688: Dr. Henry Cloud - The Difference Between a Dream & a Vision, Why Revenue Is Not a Goal, the 5-Step Model for Achieving Any Goal, and Why the Highest Performers Seek the Most Coaching

25:04Ryan Hawk:That is so cool, man. Or look at our buddy Will Gadara. Yeah, what about him? Well, you know, he had the number one restaurant in the world. And when he was number 50, he goes to the awards thing, and they don't know what number they're going to be. You know, you start with the last, and he gets called first, which was last. And he's sitting there going, I'm in the top 50 restaurants in the world, but how do you get to number one? And then he had a realization, as this is where vision comes into play. He knew that every one of those 50, their food is not going to be a big differentiator. I mean, every one of those, their food is the best in the world.

25:48How do you get one micro calorie better than, and who's going to notice that? So he said, how can we win? And he came up with something, as everybody knows, if you've read the book, and if you hadn't read it, you should, we're going to have unreasonable hospitality. And so then it's, you go through the sale, you know, there was a strategy and a team and all that to get there. So what he did was he created a strategy and a position, I think he called it the dream maker. And the dream maker, a few people would be in the restaurant. This is 11 Madison, I think was the name of it in New York. And the dream maker was on call.

26:30Okay. The servers, when they're around the table, they would listen to conversation. And if they heard something from the guests that they could lateral off to the dream maker to go turn into an unforgettable moment emotionally for them. The dream maker would go do it. Here's an example. This couple was eating there and they said, I can't believe the flight got canceled. We're not going to, and they started talking to him, what happened? Well, we were going to Tahiti or somewhere or the Caribbean, saved up for this beach vacation. And, you know, it's our anniversary or I don't know the particulars, but they're headed to this beach thing, passes it off to the Dream Maker.

27:12The Dream Maker goes out, gets bags of sand. They got a special room over here that wouldn't be in use, makes the whole thing into a beach, brought in some palm trees, blew up air, swimming pool, couple of beach chairs, took them in there and served them their dinner. They'll never forget that. That's a different vision than, you know, we want to have great food. Yeah.

27:38Ryan Hawk:How would you apply that for, let's say somebody, Henry is a SVP of whatever at a huge company in America and they got really aggressive goals and a very demanding CEO and they're really money focused. Hit the goal, hit the goal, man. We got to grow X percent, whatever. Nothing wrong with that. Right, right. Agree, I've been in that environment. For that person who's facing that pressure and thinking about that and trying to hit that and hire good people, how would you help them cast a vision, create a vision that's inspiring for their people to help exceed their goals that are being set by the CEO of the company?

28:18One of the things that I would want them to do is, I wrote a book called Trust. Now, trust fuels investment. And the first big dynamic in trust is we trust somebody and we engage and we invest in people that we feel like understand us. Oh, my VP gets me. We're in this circumstance. We've got to hit these goals, all this. he understands what that's like for me and what I got to deliver and the pressures I'm under and all that stuff. So the first thing, first thing I would say to that person is, I think you need to really work on that your team, who's got to deliver all this stuff for you and for them, for the CEO who's demanding, you got to develop deep trust because you're taking them into a war and they got to follow the platoon leader into that war.

29:13And they've got to have deep trust with you and they will follow you. So the first thing I would do with that person is say, you know, we got this vision and goal or whatever it is, but his micro vision for that team is I'm going to develop a deep, deep sense of trust and let them know and have them experience that I am here to help them thrive in reaching this goal. And de facto, you're already serving the big goal when you do that. So, you know, vision can die without, without the plan or without people, but it's so important. And a lot of times a vision statement is just a placard on a wall.

30:00It has nothing to do with the real stuff that's going to make it happen.

