David speaks with Bob Gower, a consultant, speaker, and author. He is the Managing Director for Organisational Effectiveness at changeforce, and one of the world's most sought-after experts on high-performing teams. Bob has authored three books: Agile Business, Radical Alignment, and Getting to Hell Yes.
They talked about:
💖 The power of altruism
👔 What makes a great leader?
🧠 How to make your team more resilient
🚨 What happens when leadership goes wrong
🚩 The red flags of manipulative leadership
🏛️ The three pillars of effective leadership
🎙 Listen to your favourite podcast player
🎧 Listen on Spotify:
📹 Watch on Youtube:
📄 Show notes:
[00:00] Introduction
[01:47] How teamwork builds everything
[05:25] What makes humans so social
[08:03] Success is a team effort
[10:19] The secret to great leadership is focus
[13:20] Why trust takes time to build and moments to destroy
[16:39] What drives us to trust the wrong leaders
[19:47] The psychology of cults
[22:06] Is your job taking more than it’s giving?
[24:40] Great leaders don’t just lead, they strategise
[26:15] The three ways to be a better leader
🗣 Mentioned in the show:
Tim Urban | https://waitbutwhy.com/
Inside the mind of a master procrastinator by Tim Urban | https://medium.com/@apoddar573/inside-the-mind-of-a-master-procrastinator-tim-urban-6e0f90907569
Albert Einstein | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein
E. O. Wilson | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._O._Wilson
The Social Conquest of Earth | https://amzn.to/491O892
GoFundMe | https://www.gofundme.com/c/about-us
Nicholas Christakis | https://sociology.yale.edu/people/nicholas-christakis
Radical Alignment | https://amzn.to/3CCABsl
Steve Jobs | https://www.apple.com/ph/stevejobs/
Elon Musk | https://www.tesla.com/elon-musk
Larry Ellison | https://www.oracle.com/corporate/executives/larry-ellison/
Theranos | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theranos
Elizabeth Holmes | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Holmes
Apple | https://www.apple.com/
Tuckman's stages of group development | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuckman's_stages_of_group_development
Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs | https://www.simplypsychology.org/maslow.html
WeWork | https://www.wework.com/
Adam Neumann | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Neumann
Kim Scott | https://kimmalonescott.com/
Just Work | https://amzn.to/3CCN3bp
👤 Connect with Bob:
Website | http://bobgower.com/
Books:
Radical Alignment | https://amzn.to/3vNnNYX
Agile Business | https://amzn.to/476hvos
Getting to Hell Yes | https://amzn.to/3OgMlmM
👨🏾💻 About David Elikwu:
David Elikwu FRSA is a serial entrepreneur, strategist, and writer. David is the founder of The Knowledge, a platform helping people think deeper and work smarter.
🐣 Twitter: @Delikwu / @itstheknowledge
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📜 Full transcript:
Bob Gower: What's challenging for leaders is that bullies will often, if you are higher in the social hierarchy than they are, the bully will be very nice to you. You will not see the bullying behavior. So you have to do skip level interviews. You have to ask other people how they feel about each other. There's a whole lot of other stuff you have to do because bullies are very, very good at hiding themselves. And so you have to be really, really rigorous in your listening techniques in order to make sure that these people, you get these people out of your organization as quickly as you can.
David Elikwu: This week I'm resharing part of my conversation with Bob Gower.
Now, Bob is a consultant, speaker, and author of two books, and he also frequently contributes to publications like the Huffington Post and Inc. Magazine.
Now, what I love about Bob is that he's obviously incredibly erudite and has a very active intellectual life, but simultaneously he is also deeply empathetic, deeply relatable. And all of that resonates when you consider his work, which revolves around helping organizations and teams to operate more effectively.
So you can get the full show notes transcript, and also read my newsletter at theknowledge.io and you can find Bob on Twitter @gower_bob.
Now, if you love this episode, please do me a tremendous favor and share it with a friend. I very often get messages, emails, YouTube comments of people saying, first of all, how much they love the podcast, but also they think it's tremendously underrated. And I completely agree, but it's completely within your control to share this with anyone that you know that you think might love it.
And particularly if you're listening on Apple Podcasts, please don't forget to leave a review because that helps us tremendously to find other listeners just like you.
