Episode 26
The 21 Traits of Authentic Leadership
Season 2 launches with studio upgrades and a new look.
In this episode, Jan talks about the 21 traits of authentic leadership compiled from Season 1 along with a sneak peek at the guest line up for Season 2
Transcript
[Transcript]
[:Join your podcast host Jan Griffiths, that passionate, rebellious farmer's daughter from Wales, entrepreneur, leadership coach, keynote speaker, one of the top 100 leading women in the automotive industry, as she interviews some of the finest leadership minds in the quest for Gravitas.
Jan: [:[00:01:38] Trait number 21 is resilience. All authentic leaders show a tremendous amount of resilience. The ability to adapt and bounce back when things don't go as planned. And, you know, in the Accountability Lab this morning, we actually have had a couple of instances where we've had to show resilience with tech issues, and just this weekend I recorded into the wrong channel and blew the entire episode.
It's not, you know what they say, it's not what happens to you in life, it's how you deal with it. And then it goes back actually to communication, and how you talk to yourself in your head. So resilience, I've noticed that all authentic leaders have a tremendous amount of resilience and they don't dwell on the past.
So you know how some people, they talk about the past and what happened and how bad it was, authentic leaders don't do that. They may recognize it as a data point, but they will learn from it and move on.
[:I've learned that a great leader knows how to encourage all voices on the team to feel safe and to bring their opinion forward. Cognitive diversity is not, it's not just diversity of either age or race. It's about different, bringing in different thoughts into the process. And after all, that's how we're going to get really creative and foster innovation. And great leaders know how to do this. They'll recognize that quiet person, or that person that isn't quite ready to speak up.
[:And they also know that there's no cookie cutter approach to this. So there's not a one size fits all, it doesn't work that way because every human being is different and they require a different touch point, a different way of encouraging, of motivating, and great leaders know how to sort of tune into that. It's more of a serve first mindset and they're focused on empowering and uplifting. So they're very inspirational. There are not the kind of leader that says, okay, these are your metrics. These are the objectives. This is what I want. I'm going to have a review with you every month or every quarter, and if there's two quarters of bad results, you're out of here. That's not very inspirational.
Of course they recognize the need to drive accountability and they have metrics because we all need metrics, but they do it in a very supportive coaching way. And then when people fail, because if you give somebody the authority to do something that perhaps they're not used to doing, but they need it for their own growth and they fail, the authentic leader will help the person through that experience, coaching them through what they learned and what they didn't learn and telling them that it's okay to fail. It's okay. They create that safe environment.
[:In Warren Buffett's mind, he said, when you do that, you may force the organization to do something, and to use his term, unnatural, that would cause you to course correct. If you have a short-term focus for the month or the quarter and not stay true to the long-term goals. So authentic leaders understand that there's a long-term goal out there, and it's going to take twists and turns and ups and downs to get there, but they stay true to that long-term goal. That's a hard one to practice.
[:So if the room is perhaps down or miserable or people are bitching and moaning, And you walk in there with a positive attitude, you can change that. Imagine a world, if we all did that, how much better it would be. And we can do it in virtual, just as well as we could do it in person.
Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, he says that he's looking for two things when he's recruiting people. He's looking for clarity and energy. He wants clarity of purpose and clarity of communication. He wants people to be able to communicate clearly what they want and how they're going to go about doing it. But the second thing that he looks for is energy. He wants people to have the right energy.
You know, there's people out there that have that toxic energy, they can ruin a culture, they can take down a culture. And then what do you do when you have one of these toxic personalities? Most people would say, well, I would, you know, give them an opportunity to improve. And then if they don't improve, then I would have to take them out of the organization. Yeah. But most of us know there’s a lot of leaders today don't actually follow through with that last step and they end up moving them around the organization. And that's all you do, when you do that, is you spread that toxic nature into another department. So it's often a hard action to take, but taking out toxic employees is always the right thing to do.
