Young and Profiting with Hala Taha - Ron Carucci: Preparing for Leadership | Leadership | E39

Episode Date: September 25, 2019

The next generation of leaders are rising to power! In #39, Hala yaps with Ron Carucci, founder and managing partner of consulting firm, Navalen. Ron has an impressive thirty years of experience helping executives tackle challenges relating to strategy, organization, and leadership. He has worked with start-ups to fortune 10 companies in over 30 countries. He’s also the author of “Rising to Power,” and his work has been featured in HBR, Business week, Fortune among other publications. In this episode, you’ll get a guidance on how to navigate a new leadership role by learning ways to avoid failure, how to improve self-perception to better manage weaknesses and why we should avoid binary decision making at all costs. Fivver: Get services like logo creation, whiteboard videos, animation and web development on Fivver: https://track.fiverr.com/visit/?bta=51570&brand=fiverrcpa  Fivver Learn: Gain new skills like graphic design and video editing with Fivver Learn: https://track.fiverr.com/visit/?bta=51570&brand=fiverrlearn If you liked this episode, please write us a review! Want to connect with other YAP listeners? Join the YAP Society on Slack: bit.ly/yapsociety Earn rewards for inviting your friends to YAP Society: bit.ly/sharethewealthyap Follow YAP on IG: www.instagram.com/youngandprofiting Reach out to Hala directly at [e-mail] Follow Hala on Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/htaha/ Follow Hala on Instagram: www.instagram.com/yapwithhala Check out our website to meet the team, view show notes and transcripts: www.youngandprofiting.com

Hey guys, if you're an avid listener of Young and Profiting Podcast, I'd like to personally invite you to Yap Society on Slack. It's a community where listeners network and give us feedback on the show. Vote on episode titles, chat live with guests, and share your projects with the group. We'd love to have you. Go to Bitley slash Yap Society. That's bit.ly.ly slash Yap Society. You can find the link in our show notes. This episode of Yap is sponsored by Fiverr, a marketplace that over 5 million entrepreneurs used to their business. I've been using Fiverr for years. In fact, I got the Yap logo made on there, and if you've seen my cool audiograms with animated cartoons, I get those images from Fiverr too. They have affordable services like graphic design, web design, digital marketing, whiteboard explainer videos, programming, video editing, audio editing, and much more. They have over 100,000 talented freelancers to choose from, and it's super affordable. Prices just start at $5. If you're interested to give Fiverr a shot, hit the link in our show notes. And if you'd rather learn how to do these types of services on your own, check out Fiverr Learn, a new platform that provides on-demand

professional courses from leading experts. They start at just $20, but what you could learn is priceless. Check out the links in our show notes to learn more. You're listening to YAP, young and profiting podcast, a place where you can listen, learn, and profit. I'm your host, Halitaha, and today we're speaking with Ron Carucci, co-founder and managing partner of consulting firm Nevillein. Ron has an impressive 30 years of experience helping executives tackle challenges related to strategy, organization, and leadership. He's worked with startups to Fortune 10 companies in over 30 countries. He's also the author of Rising to Power and his work has been featured in HBO, Business Week, and Fortune among other publications. In this episode, you'll find out why

some leaders fail while others succeed, how to improve our self-perception to better manage our weaknesses, and why we should avoid binary decision-making at all costs. Hey, Ron, thanks for joining Young and Profiting Podcasts. It's great to have you on the show. Hey, Halah, great to meet you. Thanks for having me. So, Ron, I see that you are currently the co-founder and managing partner at Nevilleent, helping CEOs and executives pursue transformational change for their organizations and industries. How did you end up becoming interested in organizational change? And how did you make your way to become an expert in this field? Could you just share a bit about your career path with us?

Sure. I've always been fascinated even as a little kid by, you know, the organizing of human endeavor. If there was a fundraiser at school, if there was a neighborhood stickball game, if there was a block party, I wanted to be the one organizing it. I loved the idea that people could come together and contribute things to a larger effort and produce something they couldn't produce on their own. It's always been fascinating to me. I began my career in the arts, so in a field far away from the one I'm in right now. And I was in Europe in the 80s working with a company that we had a contract with the military and state department to do work with a variety of departments in both state department and all branches of the military. And we were at Dachau. And back then they didn't have

the term diversity and inclusion, but had they had the term, that's what this workshop would have been on. was on how to deal with differences. And we were using a variety of arts and medium to bring about a conversation between military, civilians, Germans, Americans. And of course, the symbolism of being at Dakau, of all places at the chapel, was not lost on anybody. And in the middle of that conversation, a young soldier, not much older than me,

stood up and talked about how tired he was of being trained to hate. And my first thought was, well, I can't believe something I did up here on the platform, made him think that. But then I wanted to know more. I wanted to understand, well, what was it going to do about that? So even after we processed as a group for a few minutes, his views and other people weighed in about whether they agreed or not. We went out for beers afterwards because you're in Munich and you got for beers.

And I think that was at the beginning of a turning point from Mihala. I don't know that I could have named it at the time, but telling great stories from the stage was an interesting thing to do. But engaging other people in their stories, that was really fascinating for me. And I learned early on that I bore easily. and that was ever going to be boring for me. Every day was a new story. And so I think that's where I began to move into organizational behavior and the field of industrial psychology and began to make my shift toward doing works that helped bring about change. Very cool.