David Elikwu: Yeah. You touched on something which I find really interesting, which is essentially the power of groups. And it made me think about Tim Urban, who you've probably come across. Who's a writer on the internet and I was listening to something well, something he said inspired me to write something else, which is essentially just about the fact that on our own as individual humans, we're actually so useless, particularly now I'm thinking even back to what you were talking about before, about, you know, this idea of working with your hands and building things and all the impact that that has and how much of that we've lost.
And so Tim Urban had this example that he used, which was essentially that if some kind of witch or an alien decided to magic away everything that we've built, everything that humans are built. And we were just here wherever we currently are on the earth with just our, you know, just completely naked with no clothes, no machinery, nothing. Could we build a pencil? And the answer is that we probably couldn't. Because it's so interesting when you think of like, where does the human exist? Does the human exist as the individual person or as almost like the ant colony. Where the ant colony is really the mind and the ant colony is it's only together and as a group that we can often create and have a much larger impact on the world. That's not to say that individuals can't but even still like, the way that the work of individuals passes through to the wider collective is through others, right? It's disseminated through others. You know, even Einstein was not handing out pamphlets to every single person in order to disseminate his ideas. They were able to spread through the collective of scientists, right. And through this broader organization and through this broader idea that there's a community of people that are dedicated to this thing and they are committed to furthering certain ideas.
There's so much wrapped up in this idea of as individuals, we try and find our identity and often we try and find our identity in groups and we try and find our place in the world and try and find our orientation as we've discussed. And it's interesting how through the power of groups, it can be for positive and for negative. And I think I'm really glad that you highlighted that. Cause I've probably spent less time thinking of the negative side, but I definitely think, you know, there's the positive side where through the power of groups, we have this power to create and we have this power to do all kinds of things like going back to the example of the pencil. What stands out so much about that is that it seems ludicrously simple. Like the pencil was one of the first things you see drawn in children's books, but when you think about everything that goes into it, you're cutting trees and you're sanding it down and you're filing one of these things you're getting lead from the earth. Or I don't think they use lead graphite from the earth. Like even every single step, everything that it takes to do all of that, you have to get rubber. I'm not sure where they get the rubber from. Is it rubber plants or is it some kind of something that we make chemically now to approximate rubber. So there's so many things that no one person could do, but as a group we can.
But then on the flip side, you do have this perhaps destructive power where in trying to find yourself in the group, you can lose yourself to the group and you can become assimilated into this mass that takes you anywhere and you lose maybe some sense of agency and a sense of being able to maintain who you are and your values, like you talked about before, about how important values are.
So I'm interested to know just from what you were saying now cause you also highlighted the importance of the leader of the group as well. And how much of an impact the leader of a group can have on swaying its direction and, and swaying its impact. And I'm interested to know your thoughts on well, whether or not you think at all, there is a leaning of power between the impact of the leader of the group and the impact of the community within the group itself,
Bob Gower: There's so much in this conversation. And I think the, I mean kind of going back to sort of some foundations in first principles, like the place that I start from is look, the humans as primates. We're a very kind of unique primate in a lot of ways, but we're, we're unique, not necessarily in terms of brain size, but what we're unique in is in terms of social behavior.
So there's a biologist by the name of EO Wilson, who he was an ant biologist, actually, that was his main focus. But he wrote a book called The Social Conquest of Earth where he looked at humans, like in groups, we are super powerful to Tim Urban's point, right. That in groups were super powerful. But as individuals that we tend not to be. And you know, he points out that all other species that have the level of sociality that we do tend to be hive insects or siblings. The idea that if we're walking down the street and we see a baby carriage rolling into traffic that we would jump out to save that baby. Even if we'd had no idea whose baby it was or whatever, right. If we saw another human, especially an innocent, especially a young innocent in, in distress that we would risk our own lives in order to save that. And we would be counted as heroes. If we did, can you imagine, like you walk down the street, you see this baby carry you jump out into the street, you push it out of the way you get killed. Like there's going to be news stories about you and there's going to be, you know, like GoFundMe campaigns for your family. There's going to be like, we are going to hold you up as a hero because you sacrifice yourself for a member of the collective. That is very unusual. As a matter of fact, no other primate would do that. Every other primate would like Eat the baby or ignore the baby, right. You know, like chimpanzees are notoriously sort of violent in this way and it's kind of gross.