But back to the positive side, energy is something that I have learned to manage much better now that I've left the corporate world, I tend to work in line with my energy. So in the morning, my energy is at its strongest. It's at its best. I'm in peak condition. And that's probably because I start my day with the Accountability Lab, and I work out, and I run, and I do all these things that sort of helped me get my mind in the right place, so my mindset is right.
So I take on the big, important tasks right away in the morning when my energy’s in the right place, because like most people, it starts to wane in the afternoon. So then that's when I would do more of perhaps social media follow-up, emails, organization tasks, those kinds of things. And I find that works really well.
[:And my mind was just thrashing. You know how sometimes they say that computers thrash, which means they're operating, but they're not actually doing anything. So my mind was just spinning. And there was some fear, of course, I found myself watching the TV, watching the news channels, and then I thought, oh, I've got to do something about this. This is not the growth mindset that I want for myself. And then I'm a role model to my daughter. So I certainly don't want her falling into the same mindset.
So I started the Accountability Clinic, and I wasn't really sure what I was doing to be perfectly honest, but I launched this group of people. I threw it out there on social media and I said, okay, if anybody else is having trouble the same way that I am, then join me for a Zoom call and we'll figure it out together. We'll figure out how to hold each other accountable and keep moving forward in this pandemic. And that's what we did.
And we ended up with a simple little formula. We make a commitment for one work task. You know, the thing that you push off, you're likely to procrastinate on. Then something personal. So it could be yoga or running or spending time with the family or the dog, you know, whatever it is for you. And then one word to describe our mindset. And the whole idea was just to keep moving forward, to keep making improvements, stay productive and to support each other, when we really didn't feel like it. And it worked really well.
We are right now as of podcast release date, we're on week 32. When I started it, I had no idea that it was going to last 32 weeks. But creating that supportive environment. You know, when you hear the word accountability, sometimes you picture somebody yelling at you saying, I'm going to hold you accountable. That's not it. It's accountability in the most positive way. We've created a community of support. And then I changed the name to Accountability Lab, because clinic seemed to be a place that you go to for help, and our lab is somewhere where you play around with different things and different ideas. And that's what we do.
So I learned a lot about mindset and how important it is to start your day with the right mindset, if you want to be successful. And great leaders know the importance of this. And I love a Tony Robbins quote for mindset. He says “most people fail in life because they major in the minor things”. And that's true. And his other famous quote is “where focus goes, energy flows”. So getting that focus on the right things at the right time, it sounds so simple right? But it's hard because we talk ourselves out of things. We give ourselves excuses all the time. But that's why I love this group in the morning. It's a little bit of help and support and off we go, and then we report back the next day and sometimes we fail and it's all okay. There's no judgment, we're all transparent with each other and we keep moving forward. So that's mindset.
[:And sometimes we think that, you know, great leaders have to be tough, and they have to be seen to be tough all the time. And really that's not true. They have to be seen to be confident and comfortable within their own skin, but they also have to show kindness and warmth. Kindness and warmth accelerate trust. And we need more trust in our teams and our organizations so that we can get away from the wasted, toxic energy and the time that we spent emailing hundreds of people, not hundreds, that's an exaggeration, but those emails where we copy 20 people, because we're trying to show, you know, that we know something or that we're right. Or we're just trying to cover our tracks because we're afraid somebody is going to come back at us for something.
You know, there's not much trust when you're doing things like that. So kindness is a way to really start to accelerate trust
[:He says simply this, there is a relationship between trust, cost and speed. And the best example of this is if you think about somebody that you trust, think about that communication process, what does that look like? What does it feel like? It's a shorter process. And then consider the person you don't trust and that you spent a lot more time thinking about how you're going to communicate to that person, the methodology you're going to communicate. Maybe you're more likely to put it in email than have a Zoom call or a face-to-face. When you don't have trust, things go much slower.
And imagine if you have a culture where you really don't have trust, then everybody is doing the same thing. So imagine if you increased trust amongst your team members, what that could do to the bottom line results for the business. You're moving closer now to a high-performance team. Building alliances with stakeholders. We know the power of building alliances with stakeholders. When we start to generate trust, those alliances become stronger. And we’re able to operate in an entirely different realm than if we don't have trust.
