Q&A with Seth Godin - How to be a more effective leader

yay we're gonna talk about leadership I am thrilled to be joined today in the booth with Maya and with Sam watching from Toronto we've got Kelly and I'm told faiths Ailee is joining us by remote today so hi faith good to have you as well before we can talk about leadership I want to just mention how stuck we get on semantics loyalty is a great example most of the time when I talk to brands and to companies they talk about how important oil tea is and how loyal their customers are and I asked them to try this simple test if you're a customer your prospect your partner had the chance to buy a substitute for less would they and if the answer is yes then they're not loyal because what loyalty means is that someone will expend effort or money to stick with you so airlines like to talk about the fact that they have loyal fliers but except for the frequent flyer miles most of them don't because given the chance to take a flight for 50 bucks less most of us will so that's loyalty where does leadership come into this equation well leadership is not management we are all capable of leadership and if it's our job we can manage but they're different so here we go management is what we call it when you tell somebody what to do and that your goal is to get them to do what they did yesterday but faster and cheaper that's what managers are charged to do they're swingman the middlemen leaders on the other hand challenge themselves and others to go to a place they've never been before to go there with some risk to go there without a map to go there when they're not sure managers have to have authority based in to the definition of management is you have the authority to tell people what to do leaders merely have to take responsibility then what we do as leaders is we have to see and describe an alternate future and then do something difficult scary risky putting ourselves out there not because we have authority but because we care so in the autumn day we don't have a lot of spreadsheets we don't teach people techniques that you can just pick up in a textbook then what we're trying to do is create an experience that if you can experience what it means to lead then you can do it again and all of us have led sometimes in our lives when we were three or seven or 12 we did some form of leadership the question is why can't you do it again what's holding you back and usually what's holding us back is that it's easier and it feels safer to merely manage so my definition of leadership back to my definition of loyalty my definition of leadership is will people act in a different way more bravely more generously more insightfully because you opened the door for them because you established a new standard because you showed up and pointed the way and turn on the lights and said follow me leadership is not telling people how to do it leadership is encouraging them and motivating them to figure out a new way to go forward so an American corporate practice we see precious little leadership an example would be there are a bunch of companies that make baseball bats out of wood and there was a movement in Little League to ban wooden bats because aluminum bats have various benefits to them well who spoke up against the man to wooden bat people because the wooden bat people are managing they're managing expectations to managing shareholder value they're managing the day-to-day leadership would have been one of those companies standing up and leading the way into this new territory of how are we going to live in a world where bats are made out of instead of wood if someone had done that others would have had to follow and we're never sure if it's gonna work and there's more than just the CEO showing up and deciding to leave there's more than just public policy issues it can be about design it can be about technology it can be about the way we treat our workers in the story we tell our customers and it doesn't have to start at the top it can start with you you can identify a place that you want people to go you can seek enrollment who's with me who wants to follow me do we wish to do this together and those are the key steps to understanding how you can show up at work in a way that causes change to happen so that's my riff for today may hear some band saws in the background but I'm hoping this microphone will help us with that and now I'm gonna turn to Sam who's at the control panel apparently we've been hearing from some really cool people from around the world so thank you all for tuning in what do you got Xion asks how do whether we should listen to our fans or our critics you know I have an interesting relationship with criticism the right kind of criticism is priceless criticism from people who seek to go where you are seeking to go who have the insight and the generosity to show you how to do it better that's priceless almost none of us have enough of that but then there's the other kind of criticism and this criticism comes from either people who wish you well and don't want you to get hurt so they tell you to do nothing or it comes from people who are jealous or afraid who tell you to do nothing and both of these sorts of critics must be ignored because even though they may mean well or may not mean well they don't get what you get they don't see what you see so ignoring those people is essential and the same thing goes with your fans that the fans told Bob Dylan not to go elect because they were fans of the old Bob Dylan and famously what he decided to do was repeat city after city for three years when he toured because he said the first year I'm gonna disappoint most of my old friends fans first you are going to disappoint most my old fans the second year