So I kind of start there. And so you're what you're setting up. I think one of the core moral dilemmas or the core ethical dilemmas that we have as humans, which is the me versus us, right. And I think we contain both, right? Like this idea and I'm an American. So I come from a highly individualistic rather than a collectivist society where libertarianism and this idea that it's all about my freedom, freedom from constraint is what, is how freedom is defined actually in the U.S rather than sort of a freedom to do things. So we're not committed to providing a basic level of resources to all our entire population. What we are committed to apparently is providing maximum freedom from government intervention, government constraint into every member of society, which is often a freedom to starve and a freedom to fail and a freedom to, you know, to create a very sort of stratified class level society, which is obviously that's not where I would take things, right. I would actually say, how do we provide freedom kind of a base level of base level of freedom, but I think it all goes back to how we behave in groups.
What's interesting to me about all of this is that I think it comes down to when we say groups, I'm not saying like society, I'm not saying the corporation that I work for. I'm not saying the government, I'm thinking like my neighbors, you know, like the people that I interact with my workmates, my friends, my neighbors, the people that I, the shop owners that I interact with on a regular basis. It's the people that I have direct one-on-one interaction with that I think are the most impactful.
And Nicholas Christakis has done really interesting work at the Yale human nature lab, where he'll map that if your friend gets divorced, your likelihood of getting divorced goes up dramatically, right? Just statistically dramatically. If your friend's friend gets divorced, your likelihood of getting were still goes up. You don't even have to know who that friend is, even know that they got divorced, but yet, statistically speaking, you were likely. So these, these sort of like these things travel through social networks. And so what I become very interested in is this sort of, there's a systems theory idea that If you're going to create a large system that works, you have to evolve it from a small system that works. You can't build it from scratch. I cannot build a government from scratch. I cannot build an economy from scratch. I have to start off with a small system that works. And so to my mind, that becomes the team.
So I've focused my work mostly on developing either better team leaders or better teams, because I work with leadership teams, I work with teams sometimes to help them be then better or helping those leadership teams develop the sort of like structures and systems that support better teamwork within their organization, right? So rather than treating people as isolated individuals within the organization, I want to treat them as members of a social unit that is there to deliver value in some way.
So that's really, and I think to me, that's the mindset shift that I'm trying to kind of take in my work, which is a way from creating organizations as collections of individuals, isolated individuals, to creating organizations as collections of small Teams that are able to kind of work together, I suppose, social units and units of sort of production and value or value production. That's how we begin to account for the complexity of modern life is by sort of focusing on the networks that we are a part of. And we can do that as individuals, but I think we can also do that as organizations.
David Elikwu: Sure. So to bring this out, out of the abstract, how does that look day-to-day? So I know we're very much getting into the territory of your book, which is Radical Alignment and a lot of the work that you do now. So Yeah. let's, let's get into that.
Bob Gower: Yeah. So, you know, like I look at this as almost mundane, so I've learned maybe this is my own prejudice, right? Cause I was in a cult and I followed a charismatic leader, but I've also seen the dangers of charismatic leadership and I see that leadership, we often see, we often use people like Steve Jobs or Elon Musk, or Larry Ellison or you know, like somehow it's all tech people now. Those are the great leaders of our era, right.
And then there may be some like, sort of like more moral or philosophical leaders too, and we, we tend to hold them up and frankly, they tend to be jerks. You know, they tend to be charismatic and they tend to be jerks, right. Like, which is weird that, that those two things go together. I love Job's. I love using him as an example because I do think Jobs actually was a really good leader and I've known people that worked for him. I actually know his, his former chief of staff fairly well, and he was difficult. He was a difficult human to work with and he did some things morally speaking that I find repugnant, like denying that that he was the father of his daughter and having to be forced by the courts in order to like pay child support, like as one of the wealthiest men in the world, like I find that morally repugnant.
But I think what happens is, is that in the consciousness that we begin to think of leaders as jerks, as decisive visionary jerks, right? Like that's almost like the model we have. They see things that other people don't see, they can tell stories in a way that other people can't tell them, and they don't care about anything but being successful they're single-minded and focused.