Trust is the foundation of psychological safety. And you've heard me say this many, many times in the season one interviews, I love the Google Project Aristotle findings. They found that the number one trait of high performance teams is psychological trust. When people trust each other, they're open. They're not afraid to put their voice forward, their opinions forward, much more likely to have open constructive conflict. Yes, it is possible to have constructive conflict and still respect each other and still maintain a good relationship. That's when a team is moving into the high-performance realm, take a moment and think about your team. Are you there yet?
[:Um, that's not vulnerability. Vulnerability could be, okay, this is an unprecedented situation. We don't have a playbook for this. We are gonna stay tight as a team. I am going to share all the information I have as soon as I get it, we'll have full transparency and together we will find a way forward and make the right decisions for this business.
That shows some level of vulnerability, but also provides calm and confidence for the team. The expert in this area is Brené Brown and I love her quote. She says, “staying vulnerable is a risk we have to take, if we want to experience connection”. If you want to connect with a human being, and we all need to have that connection with our teams, then showing some level of vulnerability is good.
We had a great opportunity to do this, particularly in the beginning of the pandemic, to connect one-on-one with people as human beings and talk about things like, well, I don't even know where I'm going to get toilet paper from because Costco was out and where are the Lysol wipes coming from? And, my spouse is going crazy with me working from home, and on and on and on. Now, you know, there's some things about what's been happening in our world right now that we can connect with other human beings on, that's vulnerability,
[:They create a no blame, no excuses culture. One of the best examples of this, a no blame culture is the culture at United Wholesale Mortgage. And I was fortunate enough to interview Laura Lawson, the chief people officer, and Renee Harmon, VP of leadership development, and it's one of their core principles. They have thumb pointer culture, not a finger point of culture. So what that means is it's very much a positive motivational thumbs up pointer kind of culture than it is point the finger and blame somebody kind of culture. And I think that often we don't talk about this in the corporate world. When we see behaviors that fall in line with the blame culture, and we spend a lot of energy either creating it or responding to it. And I noticed that in a couple of the roles that I've been in, sometimes if somebody is pointing the finger, particularly in a supply chain role, pointing the finger at the supply base, spending time and energy and cost trying to defend a position. Whereas really, if we would just sit around the table together and acknowledge the facts. Whether they were right or wrong. And it doesn't matter which function is, hate to say to blame, but was as at fault, or has failed if indeed they have failed, but to be able to get around the table and have a meaningful dialogue, would help fear of all this finger pointing and blame.
And in Anne Carter's interview, she talked about the gotcha game, where in the corporate environment, sometimes we like to say, aha, see, I knew you were wrong. Gotcha. And that really doesn't do anybody any good. So the best leaders really, they take ownership, they take responsibility, they don't play the blame games. Winston Churchill says the price of greatness is responsibility. And I like that a lot.
And I also look to Navy Seal leadership for a quote in this area, and this is from Jocko Willink, the Navy seal. He wrote the book Extreme Ownership, and he says, leaders must own everything in their world. There is no one else to blame.
[:Whether it's their behavior, or whether it's the meetings that they schedule, their agendas. That's not to say they don't ever change and recognize opportunities for improvement, but they provide stability anchors to the team and the environment, and they explain inconsistencies. John Maxwell says small disciplines repeated with consistency every day, lead to great achievements, gained slowly over time. And I've learned that to be true. The one thing I am consistent with is the Accountability Lab, because obviously we opened that call at 6:30 every morning, and it's my call so I have to be on it. And I've learned that I can see the benefits to consistency. It's just hard for me.
[:That's what empowerment is, where people can feel safe to step up into their full capability and potential. And empowered team members can do, can accomplish so much more than people who feel downtrodden and feel like they have to go to seven different approval levels. And they're afraid to make a decision in case they get their head taken off.
