[REPLAY] Randall Stutman - Admired Leadership (EP.150)

24:41I don't see them as a whole lot different. Usually when I'm working with them, I'm not helping them with their businesses for the most part. They feel like they're expert at that and they don't have enough time for me to get involved with that. I'm helping them grow their own organizations. That's my focus and deal with their own team members and the like. So it's very similar to everything else that I face. I have no doubt that they have unique challenges relative to the industry, but I don't see them because of where I go and how I go, generally speaking. I want to get into this admired leadership and to do that a quick step back.

25:13And I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about your business today. Our business today is largely two big businesses. We have a large group of team-based approach group that focuses on internal communication inside large organizations. Everything from the design, the build, the run of communication processes that pushes basically strategy down inside organizations. And how well do people know that strategy? Can they act on that strategy? Is that strategy articulated in a way that they can engage in and so forth? So that's one business inside our firm. And then the other business is a leadership development business, which is largely coaching business.

25:52And unlike most coaching practices, we're all employees. We're all tied together as colleagues and full-time employees. We only have a handful of independent contractors, and that's because they're old standing relationships of mine that they couldn't become inside the firm. They already have a different job, like a professorship or something like that. But most coaching firms, large ones like ours, are made up of independent contractors that basically are mercenaries, come in and out of client basis. And that's just not how we operate. We don't think you get a whole lot better that way. We've been around each other a long time.

26:23That enables us to really come together and share best practices and get a whole lot better. And everybody's getting better all the time. I certainly am. You talk a lot about values-based leadership. And I'm curious, what are the values at your firm? Our firm, again, not without flaws. But we have some really strong values that have evolved over time. And one of them is this whole idea of excellence and how we display excellence. And so details really matter to us in documents and in all kinds of forms, how we follow up and the like. Responsiveness, because relationships really matter to us. But for us, being client-centric is about being responsive.

26:59So we're responsive to each other and we're responsive to clients and we're speedy to engage. Our firm is not a place where you would leave a message and you wouldn't hear back from somebody for a long period of time. So it's a highly responsive culture. That's a really key value. And in other pieces, we're not contrarian in the fullest sense, but people like really smart, innovative ideas in our place. And so they generally look for the unusual, the novel, the thing that isn't fully embraced yet, the idea that people don't know about. And so there's a high value for not just being excellent, but being somewhat avant-garde and having new answers.

27:38Another value that really matters to us is the nature or the notion of how we're colleagues with one another. And so it's a place where people have been around each other a long time. So it's a very honest place. There's a lot of feedback, a lot of information that comes back and forth. People don't hold back punches in our place, which, of course, younger people, they must think we're just the most evil place in the whole world. We were interviewing somebody a few months ago before COVID and while we were still face-to-face. And they had raised some issues. And then we started engaging in dialogue as a group.

28:12There's about 30 people in the room. And afterwards, he said, you guys must not like each other. And I said, well, what do you mean? He goes, that debate was really testing. I go, that debate is what we are, right? And it's what makes us good. We really like each other. You can't debate like that and not like each other and still work together. And by the way, nothing inflammatory or anything like that. But people really go out and say like, oh, you know, like that's crazy what you just said. And like, I don't agree. And that's the nature of our firm. So we have several other values, but those are the core.

28:40How have you gone about building this business when so few people really know externally who you are? Oh, that's the most wonderful question. And that's such a great, great asset that we have. So I'm a big believer that our firm and leadership in general is in the background, not in the foreground. And so Bob Dylan was right when he said, you're on top, you're really on the bottom. the idea that it's not about us. And when we study the best leaders, they have good reputations and people in their industry, certainly people in their firm know them, their organizations know them, but they're not that well known unless their seat is so high profile that they can't avoid it.

29:20The object is not just to put your head down and hope for good things, but to do great work. And we're a referral-based company. So we're a very large relative to what people do in our space, not certainly by publicly traded companies, but we're a rather large firm. And it's an entirely referral-based firm. We don't advertise. We don't market. We don't do seminars. We don't do presentations. We don't even have a base organizational presentation that we would go out and say, here's who we are. So it's all referral. And we try to do really good work and create deep relationships. And then people take us from spot to spot, organization to organization, push us down inside their organizations and the like.

