Inside Out: Unlearning it all and Building Leadership from Within

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1:02Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantz. My guest today is Scott Stratton. He's the president of UnMarketing, has co-authored six best-selling business books with his business partner and wife, Allison, and was formerly a music industry marketer, national sales training manager, and a college professor. If we could just add NBA started, it would be amazing. It just all stands. He's now a professional speaker for companies like Walmart, Pepsi, Adobe, IBM, Microsoft, and the list goes on. But today we are going to talk about his book, Unleadership, Make Building Relationships Your Business.

1:44So welcome, Scott. John, if it wasn't for my height, my endurance, my strength, my shooting ability, my defending ability, and rebounding, I would be in the NBA. Thank you for having me on, John. It's wonderful to see you again. As with all of us. Exactly, exactly. Here's what I really want to know. When is the revised edition of QR codes kill kittens coming out? You know, the best part, the best, I know it's a joke, but the best part about that is when you write a book called QR codes kill kittens, which is a business picture book of business screw ups. When a New York Times reporter during a pandemic, Google's QR codes, because they're doing a story on how crazy they've been.

2:25Whose name do you think comes up first for them every single time i got into new york times twice including i have it right here beside me for my mom an edition of the new york times just because of that so it's like if it didn't bring me anything and people were every single i i swear don't every time it came up in the news somebody people would forward it to me what do you think now what do you think now and i'm like it only took a pandemic and for apple to make the iphones have it natively in the camera that's all that's all congrats save the kid yeah but they they still don't belong on billboards on the highway that they still don't belong a billboard they still don't belong in an email they still don't all the rules still apply it hasn't changed go back i look go to the tape you have me i had my first thing about it was a whataburger conference and i had told them i said there i'm like in a closed system great boarding pass killer concert ticket awesome you walking around in public, not as easy to do if you've ever seen a human being, you know, it just doesn't, it doesn't always work.

3:22So yeah. So congrats to QR codes. The true winner of the pandemic. So that's right. That's right. Good point. So one of the things I like about this book is that the chapters are all really short. There are 70, like four page chapters. And I'm, I get like excited when I finish a chapter. One of the great things with, so with, with, I'm such I'm such a lucky human because like Allison is a brilliant writer. And I run after squirrels. Like I just run around and I there was a reason why I got so big on Twitter. Right? That's about my length of my focus of time that I can write things for. And so when originally a marketing was doing I was writing it in the way that I thought which was very short, great chapters, and Allison just ran that with the baton.

4:05And when we got to unleadership, one of the really key things. And the reason why there's 70, you know, smaller chapters in it is because if Alison and I believe that one of the most important parts of leadership is self-awareness, meaning knowing what you can and can't do and knowing your people as well, and how, you know, how you affect them, that we can't talk about leadership because Alison and I are blessed with the fact that we don't go into work, that we don't have a boss, that we don't have a corporation. And we don't have like, I, it's easy for me to get on stage and say, just do this.

4:37And then I get to go home. But for us, we wanted to say, look, if self-awareness was a key, we have to be self-aware. And so we found, we looked up and we just figured out over an extended period of time, you know, as you're getting a book together, you just ideas start popping and popping. And we came up with 53 unleaders that we had learned from and either gotten to know or knew from afar over the past 15, 20 years and decided, Alison interviewed every single one of them for an hour, boiled all their thoughts down to about 1100 words each and put it and put it all together. And it's the most diverse group of industries, of levels and of human beings that we think we could find for it.

5:16And the best red thread, as Fred Damsen would say, the best through all of it was almost every single person in the book questioned why they were being asked to be in the book. They didn't think they were like, they're like, Why would you ask me to be in a leadership book? And the answer was because you're asking why? Because you're not doing these things to be in a leadership book. You're not doing these things to go trend virally on on Instagram or something like that, or LinkedIn or something like that, that we got to it's one of the wonderful things I don't know about social media, but being an author and being in this world where we get to go And I get to see so many companies when I go through and talk to so many people and certain things just kind of bubble up to the surface.

6:03And then we get to go and say, look, here's our favorite 53 people in leadership. And it's such a joy. Yeah, that's amazing. So I guess maybe we better let you define it. I'll bite. What is unleadership? You know, I think unleadership is really goes with all of our other uns, the unselling, on branding and on marketing stuff, which is leadership is moments. It's not in the time where leadership is not a performance review. Leadership is not an all hands meeting and you get up and talk to the team. Leadership is made up of everyday things because we understand that we get it's like the word culture.