And so you said you started out as an art major. Did you learn everything about organizational change totally on the job? Or did you have any formal, you know, training and education in regards to that? I went back to school and my master's in order. behavioral behavior and got training and took some entry-level jobs. I was able to build on my experience in the arts and the performing arts. So I was able to make the shift in my platform work more naturally because I'd done training work and I'd done other entry-level OD work before continuing on my career to purely into the OD space. The transition looks far more elegant in

retrospect than it actually felt like when I was doing it. And so how did you get the idea to start your own consulting firm? So I think that idea sort of found me. I realized early on, I spent much of the early parts of my OD career inside big companies. And what I learned was politically, it's very difficult to tell the truth. And part of being a great OD practitioner means you have to be honest about what's happening. So I realized that what got me into some political trouble inside companies actually got me paid pretty well outside the company because as a consultant, you're expected to be a broker of the truth.

So I realized, you know, if I was going to live out my passion for organizations, it was going to have to be by not being part of one. And so I joined a large consulting firm in your city and had a wonderful run there for eight years. But that firm got sold to a much bigger firm. And then when that happened, you know, now you're part of a massive organization. And it's about revenues and it wasn't about the craft anymore. And so a few friends and I said, you know, we love this work too much to just do it to make money for the firm. We can go do this on our own. So really what launched our firm was our desire to work together as colleagues and friends and to do great work for our clients. The goal wasn't actually to go start a firm. So when we started our practice together, what it meant was, well, if we're

going to do large products, we're going to need help. And so we had to hire people. So the idea of growing a firm was sort of, we backed into it by our goals for wanting other things in our life. Yeah. And so a lot of my listeners are at this stage where they're an employee and they're considering becoming an entrepreneur. What were your major challenges when you decided to start your own business? And was there anything unexpected that you could? came across. It was all unexpected. I don't know that I ever set out to be an entrepreneur. And it's funny when I think about the journey was certainly an entrepreneurial one, but whenever I hear folks thinking about, you know, their frustrations in being a big company or being in a cubicle

farm or I don't want to work for the man anymore and they think the answer to that is go start my own business. I'm always really thoughtful about that's not for everybody. And you have to really understand the psychological and emotional challenges of what it means to go start your own business and go away distance. Having a great idea doesn't make you an entrepreneur. Having a great personality doesn't make you an entrepreneur. Having the ability to sell things doesn't make you an entrepreneur. And so I tell people all the time, try a side gig, try a side hustle, experiment. Because just the idea of marketing, we started our firm 15 years ago, the idea of leadership and organizational work was a side dish. There were not that many specialized firms working in it.

It was a unique niche. We were one of the best at it. Fifteen years later, everybody and their mother is a coach. Everybody, their uncle and their cousin is doing leadership and organizational work. They use the same language. They have the same website pictures. They have the same blog posts. There's literally, literally tens of thousands of practitioners now more than there was then, which means if we want to get picked, if we want to be in the decision path of a good client, of somebody we want to work with, we have to find some way to set ourselves apart from all that norm. And we never saw that coming. We never anticipated that. 10 years into our 15-year story now, that became a major requirement. It was an entirely new set of muscles. None of us had ever built before. None of us wanted to.

So, you know, when you're thinking about going out and starting your own business, start with the acceptance of the fact that you may think that your idea is the most unique, brilliant thing in the world. And when entrepreneurs fall in love with their own ideas, that's the kiss of death, you have to know that there are already gazillions of other choices for whatever is you think you're going to do. And if you're not so clear strategically on what you can do differently, what you can do better, and be honest about that, and what it's going to take to carve yourself a space in an already cluttered space, well, your first show, be exciting because you'll set up your

website and you'll print your business cards and you'll do networking meetings and you'll call yourself whatever you are, but you won't be getting paid for it. If you want people to pay you money for this thing you think you want to do, you need to really do your homework, really recognize that you're in for a multi-year journey to get to the place where you're really actually getting paid to do it and loving it. And I think a lot of people, especially in your peer set, Hala, are just not clear on what that's going to they say, oh, I could do it. But I don't know that they're really prepared for that journey is going to require. Yeah, I think you bring out a good point that your marketing and positioning like really has to be super clear and on point and professional and you need to stand out and your

value proposition needs to resonate with the people that you're trying to target. So I think you bring out a lot of great points there. Something very fascinating I found about you is that you've worked in over 30 countries. So that's very diverse. That means you're probably very familiar with culturally how different countries work when it comes to business. So is there any insight you want to share to specific countries and how they operate when it comes to business? Well, I think just going in and accepting that there are different cultural nuances and expectations and laws if you have a desire to do business overseas. If you're going to have a website, just the fact that Europeans require you to say certain things about your website that Americans don't yet, but we will.

You have to know that there are going to be people scrutinizing your website differently in China than they are in other parts of Asia versus the Middle East versus Europe. So I think recognizing that there are implications, assuming that your consumer or your entire customer is the same in those countries, that you're solving the same problem is naive. So recognizing that what you think you're selling and what they're actually buying may be very different. how people treat hierarchy or honesty or the idea of how people consume content or whether or not it's even okay to consume certain content in certain cultural contexts, how people treat women, how people treat younger people or older people. There's so many different cultural nuances that change how people will metabolize you that if you don't know what those are, you're going to make a huge mistake. Early on, I was in Israel and I was told that I would have to choose

between working with Palestinian clients or Israeli clients, that I would never be able to work with both. And I was defined. And this is back in the 80s. There's no conflict, but it's not like it is today. Yeah. And I was in a Palestinian school in the West Bank. During a program, we were being paid for it. The school was very excited to have us there. And I just used the word Israel. And it was early on, as I was introducing ourselves for an hour and a half workshop, the minute I said the word Israel, you could tell the whole room shut down. And for the next hour and a half, it was torture trying to get people to participate in this workshop. I had no idea what I had done.