29:59And the thing that I'm most proud of is not not just that we're not known, because I like that a lot, but I'm most proud of the good portion of our clients, over 80%, are people that we've worked with for years and years rather than that we've had for six months, nine months, or whatever else as a client. So a lot of our clients stay with us because we stay with them. And one of the reasons they do is because they don't have to worry about somebody saying, oh, I work with this person. I'm the coach of that person. We're just always in the background. And I much prefer not to get the external credit, but to get the internal credit.

30:29People know what kind of value we add, and that's the most important piece. And this idea of profile and vanity, it makes you feel good, but it's actually not good for most businesses. It's definitely not good for ours. Now, that's contrary in view. We have young people come in our firm and they go, well, you guys are crazy that you don't promote yourself given what you are and your client base and everything else. And my response is, and I keep smiling right for more success because it's not about pounding our chest. We also, we don't want to be compared against those people that pound their chest and make it about themselves and so forth and so on.

31:01I just don't respect those people nearly as much as I respect the people that do quality work and go along their way. So that's kind of who we are. People don't write a lot of things in our firm. We don't get quoted by magazines. We don't talk to the journal and other kinds of places. And they call us all the time and they want to know about X. You know, they learned that we're working with a Y client or X CEO. and my response is, I don't even know what you're talking about, and we go along our way. And that seems to be the right call for us. I'm not saying it's the right call for everybody, but it's definitely the right call for us.

31:33I got to tell you this. I had leaders say to me, Ted, you're only truly famous when somebody who's crazy thinks they're you. And there's no upside to that. And I've always believed that, that profile is your enemy. It makes you a target for litigation. It makes you a target for media scrutiny. It makes you a target for pure jealousy. See, profile for all great leaders, unless they can't avoid it, is your enemy. And your job is not to covet profile. Your job is to covet the outcomes that really great work produces, the self-satisfaction it produces, the relationships it produces, and the differences in people's lives that it produces.

32:10And that's what it should be about, rather than your picture on some magazine. So that notion, of course, was the original impetus of when I had first asked you to come on the show and you respectfully declined. Part of that was this incredible knowledge that you've developed with your team of what these behaviors are of these great coaches. Now, you have developed an online course called Admired Leadership. And I'm just going to flat out vouch for this because I've dove into it over the last week and gotten through a good chunk of it. And it's amazing. The nuggets are just amazing. I'm going to be telling people about it.

32:48So what was the impetus for sharing this more broadly than just within your coaching clients? So understand that I went here kicking and screaming, absolutely kicking and screaming, because I've been a big proponent that the stuff that we've been able to uncover and that we use in our coaching practice, tremendously powerful stuff, things that we can teach people, things that I can summarize in just a handful of minutes. There's a lot of leadership wisdom there. We focus on the stuff that people don't know rather than what they do know, or at least that's what our goal is. We could have written 50 books and we chose not to ever write a book.

33:24And every once in a while, I'll make a presentation for a client organization and that's self-satisfying to a degree. But we've kept this stuff under wraps. We've lost a few behaviors over the years by being out and about in public forums, one of which became a very, very popular book that sold millions of copies based on one idea that's no longer in the course because it's somebody else's attributed to them now when I know they were in the room when I spoke at one point. So I was not a big fan of the idea of doing this. And I've been railed on by lots of my colleagues over the years, sometimes for vanity's sake of they just want to be known for this stuff.

34:00But usually, and the arguments go like this, number one is more people should benefit from our work. We can make anybody a better parent, a better teacher, a better coach, a better leader, a better spouse. Shouldn't we put this in the hands of more people? And my response is, yeah, that's nice, but I'm not sure how we do that in a way that's humble enough. And then the next piece is you're not going to be here forever. And a lot of this knowledge resides with you, even though we have the outlines and things that it's hard to know like all the nuances that you know. Shouldn't we get some of this down in a different way?

34:37And my response is, yeah, maybe. And then the biggest argument that was made, and I created a relationship with a very special person who came into our organization because he believes in admired leadership. And his whole goal, unbeknownst to me at the time, was to get me to do this. And his response is, you're going to lose all this content over time. That it's now, you've been out there, you got so many coaches and so many other people talking about this stuff and you're out there speaking in different things. You think you've lost one great behavior to a book, you're going to lose dozens because the only way to keep things in this time of social media and the low forth is to be out there with it and to own it and have people attribute it to you.