the people who liked it will bring their friends and then the third year the third year I can get back to work and the same thing is true with many forms of leadership then what we need to do is be clear about the why assignment cynic would would point out be clear about why we are headed this way who is in our tribe what we will get from it what does it mean to be on this journey then when we get enrollment the people who are enrolled will give us the best feedback of all because we've empowered them to see what we see to know what we know and challenge them to help us take it to the next level Wow most of the time any question that starts with I had a boss and includes the word never my answer is no I don't so what's an apology an apology is something that a brave and confident and generous leader is capable of doing beware of people who insist that everything they've ever done is right and that everything they've ever done is fabulous and that they have no need to apologize because those people have also committed to not learning anything I think it's totally appropriate to not apologize for doing what you promise to do if someone goes to a vegan restaurant the owner should not apologize for the fact that there's no hamburgers on the menu it's a vegan restaurant of course there are no hamburgers on the menu but if you are doing this thing on the fringes and you're doing things that are wrong and you learn how to do them right by all means close the circle point out what you learned make it clear that if you're doing it again you're not going to do it that way it feels to me like the right kind of apology with the right effort is a great way to build a bridge not tear one down and I don't recall ever meaning an effective leader who refused to apologize these are great questions Sam thanks Maya thanks crow crowd crew here we go you could do everything by yourself if you want and if you do everything by yourself you will get exactly what you would do there's a cost to that and the cost of that is you don't get a lot of leverage the alternative is to let everyone do anything they want in which case you're never gonna get what you want but you're gonna have an enormous amount of leverage so the work is to find the thing in between the work is to say you know what I hired a designer and I don't like his logo but it doesn't matter because whether I like the logo or not has nothing to do with our vision and our mission so it stands because that's the only way I'm gonna be able to build a culture of people who can do work that they are proud of that's really different then when Bob engineer a third-level comes to me with the nut and bolt he spect for the third floor of the battleship and it doesn't meet spec because the walls gonna fall down this is not in that moment a matter of boosting Bob's eco it's a matter of saying what's it for because if you're giving me work that doesn't match the what's it for then we can't use it you're sabotaging the entire mission so part of what it means to be a leader is to be super clear in advance about the what's at for Who am I trying to change when we bring this forward will it give us the desired outcome now we get to have a conversation and it's not well let me tell you what I would do it's going back to first principles why are we here what's it for is what you suggested the best way to get what's it for if it's not how do we cycle so we get the answer that we want that is that the essence of what it is to build the team and lead them going forward is to set a standard and understand the structure underneath the standard not to insist that everyone read your mind because if that's what you're trying to do everyone's going to be frustrated you know I think that a really common leadership mistake goes back to the question a minute ago about apologizing that what we do is we lionize and turn it to heroes leaders who didn't listen right that all these leaders who were innovators and who moved things forward didn't listen to their people and we're proud of them because they overcame the doubts and went forward so we've trained folks want to be heroic leaders to think that what you need to do to accomplish that is not listen deny the rules of physics deny the law of gravity deny all sorts of history about what actually works in fact don't even bother learning history because that's just another form of listening and I think that that's a recipe for tragedy and disaster that the people who have actually created breakthroughs had skills they understood the foundational principles so when Jackson Pollock started doing his work many critics said that he was a crank but you know what Jackson Pollock was also a really good painter and the fact that he understood paint and imagery and the canvas enabled him to use this thing as a tool so he could ignore just a few critics on just a few areas as he went forward so what we have to do it's leaders is not merely listen to our hunches not fall in love with that voice in her head but to understand that a lot of the time were wrong and that listening carefully to the marketplace and to our peers helps us get to where we actually want to go from Nancy I'm hiring for a technical role at my company we have two equally qualified candidates how do I determine who gets the job hire the taller one no I'm just kidding sorry I really have trouble with the word qualified I don't even know what that word qualified means its qualified in what way cuz they know what the square root of 17 is every single time we boil it down to a spec then we've probably figured out a job we could outsource for less than you're gonna pay those people for me qualified means are they flexible are they intuitive do they listen can they speak do they