So I believe very much in empowerment and I practice it, but it's really interesting that other people viewed that as I trusted my team too much. Can you trust people too much? Probably, you know, if you just let people go and sit back and not do anything then yes. So there is a balance between letting people go, but making sure that they're still on the right track and headed in the right direction, and holding people accountable. But that has more to do with inspiring people to achieve a goal as a team than it does micromanaging people, nobody likes a micromanager.
Bill Gates says, “as we look ahead into the next century, leaders will be those who empower others.” And so, I haven't changed. I'm still very much a firm believer in empowerment, regardless what other people say or may think.
[:And one of our guests in season two, is Tim Fiore, and he talks a lot about transparency and being open with his stakeholders and his suppliers to the point that it's quite shocking, but he knows that it's the right thing to do. And he is the CPO of Ryder, so I'm pretty sure it's meant a success for him, and is indeed a key trait of a successful leader. Jack Welch says, “trust happens when leaders are transparent.”
[:If I were to go back into the corporate world right now, I would do it differently. And this is something I've learned in the last two years. I would either record a video message every single week and it wouldn't be produced. It wouldn't I know it's not something that we would hire a production company to do, and we'd have a big, you know, marketing involvement. No, it would be internal. It would be me speaking into probably my iPhone. And it would just be a message for the week, either talking about some accomplishments or recognition, some events that were going on in the company that week.
It doesn't have to be this massive scripted type of production. I would absolutely do that. Or I would produce a podcast where I would put my thoughts on leadership and then recognizing and reinforcing those behaviors that support the team brand. That's what I would be talking about because it is the behaviors of people on teams that destroy a culture.
It's not the skillset and the content and the metrics. It is how people feel about themselves and each other that destroys the culture, or the other side too, that makes a high performing team. So I would be talking a lot more about the behaviors that support the team brand that I wanted to see in an organization.
[:Now, if you'd asked me at the time, I would have thought that I was a great listener. Oh, I always listened to my people, whatever, you know, whatever they want to talk about. I'm here for them, open door policy, blah, blah, blah. And I really believed that. And then the feedback that I got was that I wasn't a very good listener.
So, this is what I learned. And again, self-awareness, as you know, is something that's key, supporting value of an authentic leader. But one thing that I've learned about listening skills, and this is what I did: Somebody would start to talk to me about something, an idea, or initiate the conversation. I would be so excited about the idea and want to take it to the next step. Or talk about it, I would jump in right away. I wouldn't necessarily talk over them, I'd wait for that, you know, that split second, where they took a breath or a pause and I would use that and jump in and I didn't give the person time to really explain and articulate their idea. And I thought I was listening, and I was being productive. And I was not, I clearly was not listening. The person I was talking to needed to explain their idea and get it out the way they wanted to, not the way that I thought it should be done. And then it was my turn to say, okay, I got it, let's do this, let's go. No, no, no, no, no. So practicing that type of listening is not easy. I'm a much better listener now than I was before, but I have to tell you that was a rhythmic moment. I was horrified when I got that feedback, but it helped me to improve. So self-awareness getting feedback brings these blind spots into focus so that we can do something about it.
And Stephen Covey says, “most people do not listen with the intent to understand, they listen with the intent to reply,” and that's so true.
[:They don't say things that they don't mean, and they earn respect, and they always stay true to their word. And they practice personal accountability because that really becomes a hallmark of their personal brand. Brené Brown says, “Integrity is choosing courage over comfort; choosing what is right over what is fun, fast, or easy; and choosing to practice our values rather than simply professing them.”
And that's, you know, that's okay. That's a nice quote, but sometimes practicing that can be difficult if you're in a situation that you're talking to, somebody that you need, either they're your boss who controls your paycheck or somebody that you need at work to help you be successful, to be completely transparent and honest sometimes is hard because you don't want to upset them, right? But what I found is if you're really coming from a good place and you're really coming from that place of authenticity, and you want to help the situation to disagree with somebody or to say no to somebody, as long as you're coming from a good place, people sense that, and they're much more receptive to it and that's much better than just ignoring it and just, you know, continuing the conversation.
