YouSaid · the spoken record

Randall Stutman

lines on the record: 106
first: 2020-11-10
most recent: 2020-11-10
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Right now. This is my priority. How about yours? And then if they hear a response that is of a smaller priority or a less priority, then let's talk about it. That surprises me a little. Why is that such a high focus for you? Isn't this more important and the like? And listen, every parent should be doing that with kids. Every team leader should be doing with a team. Every CEO should be doing it with their business heads. Everybody should have direct priorities going on today, tomorrow, next week. Most priorities don't last for more than a couple of weeks, and we should be recalibrating them and calibrating them all the time. The best leaders do that. They do that in Ron Robins. They do that in staff meetings. They do that in conversations. They're constantly asking people and sharing their own priorities and then asking people to think about, is this a higher use of their time and refocusing people's efforts? And that has a bigger impact on long-term results than does making clarity around multiple outcomes.”
2020-11-10 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #96 Randall Stutman: The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Short term priority of everyone's focusing on right now. One of the reasons they're not is because it's hard, in one sense, because you have to constantly calibrate and recalibrate people's priorities. You've got to be checking with them all the time, asking them, what's your focus right now? What are you really spending your time on? Where's your energy? What's the most important thing this week or even today? And then when you listen to them to be able to help calibrate them to say that really is important, but isn't this more important or isn't this of a higher focus? And what you find is when teams or individuals have their priorities right, lots of other things happen in a really good way. My view is that every single person in your leadership life should have a priority right now. And if they don't, your job is as a leader is to make sure that they have that priority. And by sometimes starting with you, yourself, because good leaders always start with themselves to say, here's what I'm focused on.”
2020-11-10 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #96 Randall Stutman: The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Idea of a priority. So what's the difference? Well, it's just long term, short term, and it's level of specificity. A priority is something that's shifting all the time. It basically says it's my focus right now. It's maybe my highest focus. It's never my day job if it's truly a priority because that's an ongoing commitment. But there's always something that I should have as a higher focus of my attention, my time, my energy, and that I'm more fully engaged on. What we have found is over and over again that when you get people's priorities right on the short term, a lot of the longer-term goals and issues take care of themselves so that you'll find that you'll get higher results if priorities are set. But in fact, what most leaders do is the opposite. They're very, very clear, maybe even too clear because there's too many of them, of all this critical success factors and the objectives and the long-term goals and the target goals and the stretch goals and everything else. And they're not nearly as focused on the”
2020-11-10 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #96 Randall Stutman: The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, listen, again, you wouldn't think performance could be universal. Like, performance is very specific to the job, to the task, to the organization and the like. But in fact, when you study the best leaders and you try to make sense of how some of them drive or elevate a higher level of performance that a lot of them do some of the very similar things to one another. And so we've identified 25, 30 different behaviors of how the best leaders elevate performance. And some of them are anything but common sense. Some of those behaviors, I think, are really simple to do, but they're not intuitive. Let's take the idea of priority because I think that's a really interesting one. It's just not intuitive to me to distinguish between issues of, say, objectives or goals or outcomes or KPIs or OKRs if you're into that jargon or the”
2020-11-10 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #96 Randall Stutman: The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“go straight to the roof, because that's the power of third party praise. And we can all get create a routine on a third-party praise in a much more powerful way, in a more consistent way. I coach leaders all the time. Anytime you see excellence, I want you to tell the first person as much as you can, but always make it a rule, like a hot potato. You have to tell a third party. And when you walk in and you praise your leader to one of your leaders peers or your son or your daughter with one of their friends them not present or your spouse or partner to one of your in-laws or one of your neighbors, it always comes back. And people are always astonished that you would go out of your way to offer third-party praise, that you must really have thought that was special. And you can get to a place where it's not just a tip or a technique. You can do it all.”
2020-11-10 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #96 Randall Stutman: The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The object is to always tell a third party. Now, why is third party praise so powerful? So, number one, I made you look good in front of somebody else. That's always a good thing. Number two, there's no buts in that praise. In other words, high standard people will always have a but. Like that was a great presentation, but right, you could do this better. There's no but if you're telling a third party. But the real power in third-party complement or third-party praise is that I perceive a higher level of sincerity about it. If you didn't really believe it, would you actually tell a third party? And by the way, it's time release vitamin. It's going to come back to me. It might come back to me tomorrow. It might come back to me three weeks from now. It might come back to me in two months from now. But that person, that third party that I've shared that praise to will actually mention it at some point. And you will see the sincerity, the view that you really think that I did excellent or I was excellent in that given context.”