30:04Ryan Hawk:One of the other elements of it is accountability, which is a part of this to keep the plan going. You write about Alan Mulally's weekly 7 a.m. Thursday meeting at Ford with the color-coded scorecards. Can you tell that story of how that worked from an accountability perspective? You know, I go through a lot of the science of how your brain works and how people's brains work and how we get from here to there. Leaders have to lead people in a way in which their brains can follow them. And that's a big deal. So when you talk about measurement accountability, the human brain, if I say I'm going to, you know, I'm sitting here and I want to go over there, it's already begun to figure out the strategy and the plan to get there, but it's also developed a measurement and accountability system.

30:54You don't even realize this, but if something you've done before like that or that your brain knows how to do, it's already said, you know, that should take about 15 steps and a step every second and on this direction and you start to walk. Well, what if you get distracted and your phone rings and you stop for a second and you really got to get over there by a certain time and you stop. At some point, your brain's going to go, hey, dude, you got to get moving and it gets you back on track. Think of an airline pilot. Okay. They have a vision and we're going to fly from LA to New York. The next thing they do is they engage the talent that's going to help them get there.

31:35So they've got the co-pilot and the fuel people and all that. And then they've got the strategy and the plan. They have a flight plan. How are we going to get there? We're going to fly an airplane. But what's the plan? Well, certain heading, certain speed, certain altitude. Then you get to the measurement and accountability. A pilot would never take off without their measurement and accountability relationships. because the wrong view of accountability is looking back to spank somebody for what they didn't do. The right view of accountability is a tool to make sure we reach our destination. So that pilot takes off, and the first thing that happens in that is her first accountability relationships, her instrument panel, it's supposed to be at 40 ,000 feet.

32:25She gives a beep, beep, you're at 38 ,000, and she knows I'm burning too much fuel, got to get up to 40 ,000. And she quickly fixes what the measurement and accountability systems told her. So if you go back to Malali, what he did was he had all of the VPs and the people that had the different components of what they're doing on a red, yellow, green kind of system. Every week they had to go around the table and they'd talk about a specific project and they would have to give it a red, yellow, or green. And if it's green, we're on track, everything's fine. If it's yellow, okay, so what are the issues?

33:06And what he did, and accountability is a big, you know, it sits on some stuff, and part of that is real psychological safety, that it is an environment where we want you to tell us the problems, and we're here to help you solve them, not shame you, spank you, fire you, or whatever it is. It's like in an operating room, you know, if a nurse notices a reading that's off or an instrument that's off, to hold the team accountable, oh, we didn't do this, or we're doing this, or that's wrong. That's to get to the goal. It's not to make anybody feel bad. And so what he did was he developed that system.

33:39I think the way he tells the story is when he first went in there, you know, they're hemorrhaging money and everything's bad and all this. And he goes around the table and everybody's holding up green. he's going how can you be holding up green when here's the reality over here he said basically i need some reality in here and i think one guy came up so i was probably red and he asked the guy sitting next to him to move and brought the guy that said we got problems said you sit next to me and it was a great model of your brain's accountability is not afraid of data and it's not going to flip into an autoimmune disease where it starts eating the body because it doesn't like what the body's doing.

34:26Your accountability system is the immune function of your body. And this is why the body as a model for this is so unbelievable. Ryan, if I've got an infection, what happens? Well, the immune system first sends out what's called a marker cell, and it names that infection. and it gives the genetic coding of it and the construction of it so the rest of the body knows what the problem is. And then it sends the T-cells to contain it. We're going to let this spread. That's what accountability does. But an autoimmune disease eats the body. We don't want your accountability systems to be eating people.

35:10We want your accountability systems to be aiding people. Thank you for the help. I brought this problem. Now we're getting there.

35:17Ryan Hawk:that's what it's for you told me last time we talked years ago i've probably repeated it a thousand times to leaders since then you get what you create or what you allow i just love to go back to that again because it's such a useful phrase as a leader you're going to get what you create or what you allow especially when it comes to accountability and i found that average to decent leaders, they allow things that then lowers their standards and then their eventual results follow, right? We'll talk about leading and lagging in a second because you also write about that in this book, but can you just go more back on that classic line I learned from you a long time ago as a leader, you're going to get what you create or what you allow?