know how to develop a theory what do they do when they're wrong how easy are they to talk to about your work and their work now if you still think these people are equally qualified based on those sorts of parameters demet at a loss in that case hire the tall one hire the short one and flip a coin because you want it's fine but most of the time companies don't hire that way most of the time companies are looking for a checklist right out of the book so my rule of hiring which I've been really happy with is I try to work with people before I hire them because when someone does a project you're not evaluating whether they're good at interviewing you're evaluating whether they're good at working with you which is the reason you're hiring them in the first place and that idea as we get more flexible in the workforce I think is going to become more and more important because it's the personality that people bring to the office their flexibility their ability to be soft when they need to be soft and difficult when they need to be difficult those are things that are much harder to measure in a standardized test boy I wish I'd taken the all ten be a twenty years ago that is why I started it that most of the time people who create things at some level are doing it for themselves and that's what I was thinking when we built the ultimate learning how to see it was a really expensive few decades learning how to see learning how to make decisions thinking about the decisions I made that cost me a lot of time a lot of money and a lot of heartbreak learning how to persuade other people to my point of view those three things are at the heart of the of MBA I have a real in quotation marks MBA an MBA that today would have cost two hundred thousand or more dollars and I know what a real MBA is some of the things you learn in two years at an MBA are valuable and many of them you can learn from a textbook many of them you can learn in other faster cheaper ways but the things that we teach in the alt MBA the experiential the group work the connections the coaches I didn't see any of that when I was at Stanford and it may have changed but I'm not sure it has what we are trying to do in 30 days is create new habits create a new way of seeing create a new way of being in the world we do it the best way we know how with a high amount of intensity and a big safety net underneath so that you don't fail and that is something that would have made an enormous amount of difference to me at night when I was 32 years old and I hope that we can share that with other people now not only don't I give reassurance I don't think other people should give reassurance because reassurance is futile here is why if you need a little reassurance right now it will make you feel better and then a minute from now you will need more reassurance because reassurance even more than bathing doesn't last very long it wears out that the voice in our head the resistance the fear it will say ah loud enough that we will forget that we were just reassured and so if you are Amazon author and you go read a positive review that's great until the next time you see a negative review and now you're going to need even more reassurance and back again and back again back again so I don't believe positive feedback in the form of reassurance is sufficient installation to the voice of the inner critic or the external critic I think what we have to do is learn how to live with the voice in our head instead and so we do not spend a lot of time in the Alton BA nor do I personally saying everything's going to be fine you're great don't worry don't worry don't worry because it doesn't last I'd rather teach you to soothe yourself I'd rather teach you to see what's actually true which is that there's a voice in your head that's working overtime to sabotage you and if you can learn to dance with that voice the voice loses its power and then you don't need reassurance to know that in fact you are okay that you are personally charismatic that you are capable of solving interesting problems and leading you can tell yourself all of those things because they're true how we doing on timing there because I've been ranting okay this is a great question how do you keep this from happening why does the organization hinder creativity it does it because they prize reliability and predictability over what they're gonna get from innovation and if you're not prepared to change that priority you're not gonna be able to solve the problem so you know I was a beta tester for the Mac in 1983 I have owned more than 40 different models of practically every model that's ever been made as far as I know I used to be buying them a dozen at a time for my company I've been through the trenches a member of the tribe met Steve get the whole thing like me there are a lot of people who look at Tim Cook's Apple from the last three years and say whoa a watch is not innovation and it's certainly not innovation to just make your profit go up by coming out with a better version of the iPhone what happened well it's clear what happened what happened is there's thousands of people of stock options and the best way to reward your coworkers and make the stock price go up and the best way to make the stock price go up is to reliably move forward without death-defying innovation that's what happens as soon as you go public that's what happens if big companies unless you're willing to work really hard against that tide and so we have a Schumpeter says creative destruction we have this constant cycle of people who have less to lose crossing across the chasm of innovation people who have less to lose daring to deal with the innovators dilemma so Christensen's book is brilliant in this respect in the sense that he understood that you can't have it both ways the juries are gonna sign up for this constant sense of leaping or you're not what does that mean to you what it means to you is if your value add if your contribution is that you are ready to take responsibility to leap it might be you need to do it at a different company it might mean you need a different boss it might mean that actually the company is ok with innovation but you're just afraid and you're not accepting enough responsibility any of those three things could be the case but the thing that's not okay is to simmer in it and to stew in it and to hide your light that there are are alternatives you know what to start your own gig but there are definitely alternatives and it doesn't have to be about money the fact is if you blog every day you can practice innovating if you make youtube videos you can practice innovating if you're willing to generously publish your work your ideas and your thoughts of the world you can practice innovating and maybe you don't get paid for it the first time or the fifth time of the tenth time but sooner or later if you are that linchpin that voice that person who brings something to the room people are gonna seek you out so you don't need to wait to get discovered by your boss or by someone who's gonna give you the magic key that it solves you from responsibility what you have instead is the ability right now to say I have stuff I'm willing to put into the world and I'm willing to own the outcome positive or negative you should let me do that and if you don't let me do that I'll go find a place that will because we need that light you've got and it would be a shame to keep hiding it this is from Harrison as a manager myself how do I evaluate success and it usually comes down to numbers how do you evaluate success yeah it's really tempting numbers were fairly recent invention and the idea that we can put them on an axis and just stack them up I mean maybe the invention of baseball was the beginning of that but right around then so oh you have a number for bestseller why isn't number three bestseller oh you batted 322 whitey inch about 320 for one number one axis up up it's so easy it absolves us from so many forms of responsibility don't blame me I ought rank seven other people write that Jack Welch super lazy School of Management is all about fire your bottom ten percent rank them out on one axis here we go well you can't have it both ways either that's okay or it's not if it's not okay then you need new axes you need to develop nuance and how you decide what's important and what's not you need to accept the fact that it's okay to have an axis it's not easy to measure for me it's something like trust I would like to be trusted it's important to me it is more important to me to be trusted than it is to be popular or profitable that's my metric is there a way that's easy for me to measure no it's not that's okay it's still my axis people asked me recently about the net promoter score the net promoter score is a simple measure there we go the word simple again of how many people would recommend you to a friend you know what there's a really easy way to make your net promoter score go up reward people for recommending you to a friend I don't think that's the goal though back in the day when radio was important there were ratings books Arbitron would give a diary to people and you'd write down in this diary what radio station is - so consultant made millions of dollars going around to lots of radio stations said I'm gonna tell you the secret to make your ratings go up and they paid this guy money and they said alright what's the secret what song should we change what formats we changed is that enough to do any of that all you have to do is say your call letters over and over and over again triple the number of times you say your call letters every hour why because it made it more likely people would remember what to write in the diary so your ratings went up did they really go up of course not all that went up was the number of people who remembered to write down your rating your call letters well the same thing is true with most of our metrics if you have a simple easy to measure metric there's probably a simple scary inappropriate way to make that number go up that's not the point just because it's easy to measure doesn't mean it's important let's do one or two more thank you for this questions this our friend Ettore and connecticut probably know okay different Ettore i love the fact that there are people coming from all over the world here here's an answer I don't know if it's surprising or not the simplest way is to dramatically decrease your requirements if we think about this idea of ultralight camping one way to go on a hike is to bring 40 pounds of gear with you that means you have to carry 40 pounds of gear but it means that you have a softer cushion to sleep on the other way to go hiking is to bring six pounds of gear with you which means that you don't have all of the comforts but also you don't have to carry very much on your back which means you can travel much faster which means you're in the woods for less time which means you actually spend more time sleeping at home in the bed you intended to sleep in so the same thing can be true in building a life of a freelancer which is if you don't live well if you eat black beans and brown rice and live in a tiny little apartment your requirements are lower if your requirements are lower your freedom goes up if your freedom goes up you're more likely to be creative if you're more likely to be creative you're more likely to get the gigs you seek and if you're more likely to get the gigs you seek you're going to be able to afford a nicer place to live so this idea of not getting behind the eight-ball gives you the freedom to dance the way you want to dance I'm a huge fan of jay Levinson's original concept before guerilla marketing of having multiple streams of income go do your day job for 40 hours a week but at night don't turn on the TV get rid of the TV at night spend three hours doing your freelance work your creative work because you know how much money you have to make from that zero because you have a day job and keep doing that and doing that and doing that until it's more than working because the creativity that you're excusing yourself from is the creativity you need if you're constantly saying well I have to fit in and do dumb stuff because I got to pay the rent you're going to get trapped paying the rent the alternative is to go ultralight to figure out how to fly in a different way in a way that makes some people decide that the work you do is irreplaceable to be that linchpin that's the goal right not to please everybody just to please a few people a few people who will decide they can't live without you last one from Sam yeah this makes me very sad Francesca it's unfair and I wish we could fix it today the fact is that there's been more change in the culture of the West in the last 30 years that at any 30 years in the history of mankind that we went in 1960 when I was born from very few women having important roles in the workplace to most of them having important roles in the workplace that happened in my lifetime so that's not an excuse but it's a bit of an explanation and culture shifts fast in some ways and slow and others so here's the best advice I have for you speaking as someone who has not had to confront this and I have nothing but sympathy for what you're trying to wrestle with and I hope that this helps you can't change the system all at once or you can changes the voice in your head and if the voice in your head is holding you back that's not helping what it means is that the power structure has corrupted the voice in your head and put it to work for themselves that what is essential whenever we are trying to get people in power to listen is to change the voice in our own head first to figure out how to befriend the lizard brain and the resistance and not let it sabotage what we're doing because what people read in us is our confidence our authority our belief in what we are actually doing that figuring that out helps you get 80% of the way there the second thing is learning how to sell actually taking a gig in your spare time selling something can be door to door if you want it can be on the phone if you want learning how to sell being able to talk to somebody about something you care about and getting them to believe you and pay you money for it because we're in the idea business now all of us and what we have is this opportunity to show up with an idea that's worth more than it costs and some people are gonna be so stuck and so misogynistic and so afraid that they're not going to buy it from you but their competition is and that's how we change the culture we change the culture because the losers learn a lesson and the lesson that they lose diversity pays off that it doesn't matter what the messenger looks like doesn't matter what kind of shoes the messenger is wearing what matters is what will get you to move forward so I'm optimistic that we are on the cusp of this cultural change happening even more that people are going to look past DNA and chromosomes and start to understand that's seeing people for who they are and understanding ideas for what they offer is where we need to go but along the way a lot of people are paying the price and it's bad enough you have to deal with the voices outside of your head but you can begin by straightening out the voices in your head because that's something everyone has wrestled with whether it's bono getting stage fright before he goes on stage or a 22 year old intern afraid before she gives a talk at Bain it's always that same voice figure out how to befriend it to dance with it to understand that we've got a shot over my shoulder is a picture of Annie Kenney and I put her up there on purpose Annie Kenney completely unsung is largely responsible she was the last straw that gave women the right to vote and I tell that story in my book what to do when it's your turn but basically what she did was at the age of twenty something she stood up when her Member of Parliament said that women didn't deserve the right to vote interesting trivia Winston Churchill was also on stage he was only 28 or something at the time and she said that's not fair that's not right and the MP said sit down young lady and she refused she said that's not fair that's not right and he ordered her to sit down again and she refused and the third time he had her arrested and as a result of Annie Kenney being arrested it became a sensation across the United Kingdom and then spread across the ocean and not too much later both in the UK and in the u.s. women got the right to vote long overdue partially because one woman stood up overcame her fear and spoke her truth so I'm hoping that resonates with you the Alton ba is completely full for October and November but we have another session that we're doing in January and the applications keep coming in for that so if it's something you're interested in I hope you'll check it out at all to nba.com and you can read what our students say it what's the URL for alumni in komm slash testimonials slash testimonials so see what other people say thanks for tuning in go make a ruckus

Channel: altMBA

Views: 10,425

Keywords: altmba, seth godin

Id: c1eqcOGnb74

Length: 33min 13sec (1993 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 17 2019