2020-11-10 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #96 Randall Stutman: The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So here's what we know we know that most leaders are praised Dingy, but when you study the best leaders, they're not any less praised stingy. Again, the best leaders are really results-focused, and they have a tremendous investment around excellence and achievement, which is one of the things that makes them fabulous leaders. But if you talk to even the most admired leaders and their teams, you'll find their teams go, this person doesn't offer near the amount of recognition, approval, appraise that I would prefer. But when you go deeper than that, what you find is they have committed themselves to a routine that actually has more impact, which is third-party compliments or praise, which is to say when somebody does something really excellent or they see excellence anyplace, if they can, I want them to tell the party directly. But when they can't, or if they're not...”
2020-11-10 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #96 Randall Stutman: The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In almost any organization. Now, you will see that I think it was Einstein that wrote the quote, you know, can't wait for us to get over this praise so I can get back to my work. People that are super dedicated to achievement will oftentimes tell you that they don't need praise because they're intrinsic motivation is so powerful and so strong that the external kind of praise approval recognition doesn't have much impact on them. But for the most part, most of us want more praise that we get. And leaders are stingy about it because either they don't need it or because their standards, especially results-based leaders, their standards are such where they want people to strive and get the excellence before they offer something positive. And by the way, once you're out of the habit of praise, it's really hard to get back into the habit of praise, which is probably why Ken Blanchard's old book, The One Minute Manager, was so powerful in the 60s and 70s because it's such an important piece of leadership.”
2020-11-10 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #96 Randall Stutman: The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, well, you know, praise is tough for some people because they don't personally need it. So go back to the individual difference piece. I don't need it, so why would I give it to you? But the most common reason that I find that leaders don't give praises because they have really high standards, that when they say excellence, they really want people to do excellent work. They withhold that. They watch people seek their approval to get that praise, and that makes them feel powerful a little bit, makes them feel a little bit more as if they're having the influence they want. And so that even encourages them to withhold it more. I've been around very few leaders who get too much praise from the people above them.”
2020-11-10 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #96 Randall Stutman: The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The world is like. That's the only thing that's going to make them better. And I agree, but it's not about not dumping them. It's about being imbalanced. And so sometimes you just have to take the time to say, let's have other conversations that are so positive, that are focused on that, that it equals out and creates an equilibrium for the feedback. Because once you're in a valuative climate, it is really hard on both parties. The one-party feels as if they have to defend themselves and the other party is frustrated that everything they say is misinterpreted. And it's a problem. By the way, great sign when somebody tells you, like, do I do anything right? Is it ever good enough for you? I mean, that's such a great sign that they believe they're in an evaluative place with you. And you have to fix that. And if you don't fix it, it has long-term consequences on the relationship.”
2020-11-10 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #96 Randall Stutman: The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That were not negative focused on anybody's results or metrics in a way that created the conversations in better balance, not perfectly whatever else. And as soon as she did that, about three months after that, the relationship started to evolve and become more productive. So even conversations from one to another can be a balance or not balance. But your strategy of talking about it first and talking about we're out of balance that I know I've been more critical. By the way, people with high standards that really care deeply about other people sometimes are very critical people, even censorious. And so it's not easy for them, even if they admit that they're overly critical to stop being so and stop being evaluative. I can't tell you how many parents that I've talked to that they think they're being loving and from an outside point of view, all I hear is like, wow, your child is just getting dumped on over and over again. And they would say, well, but that's what.”
2020-11-10 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #96 Randall Stutman: The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or doing and the like. So people quickly got came to both see her negatively, as well as avoid her like crazy. So when I first got involved, I looked at it and I thought, wow. I mean, almost by necessity, these relationships are really out of balance, but they don't have to be. So when I started offering some simple advice, and really the vice is so simple, it kind of shocking, I said, you know, we need to balance these relationships, but not in that conversation. Those negative conversations are going to be negative conversations. But we need to start having other conversations that were the conversations are in bounds. So that advice, which I think would work pretty well with most people, goes like this. I needed her to start having conversations around the talent that she saw in teams and where it was good and what was going on with them personally and learning more about them and stopping in their offices and simply showing them something that she had just gotten excited about. And she needed to start having some normal conversations.”
