I know I'm not exceeding, you know, my calorie count. And I know I'm doing all my movement I need to do.

And so I said, well, you know, I'm going to look at this. So I got an app that measures all this stuff. and I found one of the great psychological truths to be true. We overestimate how well we're actually doing it. And when I would count up the stuff and look at, oh, oh, that little grab into the snag bin, that was that much, you know. And so the scales are the lagging indicator. But the leading indicators are the activities that move the needle. And what this gets to the essence of in leadership and goal achievement is this.

Am I working on the factors that actually make a difference? The great CEOs that I've worked with, I've got one that is one of the greatest I've ever worked with and it's created multi-billions in valuation from a one-office company. And I actually coined a term. I never had heard this term. Maybe others who said it. But I said, dude, you are the best I've ever seen at what I'm going to call micro-drivers. And he said, what's a micro-driver?

And what he does, which he was doing, he just didn't have a term for it. What he does was he knew the specific activity. at each level of the business that actually move the needle. It's sort of like an atomic compression of the 80-20 rule. And he made those micro-drivers objects of extreme awareness, focus, training, deliberate practice. And that's what's going to move the scales at the end of the day, or the scoreboard at the end of the Super Bowl.

If our measurement is the goal, we're not measuring. We're related to game film on Monday. Yeah. So how did you do it? You look great. You look great. How'd you do it? Oh, almost 40 pounds.

Wow. Thank you. I don't know if I look great, but I look different. You do? Seriously, your golf game is probably as a lagging indicator. What do you do? Did you just the tracking? of it? Is that what was key?

Well, you got to, you got to be measuring the right things. Yeah. Okay. And you got to track it. And you've got to be held accountable and you've got to fix what you find. Now, the question is, do I have the internal structure and resources to do all of that? Or do I need to engage some outside talent to help me do that? Now, in my case, I need some outside of town. I mean, this is why a lot of people, I mean, there are guys that go to the gym every day,

and they would never go to work. They love it so much. You can't get it out of there, and they work on the right things. I'm not one of those guys. Now, I do that in golf. You know, if you go to that, when I was growing up playing competitive golf, I tracked my activities. You know, I'd hit a few hundred balls early in the month.

morning, I'd play 18 holes, I'd count the greens I hit, the greens I miss, how many, three putts or whatever, and then you know what to go work on. And at the end of the day, I'd go to the range again, but then I'd hit, after going on the range, I'd go to the chipping green, and I had a system where for an hour I practiced my shipping, and I would not let myself leave and go home until I'd made three from off the green. And that puts pressure on you. It's like, I can't go home and eat dinner, so I'm making another one, right? But the point is that you're working on the activities that you know move the needle. That's what's important.

And sometimes, for the accountability piece of that is so big, you know, I could do it in golf, but I couldn't do it in the food thing. I needed external structure. And so I needed accountability. If I had an appointment at the gym with a trainer, well, it's not as easy to sleep in. And we know this for me, sir. Nothing stronger than peer accountability as opposed to the boss. One of the common, I'm going to ask you for others,

but one of the commonalities, Henry, I've seen over the past 11 years, 680 plus of these conversations are those people have done an amazing job with surrounding themselves with other high standards, get after it, truth tellers, people that are unafraid to tell them the truth. out of love, right, out of care for them, and they do the same for them. And they also have those equally high standards, and they're always pushing on those standards to increase them. That's one of the commonalities. I'm curious, you spent decades with some of the most impactful CEOs,

senior leaders in all different industries. They've loved your work. They've called you. They want you in their life. What have you found to be some of the commonalities among those leaders who have sustained excellence over an extended period of time. In a short word, character. Here's the problem with that word. Everybody's eyes glaze over because they think, well, I have good character. But what they're meaning is moral and ethical character. When I say character, what I'm talking about is your makeup as a person, how you're

glued together. That is what matters. and good character, I wrote a book called Integrity, which comes from, and the whole thing was about, integrity is more than somebody doesn't lie, cheat, or steal, or you can believe the numbers, or they're the same person in the light they are in the dark, public or private.

Now, that's duplicity. That's not character or integrity. Integrity comes from the word that means wholeness. An integer is a whole number to be integrated. And so the great performers are not just drivers of task and results, which they are. They're also drivers of relationships. And what I mean by drivers, not mowing over everybody, but they're able to do the things that relational competency that loads home performance are able to do.

And so they're not getting there and killing people in the process, which is always going to be short-term success and not long-term. Or they're not really everybody loves them, but we're not getting anywhere. That's going to be short-term and not long-term because the company's got to go somewhere. But they leave a wake behind them of the balancing act of having the relational abilities that drive performance, which is more than being nice. and the aggressive capabilities, which is moving something forward, those capacities together. And that's why the great performers always have coaches.

They don't usually need to know more about markets. They know what they're doing when they get to that level, but they got to work on themselves. And the greatest boards require that kind of leadership development. I've got one client company that says 100 million, dollars a year on individual coaching for their top leaders. And so that gets to when you said, what are some of the things you see in common with these people?

Another way of looking at that is that they reversed the second law of thermodynamics. People, P.M.A. knows physics. That's the law of entropy, which means things get worse over time. You leave your kids at home and don't go there for you. for two weeks, it's not going to be more cleaned up when you get home. But that only is true for a closed system. In physics, the second law, if you open the system to two factors, new energy source from the outside and intelligence to organize that energy, you can reverse entropy.