35:17And so he made that argument. He made it over a period of months to me. And I said, okay, what would we have to do? And he said, well, what about a leadership course where we took 10 modules or something like that, took a bunch of behaviors in each module and kind of videotaped them and articulated them and created some outlines and examples. What do you think about that? And my first reaction is, that sounds absolutely horrible. Do I have to be in them? And he said, of course you do. And I said, well, it's already a non-starter for me, right? And so we worked on it, we worked on it, and finally he convinced me that we needed to do this.

35:49And like everything else, once I go in, I'm all in. Although I have to tell you, I had major doubts all the way through. I still have doubts about it all. I just don't like being out there like that. I've trained myself not to be, so it's kind of hard to see it when all of a sudden I'm on a YouTube video. That's a really big departure for me. But anyway, that's where it came about. And so about a year and a half ago now, maybe two years ago now, we started the process and we started doing the outlines and deciding how we were going to go about it and everything else. And this last March, we launched the digital course and weren't sure if it was going to get much reception or anything else.

36:24And it's been overwhelming so far. So it's early days, but it looks like it's going to have a big impact on people, which is what I wanted to have. And we'll get our critics. The haters will come out eventually and all that kind of stuff. But we haven't seen much of that yet. And we've seen nothing but like your reaction, which is, wow, where has this stuff been? And your notion of nuggets, I like that. Those nuggets are just real behaviors. And as you know, we take a big difference between technique and routine. And we don't want people to use these things as techniques, which is an easy thing to do.

36:54And so we make a big push for that. But so far, it's been fun, but that's where it came from. And every once in a while, I wake up in the middle of the night with cold sweats going, why the heck did I do this? But for the most part, I'm very pleased with the outcome. And I know our organization is happy that we finally did this. And they're right, I'm not going to be around forever. And so this is a good thing. Great. Well, we got to get a little taste of these. There are 10 modules, 10 behaviors in each. So there's a hundred of these on the course. I plucked out a few ones that I thought were just sort of most eye-opening.

37:25The first is in this area of decision-making because I've done a lot on the process of decision-making, the new science of decision-making. But this is really about the behaviors and would love you to kind of pick on one. The weigh-in consensus was the one that I kind of grabbed onto. It's interesting. You start on the one that maybe is one of the more complex ones in the whole set. So it's actually weighing consensus making is, and by the way, the title is basically what it is, but it's a series of routines, not just a single routine. So it has a variety of different parts to it. Almost none of the other behaviors have that many parts or parts at all.

38:01So you took a complex one, but decision making is complex. So over a long period of time, we've studied the particular kinds of leaders who make great decisions. And what we realized is that they were operating in different expressions of the same pattern. So the bias has been, especially in the last 30 years or so, to benefit from the diversity of the group and to try to create better execution of decisions because let's separate the idea of actually making a decision versus getting it executed. So the idea is to get everybody heard, to build as much consensus as possible. So the bias is toward a consensus orientation to making great decisions.

38:38So rather than one smart person sitting in a corner by themselves generating a decision and then unilaterally deciding and then asking people to execute, the bias here is that getting everybody to contribute and having everybody's views thought and trying to get as close to everybody being able to live with the decision, which is what consensus is. Consensus is an agreement. It's having a few strong champions and everybody else can go with the wisdom of the group. So that's the bias. And it seems to be that a lot of the best decision makers do in a particular way. And so one of the things that they do is they rely on a target proposal decision that basically they put out there, but they go out of their way to say, here's the target.

39:20And now they get people to weigh in against that target. And that saves tremendous amounts of time. People can respond much more quickly and clarify their thoughts against a target. The active leadership then comes to play. And that is once you get people to respond to a target, now you know who the dissidents are, the people that are not in support of that decision, you can now start to work consensus, is what we call it, by having multiple conversations, getting them to either reshape that decision with you, that is compromise on that decision, or influence, persuade them as to what the benefits of this are and so forth, until you reach a place where you have near or close to consensus.

39:58And then what you do in course of group settings is rather than waste time in group settings, trying to make decisions in group process, what you do is you do it away from the table after a target position is made. You create consensus or near consensus, then you come to the table and then you validate the decision. You say, all you heard the arguments and we're very close to this. Let's have a last discussion on this. And now we basically make the decision together. And now we spend our time in execution. It's so much more efficient than other ways of doing it. It is the natural way that we see lots of leaders do it.