2020-11-10 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #96 Randall Stutman: The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Your great question. And by the way, that's not a bad strategy. It's what's called what the academic literature called Goi Meta, having a conversation about our conversations and the like. There's a lot of different things you could do, but if you were in a relationship that was out of balance, it's going to take some time to get it back into balance. Let me give you an example for me that's real and personal. So I had a chief financial officer that I worked with in a very large organization. They had joined this organization about six months before I had started working with them. And they had gotten themselves embroiled in all the lack of performance of this organization. One of the reasons they were brought in was to help turn this thing around. And almost all the metrics, almost everything about this organization was negative. Almost all the conversations with their peers was also negative. And this person, she was very talented, but almost every conversation, she walked in your office. You knew you were going to get blasted about something that your team and your performance numbers weren't revealed.”
2020-11-10 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #96 Randall Stutman: The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Had the ability then to say, okay, tomorrow I'm going to be preparing to give you some feedback on something that just happened. How do I prepare myself? What are the positives and how do I describe them vividly? I don't have to rehearse, but let me get ready to be in balance so that I can practice this and make this a natural part of my leadership. That's a behavior that we consider an admired leader of feedback.”
2020-11-10 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #96 Randall Stutman: The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Relationships. And then when we are going to be specifically in a critical moment, trying to make somebody better with feedback, we need to start positive and make that positive set of remarks be as vivid and elaborate and as detailed as the negative is going to be. That's a behavior that you'll find that almost everybody that's graded feedback, athletic coaches that are fabulous, dance instructors, leaders we've studied in corporates and the like, they all tend to do it in some form or another. They're in better balance than everybody else, which is why people accept their feedback a lot differently. You and I can start doing that better tomorrow. We could look at any of our relationships right now and say, which of my relationships is out of balance? Which ones do I have more negative to positive, more positive to negative? Am I in balance with my marriage? Am I in balance with my kids? Am I in balance with each of my team members? And then we also...”
2020-11-10 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #96 Randall Stutman: The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They've only heard positives. Several examples, one of my favorite examples is I sat down with a leader who had gotten 15 years of positive performance reviews, got a brand new leader, and that leader was fairly critical. And that leader in their first review gave them a very honest, what I thought was an honest, a fair review. But they couldn't see it as honest affair because they had been used to so much superlative for so many years from so many leaders that were not courageous enough to be honest with them that they absolutely went catatonic when they saw this particular feedback, which I thought was just objective. That happens with kids all the time too. If you want to really prepare children for success, you have to give them a nice balance of feedback. Positive, negative. Again, it doesn't have to be perfect, but too much positive makes it so that people get alarmist when they hear negative and too much negative means people defend themselves on an good basis. You and I can do better by striving to be more imbalanced in our”
2020-11-10 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #96 Randall Stutman: The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Defend themselves because the equation is hugely negative to positive. And so they know criticism is coming their way and they're bracing against it, which is why they're counter-arguing or they're turning off or they're sulking before you even finish. Or they shake their head before you even get the whole idea out. And so anytime a relationship is out of balance, negative to positive in terms of the general feedback and criticisms that are offered in that relationship, you're going to have that evaluative climate and it's going to go hugely negative. Now, the opposite is equally problematic, by the way, especially with children. You can have relationship that is really, really positive. All you say is positive stuff, that there's very little negative, so it's out of balance that way. And most people would say to me, well, how can that be a problem? It's a problem because what happens is when I do offer a piece of criticism or somebody else does, people freak out. They're not ready for it because”
2020-11-10 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #96 Randall Stutman: The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And other people to talk about marriages because the same thing would apply to marriages. But let's just talk about leader relationships. How quickly they can get out of balance? Every time I talk to you, I'm focused on trying to get you to be better. But in the process, I'm giving you negative feedback. I'm giving you criticism. Yeah, I might spike on a couple of things that I say are positive, but I'm out of balance. And so what happens is when you have a relationship that has almost always negative information, negative feedback versus positive, then what happens is people withdraw. They basically stop listening or they react. And so, you know, I can't tell you how many leaders I've dealt with in my life who will say, I have a team member or I have a child in my life. And every time I say something, even before I get it out, they're defensive, they're counter-arguing, right? And I know immediately it's because they feel as if their relationship with that person is out of balance that they have.”