36:04Yeah, it came from a conversation I was having with the CEO of a global entity that everyone would know. And there were some issues in his team and sort of the culture of the team and the morale and some division and blah, blah, blah. And so I said, well, why is that? And he said, well, you know, because I brought in so-and-so from another company and, you know, he had some, I said, well, why is that? And he said, well, you know, then he started to, that sort of spread and they created, you know, the meeting after the meeting. I said, well, why is that? And every time he would give me a reason, and I'd say, well, why is that?

36:38And finally he looks at me and he said the best line. He goes, I guess I am ridiculously in charge, aren't I? I said, yeah. If what's going on in your team and the morale, either you're creating it or you're allowing it to exist. When you're talking about leadership, if you are the one who's actually in charge, you're ridiculously in charge. And this gets back to when I was talking about the whole model here, and I said, none of us are good at all five. You know, the strengths movement showed us that. But that doesn't mean that all five aren't necessary. Your lungs can't pump blood. I mean, the body has different gifts.

37:26But your prefrontal cortex has a system to make sure they're all doing their job and they're all present. So if you go back to the accountability, and you said people allowed things to go on. And I've seen this many times, you know, great visionaries, and they're great at engaging talent. Or they may be great strategists. But what if they're conflict avoidant? What happens to the accountability system? They avoid it. Or what if they're overly zealous about accountability? Maybe they should have been an attorney and not a CEO. You know, they want to litigate everything and they rush in there and, you know, blow everything up.

38:08That accountability system is broken. They're not good at it. And so it's very important if we would just look at these five things. Am I every day? Is it clear why we're here and what we're doing? Even about a sub goal, clear and compelling desired future. What's going to look like by when? Have I brought the right talent to what it is I'm trying to do? Are we clear about the strategy and the plan that has who does what by when, the activities that drive the strategy and move the needle on that? And are we measuring those activities to answer the question, am I doing what I said I was going to do?

38:55Are we doing what we said we were going to do? Are you doing what you said you were going to do? If not, then why not? Let's do a root cause analysis and figure out why not and then fix it. Because what accountability does is it answers two really important questions. Did we do what we said we were going to do? That's what measurement does. And you got to be measuring activities probably more so than even goals. Goals is a lagging indicator. It's after it's over. You know, it's too late. Measuring activities. Did we do this week what we said we were going to do in the activities that move the needle?

39:38If the answer is no, what most leaders do is, okay, guys, you got to do better. You got to go do that. They never ask the question, well, why not a lot of times? Because what you might find, they don't have the tools they need. Or you've given them competing goals or competing activities. or, you know, this could be a leadership problem. That's a root cause analysis. Or it may be a performance problem. You may have somebody that they need to hear, you know, get up and do better next week and we'll let you do that. But if we don't, you know, we're going to find somebody who can. But you got to know why it didn't happen.

40:18A. B. If the accountability said we executed perfectly, then you got to ask a second question. If we did, did we get the result that we expected? If the answer to that is yes, pour on the gas, baby. I mean, this is working. If you're getting a three-to-one return on ad spend, let's spend more money, right? It's working. But if the answer is we executed perfectly and we didn't get the result, you know, Drucker said, nothing's worse than perfectly executing the wrong things. And a lot of people do that because they feel good about how well I did doing this, but it's not getting you anywhere. And so if the answer is no, we didn't get the results, then you go back up the model and you got to look at maybe we need a strategy adjustment.

41:12Ryan Hawk:Talking about leading and lagging, you actually write about this when it comes to your own weight loss story can you get into leading and lagging and how all that worked with you personally yeah now you've gone from preaching to meddling as i say so it's been a few years now but i i went through a rough patch with i had two total knee replacements and spine surgery and i was basically in a wheelchair for three years had to travel with a wheelchair i you know i'm in a set for three years, and there's a lot of reasons. But I got fat. I mean, I got fat. There's, you know, that's the nice way to say it.

