3 More Questions (Klaus Kleinfeld) with David Novak and Koula Callahan

0:04Happy Monday, everybody, and welcome to another edition of Three More Questions, where we put David Novak in the hot seat and get his takes on what he discussed with the previous week's guest. David, great to see you. Great to see you as well, Koula. Today, we're debriefing the conversation that you had with Klaus Kleinfeld, who I am awarding as the man with the most interesting name that you've ever interviewed on the podcast. I love saying his name, Klaus Kleinfeld. And I also love in the lightning round with Klaus, he says that his most profitable business ever was actually dressing up as Santa Claus when he was younger, when he was like a young boy.

0:44Klaus as Santa Claus. I thought that was amazing. Santa Claus. Get it, everybody? Well, Claus is the former CEO of Siemens and Alcoa, and he's the type of leader who really

0:58David Novak:understands the importance and the value of motivating your team and making motivation a key piece of your culture. Yeah, I think you want to have people pumped up, coming to work every day, wanting to do something that's exciting. And he really realizes that and understands that human capital is just as important, if not more important than the financial capital. In fact, it's the human capital and how people feel. That's what really drives your business and gets you to have the profitability you're looking for in the end anyway. I love it too, because Klaus is from Germany and Siemens, when he took over as CEO, he spent a lot of time in a lot of countries.

1:37David Novak:And that concept, David of Human Capital is universal. And so this episode will apply regardless of what type of business you're in or where you do business.

1:50David Novak:Question number one. Klaus said one of his favorite moments in his leadership at Siemens was when one of his employees said to him, you gave us our soul back. He goes on to emphasize the importance of knowing how to deeply motivate your people at that soul level. David, motivation is one of those intangible things that lots of leaders talk about, but few know how to impact. So I'm curious, how can leaders measure motivation and what can they do to drive it in their organization? Well, I think the classical way to measure your motivation and how you're really driving the culture values that you have in your company is to do culture surveys where you really dive deep into, you know, how people feel you're actually delivering as a company, as a group of people, as a group of leaders on the principles that you espouse.

2:39So that's a formal way to do it. But I think what leaders have to do, you have to really know your people, know your audience, and you have to really understand the importance of building the capability, building that intangible that allows you to really motivate and inspire people. You know, if you're looking out at your audience when you're talking to them and you see a bunch of glazed eyes and nobody's eyes are lit up, you know you're really not connecting. But the best leaders have what I call, what I think a lot of people call the it factor. They just, they have this it factor that lifts people up, inspires others, and people really want to follow them.

3:16And that's an intangible. It's really hard to get at. But boy, the best leaders have a real knack for figuring out how to get that done. And I think the way you get that done is that you're constantly looking for stories. You're looking for stories that really drive home what the noble cause of your company is. You know, people, as I've said before, they do not go to work every day wanting to be a part of something mediocre. They want to be a part of something great. So you want to give a noble cause to your work. And, and, uh, that's what that, uh, employee was saying to Klaus when he said, you gave us your soul back because, you know, he reminded people how much what they do really matters.

3:56And when you do that, That's extremely powerful. I mean, we had a lot of passion at Taco Bell, for example, on the notion of just really making food extremely affordable for everybody. You know, that was the same kind of value that drove Walmart, where they wanted to make everybody be able to buy things at very affordable prices. You know, Walt Disney wanted to make everybody's day and light up everybody's day with a smile. But these are all much bigger things to get focused on than just making a buck. And I think that's how you really motivate people is you get to that noble cause of why you go to work.

4:30David Novak:It's so true, David. Those formal culture surveys don't always get the real honest truth about how people are feeling about the work. So I think to your point, it's part of the leader's job to really sniff out what it is that's happening behind the formal surveys and get a sense for how people really feel about the work that they do and an excellent way to get to the heart of those people and what they're feeling as stories. So I love that. You got to look for those stories. We all have them. And you got to look for them. Question number two. Klaus said that the key to sustaining high performance is managing energy, not just time.

5:06David Novak:He talks about the fact that there's physical energy, mental energy, emotional energy, and spiritual energy. And great leaders know how to manage each category. David, how do you think about managing your energy? Well, I think the physical energy makes a great deal of sense. I believe that's why I worked out every day. You know, I wanted to get myself energized to go to work, and I wanted to get the exercise out of the way, get my metabolism going. And, you know, if you haven't worked out and you want to do it, and if you don't do it in the morning, you're thinking about when are you going to get to do it, and then by the end of the day, you're tired and you don't do it.