2020-11-10 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #96 Randall Stutman: The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But it needs to be slowly or somewhat imbalanced to do so. Now, what I also think is interesting about that behavior is when you become masterful at it, you practice it all the time. There is no criticism that you can't give that's imbalance. None. And the balance is not about what you say. It's about how, again, starting positive, how detailed, how vivid, how elaborate are you in the positive as well as the negative. But let's look at a different aspect of the balance issue, which I think is equally fascinating, which is all relationships are in balance, either in positive or negative, because almost everything that a leader says to somebody that reports to them or works with them is either positive or negative. There's not a lot of neutral. And that's true with teachers and students. It's true with parents and children, where the power relationship exists. It's almost everything. So I'll leave it to people like John Gottman.”
2020-11-10 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #96 Randall Stutman: The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is as vivid, elaborate, and as detailed as the negatives are going to be. And they generally match in terms of number. So if I'm going to give you five criticisms, I probably need to have three or four or five really positive things. But they can't just be at a level of vividness or detail that is not equal to what I'm going to do in a second. So if I'm going to focus, I'm going to start positive and I'm going to go as deep into that positive as I can. And by the way, if I tell this to leaders all the time, they'll say, well, I have five criticisms, but I only have one really good positive that I can focus on. Well, first of all, I'll tell them stretch yourself, right? See if you can come up with two, right? But more importantly, they're only ready to hear from you two criticisms right now because the only way to keep that imbalance, and again, doesn't have to be perfect, doesn't have to be two to two or three to three.”
2020-11-10 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #96 Randall Stutman: The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was complex and made it even more complex. I didn't think you tied the introduction inclusion nearly strongly enough. I thought when you got to the Q&A, your second answer to the second question was really flat-footed and really left people wanting. And I think the overall people could have been a lot more engaged if some of those things were fixed. That's an example of the difference between feedback imbalance versus feedback being totally out of balance. Because I don't know anybody that wants the first one. There are a lot of people that don't want the second one either, by the way. But if you really want to get better, you want the second one. And you can deal with the balance of it. So now what did we learn? I'm not telling you anything yet. I haven't told you the behavior yet. So the behavior is not just about being in balance. It's about how you're in balance. And when we study the really best leaders, the best leaders on the planet, the most admired leaders everywhere, they all do the same thing. They all start positive, just like we all do intuitively when we're going to be critical. But they're positive.”
2020-11-10 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #96 Randall Stutman: The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But in balance. So the individuals instead, the leader says to you, listen, I think the audience was engaged across your presentation. I think it went pretty well. I want to tell you that I never saw slide eight before, and I thought it was masterful. I thought you took something really complex and made it simple. I thought when you reached before you got to Q&A, when you reached your main point, I thought that you hit it hard several times to the point where it resonated with the group. I think they were excited to get to Q&A to ask you questions. I thought you started out Q&A really well. And I believe that your answer to the fourth question, which was the hardest question of all around why we do what we do, you just hit it out of the park. Now, let me be critical on the other side, okay? You know, your slide five was indecipherable. We got to do something about that. Your slide 10 really made, took something that was...”
2020-11-10 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #96 Randall Stutman: The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Example of a presentation. I'm just going to make it up on top of my head. But let me give you two pieces of feedback presentation. So my first feedback goes, hey, the presentation went pretty well. I think the audience was engaged. But listen, you know, your slide in the slide 10, it was like not really understandable. And slide 15 confused everybody. You know, I didn't think you tied your introduction to your conclusion so that you lost people at the end. When you got to Q&A, you started out, okay, but boy, you were really flapping on the second question and your answer was really weak. And I thought the audience was not as responsive at the end as they should have been across the presentation. And you're thinking, wow. I mean, really, you thought the thing went okay and that the audience was fairly engaged. Like, I don't remember that, but I remember you just crapped a lot on everything that I just did. And I don't hear much of that, by the way. But let me give you a different one, different view. Let me give you the same feedback.”