6:43Okay. And what is that? Well, it's very simple. It's how the person at the bottom of the org chart feels. Culture is driven top down and felt bottom up. I just did it last week. I was in front of a bunch of leaders in a room and I looked at them. I said, none of you know the actual culture of your company because you have power. And the culture is felt by that bottom rung. And that's where unleadership is people looking at the people below them as their inspiration versus the people above them. That's really what it comes down to me. So a theme of really all of your books is to somewhat say what we commonly take as marketing or as selling or as leadership maybe is wrong and that there is a, here we go, pun, unlearning that we have to do?

7:26I mean, would you say that's true that most leaders or many leaders need to unlearn what they've been taught? I think really it's, it really comes, it's, yeah, I think people individually, I really hear, because the reason why I say people is because you can't try to figure out or shift or change as a leader and not as a person. So if self-awareness is really huge, and I beg of people to hear that, that self-awareness is such a huge key to not now going forward, but always, but also in the world that I don't think you put on your professional persona and you can be self-aware and you then take it off and you're not.

8:03And I think one of the things is realizing that we are part of the situation. It's like saying, you know, For me, example, every single relationship that I broke up with somebody, every broken relationship I've had in my life, and there's been many, I'm the only common denominator in those. It was never my fault, but I'm the only common denominator. So starting to realize those things, and if you wanted to have a different relationship, maybe look at yourself too. I'll give you an example of that, even though this is right down the personal side of the road. But it's like the phrase. You ever heard that phrase, John, that old phrase, right?

8:40Do you want to be right or do you want to be happy? Right? And they usually say that line about marriage. And I'd always hear that. And I'm like, yeah, that's a good point, right? I don't know. What I never thought, what I never thought was there was a third option. I could be wrong, possibly wrong. You know, not just are you right or you're happy, but maybe also looking at what you could be wrong. And that was never part of that equation. That was never part of that answer. It's right or happy. No, maybe it's maybe to submit you're wrong sometimes. And it's a fascinating thing in leadership that we don't take that.

9:12Look at a company, look at a company with, let's say five levels. Okay. CEO. And then we have VP, director, manager, then the bottom of the org chart. What you drive down is the wake gets heavier and heavier as it goes down. And if you want to know how things are going, you want to know how to be more efficient. You want to know how to hold on to your people. They know, they all know. So the problem is anytime we go against what the upstream is saying, we call it insubordination, except the only way to innovation is through insubordination. Think of every company that's ever innovated. It usually broke into or took away or threatened an existing piece of business or an existing way of doing something.

9:52But that insubordination of what... And if somebody... I want you to hear this. Anybody listening right now who is in a leadership position, I don't care how high up or how down low you are, if anybody reports to you, if that individual is talking to you and you feel they're being insubordinate, meaning they're disagreeing with you, which is not insubordinate, by the way, but they're disagreeing with you, giving you feedback and saying, I don't think this is going to work. Do you understand the risk they're taking? That they are risking potentially their job or their future placement in the company or their relationship with you to drive this home?

10:24That's how important this point is to them. So instead of trying to think of why I'm right or why I don't, this person shouldn't be saying this, or they were told something. We hire people so we can use their brains as on top of whatever else they're doing. And you want to keep people, listen to them. You want to keep people, ask for their feedback. You can use something simple, stop, start, continue. The most basic thing that a bunch of people have used in the past. What should we stop doing? What should we start doing? What should we continue doing? But we don't. You don't know what it's like to work for you.

10:53I put that on the screen on stage and I let it sit there for about 10 seconds. It's the juiciest 10 seconds of my day because it makes people just shift a bit in their chair. And then I say to them, this can't be about you personally, because I don't know you. But if you're getting a little uncomfortable reading this, take note. It's my pleasure to welcome a new sponsor to the podcast, our friends at Active Campaign. ActiveCampaign helps small teams power big businesses with a must-have platform for intelligent marketing automation. We've been using ActiveCampaign for years here at Duct Tape Marketing to power our subscription forms, email newsletters, and sales funnel drip campaigns.

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12:17That's activecampaign.com slash duct tape. Now this offer is limited to new ActiveCampaign customers only. So what are you waiting for? Fuel your growth, boost revenue, and save precious time by upgrading to ActiveCampaign today. You know, as a side note here, as a speaker, you know, it's probably, it was hard to hold on to something for 10 seconds of silence, isn't it? Oh, and it feels like 10 minutes. It's so great. It's because I'm because I'll because part of that's for me is that's my job. Like that's my that's what I do. So doing that type of timing something is really important impact. Because also you get on stage and I'm not getting up there saying everybody's a terrible leader.