I had no idea what I had done. But the fact that I used a word that they not only did not relate to, did not consider their country to be, but I had offended them. Yeah. And I hadn't even known I'd done it. So if you want to do business outside the borders of your own country, do your homework. Yeah. That's very touching. I'm actually Palestinian.

So it's so funny that you're bringing this up. But yeah, I just think that certain topics are just so sensitive. And like you said, you need to do your homework and really be well-versed before you go ahead and try to conduct business somewhere else. Where do you think people should start? Is it just researching online? Like, is there anything specific that you recommend? Study the country. I mean, what I did in your home country hall out was a stupid mistake.

And what was so sad to me was this was a group of people at a school who really needed what we had to offer and who really wanted us there. And we could have been very helpful to. had I just been more educated and more informed. And frankly, I was an arrogant American. I just assumed, no, I could work with both. And it was just one word, right? Yeah. That was before the Internet was even a thing, right?

Today, there's plenty of information available to you about the country, the laws, the culture, the people you're trying to serve, what they're trying to solve for. But I think the problem is that Americans are arrogant. We universalize ourselves. We think we're the standard. So we assume that problems are challenges or opportunities we have and want, everybody wants. And that's just dumb. And so, you know, don't be arrogant about where you're starting from.

Assume you don't know anything because you probably don't and start from a place of all I know is far from all there is to know. And assume you need six months of education, go visit the country, spend time there as a tourist, spend time talking to people in coffee shops off the beaten path. Just go be in the environment and meet the people you believe you can serve before you ever try to. Yeah. That's wonderful advice. So you're also the author of eight books. That's pretty amazing. What motivated you to become a writer?

This is going to sound like my entrepreneur story. I don't know that I started out to be a writer. I'm certainly not an author. You know, some people ask me, are you an author? I'm like, no, I am a writer. Writing for me was a way to solve problems, right? So when my clients would ask me or I'd start to see patterns with people I was helping of intractable complex problems that I didn't have an answer to, that they were asking

or they were asking more intensely or they had gotten themselves sideways because of. And I didn't quite know how to solve it. Writing and researching became my way to go learn more. Became my way of how do I figure this out? How do I go here where other people have done? By nature, I'm an introvert. So I don't talk to people. So writing is a way to sort of honor my introversion and just go inside and think and talk.

I can do interviews and get data. But it's how I learn. It's through writing. And then when I've learned, I can then go talk about those solutions. Now writing is a way of marketing. Today, any pathway to a client hiring me goes to the internet. Used to be that they talk to you first, and then if they like you, they bet your ideas. It's completely reversed now.

Now they vet your ideas first, and if they relate to your ideas or like them, then they'll talk to you. So if people can't find my ideas, if they can't find me and what I think and how I feel and how my experiences with other types of people like them, they're never going to call me. And so now writing is a way to make sure that people understand who I am and how I think and how I think about the problems they're facing. And if they can locate their story in my story, I raise the odds of a call. That's awesome. Very interesting.

So for this interview, I definitely want to spend a good chunk of time on what I think is your most popular book, Rising to Power. You co-authored that with Eric Hanson, who's also a managing partner at Neville. And I know that my listeners love to learn about power and influence based on my downloads. It's their favorite topic. So can't wait to get into this. So let's just kick this off. Your book is backed up by a 10-year study that you and Eric performed on executive promotions to assess why some leaders fail and others succeed.

In the study, you found that more than 50% of leaders fail within their first 18 months of a new position. So what are the reasons for that? Talk to your listeners, I think this isn't just about career pathing up a top. This is about career pathing where you're at today. So if you aspire to take on a position in life or in your organization, that has broader influence, broader reach, broader visibility, these findings apply. If you desire to go start your own business, they definitely apply. But mostly because people start out with assumptions about that role that are flawed. So even in the selection process,

we set people up to fail. So if you're in a job interview and people ask you or say things to you, like sound like, wow, look at these great apps you've built at that last assignment, that's what we need here. Or, oh my gosh, you've turned around two sales forces. We that here. If you hear anything that sounds like people asking you to repeat your past successes, you are being set up to fail. Because the mythical implication is you have a mandate and a formula. And the mandate is to take your formula and apply it here. So we've all seen the movie. I'm sure you've seen it too, how what happens? The person walks in thinking they have this mandate to start doing what they've done and they start repeating what they've always done. And they start pushing harder

to apply their recipe on you. And what happens? doesn't work so that they push harder they slap harder people get more resistant then they go to their hiring manager and say you didn't tell me it was this bad or oh my god your people are dumber than I thought and so now your diagnosis becomes an indictment and you have completely skipped over the most important parts of what it means to begin in a new role or assignment which is don't hit the ground running hit the ground learning yeah and you've skipped the whole point of context of learning the context and accepting the fact that it has as much to change in you as you believe you've been told to change in it.