2020-11-10 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #96 Randall Stutman: The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So naturally, what happens is we start to offer feedback. Most feedback and criticism, most of it other than praise and flattery and so forth, has a negative tinge to it. And so not all of it, but more of it. When you're trying to improve people's performance, you're giving them at least constructive criticism around try this differently, do this, and so forth. So because we know that the negative and the positive are very different, and because we know the negative is overweighted, It's called the negativity effect, by the way, not my research, we naturally buffer almost everything we say on a scale. We start with a little bit of positive and then we offer a little negative, and then we get to our negative. Now, if I do that consistently, if I give you one little positive and then I give you my four criticisms, the balance is not there. It's actually out of balance. So let's take an example of that, just real simply. Let's just say, let's take the idea.”
2020-11-10 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #96 Randall Stutman: The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You want to get into Take the idea of balance, the simple balance. And by the way, you know this one. This is in your head. I'm just going to be very specific about it. And it's going to take me a little while to really unpack this one because it's got a lot of different pieces to it. But I think you'll find it rather fascinating. So no surprise. We all have a natural and intuitive understanding that negative information carries a lot more impact and weight than positive information. So even when I think you've done a lousy job, I'll normally start it with some throwaway like, oh, that went pretty well. Like, yeah, you really worked hard at that. Like, oh, you know, the audience seemed to really like that one piece. You'll start out with some softening of the blow. Because number one, you want people to hear you. But number two, you naturally know that if you go negative to start with, that people withdraw, they shut down, they don't, they react. They do all kinds of things.”
2020-11-10 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #96 Randall Stutman: The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“How to move things to routine and not do them for the point of technique. And feedback is a classic area. There's a lot of other pieces of advice, not using the word you because that impersonalizes things. Separating ideas and people, all good advice, by the way, but too easy to use this technique and hard to pull off on an ongoing basis. So feedback's a really interesting area that when you really try to get under the covers and find out something cool about it, something neat that you can teach other leaders, that's universal, that's timeless, you know, when you find something, it's really, really powerful. But it can sound like things you've already do until you really think about them.”
2020-11-10 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #96 Randall Stutman: The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Doing something, why you're doing something to have an outcome or manipulate me in some way. So let me put my antennae up and resist this a little bit. So technique gets in our way about everything. Anytime someone gives you a tip or a hack or some level of behavior or action that you would say, you do this for having an effect. If that's when you do it, it's going to have a problem for you at some point, even initially or eventually. A routine is something you do because you want to be that person. That's the kind of way that you want to give feedback as an example. You want to commit to that this is, and so you master it, you do it all the time and all the feedback that you give and you become masterful at that piece and you do it on a consistent basis. People come to know it as part of your style so they don't see it as out of the ordinary. And now you become more and more skillful at it until it's almost second nature and it becomes a habit. So we're after trying to teach leaders.”
2020-11-10 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #96 Randall Stutman: The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To want to hear what I have to say. Great. But the problem with that is as a technique I don't do it very often. I only do it when I want to have that effect, when I need some catharsis or I need you to stop you from doing something or you being resistant for me. I don't do it, which means that you automatically know it's not my normal way of offering feedback, that I'm only doing something. So it's not typical. But the biggest issue when you do something for technique is you don't do it often enough to become skillful at. So if I were to actually follow most leaders around who would even tell you they believe in the behavior of asking for permission, most of them don't ask for permission all that often. They might ask for it in a formal review or they might ask for it in a given spot. So what they're doing is they're doing it because they think they need to have an effect right now, which makes them less skillful and masterful at it. And then more importantly, the person on the other side says, this is not what you normally do.”
2020-11-10 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #96 Randall Stutman: The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And want to resist the feedback that you want. So ask him for permission, they'll never find the right time or energy to do that in the like. And so listen, again, subscribe to the view that I'm trying to change your behavior with feedback. It's not just catharsis. So I should want you to be ready to hear it. But asking you for permission can be a pretty broad thing to do. Now, what happens is people learn that advice and then it becomes a technique. By that is every time they give feedback, they think, oh, okay, maybe I should ask for permission. Well, it doesn't happen in one situation. I'm with my child yesterday and I'm not like I wasn't thinking about asking for permission because they needed to hear something right away even for safety sake and so on and so on. So what happens with the technique is it's something I do for an effect. I do it for a reason of an outcome. Not just the outcome of I want to make you better. I do it because by asking for permission as an example, I get you.”