12:59What I'm saying is we have to shake the entire foundation, right to say, hey, because there's a lot of people right now that are trying to go back to four and a half years ago. There's a lot of people right now saying, let's just go back to normal, back to business. And you're missing the plot. You're missing everything. People are not going back. Things have shifted. It was the great, we called the bluff. We had resistance to working from home for 20 years. And you know why I say 20 years? Because I asked over 20 years ago to telecommute, because we called it telecommuting at the time. Right?

13:36When my son was about to be born and I traveled to train our distributors in sales. And they were said, no, we're not a company that does that. They were also not a company that like we're on the internet for a long time. And you look at this stuff and people were just like, no, and I can use that example. And one of the things that, one of the problems, John is get told, you know, I asked to speak somewhere that like, can you talk to our audience about, you know, retaining people nowadays in the younger generation and attracting younger generation, but just don't bring up two things. Don't bring up pay and don't bring up returned into office.

14:04And I'm like, so the two main things, the two main things, right? It's like, it's like, there was a great phrase. I saw somebody who's speaking at like a Davos or something. He's like, it's like having a firefighter convention and not being allowed to talk about water. It's literally those things. They're your biggest things. Or you're like, Hey, well, why don't we put something on, you know, like, how do we attract younger people to our industry? And somebody pipes up, you know, an intern's like, why don't we do something on TikTok? And you're like, shut up. You know, we don't do that here. We don't do that type of stuff.

14:31And you're just like, what are you talking about? What are you talking about? I'm really hoping, I'm trying to get us back to the point of understanding what a job is. A job, somebody working for you is a business agreement. It's a contractual agreement. I offer you my skills and my intellect. You give me a job description that I'm supposed to follow, including other duties as noted, which is the worst one of the whole job description. and then change. You give me a compensation package, but we thrown that it's somehow, it's just like, you work here, you do what I say and you'll like it. And I'm just, I'm done with that.

15:10And so many people are too. One of the early chapters, I think it's chapter three, chapter four. I don't have the table here, but you, you essentially talk about leadership being a creative action or creative act. And I think that is something that so many people miss. You cut out right when you said the exact point I was going to talk. Can you repeat it? The title is, or the idea of the chapter is that leadership is a creative act. And I think that's a brilliant idea that so many people miss because they think they're not creative. Well, and that's part of the point too, right? It's like when you're coming together and it's like, look, the subtitle is make building relationships your business.

15:52It's literally about relationship. And when you come together in relationship, right? Yeah. The sum of what creates out of that is supposed to be something you can't do yourself. A leader is supposed to be able to tap into their people and stuff they didn't think they had or think they can come out with. There's a great one. Jeff Alexander is one of the chapters. He talks about partnerships even where you're going into a partnership where you're supposed to be looking at the other side first when you're leaving. You're supposed to be saying, what do they need? What do they need? versus this is what I'm trying to get out of something.

16:24And it's that same thing as a leadership subordinate relationship as well. So relationships, connection, group hugs, how do we not make this family? Because I don't believe it's a family. I have a family. It's not like my business. I agree. I agree with you. So how do you find, what's a fine line between the, you know, when I hear relationship connection, do I start to leap to like, oh, this is a personal thing? Yeah, well, that's the thing. Okay. So there's a couple of things. So it's funny is like the group that is most against relationships, marketing and connection and leaderships are the ones that call their businesses a family because what they mean by that is you don't say anything negative.

17:04You don't bring anything up. You don't go outside of the house. You don't go outside. It's like, and like you said, I have a, I don't need another. Allison and I combined have five kids. You can take your own family and do what you need to, but we're covered here. Okay. We're covered here. I'm not rolling the dice again. We got five great ones. I'm not going again for anybody else coming into this. I know the odds, but there's this thing that, that the problem is it's always the context, right? Because I've talked to people like privately about it because I brought it up and I said, don't say we're a family here.

17:34Don't miss it's because it's not good. And nobody else, so many people in leadership donors, because they're the ones saying it and their intent is supposed to be good. But I really want people go back down to, let's go to, depending where you're at school, it could be like grade 12 or it could be maybe college. There's that the basic communication model, right? You just pull that out of a textbook, right? There's sender and receiver, right? And the sender encodes the message they're going to send and they send it to you. And then in between you, there's noise. And then the receiver decodes it and takes it the way they take it.