And that's frankly, I think how we end up with I'm watching the Theranos TV show now. And I also read the book, like that's how we ended up with Elizabeth Holmes, right? Who idolized Steve jobs, but she idolized the wrong parts of Jobs. What made Jobs actually a great leader was that when he came back to apple what is it? 20, 25 years ago now, right. He came back after having been kicked out. He said, "Look, we're only going to build four things. We're going to build a portable and a desktop machine. One for the, you know, each for professional and for personal. You know, he could just create it a four by four. This is what we're going to create, we're going to focus.
To my mind. That's what a leader does. A leader says, this is what we're doing. We're focusing on these things. And he had the great vision to know what to focus on as well. But a leader doesn't have to even have that. They just have to have the ability to kind of constrain the attention of that group into something that's valuable.
And then frankly, a lot of the rest of it is getting out of the way. A lot of the rest of it's bringing the right people in letting them develop the sort of the social environment that works. And so when I think of teams, when I think of organizations, I think we have two things going on and these are big things that we, you can subdivide in a lot of ways. But one thing was, we have operational stuff going on. We have to have a vision, a mission, metrics, we have to have some processes. We have to have some tools. We have to have some information. We have to have time. We have to know we're part of the team we have to meet regularly. These are all very sort of block and tackle operational pieces.
And then underneath that is the kind of cultural or emotional pieces, right. Where it's sort of like, we also need to trust each other. We need to respect each other. We need to have a degree of psychological safety so that I can bring out crazy ideas. And you're not going to kick me out of the group or fire me because I had a crazy idea or make me feel bad about myself. You're just going to say Bob, you know, like, oh, Hey, I'll take that. And I'll, you know, and I'll do something with it, right? This idea of like, we can have some friction with each other, but it's productive friction because we're sort of arguing and excited about the best way to do things.
And I think Jobs actually did that very, very well. When you look at sort of the culture that Apple has, it gets a little culty at times, but it's not, not, not horribly so, but you have people that are focused on real problems, focused on really interesting design criteria and he hired and brought together like this very unique group of people that was able to like, iterate towards frankly, some very, very, some magical stuff. I mean, I love, I love my Apple products obviously. And I think to my mind and that to me, like that's what my work is about.
So my book is about sort of a framework that I created that helps with the emotional piece. It helps people understand each other and begin to build the foundations of trust because trust and psychological safety, which are so essential, they take a long time to build often and they can be destroyed almost instantaneously, right. You know, like if I, if you betray somebody's trust, that person will not trust you for a very long time, if ever again.
And so the framework that I created, essentially, it takes us, it helps begin to take us through Tuckman's sort of developmental model, right? So forming, storming, norming, performing, right. We get the group together, then we have to like, rub up against each other and figure out, where there's friction, where there's not friction. Then we need to develop some norms that help us work together. And only then can we start performing. And so my, a lot of my work is around that initial stage of a team development where it's like, okay, we're coming together to do something. How do we develop those norms that are both that are constructive relatively quickly. And that also going back to the me versus us piece, right? Like they don't step on me too much. They actually bring out the best in me. They allow me to actually be me, but they also allow me to be part of the group. And I think it's that, it's sort of that conversation. And then a lot of the other work I do is around the operational pieces or the structural pieces instead of organizations that kind of help support these things. But I think we have to, we have to have both, we can't do one or the other. It's not about, it's not all like trust falls and hugs, it can be that, or it can be what those things are designed to serve, but it also has to be like, well, we have to meet regularly. We have to have good plans. We have to have good tracking tools. We have to, you know, have, have the right skills on the team and all sorts of other stuff well. Yeah.
David Elikwu: The question that I want to ask is, what is it that you think that we most frequently get wrong about leadership? I know, you know, you might have touched on some pieces of this, but the reason I ask is that when I think of some of the people you just mentioned and this idea of charismatic leadership, and even the idea of cults that we've discussed as well, what I find fascinating is that on some level we deeply crave cults like, we really want leadership. We love this idea of someone that will come along with clarity and that will build trust and that will almost lead us to the promised land, and that will galvanize the troops and there are so many scenarios where that is exactly what is needed, and that is exactly what people want.