And if you skip that part, you know, then what happens is within a year, we've all held the classic words, it wasn't a good fit. And out you go. Yeah, that's so interesting. And if I remember correctly, 67% of executives struggle to let go of work from their previous roles. So how does that play into failing? The classic micromanager, right?

So one of the things that happens when you elevate to a higher altitude in a organization is your timelines change, right? The things you're responsible for are now measured in months and years instead of weeks and months. The ambiguity and uncertainty that comes with decisions you make or outcomes you're controlling is uncomfortable. The role you came from was in the middle of the organization or at the bottom of the organization is much more about today's results, tomorrow's results. And you became really good at that. It's what you got reinforced for. It's what you got applauded for. It's what set yourself apart. It's probably what got you the promotion in the first place. So now you're in this uncomfortable spot of feeling uncertain, of feeling,

like an imposter and I mean, one of the classic things we hear newly promoted leaders say is, I feel like a fraud. I'm going to get found out. And so you naturally reach back for the things you're already good at. You reach back for the things you've accomplished before and you take with you the things you're good at under the justification of, well, they're not really ready to take it over yet. So I'm just going to keep doing it until I think they're ready. Well, the reality is they're never going to be as good as you were at because you did it for much longer. You have to let go of what you used to be good at the things you're now responsible for. And if you never let go, labeled a micromanager and a control freak and all these other labels that get put on people who are still doing the job they left.

Yeah. And you're never going to learn the job you got. So in your book, you call this having an anthropologist mindset. Can you talk about that a little bit? Yeah. So one of the things I love about anthropology is you enter a space as a complete learner, right? Everything is data. And the problem is when you come in from outside the organization, you really are alien, right?

It is a foreign line. But when you come up in the organization, the problem is you already know a lot about the organization. have biases about the culture. You have biases about the people you're working with. If you got promoted in your own department, now it's more complicated by the fact that your bosses are now your peers. Your peers are now your direct reports. And so everything you know about them could be flawed. And so letting go of what you think you know in order to learn becomes even harder. But you've got to start out with a notion of what does this all mean? How did it get to be this way? And even though you may think you have deep insights about what's happening. And some of those insights,

may be correct, you should start with the assumption of this is all brand new. And if I'd never seen it before, what questions would I ask? What would I want to know more of? How would I go about learning? How can I get reacquainted with people who I think I know, but now I now have a different relationship with? And really study the environment as if it were a brand new world to you. Because you won't know how your biases are getting in the way unless you first discover what they are. Yeah. Sounds very, you know, practical and relatable, honestly, because I'm sure. many of us are getting promoted and need to understand how to navigate the landscape once we do. Something else that really fascinated me in your book was this concept of summit shock or altitude sickness.

And you relate this type of analogy illustrates how executives experience debilitating and disorienting symptoms similar to when we climb high altitudes without giving our bodies proper time to adjust to lower levels of oxygen. So can you help us understand this concept of summit? it shocked more and explain how idealization and cognitive dissonance play into all of it. At Yap, we have a super unique company culture. We're all about obsessive excellence. We even call ourselves scrappy hustlers. And I'm really picky when it comes to my employees.

My team is growing every day. We're 60 people all over the world. And when it comes to hiring, I no longer feel overwhelmed by finding that perfect candidate, even though I'm so picky because when it comes to hiring, indeed is all you need. Stop struggling to get your job post noticed. Indeed, sponsored jobs help you stand out and hire fast by boosting your post to the top relevant candidates. Sponsored jobs on Indeed get 45% more applications than non-sponsored ones according to Indeed data worldwide. I'm so glad I found Indeed when I did because hiring is so much easier now.

In fact, in the minute we've been talking, 23 hires were made on Indeed according to Indeed data worldwide. Plus, there's no subscriptions or long-term contracts. You literally just pay for your results. You pay for the people that you hire. There's no need to wait any longer. Speed up your hiring now with Indeed. And listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility at Indeed.com.com.com. Profiting right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com slash profiting. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring, Indeed is all you need. Hey, young improfitters. As an entrepreneur, I know firsthand that getting a huge expense off your books is the best possible feeling. It gives you peace of mind and it lets you focus on the big picture and

invest in other things that move your business forward. Now imagine if you got free business internet for life. You never had to pay for business internet again. How good would that feel? Well, now you don't even have to imagine because spectrum business is doing exactly that. They get it that if you aren't connected, you can't make transactions, you can't move your business forward. They support all types of businesses from restaurants to dry cleaners to content creators

like me and everybody in between. They offer things like internet, advanced Wi-Fi, phone TV, and mobile services. Now, for my business-owning friends out there, I want you to listen up. If you want reliable internet connection with no contracts and no added fees, Spectrum is now offering free business internet advantage forever when you simply add four or more mobile lines. This isn't just a deal. It's a smart way to cut your monthly overhead and stay connected. Yeah, BAM, you should definitely take advantage of this offer.