So having the courage to do that, I think is often tricky. But I think it's something that we all work towards. I know for me, it's, um, something that I work with every day to make sure that yes, I put my opinion forward, but it's in a respectful way.
[:[00:37:40] 4 is self-awareness. It all starts with self-awareness as Gary Vaynerchuk says, when you know who you are, everything changes. And I would say that I personally am working with this every single day of my life. I've certainly in the last couple of years realized who I am. And as many of you know, I talk about stripping away the corporate mask and not trying to assimilate into a culture and be who they want me to be, but to be myself.
But again, you know, that's easily said and not so easily practiced. Right? I don't know that you're ever gonna work for a company where you can be 100% truly authentic. You can get close. And as human beings, we strive every day to live our lives in line with our values. And certainly the last couple of years I've come much closer to that, doing what I absolutely love to do. And it starts with self-awareness, being honest with yourself and then getting feedback from other people.
[:And make sure that we give credit to others consistently. Great leaders really know how to do that. Mia Hamm. I love her quote, her thinking in this area. She says, “Celebrate what you've accomplished, but raise the bar a little higher each time you succeed.” And to my female listeners, I will tell you as mothers and role models to our children, this is something that I don't think we're very good at doing. When there is a success, and I've seen this with women I know who have achieved high levels within an organization, the last thing on their mind when they achieved that position was to celebrate that with the family. When you've got young children growing up, they need to see you as the role model, as a success, and they need to know what success looks like and feels like. Celebrating success is important to all of us, whether it's personal or professional.
[:So often in the business world, we start moving forward fast on the numbers and the metrics that we have to achieve. And yes, that's important, but there has to be something bigger. Over 70% of Millennials say that they only want to work with a company whose mission and values resonate with them.
Now, I don't know about you, but when I started my career, I couldn't care less about that. I just wanted a job, I wanted a career, I wanted money and I wanted to get up the career ladder as quickly as possible. I didn't really care what they made or why they did it. I've changed now, since those early days, but certainly Millennials and Gen Z will not work for a company that's all about just producing a widget and ROI. They're not prepared to spend the currency of their lives in a company that's just all about ROI. It has to be both. So really working with teams to define that vision and getting everybody's ideas and being bought into the process. Something that will guide the team will guide the brand, the team brand will guide the behavior, becomes a guiding light for the culture.
And there's lots of great examples out there. One of the great examples I love is Starbucks because they don't say they want to produce coffee or be the world-class supplier of coffee. They want to nurture the human spirit one cup at a time. It's a very, very different vibe than a company that just wants to sell coffee. So I think there's a lot of work here that we all have to do to understand how our businesses and our teams connect to a bigger purpose, connect to them emotionally, and then as a leader, we have to galvanize the team around that mission and develop our why.
I love the work of Simon Sinek around developing our why, and he says, “Great leaders must have two things: a vision of the world that does not yet exist and the ability to communicate that vision clearly.” So if you're ever thinking that you just got to get straight into the day-to-day business, and you push off that team meeting that you've been thinking about having to really talk about vision and purpose, don't. Have it. Now's the time to have it. Now's a perfect time to have that meeting, whether it's off-site or virtual.
[:Gravitas, again, is very difficult to describe. It's a feeling. It's an emotional response you get when you meet a real leader. And that's what my mission is all about. It's getting to this hallmark of authentic leadership, which is Gravitas.
Those are the 21 traits of authentic leaders that I've discovered through season one. And now we start to get into season two. So here we go.
First up on our interview list is Fred Lowrey. Fred is a Senior VP and President of the Life Sciences Solutions and Lab Products for Thermo Fisher Scientific. That's a mouthful. That's a big title. As if that's not enough, he is also on the board of directors for DuPont.