5:38So I always try to knock that out right at the beginning. The mental energy to me was just getting myself, you know, really ready to go, understanding what was happening in my day, what my calendar looked like, Thinking through each meeting, trying to figure out what it was I was going to need to do to make that meeting successful. The emotional energy was just making sure that I had my mood in the right place so that I could make the best decisions. You make your worst decisions when you're angry and resentful. You make your best decisions when you're high up in gratitude. And I tied that into my spiritual energy, which is every morning I try to get up every morning and write down the things I'm really grateful for.

6:17and when you do that you know it kind of puts everything into focus and speaking of focus you know i think that's one way how you can really keep your energy high is focus on the things that really matter most you know we had this training exercise where we had blue chips white chips and red chips and you know we said okay in the next uh 30 seconds we threw all these things out on table said pick up as many chips as you can okay and everybody goes in there and picks up all these chips but nobody asked what a blue chip was worth what a red chip was worth or what a white chip was worth. Of course, the blue chips were worth a lot more.

6:49So if you'd gone in and picked out those blue chips, which there weren't that many of them versus all the white chips that you could pick up that really didn't really matter for much, you would absolutely, you know, be so much more productive in terms of what you do. You got to realize you only have so many assimilation points that you can handle in a day. There's only so much stress you can take. So think about that in terms of a unit of a hundred. You got a hundred assimilation points that you can pour into your day in terms of things that you can focus on, put your energy on. Hey, are you really, are you spending your assimilation points on the right things?

7:21I always try to ask myself those kinds of things as I went about my day.

7:27David Novak:David, in almost all of the lightning rounds that you've done with guests, for sure the past 50 episodes we've done, I think maybe 95 % of the answers to the question, what's one thing you do every day is something that you never miss. It's working out in the morning and some sort of meditation or reflection. The best, most successful people are doing these things to manage their different energy categories so that they can use their assimilation points in the right way. Yeah, absolutely cool. Absolutely. And they do it after they get their cup of coffee. No, I'm just kidding. All right. Question number three.

8:05When Klaus talks about vision, he talks about how he starts in the dream phase, but then runs the reality test against that dream.

8:14David Novak:He says you can't just be a visionary. You can't just have dreams. You also have to be an executor. What advice do you have for leaders who might be great at dreaming big, but struggle to make those visions practical and real? Just off the top, I'd say F squared. F for follow-up. So many people start something, but they never follow up. Follow-up is the biggest thing that really drives execution. You got to make sure that you really, really make sure that people are getting done what needs to be done. And that only happens if you have real systematic process for following up to make sure people are getting things done and then holding them accountable for doing it.

8:58That really drives execution. Besides follow up, that other part of the F squared is focus. What happens is that people don't execute well because they're so good at dreaming. They keep dreaming things up and then they move on to the next thing before they've done the first thing. And so, you know, before you go after that next idea, make sure you focus on what you've already asked people to do. And that frustrates people more than anything is that is when leaders just keep coming up with ideas and keep overwhelming with the things that they need to do, not recognizing that they haven't already done the first thing that they asked to do.

9:34And there's only so much an organization can do. There's only so much a person can do. You have to have focus if you really want to get execution and you can't spread yourself too thin. F squared. I love it. I'm taking that one. That's a new Novakian term. I haven't heard you. Well, you know why I came up with that? I watched F1 this weekend, which I loved, which I thought was a really fun movie. And it was kind of nice to have a feel good movie come along. Especially since you interviewed Zach Brown, you know all about F1 now. Yeah, he's actually in the movie. And that's one of my to-do lists is to go to an F1 race.

10:08And so that's a dream. And I'm going to have to execute by following up and make sure it happens. And I know Zac Brown, so I think I ought to be able to pull this off. I love it.

10:22Well, David, thank you so much for another fantastic edition of Three More Questions. And thank you for listening to How Leaders Lead. We're on a mission to make the world a better place by developing better leaders.

10:33David Novak:And if you carve out a little time with us each and every week, we'll help you build the confidence you need to lead well. Yeah. And speaking of managing your energy, our mission of making the world a better place by developing better leaders, that's a great example of that focus. And the fact that we're doing this podcast and all the other podcasts we do is a great example of following up to make sure that we do that every week and deliver on that promise. But anyway, coming up next on How Leaders Lead is my interview with Paul Brown, co-founder and CEO of Inspire Brands, which is the parent company of Arby's, Buffalo, Wild Wings, Sonic, Jimmy John's, Duncan, and Baskin-Robbins.