It's free business internet forever. Visit Spectrum.com slash free for life to learn how you can get business internet free forever. Restrictions apply. Services not available in all areas. What's up, Yap Gang? If you're a serious entrepreneur like me, you know your website is one of the first touch points every single cold customer has with your brand. Think about that for a second. When people are searching on Google, everybody who interacts with your brand first is seeing your dot-com initially. But here's a problem. Too many companies treat their website like a formality instead of the gross tool that it should be. At Yap Media, we are guilty of this. I am really due for an

upgrade from my website and I'm planning on doing that with Framer this year because small changes can take days with my other platform and simple updates require tickets and suddenly we're just leaving so much opportunity on the table. And that's why so many teams, including mine, are turning to framework. It's built for teams who refuse to let their website slow them down. Your designers and marketers get full ownership with real-time collaboration, everything you need for SEO and analytics with integrated A-B testing. I love that. I love testing and making sure that we've got the best performing assets on the page. You make a change, hit publish, and it's live in seconds.

Whether you're launching a new site, testing landing pages, or migrating your full.com, Framer makes going from idea to live site fast and simple. Learn how you can get more out of your dot com from a Framer specialist or get started building for free today at Framer.com slash profiting for 30% off a Framer pro annual plan. That's 30% off in 2026. Again, that's framer.com slash profiting for 30% off. Framer.com slash profiting. Rules and restrictions apply.

Yeah, sure. If you've ever hiked up a mountain and you know, suddenly you're getting nauseous, you're dizzy, you're struggling to breathe because the air is changed and your lungs are having to adapt. And so, you know, great mountain climbers will climb up. They'll acclimatize, they'll climb back down, spend more time there, climb up a little higher,

and they elegantly trying to adjust to help their bodies and their minds adapt. The same is true in an organization. You know, when you get to the top of an organization, politics are different. As I said before, what they're measuring is different. Relationships are different. How you're expected to talk is different. Suddenly, now people are concocting you, right? So now you're more visible.

So your life now plays out on a jumbotron, right? People are making up versions of you. People are attributing words to you never said. You have to behave as if you have a bullhorn strapped to your mouth 24-7. And most leaders show up and then they want to be. authentic. They want to just be themselves. I think, I just want to be me. And I have to coach my clients to realize, well, yeah, but there's more than one of you now. There's a lot of you. And if you're leading people who are further away from you, or they're virtually in a different

country, you're concocted. You're aversion of yourself. And if you don't learn to control the narrative of how people metabolize you, they're going to make things up. You don't want them to understand. So, yes, you have to be authentic and you have to be you, but you have to recognize that who you are to the people you're leading on guiding or responsible to when they're not directly in your presses 24-7 is different than it used to be. And many leaders just struggle to accept that. Yeah, I love this topic. I love the topic of distortions and altered perceptions of people.

So let's talk about this more. Once we take an elevated position in our companies, you mention a lot of distortions in your book like Larger Than Life, the Megaphone Effect, Sifted Data, and Aliens Next Door. Could you walk through some of these and explain it to our listeners? I think it's so fascinating. Yeah. So the larger than life is the jump-buchar issue, right? It's the you give a speech on a video.

And now instead of talking to 30 people, you're talking to 300 people. Or instead of talking to 100 people, you're talking to 1,000 people. The amount of biases and perceptions of issues of power, issues of leadership, issues of culture that you are now getting filtered through is endless. And while you cannot control all those narratives, you cannot assume that what's in your head is being matched. by their interpretation network. So your requirement to lead out loud more, to say things like, what I want you to hear is this.

I don't want you to misunderstand this. What I hope you'll hear is the reason I'm asking for your trust is this. If you took the job over from a boss who they loved, you're now hated. If you took it to the job over from a boss, they hated. You're now hated more. Right? So there's a history. The story you stepped into didn't start with you.

And you've got to appreciate the biases and beliefs that were shaped by the story before you and speak to those honestly. You have to let people see who you are and know who you are in an appropriate way. Obviously, they have to be boundaries. You have to recognize that people will want to curry favor with you. People who used to go out for beers with, right, who are now two levels below you are going to come up to you and say, hey, how's it going? They're going to want the inside scoop and they're going to want special favors and they're going to assume that we're still buddy buddy and but now you have all this power so you're going to help me out, right? And you have to set those boundaries and say, actually, no, I'm not.

Yeah. Or we used to be peers. Now I'm your boss. How is this going to go? I used to go out for beers with you. Now I can't. But now the flip side of that is you're going to be lonely. You're going to see everybody going off of beers that you used to go with and you can't.

And how do you deal with that loneliness? How do you deal with that? We are different now. And you can't give into the notion of, hey, I'll go out with them and I'll be one of the gang so they can see I'm still me. That's a bad idea. It's a two-way street of adjustment, right? They have to adjust to a new role of you.

you have to accept the limitations of who you are now in this role. And that's really hard work. Yeah. It does sound like a lot of hard work. So do we have to have like better self-perception and better understand our own weaknesses so we can manage them better? We do. We have to understand who we are. We have to assume as a leader we're all bad observers of our own reality, right? We don't have the luxury of being going to see how we operate and how we're experiencing. So if you don't have a source of reliable feedback of somebody who's got your back, who's got eyes on you who can tell you in meetings when you're being misunderstood, when you're coming across like a jerk, when you're too passive, when you're too assertive, when you're not listening enough.

If you don't have somebody who's regularly helping you calibrate how your intentions and your impact are matching or not, you will dangerously widen that gap. And, you know, it's obviously even more likely to happen at a higher altitude when there's more opportunity to be misjudged. And so you've got to have a source of feedback. You've got to have a source of calibration for people to be able to tell you this is working, this is not. Yeah. And so I know in your book you mentioned the importance of like detecting patterns to clear up any organizational distortions. Can you talk about this a little bit? Like why are patterns so important and how can a leader start to understand the patterns that are going on so they can clean them up?