2020-11-10 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #96 Randall Stutman: The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is some useful ideas without any question, but they don't have that universal applicability where I can practice them and they work all the time. So I don't become very masterful at them. So it's the difference between what I normally call technique and routine. So feedback is the classic area that that occurs in. And that is, so let's just say that I subscribe to the idea that I should ask you for permission for me to give you feedback. Now, I can see the conditions by which that would be a good idea or not a good idea. It speaks to relationships and power and all kinds of things. So I like the behavior. It's a fairly broad piece of advice that's given inside there, but it doesn't work in all situations. There's a lot of cases where you shouldn't ask for permission. There's a lot of cases where you've given people feedback over and over again. They haven't acted on it. There's cases where in situations you'll find yourself in where people want to deflect and”
2020-11-10 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #96 Randall Stutman: The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So feedback is really difficult because there's no question that what we say and mostly when we say it is pretty contextual. No one would ever be able to come up with a universal that says always say this in this situation or always do this. And even when the timing of things really is very precise to what's happening, what already happened, what's going to happen and so forth. But when you study really fabulous leaders, what you learn is that the universal of feedback is how they carry messages. So how do they offer criticism? How do they offer feedback? What are some of the things that they do that are very specific? And then you start to learn things that once you hear them, you naturally start to subscribe to a view that says, oh, there's something there. I can do better at that. That's a really important part. The other piece is when I look to the practical literature of feedback, what you generally get.”
2020-11-10 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #96 Randall Stutman: The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I believe so. And the one thing that I would say about the timelessness issue is if they're truly wisdom and they're truly universal, and then therefore they're timeless, we can't know perfectly because we don't have the behavioral or textual data probably prior to the 1960s or 50s. That's not very long ago. But I'm convinced that whether it be Susan Anthony or Abraham Lincoln or you pick a leader that you really respected in history, I would almost bet everything on the farm that if you went back and you had the behavioral data, you would see that they do all the same things that we've been able to uncover that the best leaders do today. Because when you know how to give feedback in a particular way, it works with everyone and it always has worked. It's not about our culture right now or technology or any of those things.”
2020-11-10 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #96 Randall Stutman: The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then masterful of one of these routines, it works everywhere. And if they can bake it into their style, they're automatically foundationally more effective before they start adapting the situations and flexing to people's differences. That's the cool part.”
2020-11-10 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #96 Randall Stutman: The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Any place, you become more respected and admired by everybody around you. So isn't it fascinating when you say, you know, does it apply? It applies to everything. So when you find a routine like of making a great decision, it works in your household. It works with your friends. It works in deciding, helping your teenager figure out a college. It works with the critical strategic decisions that if it's really a routine that's common and universal to leadership, leadership is leadership and it applies in every aspect of your life. So the most amazing privilege that I have is when I work with senior leaders largely and I try to make them better, I'm trying to make them better, the whole person better. I'm trying to make them better spouses and better friends and better with their teams and better up and better with their boards and better everywhere. And what's cool is if I can convince them and show them how to put in practice and really become”
2020-11-10 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #96 Randall Stutman: The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They were admired by their spouses. They were admired by their friends. They were admired in the places of their worship. They were admired by their neighbors. They were admired in their communities. They were admired by their team. They were admired by the leaders above them. They were admired everywhere they went. So I thought that was an anomaly. But in fact, it's turned out that's the very essence of what it means to be admired. See, because you and I, we've been taught about this individual difference psychological view for so long that we believe we have to act differently with different people. And in fact, the best leaders, most admired leaders, do the same thing. They want to operate differently in different situations with different people, but they do something that other leaders generally don't. They believe in a set of core behaviors and routines that they do all the time, that they don't turn on and turn off. And so when you do some of the best behaviors every place.”
2020-11-10 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #96 Randall Stutman: The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And he said, my management team is available to you too. And I thought, wow, isn't that fascinating, right? Because of course they thought they were admired. They had risen to the very top of the echelon of this large corporate publicly traded company. And by the way, very skilled. But in fact, I only found two. I found several results leaders of which there were a few represented that way. And I found a handful of follower leaders, but only two admired leaders. Now, the reason I tell you that is because I've been on the hunt for the rest of my life, you know, since then, to find more admired leaders, as well as thousands of results leaders and thousands of followership leaders to try to figure out what they do differently. But there was a quality of those first two admired leaders that I thought was an anomaly. I thought this is just a coincidence. There's nothing here other than the fact that these two leaders have this. And it was this.”