And so I think what you find in many of those scenarios is those types of people are incredibly rare. If you were to go out and do a poll and ask people, how's your boss? Most people's bosses are not galvanizing them to jump out of bed at 2:00 AM in the morning and, and crack on and work all hours because they love what they're doing and they believe in the vision. They're doing it out of a sense of compulsion, they doing it because they're usually miserable. They're usually trying to get some money, trying to do things for themselves. So it's almost, I am here to serve myself. I'm not here to serve the cause. And not that there's anything wrong with that, but that's typically the idea.
And so what I find fascinating is that typically we're constantly straining against this dynamic where it's only, once someone comes in that fits this model of almost something that we want and we look for. There are elements of something that we're looking for, at least not that they are the perfect encapsulation of that, but there are elements of something that we look for that we see and people gravitate towards that.
And you see, even with the Elizabeth Holmes scenario, there are people leaving their jobs, discarding members of their family to gravitate towards this light towards whatever it is that they see in this person. And also the second part is that the love for the person or whatever is drawing you towards the person seems to surpass the love of thing, because all of these venture capitalists and people that are investing in Theranos for example, are obviously in it to make money. They're not in it to make friends. I mean, some people want to have friends, but ultimately you are investing and throwing hundreds of millions of dollars into this company because you want a return. And you're not seeing the return. You're not seeing the return. You're not seeing the machine that is supposed to be doing the work. You're not seeing any of the tangible stuff that you've told yourself that you're here looking for. But because of this person, you are here and you're staying and no matter what happens, the stories that come out, the rumors and everything that's happening, you stay there.
So I really want to understand, okay. One, what is it that makes that happen? And Two like, what is it that we're getting wrong about leadership, where you have such binary outcomes, where you have the one in a million where there's someone that promises to take you to the moon and it all ends up being a farce. But then on the other side, there is the mundane swamp of most people's jobs where no one is motivated to do much of anything, unless it's putting food in their families mouths.
Bob Gower: Yeah. That's such a, there's so much in there. I think you know, we have some core psychological needs as humans, right? Like I think we all need to feel a sense of security, which is often represented by money, right. In our, like, we need to feel like, Hey, I'm going to be fed. I'm going to be clothe. Like if I don't have a sense of security, I feel very unstable. Kind of going through Maslow in some way might mean Maslow's hierarchy. We got to have those base needs taken care of.
We also need to have a sense of significance, right? That we are important to a group of people that we are valued by other people. This is very core. This would correspond to kind of the middle, you know, sort of the social needs part of Maslow's hierarchy. And then we also want to have a, have a sense of meaning of our lives, right? We want to have some kind of like, self-actualization or that our life has a purpose that our life has a meaning. Like these are also things that, that people really care about.
And I think what happens in a cultic dynamic and I think the two biggest examples I can think of where it is so clear in the last few, the last decade would be WeWork and Theranos, right. Both had inspiring charismatic leaders, people who told stories very well. I think in the case of Elizabeth Holmes, it was a fraudulent story. It was a fiction. I think in the case of Adam Neumann at Wework it was not fraudulent so much as exaggerated. He was building a business that actually did have some financial, you know, that did have a product, the product wasn't nearly as valuable as he said it was right as the story that he spun. But, you know, office space is valuable. It's not going to change the world. It's not going to solve the world's social problems, which is what he was spinning. So what happens is, is when people use the meaning and the significance, they kind of start at the top. I feel like that's what happens in a cultic storytelling is we start at the top. We say, we're going to give you a sense of meaning. We're going to give you a sense of social significance and stories. One way to know that your or at least you should have some red flags. If someone is telling you how amazing you are within a few minutes of meeting you, they're probably trying to manipulate you in some way, like, be really careful around that person. It's something called love bombing. It's something that narcissists do. It's something that Machiavellianists and even psychopaths will do occasionally in order to manipulate people and kind of like bring them into their orbit.
And what's interesting about these people is they tend to bring in people who are manipulative tend to surround themselves with people who are not, they tend to surround themselves with people who are trusting that then creates this other layer that, you know, like it masks their cultic dynamic.