41:50And at the, sort of when I was getting mobile again, I go, gosh, I gotta do something about this because I'm a competitive golfer. And I mean, my swing speed, you gotta get that body around. And I was carrying a, you know, you're supposed to have a six pack, I had a keg, and I just couldn't move like I was supposed to. So I said, all right, well, you know, how do you lose weight? Well, you eat less and move more. So that's my plan. I'm going to eat less and move more. And I was, I thought, I mean, I really was. I was eating less and moving more. And I really thought that, and I was really trying.

42:25Well, I'm not getting the result I should be getting. So then I said, well, I must have a thyroid problem or something, because I know I'm not exceeding my calorie count, and I know I'm doing all my movement I need to do. And so I said, well, I'm going to look at this. So I got an app that measures all this stuff. And I found one of the great psychological truths to be true. We overestimate how well we're actually doing. And when I would count up the stuff and look at, oh, oh, oh, that little grab into the snack bin, that was that much? You know? And so the scales are the lagging indicator, but the leading indicators are the activities that move the needle.

43:20And what this gets to the essence of in leadership and goal achievement is this. Am I working on the factors that actually make a difference? And the great CEOs that I've worked with, I've got one that is one of the greatest I've ever worked with, and it's created multi-billions in valuation from a one-office company. And I actually coined a term. I never heard this term. Maybe others have said it. But I said, dude, you are the best I've ever seen at what I'm going to call microdrivers. And he said, what's a microdriver? And what he does, which he was doing, he just didn't have a term for it. What he does was he knew the specific activities at each level of the business that actually moved the needle.

44:18It's sort of like an atomic compression of the 80-20 rule. And he made those micro drivers objects of extreme awareness, focus, training, deliberate practice. And that's what's going to move the scales at the end of the day or the scoreboard at the end of the Super Bowl. If our measurement is the goal, we're not measuring. We're really a game film on Monday.

44:49Ryan Hawk:Yeah. So how'd you do it? You look great. You look great. How'd you do it? Oh, almost 40 pounds. Wow. Thank you. I don't know if I look great, but I look different. You do. Seriously. Your golf game is probably as a, as a lagging indicator. What do you do? Did you just the tracking of it? Is that what was key? Well, you gotta, you gotta be measuring the right things. Yeah. Okay. And you gotta track it and you've got to be held accountable and you've got to fix what you find. Now, the question is, do I have the internal structure and resources to do all of that or do I need to engage some outside talent to help me do that?

45:35Now, in my case, I need to get some outside talent. I mean, this is why a lot of people, I mean, there are guys that go to the gym every day and they would never go to work. They love it so much. You can't get them out of there. And they work on the right things. I'm not one of those guys. And now I do that in golf. You know, you go to that. When I was growing up playing competitive golf, I tracked my activities. You know, I'd hit a few hundred balls early in the morning. I'd play 18 holes. I'd count the greens I hit, the greens I missed, how many three putts or whatever. And then you know what to go work on.

46:14And at the end of the day, I'd go to the range again. But then I'd hit, after going on the range, I'd go to the chipping green. And I had a system where for an hour I practiced my chipping. And I would not let myself leave and go home until I'd made three from off the green. And that puts pressure on you. It's like, I can't go home and eat dinner until I make another one, right? But the point is that you're working on the activities that you know move the needle. That's what's important. And sometimes for the accountability piece of that is so big, you know, I could do it in golf, but I couldn't do it in the food thing.

46:52I needed external structure. And so I needed accountability. If I had an appointment at the gym with a trainer, well, it's not as easy to sleep in. And we know this from research. Nothing's wrong with peer accountability as opposed to the boss.