2020-11-10 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #96 Randall Stutman: The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was how often I heard the admired word. It wasn't a word that I used or bandied about. It wasn't even in my lexicon, really. But when I talked to people, they would say, admire this person for that. I admire the way they do this. I admire that. And that was their friends, their family, everybody. So I started referring to that person as an admired leader. Then I went on the pathway to find more admired leaders. And in fact, in fact, I found a second admired leader in that organization. The CEO, once I told him of my idea, he was excited because I said, listen, I'm looking for admired leaders, leaders that have results and followership that have both qualities really rare. And he said, when would you like my interview?”
2020-11-10 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #96 Randall Stutman: The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Word because what I was just doing is looking for great leaders. And by the way, you can find in a large organization or a small organization, you can find a handful of people that actually outperform everybody else consistently. Good markets, bad markets, up, you know, lots of talent around them, less talent, lots of resources. Everybody can lead better with resources and revenue. Lots of support from above, less support. There are some people that are able to drive results. So we had our results leaders and we could study them. And then some people that are able to create followership. Wonderful. And so when you find those leaders, people would do anything for them, run into traffic for them, as they say. And so I started finding buckets, but you can find a handful of results leaders and a handful of followership leaders. But to find people that actually have both qualities was what I was after. And when I found my very first one in that organization, first big organization I had access to, to do it, what I was shocked by.”
2020-11-10 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #96 Randall Stutman: The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Differently about themselves when they're engaged by those people. They create a great loyalty to those people. Don't want to let them down. They believe that loyalty is reciprocated where that person stands for them. And so it creates a very different context by which that person engages the leader. So I quickly started studying leaders that had both results and followership skills. Well, I happen to have a large energy organization that's long since been subsumed by even a bigger energy organization in Chicago. The CEO had sponsored my study and he was a leadership junkie, if you will. And he said, you know, Randall, I love your approach to this. I like results. I like followership. And I like finding those leaders. But why don't we just find the leaders inside our organization? Let's do a deep dive on just who are the most leaders in our organization that produce this. And it was way before I came up with the admired.”
2020-11-10 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #96 Randall Stutman: The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You bet. And so the idea is we promote people of results. When I first started studying leaders, what I was surprised by is how many of the best results leaders I could find that were willing to talk to me. And I was, again, I was asking and interviewing teams, how many of the teams really despised those leaders that had these fabulous reputations, that these leaders were being promoted very rapidly inside their organizations, but everybody around them would have voted them off the island. They were all scratching their head saying, you know, I don't want to work for this person. And so I realized very quickly, and I'm not the only one, that results is part of the equation, but not the whole equation that you have to have followership. And the idea that you have to have people want to follow you, that in fact, when you find a leader that has great followership skills, people around them will tell you is they feel differently when they're around them. They want to be engaged by them.”
2020-11-10 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #96 Randall Stutman: The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is such a wonderful softball question because there are so many ways I can answer that. So let me tell you a story several decades ago, I first started studying what I considered to be the best leaders that I could inside one organization. And we all know that the way the popular culture as well as the academic cultures define leadership always has something to do with results. Getting things done, performing at a high level, whether that's measured or not, being good at what you do. And so results really matter. And in fact, what you find in our society in particular, that results really define leadership in a very systemic way.”
2020-11-10 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #96 Randall Stutman: The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They're all interconnected. And so something that I would call an inspiration, say routine or a behavior, you might look at it and go, well, that's really about relationships. And then you and I would say, well, yeah, you're right. It's about relationships. It's really about your credibility to even create the context to have that relationship. Oh, so it's a credibility behavior. Oh, but it really, what we're really doing when we impart that is we're imparting a symbolism, a value. We're carrying a value. So everything kind of interplays with one another, but lots and lots of different functions of leadership. And we know most of them. There's nothing there that's hidden from us. I wouldn't say anything is a part of leadership where you would say, really, you wouldn't be surprised by any common function of leadership that we would go to about trying to understand or study.”