40:33So this is all about major decisions. If you spend some time in that module, in that particular behavior, you get more of it. And you can figure out how to start doing way in consensus making, right? Again, only major decisions. I don't want you to do it around everyday decisions or minor decisions. Maybe the biggest part of that routine is that every major decision has a decision maker owner who drive the process and either work toward consensus. And if they can't reach it, they have to make it. I can't tell you how many CEOs that I deal with who try to make all their decisions in group meetings.

41:02They don't get anything done. There's never any consensus. They wind up having to make all their decisions unilaterally. Everybody thinks of them as an autocrat. They don't want to be an autocrat and they don't know what else to do. And what weighing consensus making is the way that the best leaders do it in a way where they don't have to make all these unilateral decisions. And also it sets up execution in a better way. So that's what weighing consensus making is about. One of my favorite modules has been the one on managing your time. I thought maybe we could pick out one of the behaviors in that module that related to technology.

41:36So think about the idea that, I like the old expression, technology lets you be in touch with everybody but yourself. And the reason I like that expression is because it's probably a little bit true, but mostly because technology is totally coercive if you allow it to be. So what happens with technology is, unless you have strong and hard rules to technology, it controls you and you don't control it. And then after a time, you're not as productive as you could be because it's the technology driving your productivity rather than you driving the technology. Remember, technology is just a tool. So think about telephones, which is a great example, right?

42:10Telephones diffused over a really long period of time. Some people argue as long as 60 years. It took in the US, it took almost 60 years for everybody to have access to a telephone. So as As a result, there were all kinds of rules that evolved over that really long period of time around the use of telephones, traditional use of telephones. So you probably had some in your family as you were growing up when we still had landlines and there were telephones. Like example, the rule was you probably didn't have a telephone in your bathroom, right? That was only reserved for hotels because that was really weird, right?

42:39Because you're not supposed to talk to somebody while you're having a bowel movement. But there were times where you could interrupt people, how late you could call. call than voicemail became and call waiting. There's rules like if you're at the dry cleaner in line and somebody makes a phone call, they're not supposed to be ahead of the line because the phone call isn't separate than waiting just like you are. There's all kinds of rules to when things diffuse slowly over time. The problem with most of the new media, of course, is they diffuse so quickly that there are no social rules. So what that means is I can email, text you, I can tweet at you.

43:12I can do it 24-7. And the expectation is that you're going to respond and engage just like I am and so forth. And so the rules make it so the technology basically is the powerful piece of your productivity. So shackling meat is just a metaphor that when you get into that behavior, basically says this, you should create your own rules around these mediums. Now there's no right rules, but there are lots of interesting ones. And we give some on the module and lots of examples, but a rule might be, when do you process emails? You might have a rule that says, I process emails first thing in the morning, and then I don't look at emails again until the end of the day.

43:50Now, I'm not saying you can live with that rule. I'm just saying that some people have that rule. And what it does is it shackle, constrains, that's all the shackle metaphor is, constrains that medium. So it saves you time. You might have a rule that says, when conflict occurs, I immediately go to voice-to-voice conversation because I don't do conflict vis-a-vis texts or emails because those are inflammatory mediums, because we get to hide behind the words and not the face and the voice, we will often say things we normally don't do. So as soon as it's clear we disagree or that there's some level of tension, struggle in our conversation, we immediately go live, at least voice to voice.

44:25That's just a rule that constrains that medium. I'll give you more of a software one. So most people's phones, when you leave a voicemail, if you're still in one of those cultures where you have voicemail, we're still voicemail people in our firm, you have several defaults in your phone. You have a 30-second default, a 45-second default, a 120-second default, and a three-minute default. You can set that default any way thing you want. I always set my default to the lowest number so that you have to be succinct in the way that you leave me messages because after 45 seconds, it's done, right? And then you're going to have to re-erase and redo your message to me, which means I don't listen to three-minute messages.

45:00That's just a shackling. It's just a constraint. And so to sit down over a long period of time, a couple weekends, and really think, what are the rules that I can live by, that I should live by based on my values and based on who I want to be in terms of these things. So I'll give you an example of one of those rules that I have lots of clients. They have a room in their house where there's no screens, just no screens. So the only thing that happens in those rooms is people read, they converse, they play games, they do all kinds of stuff, but there's no screens. What I have found from most of my clients is those become the most unpopular rooms for the first three months and then the most popular room in the house because people enjoy that.