18:06Well, that type of stuff, when you look at somebody who's about to work here and say, we're family, you mean one thing, they hear another. It's just a bad way to put it, first of all. But I really break it down to somebody and say, what do you mean by you mean that you have each other's back? Okay, then that is not we're a strong team. It's our wording. Okay, family is I'm going to feel like I'm going to show up at Thanksgiving, I have to deal with that cousin again, I don't have to want to see and I got to see him like twice a year. Right? It's not look and people use these phrases and stuff too.

18:37And we throw them out in leadership without even knowing the context of that, like the family phrase, blood is thicker than water, right? You hear that phrase, that's the old time. And that's not the saying. It's blood of the covenant is thicker than water of the womb. It's actually the opposite of what the phrase means, that created connections can be stronger and better than family connections. It's actually contradicting what you're trying to do. And that's where it creeps me out as well. But relationships aren't about that. A relationship is simply you are connected to the other person and you understand them.

19:12That's what a relationship is to me. A personal relationship is a whole other thing. I don't think that you should have to do anything outside of the office for your job. I don't think you should lose anything because of that. I think that I do my job and I do it well. The problem is people's definition of well. Well, a team player comes out for drinks. A team player comes on, does this type of thing. You're going going to chip in for the boss. You're going to are you're getting a gift for the boss. You're going to chip in. By the way, stop that money flows down, not out. Okay, there's no boss, you don't buy bosses day stuff.

19:48Fundraising is inappropriate to do in the office when it's directly threatened to somebody saying, walk into their cubicle and say, Are you going to fundraise these type of things? No, because they're like, Well, this is professional, you're not professional. So much of what we say and do is not in these workplaces. But they say, well, with this, no, it's rules for the, and not for me a lot of times when it comes to these things. So you mentioned, and I know this is going to be hard for you. I'm going to do it anyway. There were 53 people you interviewed. Do you have a favorite story? It doesn't have to be a favorite story.

20:16Do you have a story you like to tell as a leadership, a great leadership example of somebody you profile? Dr. Derek Kayango. He is one of my favorite people on the planet. And for a few reasons, one, he's the best dresser I've ever seen in my life. He's the coolest person I've ever met in my life. But beyond that, he's the most genuine, caring person. One of the, one of the people I've met in my life. Derek, one of the things he noticed when he came over to America, when he was stayed at hotels was that they were throwing away the soap. And he came from a country that, well, they didn't have a lot of soap.

20:54And that would be really fricking cool. If all the soap you would throw out, would go over to where I'm from. And he created an entire organization and got the entire country to get their soap all sent back. And he had a whole thing and disinfected it and he created an entire soap company, solve a problem. I have a man bun and Derek changed the world in soap. So it's like I spoke after him at an event and he got up there and then it was like the Kelly brothers were the day before. So two astronauts, Derek Cuyungo, man who changed the world with soap. and then I walked on stage. I really got to plan these things better because I, to the moon, saving the world and I'm just like, man bun.

21:36That's what I do. I love them. But honestly, John, to give you now the cop-out answer after that, like literally, just feed through it and then pick one. That's Erin Burry. Erin, I knew from Twitter in 09. We were all Toronto Twitter people. She ended up creating Willful because she noticed that wills were very cumbersome, very kind of expensive. You had to go through lawyers. She's like, it makes no sense. So now she created Willful. Willful is online wills in Canada. She went and worked with every province, every law board, everything else. And now she's got a wonderful company that gives a damn.

22:09And I got to watch her build it on LinkedIn all through her posts because she wanted to change the way things were done. And that's one of my favorite parts of people and of startups and of founders that said it's one of my favorite parts about disruption is customers who get so pissed off, they create the alternative. And that's what she did. I love that too. Well, Scott, it was awesome catching up with you, having you stop by the duct tape marketing pockets, anywhere you want to invite people to connect with you or find obviously a copy of unleadership. Yeah. Unleadership available wherever good books are sold.

22:43Um, and yeah, we're at unmarketing.com. Come by, say hi, LinkedIn, Instagram, whatever you want. And just enjoy the book. If I reach out to you on LinkedIn, do you want me to unfollow you? Is that? Oh yeah. It's my last place. I think I'm like, I'm gone on Twitter. I'm gone on Facebook, but LinkedIn is holding on. So I'm still there for the time being. So hurry up. Awesome. All right. All right. Again, thanks for stopping by. Hopefully we'll run into you one of these days out there on the road.