47:11Ryan Hawk:one of the common i'm gonna ask you for others but one of the commonalities henry i've seen over the past 11 years 680 plus of these conversations are those people have done an amazing job with surrounding themselves with other high standards get after it truth tellers people that are unafraid to tell them the truth out of love right out of care for them and they do the same for them and they also have those equally high standards and they're always pushing on those standards to increase them. That's one of the commonalities. I'm curious, you spent decades with some of the most impactful CEOs, senior leaders in all different industries.

47:54Ryan Hawk:They've loved your work. They've called you. They want you in their life. What have you found to be some of the commonalities among those leaders who have sustained excellence over an extended period of time? In a short word, character. And here's the problem with that word. Everybody's eyes glaze over. Because they think, well, I have good character. But what they're meaning is moral and ethical character. When I say character, what I'm talking about is your makeup as a person, how you're glued together. That is what matters. and good character. I wrote a book called Integrity, which comes from, and the whole thing was about, integrity is more than somebody doesn't lie, cheat, or steal, or you can believe the numbers, or they're the same person in the light they are in the dark, public or private.

48:47Now that's duplicity. That's not character or integrity. Integrity comes from the word that means wholeness. An integer is a whole number to be integrated. And so the great performers are not just drivers of tasks and results, which they are. They're also drivers of relationships. And what I mean by drivers, not mowing over everybody, but they're able to do the things that relational competency that loads on performance are able to do. And so they're not getting there and killing people in the process, which is always going to be short-term success and not long-term. Or they're not really everybody loves them, but we're not getting anywhere.

49:39That's going to be short-term and not long-term because the company's got to go somewhere. But they leave a wake behind them of the balancing act of having the relational abilities that drive performance, which is more than being nice. and the aggressive capabilities, which is moving something forward, those capacities together. And that's why the great performers always have coaches. They don't usually need to know more about markets. They know what they're doing when they get to that level, but they got to work on themselves. And the greatest boards require that kind of leadership development.

50:21I've got one client company, He spends$100 million a year on individual coaching for their top leaders. And so that gets to when you said, what are some of the things you see in common with these people? Another way of looking at that is that they reversed the second law of thermodynamics. If anybody knows physics, that's the law of entropy, which means things get worse over time. You leave your kids at home and don't go there for two weeks, it's not going to be more cleaned up when you get home, right? But that only is true for a closed system. In physics, the second law, if you open the system to two factors, new energy source from the outside and intelligence to organize that energy, you can reverse entropy.

51:17So that's what coaches do. that's what mentors do, that's what advisors do. That leader is a closed system when the only one, the only voices they're ever listening to are the ones in their head. They're opening up and they've got support and energy and they've got intelligence to organize that new energy. They assimilate it, they accommodate it, they get to a higher level. That's one of the big things. And That they embrace negative realities. That's one of the great, you know, you say, what do you see in common? They move towards problems, not to nuke them, but to either resolve them or transform them into something better.

52:08Now, if you're conflict avoidant or you go into a black hole if there's a bad number that comes across your desk or you start to think I'm a failure or somebody else is an idiot or whatever it is, if you attack negative realities instead of resolve them and transform them, then it's going to be a rocky road. So that's another thing I see in great leaders.

52:32Ryan Hawk:Isn't it interesting? I found this in our work that we do with my team is the ones who are reaching out for help, for coaching, for guidance, for assistance with their leadership teams, they are almost all already absolutely crushing it. I mean, they're like the best of the best in their industries, in any industry. They're doing really, really well, beating goals. And yet, they still want coaching. They still want feedback. They still want you there to work with them and their teams. I would bet you see the same thing. But isn't that interesting that the ones who probably need it the most, that are struggling, aren't doing well, they don't reach out for help.

53:11Ryan Hawk:But the ones who are doing really, really well, they want it. Okay, you hit something right on the nail that I've said. When I first went into this whole space as a psychologist, so I always have a mix of clients. You got the ones that are crushing it. You got the ones that want to get better. You got the ones that there's some identified problem, and that's why they call you and fix this. And then you got the disasters where the whole thing's about to just go to hell, right? And so there is kind of these three plates. I always thought it would be the disasters that I'd be hearing from all the time, right?