45:37When we talk about screens, for example, in my marriage, I have a rule that says when we eat, there are no phones wherever we eat, whether we go to restaurants, whether we're at home, the rule is no phone. That's a shackling of the media. So while I don't argue for a set of right rules, there's no right rules. When we study the best leaders who are really productive, they have very specific, and lots of them, rules to almost all the mediums. And those rules allow them to be more productive. And they change the relationship we have with that technology. The technology now, again, becomes a tool by which I'm productive rather than the whip master that creates my productivity.

46:16And that changes the game. So that's what shackling the media is. And the best leaders all shackle media, every one of them, where most of us are just, we're subject to other people's rules if they have any at all. One of the things that people always struggle with is how to handle and manage around weak performance. Yeah. And weak performance is just an anathema to organizations. Maybe by watching it, I already convinced you that it's about weak performance rather than weak performers. So all of us have weak performance, but very few of us are truly weak performers around everything. If we're known as weak performers in organizations, generally because we're weak at the most critical thing.

46:56If I'm a salesperson, I'm not very good at selling, then it's easy to label me as a weak performer. But in fact, I have lots of other strengths. So the first thing is, which I think you've just now intuitively done, maybe you did it before you listened to us or you didn't, is that whole notion that we all have weak performance. There are things in our lives and the way that we engage and the way that we do our work and so on and so on where we're just not as good as we should be. So the question becomes then, what do we do in order to get that performance up. What there's a lot of controversy around is a lot of very strong leaders, powerful leaders, but leaders that are simply to like to control things, which is a lot of leaders.

47:33They do what we call micromanage. They hover over people. They second guess people. They nudge people. They bother people. And they constantly point out to them that they're underperforming. They sometimes give them tools or strategies to go forward. But for the most part, they're seen as being oppressive in the level of detail and the weeds they get into. And it's considered micromanaging. And most consultants that operate in the leadership world would say micromanagement kind of demotivates people, doesn't make them better, and so forth and so on. So I was fascinated by this whole micromanagement piece because there's a reason that the leaders tend to do it.

48:07And the reason is they don't want to give up on that performance. They want that performance to increase, but they don't know what else to do other than to create a shroud over these people and kind of sit above of them and sit on top of them and so forth. So when we study the best leaders, people that are really good at elevating performance and getting the most out of teams, we were interested in finding, is there something that they do differently? And the answer is, yeah, they do. And they basically confront those people with information. So what does that mean, confronting with information?

48:36It's the idea of that anytime there's low performance, there's usually a piece of information that is the recipe for people's success. By information, that is there's an action and that I can gain information about this. So let's just take the sales example, which is just a simple one. Say I'm somebody that is a salesperson on your team and my performance is low. I'm not reaching my milestones and I'm not engaged in the way that I should. And so after doing a little due diligence as your leader, I learned that your call volume is down. You're just not talking to enough people. So the amount of conversations you're having is not very high.

49:10So rather than simply asking you to have more conversations, what instead I do is I simply ask you to say on an everyday basis, give me a call log. Send me your call log every day as to who you've been calling and what that conversation was about. And by asking for that information, I'm basically requiring you to engage or to do that thing. And so the information itself is highly impactful, influential. So when I confront over my information, it's how much information do I want, how frequently, and that's how draconian we become if we're really dealing with low performance. So for example, in that instance where I'm asking a salesperson for a call lock, I could ask for that every day.

49:50I could ask for that every week. Or in fact, I could say every hours, text me. Wow, that's pretty oppressive. But it depends on how bad your performance is. And it's not busy work. It's the recipe for your success. So anytime you see low performance, there is an action which ties itself to a piece of information that I can ask of you. And depending on how influential I need to be at this moment, how much of the performance I need to save at this moment because of whatever's selling in the issue here, I can ask for it more frequently. So that's the goal and that's the behavior of really making people better from performance.

50:28What do I ask of you? How often? And it's never busy work. It's always things that are ideas that are connected to your success. So there's so many different examples, but I mean, that's the essence of confronting people with the questions related to the information that they need to provide. And by the way, when you ask somebody, a salesperson to say, give me your call log every day, the first thing they say to you is, well, nobody else on the team has to do that. Why do I have to do it? And the answer of course is because your performance is below par. And as soon as your performance is up, I'm not comfortable yet that you're doing everything I want.