But what we see in cults often is that people are, I believe this anyway. All right. This is what I've seen is that your needs for security, you're more sort of fundamental needs begin to be sacrificed in service of these more social or these more meaning based needs. And in some cases that's not necessarily a bad thing, right? Like if I'm part of a community and, I think about my family sometimes, like if there was a way for me to sacrifice my life, you know, so my wife and my child could get live on. I would probably make that choice. I don't say that altruistically, I just make that you know, like to make myself look amazing. I'm just like, I think that's something that feels right to me. That feels, that feels good to me. And I, and it does feel human to me. It does feel real. It does feel, but for me to sacrifice all of my time and energy and to work at below market rates which is what happened at WeWork a lot, right? Like people have sacrificed almost their entire lives to work at below market rates to rent offices to other people. And they did it because they believed they were changing the world. And you hear Neumann use this language again, and again. "We are the only people who can make the world a better place. We are the only people, you know, like you are the most amazing people." So he's love bombing and doing the purpose thing all at the same time.
Meanwhile, everybody's working way too long, getting sick. And as soon as they're no longer useful to the, to the organization, the organization's like, get the hell out of here, right? Like the organization doesn't have that commitment to you not even a fraction of it to you that they're asking for from you.
So I think about this in terms of what I think of as toxic charisma, right? Like, so the charisma can be great but it also can be toxic. And toxicity is often defined by its impact. So whether or not you're in a toxic environment, which maybe your listeners might be asking themselves, like, am I working for a sociopath or am I not? I think you ask yourself, like, is it clear the transaction that's going on here? And do I feel like I'm getting a fair share of that? Or am I always sacrificing something for this other story? And do I feel a similar sense of commitment from the company to me that they are asking for from me. And I would say in most in capitalist society, this is almost always out of balance. It's almost always at the collective as represented by the company is asking more from the individual than it's offering to the individual.
Yeah. So look at that, look at the results and also maybe ask your friends if it makes sense to you, because often we get wrapped up and like, hey, this person sounds great to me. I did this when I met my wife as well, because I had a history of selecting bad relationships. I went around to my friends who I liked, and I was like, what do you think of her? And they were like, oh, she's great. And I was like, good. All right. You know,
David Elikwu: The one question that I do want to ask is maybe from the other side of the table. So I think we've largely been talking from the perspective of the individual or the person within the group, but from the leader's perspective, what do you think is the highest value thing that you can do or implement or be?
And the one caveat I'll add to this is that, I think sometimes we talk about, and again, I don't know which is right, and you can tell me, but I think sometimes we talk about all the soft skills and we say, oh, a leader has to be just nice and, and do these nice things. But if a leader comes in and all they do is be nice. Sometimes they are also, the people that get run over and they are ineffective and the business doesn't go anywhere because they can't strategise effectively. They can't move things forward. And so I think there is also a balance inherent there, where there are super important soft skills that you need to have to be able to lead great teams and to be able to galvanize people and get people to do things. But I think on the other side, there is also the tangible impact piece. And I think you've slightly touched on that before in terms of the other mechanisms that you need to be able to bring. But I think there's a balance there where you also get a lot of people that just default to KPIs and they default to, okay, here's the metric. Here's that, here's what you need to do this month. You have to make this number of sales. We have to push out this number of features. Okay, done. That's it. And that's where you get cultures that are people just, you know, coming in and, and pushing the clock and just coming in, serving their hours, serving their time and going home.
So I guess the question is maybe it's either, you know, how do you find that balance or what is it that you think is the most valuable piece that a leader needs to have?
Bob Gower: So I apologize. I'm gonna answer with three, with three things rather than one thing, because I do, I think there's a, I think there's a few.
The first is really is the straightforward operational stuff, right. And that's whether you're using KPIs, OKRs, whatever, you know, like here's what we're doing, making sure people have the resources, the time, the tools, the information they need in order to do a good job, the skills they need to do a good job, get some retraining in there, if needed. And then also making sure that you know, that you're planning it or early and you're doing, so people have a sense of, they have a sense of direction and they have the time. And all the things they need in order to do a good job. So that's like sort of the operational piece and that's often quite mundane. But it also sometimes takes some time to figure out exactly what those things are.