Well, so there's economic patterns or cultural patterns. There are communication patterns. But let's use culture as example. Yeah. So you may not realize that your culture is a very collusive one. That it's a culture of secrecy and it's a culture that doesn't value openness yet or it's too afraid of candor. But at a certain altitude, you're just part of the landscape. But now, when you're in a leadership role and people are bringing you to distorted information or they're couching what they say or they're not giving you the full scoop and you know it. Or they're coming to you and saying, hey, holla, you know, I don't know if you've noticed, but Bill seems to be in a bad mood today. Can you give me some coaching how to work with Bill? hoping that what you'll say is, oh, yeah, Bill's a jerk, or I'll talk to him, or, oh, I know Bill is so moody. What you used to do. Well, now suddenly you're seeing a pattern of, wow, we are not honest with each other. And people aren't being honest with me. Now suddenly the cultural pattern that you were once part of and participated in is now a problem for you as a leader. How do you become countercultural enough to get people to be more respectful and honest with you and with each other?

And so now you have to decide, do I take debate about Bill? Or do I say, you know, that's kind of inappropriate. Why don't you talk to Bill about that? If you have a problem with Bill, what are you talking to me for? And maybe Bill has something gone out at home that's, he's having a bad day. You have bad days. Why don't you give him a break? You know, now you have a choice to say something honest, to help somebody be more successful, but that's countercultural.

And risk having to say, well, gee, what made you such a jerk? or sorry I asked and be immature about it, but that's what leaders do, right? Leadership is the ability to disappoint people at a rate they can absorb. And the moment with someone's trying to invite you into an unhealthy pattern, you have to disappoint them.

This reminded me of another part in your book that I really resonated with, which was the fact that, you know, nothing is more dangerous than pushing decisions up in an organization. I found out to be like extremely relatable and valuable. So can you share why pushing decisions up is detrimental to business

and what a good decision-making framework looks like? So every decision comes with risk. It comes with accountability. It comes with exposure. And if you have a culture that's micromanages, if you have a culture that doesn't value empowerment, that decision rights have not been distributed to the places where they most belong, because a great decision is best made,

closest to the place that's most implemented. The further away from a place of impact, a decision is made, the more unreliable it's going to be. But we think I'm casting off risk. When I push it up to the people who I'm, I perceive have more authority, more power, and therefore are more protected from risk, I think I'm off the hook. Of course, that's not true, right? I still have to live with the implications of a decision because when it comes back down, it may be a bad one. And now I have

to implement a bad decision. So the place to construct a great decision is for you to understand what is the right amount of my intuition and experience, what is the right amount of data, and where shall I get the data from, and what's the right amount of other people's voices and especially disagreeing voices that I need to include in this decision so that I get to an outcome we all can live with. Most people get stuck into dangerous binaries. Well, we can even do this or this.

And the minute you hear, the menu of choices reduced to two, you can automatically assume you're going to make a bad decision. Because there is no problem in the world. There is no issue that you'll be solving for which there are only two options. And so if you're only going to explore two, you should assume that some of the better ones

got edited out. And so what you want to do is open up the menu and ask your team, well, what else could we do? Well, who disagrees with this? Well, okay, that's what your fact base says. Who's got dueling fact bases for that? And really open up the conversation to make sure that the right data that you would normally have access to, the right intuition based on your experiences with the same issue, and the right other voices who are going to have to live with the decision when it's made, whether they agree with it or not, have been included in the choice so that when you make the choice, you can move forward. And if you abdicate all that and push the decision up, you really impair commitment to that decision. You impair the ability to learn about why it might be

flawed, and you raise the risk that it's not going to go well when you try and bring it to life. Yeah. I think that's a fantastic advice. Do you have like a real life example of when, you know, you were in a situation and they were using just binary choices and that you helped them think bigger than that and found a better solution? Yeah, well, so you see this now today, because our whole world is so polarized, everything becomes politicized, so binarism is natural, right? You know, it's we-they. It's Second Amendment or gun control, border control, or immigration.

We're so predisposed to trigger-happy binaries that we've come conditioned to see the world that way. And because so many of our debates play out on social media, we just have sequential posting, right? My conversations are I post, then you post. We're not listening. So I was with the client once who was deciding whether or not to launch a new product that was in their pipeline. And the debate became down to launch or not launch. And so you had people advocating for their point of view.

Well, the reality was there was a need in the market for the product and there were flaws in the design. Right. None of that was being discussed. It was just people whose bonuses were being patted by the idea of launching it were advocating to launch it. The people who would have to live with the risks of cleaning of the mess when it got launched were out of to not launch it. So nobody was stepping back and asking the question of, do our customers want this and what need are we meeting and how can we invest meet that need? So I hold them out to say, let's discuss the benefits and flaws in the product. Let's discuss the need in the marketplace

and what's going to happen if somebody else launches a solution instead of us. And let's discuss the real issue here, which is we're trying to compete as a business and win, not cover our asses with launching versus not launching. Right. So once we dug up, got the real issue being discussed was what's in it for me instead of how do we serve our clients and compete well, we couldn't change the conversation. Got it. Thank you for sharing that. So back to power. I know that there are three different types of power, positional power, relational power, and informational power. Could you unpack this for our listeners? Sure. And by the way, if one of my TED talks is on this very topic. So if people want to learn more about what I can share here, they can go watch my TED talk on being powerful.