51:03So I want to see the call lot. And so what you'll find is either people get better because you've hit on the recipe for their success, or they'll leave. They just feel as if they're singled out on that base of that performance, which is not a bad thing in a lot of cases, right? I remember when my son was in high school and he was having problems with a particular subject matter, and I simply asked for his homework to be on the kitchen table every afternoon. And what I learned was just by that request, that piece of information, everything got a whole lot better because now it required him to know where the homework was, what the homework was.

51:34And at least he had to put it in a spot where he could have actually do it. And that was all I had to ask. I didn't have to sit over him with the problems or talk to the teacher or anything else. So I was lucky enough to land on that request for information. And then I required that that's what has existed. And all of a sudden, a lot of the problems that were happening in that particular course went away. That's the magic of confronting people with the idea of their own accountability to the information that is the recipe for their success. That's what that behavior is about. It's not hard to do.

52:04It takes a lot of practice. And sometimes you'll miss the mark and you will ask them for something that doesn't create a difference. But that's about leadership, the art of leadership. But that's what that behavior is. And it's really consistent with people that are admired leaders. I mean, they do it constantly. They're always asking for information from people. In many cases, at the same time, multiple different people. They're always managing the weaker performance, Not the weaker performers, but the weaker performance. I know I could go on and on and on, but we're going to have to leave some of this for people to sign up for the course.

52:36So I want to turn to a couple of fun closing questions, but I have one question for you before we do that, which is, I know you've worked with a lot of investment managers and you've worked with a bunch of allocators. And I'm curious from an allocator perspective, someone investing in funds, what are the ways they might take some of the behaviors that they could learn by taking the course to help them think better about their evaluations of investment managers? The modules are broken into different functions of leadership, but basically I'm not so sure you couldn't use every one of the modules and all the behaviors to say, what's the quality of this leadership?

53:15Like what's the quality of this fund that I'm about ready to invest and allocate money to? In particular, I would want to look at the team module. So listen, independent of admired leadership, but I would tell you the trifecta of teams is trust, respect, and recognition. And so where's the trust in this team? Does this team have high levels of respect across it? And is this a high recognition place where people want to do their best work? And if you go through the team module, while it doesn't say those three things, and I'm not even sure I used that in the introduction, that basically would all those behaviors produce.

53:51And by the way, it's a little more complex than you think? Because here's the issue of trust is largely a function of experience and dialogue and conversation. That's how we come to predict people and find certainty and the like. And so I would want them to look at some of those team behaviors and say, do I see anything like those team behaviors in this management group? But the respect thing becomes really interesting because remember that I can respect you on two different categories. I can respect your competence, your skill, or I can respect your character. And in many cases inside places like hedge funds or private equity firms or other places where allocators would invest, there's a high degree of respect on skill and a low degree of respect on character.

54:34And that creates division inside those teams. So we have to think through what are the character issues and how do they manifest themselves within that team, as well as what are the skill issues. Because every once in a while, you'll have somebody that's gotten complacent over a long period of time as their original partner isn't carrying their weight anymore. And that sows the seas of dissatisfaction and fraction and fragments that team and so forth. And then recognition. We know unequivocally, not our research, that high recognition teams outperform everybody else. That is those people that feel like they're recognized for great work.

55:09They feel as if that somebody above them is willing to say thank you and say excellence when they do excellent things. That irrespective of whether you're a high need of praise person and the like. You want to be a part of a team that holds the best performers up and that creates a value around acknowledging the best performance. And so you want to produce that. So I would go to that team module probably and say, what do I see of those things inside the organizations that I'm looking at? And in particular, that module focuses on value-based leadership. And we talked a little bit about that earlier, I would want to know if I can articulate for you the values by which I create this culture that aren't mom and apple pie, that aren't just about integrity and respect, and, you know, but really get granular, then I probably don't know them.

56:01And I'm certainly not operating by them. I would always suggest to allocators, you're going to do better. And they're going to do better as those organizations, if they can articulate those values and be strong about how they about apply them every day. That's a big deal. And by the way, I'm going to tell you, I'm always going to have a lot of work because most organizations just haven't figured that out. So they value good stuff. They don't know how to use values in a way that produces leadership and creates team. So that would be my off the cuff response. Look at the team module and really spend your time there and evaluate people against that team module.