53:53It was the exact opposite. That the highest performers were the ones that utilize input in the coaching the most. It's exactly what you said. And you go on, you go to a PGA tournament, the guy's not on the range by himself. You got a couple of people staying around them. You got their swing coach. You got the caddy. Probably got somebody else. And it is a team. If you listen to Scotty Scheffler, he always says, we. We were fortunate this week. He's talking about his team, and he talks about that a lot. I grew up with Nicholas as the Tiger, and Nicholas was my idol. And I remember when I was a kid, I read something that he wasn't playing well, and he said he took some time off and went back to Ohio to spend some time with his teacher, his coach.

54:52And I remember thinking, what? Nicholas has a coach? Why? Well, later I got to meet Jack, spend some time with him, and I had written about him in one of my books and he sent me a letter and very, very nice. But anyway, I was talking to him and I asked him about that. He said, well, I went through a period where I just wasn't playing as well and I called, his name was Jack Grout, you can read about him, and I went back and I said, let's start at the beginning. teach me the stance and the grip first because we can get off of the right heading on the very fundamentals because we can't see ourselves.

55:49Ryan Hawk:Yep. First day of John Wooden, what did he teach his team every day the first day of practice? This is how you put on your socks. It's like the fundamentals getting back to it, but we all need a coach. And the highest performers, that's also, like you said, the company that spends$100 million. I found that to be true as well. The ones that are doing really well, they know, I mean, Serena Williams had her coach her entire career, right? They all have a coach. It's one of the commonalities. Henry, man, this is so great. The book's called Your Desired Future, The Five Essential Steps That Take You Where You Want to Go.

56:25Ryan Hawk:Appreciate your team sending me a copy, man. I'm excited for you. And I would love to continue this dialogue as we both progress, man. Well, anytime. Obviously, you know where to find me. It's good to sit down. I always enjoy it. You make it easy. You know more than I do about this stuff. Well, I appreciate it. Next thing we need to do is to go out to dinner, you, me, and Will Gadara. I want to experience that conversation about leadership and to see the way people fall all over themselves when Will walks in the door. It'd be so much fun, man. when Will shows up at a restaurant it's like Jack Nicklaus went to a public driving race it's like Elvis is in the building so good man love it man thank you so much again always look forward to the next one Henry great thank you appreciate it

57:18Ryan Hawk:it is the end of the podcast club thank you for being a member of the end of the podcast club if you are send me a note Ryan at learningleader.com. Let me know what you learned from this great conversation with Dr. Henry Cloud. A few takeaways from my notes. The best leaders Henry has worked with for 30 years all share one thing. They seek coaching. They reverse the law of entropy by bringing in outside intelligence and support, even when, and especially when, they're already winning. I found this too. We seem to always work with eights and nines who want to be tens. The fours and fives are not attracted to our work.

58:02Ryan Hawk:And then a revenue number is not a vision. A vision is a compelling picture of a future state that makes people want to sacrifice for it. If your vision wouldn't inspire anyone to get out of bed early, it is a metric, not a vision. And I loved how Henry opened the conversation talking about his Doberman, Finley. It's a dog who races to the front door, barks, and does it again tomorrow, never once asking whether the barking is working. The question is a simple one. In how many areas of your life are you just barking at the door? Once again, I would say thank you so much for continuing to spread the message and telling a friend or two, hey, you should listen to this episode of The Learning Leader Show with Dr.

58:47Ryan Hawk:Henry Cloud. I think he'll help you become a more effective leader because you continue to do that. And you also go to Spotify and Apple Podcasts. You subscribe to the show. You rate it hopefully five stars. You write a thoughtful review. So important. By doing all of that, you are continually giving me the opportunity to do what I love on a daily basis. And for that, I will forever be grateful. Thank you so, so much. Talk to you soon. Can't wait.

59:17You