So that's what coaches do. That's what mentors do. That's what advisors do. that leader is a closed system, when the only voices they're ever listening to are the ones in their head. They're opening up, and they've got support and energy,

and they've got intelligence to organize that new energy. They assimilated, they accommodate it, they get to a higher level. That's one of the big things. And another one is that they embrace negative realities. That's one of the great, you know, you say, what do you see in common? they move towards problems, not to nuke them, but to either resolve them or transform them into something better. Now, if you're conflict-avoidant or you go into a black hole, if there's a bad number that comes across your desk,

or you start to think I'm a failure, or somebody else is an idiot, or whatever it is, if you attack negative realities instead of resolve them and transform them, then it's going to be a rocky road. So that's another thing I see in great leaders. Isn't it interesting? I found this in our work that we do with my team is the ones who are reaching out for help, for coaching, for guidance, for assistance with their leadership teams, they are almost all already absolutely crushing it. I mean, they're like the best of the best in their industries in any industry. They're doing really, really well, beating goals. And yet they still want coaching.

They still want feedback. They still want you there to work with them and their teams. I would bet you see the same thing. But isn't that interesting that the ones who probably need it the most that are struggling aren't doing well, they don't reach out for help. But the ones who are doing really, really well, they want it. Okay. You hit something right on the nail that I've said.

When I first, you know, went into this whole space as a psychologist. So I always have a mix of clients. So you got the ones that are crushing it. You got the ones that, and want to get better. You got the ones that there's some identified problem, and that's what they call. You want to fix this. And then you got the disasters where the whole thing's about to just go to hell, right? And so there is kind of these three plates.

I always thought it would be the disaster. that I'd be hearing from all the time, right? It was the exact opposite. That the highest performers were the ones that utilize input in the coaching the most. It's exactly what you said. And you go on, you go to a PGA tournament, the guys are not on the range by himself.

You got a couple of people standing around them. You got their swing coach, you got the caddy probably got somebody else and it is a team if you listen to Scottie Shephler he always says we we were fortunate

this week he's talking about his team and he talks about that lot I grew up with Nicholas says the tiger and Nicholas was my idol and I remember I was a kid I read something that he wasn't playing well and he said

he took some time off and went back to Ohio to spend some time with his teacher, his coach. And I remember thinking, what? Nicholas has a coach? Why? Well, later, I got to meet Jack, spent some time with him, and I had written about him in one of my books,

and he sent me a letter, and very, very nice. But anyway, I was talking to him, and I asked him about that. He said, well, I went through a period where, you know, I just wasn't playing as well. And I called, his name was Jack Crowe, you can read about him. And I went back and I said, let's start at the beginning. Teach me the stance and the grip first. Because we can get off of the right heading on the very.

fundamentals because we can't see ourselves. Yeah. First day of John Wooden, what did he teach his team every day, the first day of practice? This is how you put on your socks. It's like the fundamentals getting back to it, but we all need a coach. And the highest performers, that's also, like you said, the company that spends $100 million, I found that to be true as well. The ones that are doing really well, they know, I mean, Serena Williams had her coach her

entire career, right? They all have a coach. commonalities. Henry, man, this is so great. The book's called Your Desired Future, the Five Essential Steps that Take You Where You Want to Go. Appreciate your team sending me a copy. Man, I'm excited for you. And I would love to continue this dialogue as we both progress, man. Or anytime. Obviously, you know where to find me. It's good to sit down. I always enjoy it. You make it easy. You know more than I do about this stuff. Well, I appreciate.

Next thing we need to do is to go out to dinner, you, me, and Will Godera, I want to experience that conversation about leadership and to see the way people fall all over themselves when Will walks in the door. It would be so much fun, man. When Will shows up at a restaurant, it's like Jack Nicholas went to a public driving range. It's like, Elvis is in the building. So good, man. Love it, man. Thank you so much. Again, always look forward to the next one, Henry. Great. Thank you. I appreciate it. It is the end of the podcast club.

Thank you for being a member of the end of the podcast club. If you are, send me a note, Ryan at learning leader.com. Let me know what you learned from this great conversation with Dr. Henry Cloud. A few takeaways from my notes, the best leaders Henry has worked with for 30 years, all share one thing. They seek coaching. They reverse the law of entropy by bringing in outside intelligence and support even when and especially when they're already winning. I found this too. We seem to always work with eights and nines who want to be tens. The fours and fives are not attracted to our work.

And then a revenue number is not a vision. A vision is a compelling picture of a future state that makes people want to sacrifice for it. If your vision wouldn't inspire anyone to get out of bed early, it is a metric, not a vision. And I love how Henry opened the conversation talking about his Doberman, Finley. It's a dog who races to the front door, barks and does it again tomorrow, never once asking whether the barking is working.

The question is a simple one. And how many areas of your life are you just barking at the door? Once again, I would say thank you so much for continuing to spread the message and telling a friend or two. Hey, you should listen to this episode of The Learning Leader Show with Dr. Henry Cloud.

I think he'll help you become a more effective leader because you continue to do that. And you also go to Spotify and Apple Podcast. You subscribe to the show. You rate it, hopefully, five stars. You write a thoughtful review. So important by doing all of that, you are continually giving 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 to you too. Can't wait.