56:34That would be one. The second piece then, the module on why should anyone follow you, which is really about credibility. There's a lot of features there around character that you can instantly size up any investment manager and say, are you credible to the other people around you? Or are you just simply so good at what you do that everybody respects you on that one dimension? High character really matters a lot. I think that would be another instructive area to spend some time if I was an allocator. All right, here we go. Randall, what is your favorite hobby or activity outside of work family?

57:06So I played golf in college when I was younger. And while I can't hit it very far anymore, I can still compress a golf ball and I can still putt. And so I enjoy the heck out of golf. For fun, I work with quite a few college golf teams. I'm a performance coach for a couple. And I like to think about the mental side of the game and strategy to it and so forth. And I'm amazed at how these kids hit the ball now. So impressive. And so golf is still a big thing for me. Probably will be for the rest of my life. I just love the game. I love everything about the game. I love the people that attracts. And so golf's it.

57:37I still play a lot of golf, but less play golf. I like to talk about golf, especially with college kids and people that are up and coming. I've been a lot of fun and that's where I spend a lot of time. What's your most important daily habit? So my most important daily habit, I read a tremendous amount. Some people would actually say to you, because of my travel schedule prior to this pandemic, I just read a tremendous amount, maybe more than anyone that most people know. And reading doesn't mean anything unless you're able to capture. And the capture is about grabbing the insights and then being able to put it in some place where you can review it and see it over and over again.

58:16So my most important daily habit is at the end of every day of the things that I've read, I now distill it down into capsulized insights or conversations the same way. And those insights then become put into places where I can review them on an ongoing basis and either cull them out and get rid of them or make more of them or decide that I need to be refreshed by them all the time. That's my most important daily routine more than anything else. How do you curate that? What do you use to curate those insights? I use journals. And so I have about 35 different journals that use topics and it's capricious as to how I decide what goes in what topic.

58:52But if it's something around admired leadership behavior, it goes in one set of journals. And if it's something about marriage or it's something about this. And by the way, I collect jokes and stories that I think are powerful and things of that nature. And so I'm constantly curating that stuff and then reviewing that stuff and capturing that stuff. And I do that at the beginning and ending of days, sometimes in the middle of the day, but usually always at the end of the day. That's a really important routine for me. And so do you do that electronically? I do that physically. I carry one book usually with me, one notebook and then review it while I'm in travel as part of my reading and then put it away and then review another one and so forth.

59:29I'm an old-fashioned, I believe, if you don't articulate, write it down. It's too easy to lose it because what happens electronically, of course, is it disappears. You have to actually call it up. Whereas when I have physical things, just like physical books, it requires me to engage the physicality of it. I understand I'm old-fashioned, but this is the way I prefer to learn. And so I have young people in our firm all the time that look at me and go, like, how do you do that? And my response is, I don't know how you do what you do. But yeah, this electronic reliance is somewhat dangerous to me because it disappears.

59:57You don't know that it's there. You're not forced to engage it. You're not forced to confront it. I see my journals are right on my desk every single night. I see all the wisdom that's inside them. I can pick them up at any time. I don't have to open anything up and remember where the file is or see an icon or anything like that. So it's just different. But again, it's just my preference. It doesn't make it right. What's your biggest pet peeve? Gosh, I have so many pet peeves, Ted. I'm not even sure where to start with that one. I'm confused and I have a lot of consternation around people whose aspiration and skills don't match up.

1:00:28I can tell you that. And so when you interview as many people as I do and so forth, and people aspire to these grand and lofty things, and they've got no skills and foundation to ever get there, that frustrates me for them. But pet peeve, I guess my pet peeve is that there's such a large subscription to bromides and platitudes in the leadership space, where there are people out there that sell things and that are very, very popular that you learned in third grade, and that we're not very insightful and just don't have any power to them. And yet people seem to find them as amazing. That's a pet peeve of mine because that's just a strange outcome for me.

1:01:05I'm vested as far as that goes. Pet peeve. Yeah, I'll tell you a pet peeve for me. So I believe everybody should respect their psychology. I believe we have deep traits and tendencies and preferences. It's not how I focus. I don't think you get better by focusing on them. I think you should understand yourself. I think you should understand other people. No question about that. But I'm always amazed at how many people take one of the self-diagnostic tests, whether that be DISC or Myers-Briggs or Hogan or whatever it might be. They'll sit down with me and they'll say, Randall, that really nailed me.