Awesome. I'll link that in our show notes. Part of what I say that, Hala, is because we often associate power with positions, right? If you have a big job, you have more power. We all have sources of power available to us. We all have relationships. We all have sources of information and data. And we all have something in our role that makes us influential by our position. But part of the reason we wanted to study power was we all have seen it abused. We all know what happens with people corrupt power, use it for self-interest, use it for immoral gain. and hurt a lot of people when they do it.

So we assumed, yeah, that's what we're going to find. And that certainly was there. It was not the greatest abuse of power. The greatest abuse of power we saw in leadership was the abandonment of it. People too afraid to use the power that comes with their role and setting it aside in exchange for currying favor, buying popularity, budding up, doling out way too many yeses to please people because they didn't want to say no. And we label that abuse of power as, oh, he has no back.

or she's just insecure. And the reality is, it's every bit as destructive as self-interest. Because you're confusing an organization, you're diluting its resources, you're blurring its focus, and you're institutionalizing mediocrity when you won't use the power that comes with your position. And so the beautiful part about having power is that somewhere in your sphere of influence is something that's unjust. There's a process that's unfair. There's a practice that's unfair.

And with your position comes the ability to write that. justice. You have information. You can change people's minds. You have the ability to help people see the world differently with information. You have the ability to change distorted and narrow perspectives with your information. And in the context of your relationships, you have the ability to invest in people. You have the ability to help others succeed. You have the ability to help people discover versions of themselves they haven't thought of because of what you see in them. Young and profitors. I know there's so many people tuning in right now that end their workday wondering why certain tasks take forever, why they're procrastinating certain things,

why they don't feel confident in their work, why they feel drained and frustrated and unfulfilled. But here's the thing you need to know. It's not a character flaw that you're feeling this way. It's actually your natural wiring. And here's the thing. When it comes to burnout, it's really about the type of work that you're doing. Some work gives you energy and some work simply drains you. So it's key to understand your six types of working genius.

The working genius assessment or the six types of working genius framework was created by Patrick Lenzioni, and he's a business influencer and author. And the working genius framework helps you identify what you're actually built for and the work that you're not. Now, let me tell you a story. Before I uncovered my working genius, which is galvanizing and invention, so I like to rally people and I like to invent new things, I used to be really shameful and had a lot of guilt around the fact that I didn't like enablement, which is one of my working frustrations. So I actually don't like to support people one-on-one. I don't like it when people slow me down. I don't like handholding. I like to move fast, invent, rally people, inspire. But what I do need to do is ensure that somebody

else can fill the enablement role, which I do have K on my team. So working genius helps you uncover these genius gaps, helps you work better with your team, helps you reduce friction, helps you collaborate better, understand why people are the way that they are. It's helped me restructure my team, put people in the spots that they're going to really excel, and it's also help me in hiring. Working genius is absolutely amazing. I'm obsessed with this model. So if you guys want to take the working genius assessment and get 20% off, you can use code profiting. Go to working genius.com. Again, that's working genius. Stop guessing. Start working in your genius. Hello, Yap gang. I know my young and profiting listeners want bigger businesses and a better life. And the New Year is the perfect

moment to reset and commit to your growth. But let's be real. You can't build an empire if your finances are all over the place. That's why getting into it QuickBooks is one of the best first moves you can make this year. They've got powerful money management tools built right into their platform, and they have them for every stage of your business, whether you're a solopreneur or a small business. And I love that QuickBooks helps you get paid faster, pay bill smarter, and even gives you access to funding when opportunity pops up. So QuickBooks can help you with bookkeeping, can help you with getting paid, can even help you with projections and understanding where your business is at financially. Plus, QuickBooks Money Solutions reduces manual work by half and keeps your money and your books

perfectly synced. That means less time staring at spreadsheets and more time actually building the vision that you started with. That's the upgrade that every profiting entrepreneur needs. Start the New Year's strong, take control of your cash flow with QuickBooks Money tools. Learn more at quickbooks.com slash money. Again, that's quickbooks.com slash money. Terms apply.

Money movement services are provided by Intuit Payments Incorporated, licensed as a money transmitter by the New York State Department of Financial Services. So our relationships and our information and our positions allow us to change the world for the people around us in ways that not using those sources of power don't. And we all want to have impact. We all want to feel a sense of purpose. We all want to feel like we matter. And it's your sources of power that allow you to have impact, that allow you to make a difference around you. And so for goodness sake, use them. Yeah. So what's relational power? Like how is positional power or relational power? And informational power different. Did you cover all three specifically? Yeah. So if I asked you in your

organization, who are the 10 people in any direction from you, bosses, peers, reports that you most rely on to get your job done? And who are the 10 that most rely on you? Those 20 people are people you have power with. You can influence with. They are trying to be successful in their roles and you can help them be successful. You have to find out how you can be more committed to them. I have one guy in my study, of the most influential leaders in I've ever met, but has been asking me the same three questions his whole career, even when he was an interpreter. He'd ask people, how can I be a better colleague to you? He'd ask, what are you working on that's really important to you? What products are you working on? What assignments you're working on that are super important to you? And then he'd ask,