Fred was right on the front lines during the pandemic, and he shares some great stories about things that he's learned, things that his company has been able to do under his leadership in the pandemic that otherwise perhaps might not have happened. So Fred will be our first interview.
Then we're going to Clint Bruce, what a character. This guy is a Navy Seal, special warfare officer. He's also an NFL pro football player and an entrepreneur. And what a character. You want to talk about somebody who's comfortable in their own skin? You wait until you meet Clint Bruce. For those of you who follow season one, you might remember that Todd Ballard, the CMO from GoPro, talked about bringing in Clint Bruce into the GoPro organization. So that led me to Clint and he graciously accepted to do the interview.
Then after Clint, we're going to go to Aled Miles. Aled Miles is the CEO of SauceLabs. He is an information technology exec and an internet security expert. He's the guy that's often called upon to talk about internet security on the various business news channels. He is also Welsh, and has recently been appointed as a Welsh Government Envoy to the United States. There's quite a story there with Aled and you can hear all about that in his interview. One of the reasons that I wanted Aled, I know you're thinking okay probably cause he's Welsh, right? Well, yeah, of course that was part of it, but also because his entire career, he has grown his career and he's progressed to the highest levels in the technology sector. And I love being able to bring interviews from people with different industries and different environments and cultures so that we can learn from those leaders.
Then we're going to Tim Fiore. I know a few people that have worked for Tim Fiore and they absolutely love working for Tim Fiore. I mean, he's got such a following out there. Tim Fiore is the Chief Procurement Officer for Ryder. He's got a lot of business experience. He's also the chair of the Institute for supply management, manufacturing business survey committee. So he's the guy that you'll see on CNN or Bloomberg when people are talking about the economy and economic indicators, his survey is one of the economic indicators that they normally research and go to. So Tim has a tremendous story to tell, and I love, love, love his leadership style.
So that's it for now, those are the episodes we have lined up. We are recording more episodes coming up in the next few weeks. So we're excited to bring these interviews to you so that you can learn from their authentic leadership journeys and the practices and behaviors that they employ on a day-to-day basis.
The podcast has received a bit of an upgrade, and we have upgraded the podcast studio. We've added Trinnov system, which takes the room out of the equation. And for you audio geeks out there, you probably know what that means. I'm not entirely sure I know what it means, but I know it means that Dietrich, it gives Dietrich the capability to improve the sound. We also added a new Apollo audio interface, which again, I really have no idea what that does, but it means that you will get a better listening experience.
So we've made some upgrades to the studio and then you'll notice there's a new look. I have a completely new look, and I will tell you that when I cut my hair, people just didn't even recognize me. The Starbucks person who I see at least two or three times a week did not recognize me. And people have said, why, why would you get away from that haircut, that black bob, which I was quite frankly known for. And here's the reason why. I talk about authentic leadership all day long. It was time to be authentic.
Now there's nothing wrong in having a nice haircut, but when you're spending two hours every three to four weeks and hundreds of dollars to maintain a haircut that you've had for almost three decades, it's time to really think about that. And I got to tell you, it was not an easy decision to change my look, I, it was hard, but I decided to embrace the gray and I cut my hair and embraced the gray. And so now we have a new look and I have to say, it's very empowering and it feels great.
So we've got studio upgrades. There's a new look. And as always, we want to hear from you. We want to hear if there's any content that you specifically want or any guests that you would like me to interview, please call me and let me know.
The business has taken some twists and turns, again as an entrepreneur, I have learned a lot about what it takes to be an entrepreneur and people tell you, oh, it's a roller coaster ride. It's up and down and turns and ins and outs. And then you throw a pandemic in the middle of that. So it was tough in the beginning. But it gave me a chance to sit back and really reevaluate what my business was all about, and where is it going. And the Accountability Lab was sort of a natural output of that. And now we're opening Accountability Lab Number Two, that I'm very excited about.
ivating a team to come out of:That's my mission. It's the mission that I started with when we launched the podcast and I stay true to it today, it has not changed. I wish you well on your authentic leadership journey and your quest for gravitas.
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