2020-11-10 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #96 Randall Stutman: The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Ability to stylistically put yourself together so that people want to listen to you and yield to what you have to say. Lots and lots of functions. I don't really put them in any kind of hierarchy.”
2020-11-10 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #96 Randall Stutman: The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's so many of them. And there's probably some that are more core than others. I don't think there's anybody that doesn't think leadership involves making decisions and quality decisions. If you're going to make people better, then the tool that you have is criticism and feedback and evaluation and judgment and advice and counsel. So the idea of carrying feedback in some way becomes a critical function of leadership. I think not all leaders develop teams, but one can argue the families are teams, a type of very particular kind of team. So most leaders have to understand how teams and team cultures come to be, how to create coherence in a team, how to create alignment on a team. So that's a function of leadership. You know, motivation, inspiration, which you mentioned, I think is such a critical and underplayed area of leadership because it's so hard to do, especially on an everyday basis. And we have so many misunderstandings about it. But there's many functions from strategy to change to the ability.”
2020-11-10 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #96 Randall Stutman: The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Do how quickly you can find certain things. But I'm always surprised of how many leaders who don't know each other have come from different places, different experiences, different generations, and they all do some of the same things that you and I have never been taught to do. And so that's always surprising to me. Every time I find a new admired leadership behavior, I'm always shocked that I couldn't see it before, didn't see it before, and how ubiquitous it is across most of the leaders that I've ever studied. I just couldn't see it until the pattern emerged. But once it emerges, it's both surprising and very empowering.”
2020-11-10 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #96 Randall Stutman: The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hugely surprised. Yeah. I mean, again, because I was trained like everyone else, I was trained to look for differences. And once you look for differences, you can find them any place you look. But finding things that are in common that people share is not easy. Now, let me say, it's really easy to find the self-evidence stuff. It's easy that, you know, good leaders keep their promises. They admit their mistakes. They show themselves to be human. They show up in a crisis. The stuff that's been fairly self-evident, and by the way, it wasn't always self-evident. But in the last 50 years, 100 years, we know a lot of the basics. But define commonalities, the routines of excellence of leadership, or better said, the routines of leadership excellence define those things that we don't know that aren't as common, that we didn't learn in third grade. That was really hard. And it surprised me when we study really fabulous leaders and we ask that question, what do they do that other people don't?”
2020-11-10 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #96 Randall Stutman: The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And in fact, when you study the best teams across corporates as well as nonprofits and even military, you find that leaders emerge that basically the best teams are teams of leaders, not a leader that has a team, it's teams of leaders, people leading in different ways all the time. And so to me, that's just fundamental to the very way that we approach the problem or think about the issue of leadership.”
2020-11-10 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #96 Randall Stutman: The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Doing things So, leadership can happen anyplace. It happens anytime someone makes the choice to make the situation or the people better. It doesn't always work just like anything else that we do. Sometimes it actually can blow up in your face. You can make a choice that actually makes things worse. I'm always amazed that people can, no matter what, you can always make the situation worse by your choices. But the object is your intentions are to make things better, not by carrying an ideology or a value, but by actually acting. And so that's the most basic way to think about leadership. And if you think of leadership and you agree with that at least fundamentally, leadership is about making situations and people better, then the locus of leadership resides in the actual decisions and actions and messages and not in people. That means anybody can lead at any time, anywhere. Even young children can learn to lead. They don't have to have authority or position or title to do so.”
2020-11-10 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #96 Randall Stutman: The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, well, I mean, what a load of questions because it's imbued with so many charged assumptions, if you will. Dozens of definitions of leadership and leaders, but after breeding all that literature for years and years and working with people for as many decades as I have, I've landed on a really simple idea that I think is fairly self-evident. What leaders do is they make situations and people better. That at the essence of the end of the day is they strategically, practically engage in some level of message decision, action, routine, but also some level of symbolism sometimes that actually moves people to be different. So when you offer an individual that is feeling grief, comfort, you're leading. When you help a group that's experiencing lots of conflict, it de-escalate that conflict, even though you're not the team leader, but you're”
2020-11-10 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #96 Randall Stutman: The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so I came up with a kind of an interesting view on that. And then lo and behold, I started collecting lots and lots of data in order to understand how I could teach other leaders how to be better than they are right now.”
2020-11-10 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #96 Randall Stutman: The Essence of Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT