Lead From the Heart

Social belonging is a fundamental human need, hardwired into our DNA. And yet, 40% of people say that they feel isolated at work, and the result has been lower organizational commitment and engagement. I suppose we should throw “quiet quitting” in there too — a sign workers today feel less connected to their colleagues and unconvinced that they matter much to their organization, team or manager.

On top of that, we’re living in rather polarized times. Whether it’s politics, social issues, race or gender, we’re now massively divided. Even worse, as a society, we’ve grown incredibly intolerant of people who don’t think and believe what we do. To punctuate that point, 40% of people in each of the two primary political parties in the US say that supporters of their opposing party are “downright evil.”

If there was ever a problem in the world needing leadership, it’s surely this one. It’s simply unsustainable for us to cohabitate this planet without having greater empathy, compassion, connection, patience and tolerance for people who are unlike us.

So, what if there were a set of science-backed techniques for navigating life that could help us overcome our differences and rebuild lasting connections across all of these divides? What if there were a useful set of takeaways for managers and educators of all stripes to create connection now that it’s become critically needed?

Stanford University professor Geoffrey Cohen is the author of the new book, “Belonging.”  His work demonstrates that there really is a way back toward having a civil and cooperative society – one where people of all stripes feel they belong — and provides concrete solutions for improving daily life at work, in school, in our homes, and in our communities.

Cohen asserts that every human being alive has a deep and essential need to belong, but most of us don’t fully appreciate that need in others. So, this episode is dedicated to understanding the methods and practices that will help us restore a common sense of belonging all tied to his groundbreaking research.

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Are you someone who would love to make a positive change in the world? Could you be an influential change maker?

University of California, Berkeley Haas Business School professor, Alex Budak believes all of us have the potential. And he created a wildly popular class called “Becoming a Changemaker,” which has quickly grown into one of the most highly-rated courses anywhere on the CAL campus.

The popularity of Budak’s class very strongly hints at the underlying desire all of us have – as Steve Jobs once said – “to leave a dent in the universe.”  And how helpful would it be to have a guide on how to implement our ideas of transforming the world (or our team) in some truly meaningful way?

In his new book, “Becoming A Changemaker: An Actionable Guide To Leading Positive Change At Any Level,” Budak effectively provides a playbook for leading positive change. It’s a research-backed guide to developing the mindsets and leadership skills needed to navigate, shape, and lead change and to thrive amidst uncertainty.

Alex Budak joins us to discuss his book – and does so in the most interesting and relatable way possible.  As a hint to his marvelous concluding comments, Alex says, “The world needs you to be a change maker. We need you to lead in a way that’s true to who you are and to where you are.”

A truly inspiring conversation!

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Leadership is full of paradoxes:

Should we build close relationships with our employees or keep a suitable distance?

Should we trust our staff, or keep an eye on what’s happening?

Are we best to display self-confidence – or is humility a greater power?

For many of us, these competing & interwoven demands are a source of conflict. Since our brains love to make either-or choices, we choose one option over the other. We deal with uncertainty by asserting certainty.

The problem is that once we declare certainty – & rule out one option over the other – we effectively undermine our potential success by needlessly believing there’s no way of achieving both.  In other words, we get it all wrong when we think that as managers we can’t be humble and decisive, or believe it’s impossible to build close relationships with employees and retain an appropriate distance.

In their new bestseller, Both/And Thinking: Embracing Creative Tensions To Solve Your Toughest Problems, Marianne Lewis (left) & Wendy Smith (right) tap into 25 years of their own pioneering research to prove there’s a far more informed & enlightened way of approaching paradoxes in our lives.  And in what’s suddenly become common language, their solution is “both/and” thinking.

The driving question that motivated Smith & Lewis in their extensive research was “What underlies our toughest problems, & how can we deal with it? At the heart of this question was their realization that if we all had better approaches to our problems, we could consistently develop more effective, creative & sustainable solutions.

For years, we’ve seen “either-or” thinking play out in business. We’ve seen how values & ethics get tossed aside in the interest of making profits. We’ve seen CEOs defer exclusively to the demands of shareholders even when doing so harmed all other stakeholders including their employees. These are just two clear examples of how “either-or” bias continues to bias our decision making.

Dr. Wendy Smith is a professor of management at the University of Delaware’s Lerner College of Business & Economics, & the academic director of her school’s Women’s Leadership Initiative. Dr. Marianne Lewis is the dean of the University of Cincinnati’s Lindner School of Business. Together, they share some truly brilliant insights that bring great clarity to a new & empowered way of thinking.  And the information they share won’t only help make you a more effective leader –more than likely, it will change your entire life!

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Being a CEO at any of the world’s largest companies is among the most challenging roles in business. Billions, and even trillions, are at stake – and the fates of tens of thousands of employees often hang in the balance. Yet, even when “can’t miss” high-achievers win the top job, very few prove to excel.

According to the New York Times & Wall Street Journal bestseller, “CEO Excellence,” “Thirty percent of Fortune 500 CEOs are booted from their jobs in three years or less, and two-out-of-five new CEOs are perceived to be failing within eighteen months.”  Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown, apparently.

Seeing these statistics and wondering what behaviors prove to distinguish the very best CEOs, three McKinsey senior partners – including Carolyn Dewar – identified over 2400 public company CEOs before distilling that group into a smaller elite corps. And sixty-seven of that final group agreed to in-depth, multi-hour interviews including Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, American Express’ Ken Chenault, Sony’s Kazuo Hirai & GM’s Mary Barra.

From what’s been described as being “frank, no-holds-barred conversations” the three McKinsey partners were able to pin down the uncommon mindsets these top performing CEOs shared in common. And Carolyn Dewar joins us to explore all they discovered.

As Carolyn repeatedly affirms in our conversation, the behaviors that define top CEOs prove to be ones that define the top managers at almost all other levels of an organization.  And the leadership thinking Carolyn affirms as being critically needed in our workplaces today has surprising resonance with pretty much all of the themes we address on this podcast.

Heading into the interview, I’m not sure I expected this from a senior partner at McKinsey! As you’ll hear, Carolyn exudes a wonderful and enlightened balance of mind and heart.

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Tiffani Bova is the global growth evangelist at Salesforce and the author of the Wall Street Journal bestselling book “GROWTH IQ: Get Smarter About the Choices that Will Make or Break Your Business.” She’s been named to the latest Thinkers50’s list of the world’s top management thinkers. 

Along with Columbia University and Stanford University, Bova recently authored a study which averaged data from 1,000 brick and mortar stores of a major American retailer (Walmart? Target? She can’t reveal).  And the research proved what most of us have always suspected: there’s a causal relationship between employee satisfaction and well-being – and the revenues the stores produce. She not only found that the stores that “did the employee experience well,” elevated revenue – revenue per hour increased by a full fifty percent.

Bova’s confirming conclusion is that when leaders focus on employee satisfaction in the most sincerest of ways, “it produces hard financials, not the soft stuff.” Highly regarded in Silicon Valley for her work in creating bold strategies for sales and growth, she was previously a Distinguished Analyst and Research Fellow at Gartner where she won the Thought Leadership award.

Our conversation digs into her research study and it’s guidance to all managers who lead front-line teams. How you treat them truly does affect the bottom-line, for better or worse.

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Uncertainty in life is, ironically, certain. Amid a pandemic, the past two years have been no exception. None of us needs to think very hard to recall the unprecedented and sudden need we had to move employees en masse to their homes to work, the lingering fears we all had around an unknown virus, and the challenging decisions we later faced about the future of the office in light of the Great Resignation.

Over the course of his career as a professor at the prestigious Insead business school in Paris, Nathan Furr interviewed many of the world’s greatest entrepreneurs including Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. And along the way, he made the extraordinary discovery that rather than being scared by uncertainty, these people all seemed to thrive on it. And this influenced him to ask the big question, “How might the rest of us learn to embrace uncertainty – and use it to our advantage – at a time when modern day life is proving to be its most ambiguous and unpredictable?”

From that question comes the new bestseller Furr wrote with his wife Susannah, “The Upside of Uncertainty,” a book that offers extremely powerful ways of approaching all the ambiguity in our lives, and shows us how to reframe it in a way that helps us use it to our advantage.

As science proves our brains are wired to fear uncertainty’s downsides, the Furrs have uncovered clever ways of facing the unknown and teaching us how we can far better cope with it ourselves.

In their research, the Furrs tapped into neuroscience, psychology, innovation and behavioural economics to develop a four-stage toolkit to help people overcome their fears of uncertainty. And, lest anyone doubt that living with uncertainty is on the rise, the authors point to the World Uncertainty Index (created by economists at Stanford University) which shows that uncertainty has been steadily rising in recent decades.

As there is no longer a linear route forward to success in any endeavor in life, we’ve invited the Furrs to the podcast to explain how we can be more fearless, especially when our lives feels truly uncertain and unsettled.

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Alan Murray is the CEO of Fortune (Magazine) Media. He’s the former president of the Pew Research Center & the Deputy Managing Editor – & Washington Bureau Chief – of the Wall Street Journal. And, for decades, he’s had tremendous access to the world’s top CEOs.

In his new book, “Tomorrow’s Capitalist: My Search For The Soul Of Business,” Murray makes the clear & direct assertion that senior business leaders are suddenly discovering a moral compass. He says we’re living through a moment of profound change in how chief executives understand their role, & argues that this shift is already changing the way that business operates.

If this sounds too good to be true, this may be the first time in our podcast’s history where our guest was asked to endure some cynical grilling (& he responds to every question with aplomb).

In rather interesting language given the theme of this podcast, Murray says “it’s not that CEOs have grown bigger hearts,” but rather that they’re pivoting in a pragmatic way.

They’ve come to understand that their organizations can only grow & prosper if they invest in their employees, serve their customers, support their communities, & recognize their responsibility is to help lift up all of society — rather than (in the words of JPMorgan Chase CEO, Jamie Dimon) “ignore or ‘drive by’ those who have been left behind.”

Few of us could argue that Capitalism doesn’t require a major upgrade, & Murray has been sincerely persuaded that CEOs realize the historic blindness of corporations to social issues like climate change, the “Black Lives Matter” movement, discrimination of all kinds — & income inequality – is no longer sustainable or viable.

In his book, & in our conversation, Murray emphasizes that CEOs — the ultimate pragmatists — have simply realized they could lose their “operating license” if they fail to lead in a new way, not to mention ensure that it’s no longer shareholders who have a say in how their corporations are run.

Few people on the planet have had the access to CEO thinking as Alan Murray, & his perspective on the future of CEO leadership practices will surely leave you encouraged. One very interesting insight he shares here: it’s vocal employees & customers who are holding chief executive’s feet to the fire to evolve. And, Murray makes a compelling case that they finally are.

The post Alan Murray: Is The Shift To Stakeholder Capitalism For Real? appeared first on Mark C. Crowley.

When Bo Seo was 8 years old, he and his family migrated from Korea to Australia. At the time, he didn’t speak English and struggled at school. But, in the fifth grade, something happened to change his life: he discovered competitive debate.

It turns out the seemingly shy and introverted kid had a knack for persuasion – and he went on to become a two-time world champion debater and the coach for the Harvard College Debating Union. Seo also graduated from Harvard, earned a masters degree from Tsinghua University and is about to graduate from Harvard Law School.  Somehow, he also found time to write the surprising bestseller, “Good Arguments: How Debate Teaches Us To Listen And Be Heard,” a book Wharton’s Adam Grants says ”has the potential to make you smarter—and everyone around you wiser.”

As you’ll hear, the twenty-eight-year-old Seo is wicked smart and equally articulate. But we invited him to the podcast because he’s discovered the art of having arguments that don’t go off the rails or leave other people fuming.  Seo believes that, far from being a source of conflict, good-faith debate can enrich our lives and elevate our influence – and being an effective debater is inherently essential in leadership.

In debate competitions, topics are announced just minutes before participants must make their case on stage – and which side a debater gets to argue is randomly assigned. So, for example, if the topic is “It’s time marijuana use become legal in America,” a debater could end up arguing in favor of an opinion they don’t personally hold.

As Seo describes this experience, you learn empathy through the process of understanding how other people perceive an issue.  And because no one is allowed to interject a comment or speak while another debater is on stage, contestants also learn to deeply listen to what other people say.

In an era where it seems so hard to disagree with someone without being perceived as disagreeable, Seo shares practices he mastered while becoming a two-time world champion debater.  And there’s a lot of heart in them.

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He’s a New York Times bestselling author, a former White House advisor to four American Presidents – both Republican and Democrat – a long time senior political commentator on CNN television, and the founder of the John F. Kennedy Center for Public Leadership at Harvard University, where’s he been Director or co-Director for almost two decades.

Gergen is also the author of the new bestseller, “Hearts Touched By Fire: How Great Leaders Are Made,” a book he wrote to share everything of value that he’s learned during his over five-decade career. Gergen has been a student of leadership ever since graduating from Harvard Law School and beginning to coach, counsel and write for Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton.

Leadership guru, Warren Bennis, once said that becoming a leader is fundamentally the same as becoming a fully developed person. We can have companions along the way, but we must ultimately make the journey ourselves. In that vein, Gergen tells us that becoming a great leader demands that we take a two-part journey toward self-awareness and self-mastery – one that is inner journey and one that is an outer journey. During this process, our personal growth and professional development become interdependent.

In this highly inspiring conversation, Gergen explains how to embark on this two-part journey while also weighing in on the Great Resignation, the most essential qualities demanded of managers today, leading through ambiguity – and overcoming life’s most painful setbacks.  If you’ve ever seen him on television, you know he’s a profoundly kind and wise man who seeks to find common ground rather that amplify differences.  He’s a sage with wonderful insights to share.

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We’ve all been told that thinking rationally is the key to success. But at the cutting edge of science, researchers are discovering that feeling is every bit as important as thinking.

All of us make hundreds of decisions every day — including what to eat for breakfast & how we should invest our money — & not one of those decisions would be possible without emotion. It has long been said that thinking & feeling are separate & opposing forces in our behavior. But as Leonard Mlodinow, author of the new bestseller, “Emotional: How Feelings Shape Our Thinking,” tells us, “extraordinary advances in psychology & neuroscience have proven that emotions are as critical to our well-being as thinking.”

One of the cornerstone ideas of the Lead From The Heart philosophy is that human beings are far more influenced by feelings & emotions than most people (leaders) realize. And Mlodinow’s work offers a state-of-the-art understanding of how to apply this knowledge in the workplace. “Emotions shape virtually every thought we have,” he writes. “They contribute, moment to moment, to all our judgments & decisions,” even when we believe we are exercising cold, logical reason.

If we understand that human beings are greatly influenced by their feelings, then it becomes incumbent upon workplace managers to support people in ways that inspire the feelings which motivate great performance.  And we discuss how to accomplish all this in this episode.

Leonard Mlodinow is a theoretical physicist, a former professor at the California Institute of Technology (CalTech) & author of five best-selling books. His book “The Grand Design,” co-authored with Stephen Hawking, reached #1 on the New York Times best-seller list. As you might expect, he brings uncommon brilliance to this conversation – & shares insights that will prove invaluable to workplace leaders everywhere.

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