The other thing is, I think, as a leader, you want to make sure that you actually care about the people that work for you as humans and I mean that beyond their utility to you and to your mission, not that you can't care about that as first and foremost, it's a transactional relationship. People are doing work in exchange for their labor, right? Like, yeah. Like care about the mission, but you also have to, I think the, one of my favorite CEOs I've ever worked for the first thing he said to me he's even in the hiring conversation, he's like, look, we don't expect you to be here forever. As a matter of fact, we expect you to be here maybe at least two years, maybe a little bit longer if we were, if we were lucky. Where do you see yourself going after this? Like where does this fit in the trajectory of your life and your career? And I almost burst into tears. I think when he asked me that question, because I was like, oh my God, I feel so like seen and cared for, because I don't have to participate in this, in this myth that the business is going to become my whole life, right. That his business is going to become my whole life. And I felt so respected and I still like, just deeply, deeply respect him.
And that was all like, that's sowed the seeds for us to have a really good interpersonal relationship, it was still a boss subordinate relationship and it was never a friend relationship, but it was always a relationship characterised by trust and mutual respect. It made me very loyal to him in a certain way.
And then the third piece is that's the relationship between leader and individual. The other thing I think leaders need to watch out for which can be much harder is they need to watch out for the relationships within the team and within the organization.
And what I mean by this is Kim Scott and her latest book. Just really her latest book is called Just Work. And I think she really nailed it when she said, there are kind of three kinds of dysfunction or three sources of dysfunction inside of teams. One is bias, where all of our brains are biased. All of our brains see the world based on our own perspective, based on our own life experiences, based on our own cognitive limitations, we all have biases. It's up to the leader and it's up to all individuals to make sure that bias isn't running the show. So like if I'm a white male leader, I want to make sure that I have some black females or some people who don't look like me. You don't come from the background of me who I trust to call me out when I'm being biased, when I'm, you know, like and who I even specifically seek, and maybe even in some cases pay to specifically bust my bias. Like when my wife and I wrote the book, we hired a transgendered person of color to read the book and make sure that our language was as inclusive as it possibly could be, that our bias wasn't running the show. We have to bust our own biases.
But the other things come into get much more problematic, right? So bias is not meaning it. I messed up, I excluded somebody, said something stupid. Didn't mean it. Sometimes bias can metastasize into prejudice, which is where I'm suddenly now saying, this is my real opinion of somebody who has a different identity, right? Like I believe my own bias. I bought my own BS essentially. And then the third is bullying, which is being mean about it. So not meaning it, meaning it and being mean about it. Bias, prejudice and bullying. What she points out is that bias, sometimes you just need to point it out to people. And that's very helpful. And so everybody's biased. And so we need to create a group environment where we can all talk about our biases and I can talk about your biases and you can talk about my biases. And we just kind of like, we can be open and honest and real with each other. And sometimes it creates some friction, but it never blows us apart and it always leads to a better situation.
But if somebody is expressing prejudice or bullying within the organization, those people need to go or they need to face consequences immediately for what they're doing. Those kinds of behaviors are just not acceptable, especially bullying. Prejudice, you know, like if you can keep it out of the workplace, maybe, right. But we need to create consequences and often we need to get rid of those people. What's challenging for leaders is that bullies will often, if you are higher in the social hierarchy than they are, the bully will be very nice to you. You will not see the bullying behavior. So you have to do skip level interviews. You have to ask other people how they feel about each other. There's a whole lot of other stuff you have to do because bullies are very, very good at hiding themselves. And so you have to be really, really I don't know, rigorous in your listening techniques in order to make sure that these people, you get these people out of your organization as quickly as you can.
And as soon as you detect them, get them out, right? Like do not like try to like nurture them along. I'm sorry. The cost of keeping that person around, the cost of having, no matter how brilliant they are and no matter how well connected they are, no matter whether they're the nephew of your boss, whatever. The cost of having that person on your team is frankly, most often fatal to the team's productivity functionality and that social environment you're trying to create.
David Elikwu: Thank you so much for tuning in. Please do stay tuned for more. Don't forget to rate, review and subscribe. It really helps the podcast and follow me on Twitter feel free to shoot me any thoughts. See you next time.
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