1:01:39I can't even believe how good that diagnostic was. It just grabbed me and just nailed me right on. And my response always is, you're the one who gave it the answers. How couldn't it have nailed you? Like you're the one who told it all the things that it basically used their simple algorithm to tell you who you are. Like if it didn't nail you, like you got a big problem. Okay. And it's a pet peeve. Like, I don't understand how people can't see that and go this diagnostic, it just grabbed me. Like it nailed me square. I'm like, of course it did. It drives me wild when people tell me that stuff. But if that's my biggest pet peeve, I'm in a pretty good shape.

1:02:16What teaching from your parents has most stayed with you? My parents lived a very different life. My father flew bombers in World War II. My mother was somebody that had to go to work when I was young because my father was sick. These were people who worked really hard. We came from a very modest place. We didn't have a lot of the advantages a lot of other people had. So I learned about hard work. I learned about sacrifice. But my parents always believed in an expression that I still use. And that expression was, you're only as good as you're willing to be bad. And to them, that means try everything.

1:02:51Expose yourself to everything. Take the risks. The fact that you're not going to be good at something or that you're going to fail at something, that's okay. Because you're never going to be good unless you're willing to be bad at stuff. And that doesn't mean you have to stay there. You don't have to continue doing that. But give yourself the widest exposure. Don't close off relationships or conversations or new experiences. Go out and do it all. And then take the risk to try it. and you might stink at it and that's okay, but you're never going to be good. So you're only as good as you're willing to be bad.

1:03:22That was something that never left me. So while my parents believed that talents came in many different forms and none of us have all of them and the one thing that nobody can do unless you let them is outwork you, they believed deeply in that. They believed in sacrifice. They believed in all kinds of things. But that idea of being exposed and having all the experiences in life and being willing to try things and not necessarily be good at them. And by the way, I find that so many young people today have just the opposite philosophy. They won't try anything they're going to be bad at instantly.

1:03:54They don't like things they're bad at when in fact I've lived the opposite view, which is to try everything and in many cases embarrass myself, but that's okay. It's such a deep learning and all of that. You're only as good as you're willing to be bad. That was the big lesson from my parents. All right. Last one. What life lesson have you learned that you wish you knew a lot earlier in life? That's an easy one for me. Who knew that every single thing you own in life owns you first? I didn't know that. I didn't know that every car, every house, every animal, like whatever you own, it owns you more than you own it.

1:04:31Okay, it's you're responsible. You've got the maintenance. You've got to like think about it all the time. This idea of collecting material, goods and assets and real estate and everything else. I wish somebody had said to me, like, before you own that, I want you to think through how it owns you. And it took me a long time in life to get to that spot, to understand it. I'm not any better at preventing it, by the way, but I now know it. So every time I buy something or invest in something, I now know it owns me also, and I think through it a little bit. I usually don't. It doesn't stop me from owning it, but I now go, oh, okay, I'm going to do that again.

1:05:07But that's one of those things I wish I had learned really young. I don't think you have to eschew material goods or possessions or investments, but you got to know that they own you and they own you. They just literally own you. And I can see you smiling. So I know it resonates with you, right? But everything you own owns you first. And that's something I wish I'd learned early on. So Randall, how can people find you both if they're interested in minor leadership and potentially coaching with you and your colleagues? First of all, we put out a video that I did around fan-ness that's on YouTube.

1:05:40It's about 20 minutes and it's worth everybody's watch. Like if you like the idea of fan-ness, it'll give you a better and a bigger picture than what we even covered today. So that's out there. If you're interested in admired leadership, there's also a YouTube video called In Search of Admired Leadership, which kind of gives people the background of where our work came from and what it is and so forth. So I think that matters. And then if you're interested even further than that, go to admiredleadership.com. And the landing page is actually pretty interesting. There's five five foundational videos in that landing page that give people the essence of what's a behavior and why is this stuff leadership wisdom and are leaders made or born and what does it really mean to be authentic and then there's the big one that i'm a big believer in is difference between technique and routine and then that's their choice if they want to dive in more deeply and invest in the course but even going through that will change a lot of things for people and then the course is the course and they get through admiredleadership.com that's how they get there great Randall, really appreciate it.

1:06:37Thanks so much for the wisdom. My pleasure.