how can I help? What can I do to help you with that really important thing? And the amount of power in those three questions, your information power, the ideas you'll offer, your relationship power is the investment you'll make. And your position of power may be the resources you help them gain or the connections you help them make or the priorities you help them become. So just those three simple questions demonstrate tremendous commitment and power to having impact. That's awesome. So these days, I know that CEOs are younger than ever, less experienced than ever. What are the positive and negative implications of this that we should consider? Just if you're going to rise to positions of power sooner in your career than you're prepared for it. Just know you're not ready. And don't assume that you're

entitled to the role. So many people, and this is, you know, people characterize millennials this way. I'm not sure it's all true. But millennials were a generation, they were raised being told they could change the world. And they believed us. So now we have to get out of their way and help them do it. But it doesn't mean they're ready to. So how do we help them get ready? And they have to start with the assumption of I'm not prepared. I don't have the emotional intelligence. I don't have the resilience. I don't have the experience base. I don't have the knowledge base. So therefore, If I'm going to start into a position where there are tremendous gaps in whether or not I can succeed, what am I going to do about that?

It's okay that those gaps are there. It doesn't mean you're flawed. But for goodness sake, if you try and hide those gaps and keep people from seeing them, you're for certain going to set yourself up to fail. So who can you surround yourself with? What coaching can you get? Where can you train? What experiences do you need?

For goodness sake, get a therapist. You should absolutely be in therapy. Every executive should be in therapy as sort of an absolute requirement. because if you don't know your origin stories, you're definitely going to pass those pathologies on to people. You're not going to know your triggers. You're not going to know your reaction. And if you're moody in the middle, you're going to cast a dark cloud of a top. If your, quote, unquote, results oriented in the middle, you're going to leave awake of bodies behind you at the top. If you have, quote, unquote, impatience problems, you're going to have rage problems.

Those pathologies only get bigger with more influence. And so if you don't know your origin stories and how they have shaped who you are and how you see the world, you're going to hurt people. So get help. It's perfectly okay that you're arriving into a role in advance of when you might be fully ready for it. But if you don't take responsibility for those gaps, you're going to hurt people and you're going to win your career. Yeah, I think that's absolutely fantastic advice. You recently were on my friend Jordan Paris's podcast, Growth Mindset, University, and you mentioned that you believe that a lot of leaders currently lack strategic clarity. What is the importance of strategic clarity and how can we become better at that?

So I just recently completed a 15-year longitudinal study. So a follow-up study to our 10-year study that you mentioned before on organizational honesty. And what predicts whether or not people will lie or withhold the truth in organizations? And the absence of strategic clarity, the absence of knowing who you are, makes it three times more likely that people will lie and withhold the truth in your organization. What's the first thing people want to do when they start a company? Do their mission and values? dumb idea, but we all have companies that have billboards or posters that talk about,

here's our mission, here's our purpose, here's our values, and all people do is roll their eyes. Why? Because we're not living them. And we all know we're not living them. Well, the minute you create duplicity like that, where you say one thing and do another, you've now said it's okay in general to say one thing and do another. So now you've institutionalized duplicity. So if you don't really know who you are, you're going to make it up as you go. Yeah. And so if you go around your table of your company and you say, what's our strategy? You already know you can get as many different answers as there are people in the room. The fact that there are that many different answers to who you are and where you're headed

means the resources are being diluted. People are lying and making things up to justify their jobs and their budgets. People are afraid of the truth. And you just create this fragmentation of an organization by simply not being who you say you are. So the first thing to know is knowing who you say you are. and then actually embodying who you say you are. So that's what I mean by strategic clarity. And when you haven't got that, you are setting the stage for disaster.

Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Ron. This was such a great interview. Where can our listeners go to find out more about you and everything that you do? Thanks so much, Hullet. It's been a lot of fun. Yes, so come visit us and hang out at Navent, N-A-V-L-E-N-T-com. We've got some great videos and resources.

If you're leading some major change or transformation in your life or somebody else's, We have a free ebook for you called Leading Transformation, and that's at navelin.com slash transformation. We have a quarterly magazine. You can sign up for free that has all kinds of things about self-development, leadership, and teams. We're doing a whole series on teams right now. We have a phenomenal rich blog that has all kinds of insights and content by all of our writers. So it's a phenomenal content-rich environment to come hang out with us on, so come visit. Great. Thanks so much, Ron. It was a pleasure to have you on the show. Hala. My pleasure. Thanks for having me. Thanks for listening to Young and Profiting Podcast.

If you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to write us a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to the show. Follow Yap on Instagram at Young and Profiting and Check us out at younginprofiting.com. And now you can chat live with us every single day on YAP Society on Slack. Check out our show notes or young and profiting.com for the registration link. You can find me on Instagram at YAP with Hala or LinkedIn. Just search for my name, Hala Taha. Big thanks to the YAP team for another successful episode. This episode, I'd like to give a special shout out to all of our listeners.

It's so cool to hear from so many of you who are enjoying the show, whether it be in iTunes reviews, SoundCloud or YouTube comments, social media posts or private LinkedIn direct messages. It makes all this work so rewarding and gives our team the motivation to keep going strong. Thank you for spreading the word about Yap and taking the time to give us feedback. We appreciate it so much. This is Hala, signing off. Thank you.