Dr. Kimberly Janson - CEO of Janson Associates | The Leadership Blueprint: Mastering the Art of Assessing and Nurturing Leadership Capability

Welcome to Success Story. I'm your host, Scott D. Clary. The Success Story podcast is part of the HubSpot podcast network. The HubSpot podcast network has incredible podcasts like Nudge, hosted by Phil Agnew, where you'll learn these science behind great marketing with bite-sized 20-minute episodes packed with practical advice from world-class marketers and behavioral scientists. Nudge is fast-paced and insightful, with real-world examples that you can apply to your business. Listen to Nudge or a success story wherever you listen to your podcast. Today, my guest is Dr. Kim Jansen. She's the president and CEO of Jansen Associates, a firm dedicated to unleashing people's potential globally. She is the author of the mystifying talent management, the winner of the Axiom Book Award. She is also a principal contributor to Forbes, as well as Boston Business Journal, as a membership of their leadership trust. She has two books soon to be published, determining leadership potential and becoming top talent. She works with firms along with her organization from startup level to Fortune 100 companies across all industries. She has been on the ground, working with leadership teams in over 40 countries for more than 25 years and has held C-suite positions in multiple Fortune 500. So we spoke all about leadership and why leadership is so broken. We spoke about the studies, the data points, the things that she's researched and investigated on how to actually lead and major recommendations of what to focus on when determining leadership potential. We also spoke about high performance. So for leadership, but also for individuals, her trademark framework, fast, simple, good, done, why this is the ultimate high performance framework for anyone within any size organization. We spoke about how she takes good companies and makes them even better. Lessons, obviously, that you can apply to any organization. She focuses on culture, leadership competence, leadership team, cohesion, strategy, talent management, work efficiency, and effectiveness. We went into all of that. And then lastly, she is extremely passionate about horses to the point where her kids are competing at an international level in terms of equestrian and whatnot. And she has a ton of leadership lessons that she will eventually codify into a manuscript from her experience raising the highest performing show horses. So let's jump right into it. A ton of great leadership and organizational frameworks from somebody who's worked with some of the largest organizations in the world. This is Dr. Kim Jansen, president and CEO of Jansen Associates. While my origin story, I've been blessed with a lot of wonderful things in my history that have helped me get to this point. So from a family standpoint, I'm the youngest of 10 kids. So nine kids in 10 years, and then six years later, they had me. So people ask where I learned a lot of my skills. Navigating 11 adults who thought they were my parents. And then also raising myself was an interesting combination. The other thing that was formative for me is I'm a horse woman. You know, I had a good fortune of having ponies in my backyard. And I just decided they were mine. And from there, built a relationship and continued to grow and competed nationally. And they've always been a big piece of my life and they continue to be so. Education's been really important to me. I do love learning. I have undergraduate degrees in English history and education. I also have a master's in teaching that masters in organizational development and my PhD is in business. And in several of those, there's a focus on psychology as well. So the business of business is really intriguing. And I love helping companies figure out how to make money, how to be more productive, how to grow. But I like doing that for people too. And my tagline is unleashing people's potential because we boxer ourselves in with a lot of garbage, honestly. And I like to help get out a big old weed whacker and get rid of the crap in the way so that we can be really high for forming. And then I had the pleasure of working with some amazing companies and amazing people. I was largely the chief talent officer at a number of different institutions. So Heinz, the ketchup people you might know, I also was at essentially for Hasbro, chief diversity officer and a couple of capacities. And then also head of leadership for the global wealth group at Bank of America. So some good fortune there. So when you work in all these, oh, go ahead, sorry, what are you going to say? No, no, I was going to say, and that just brought me to start my own business because I'm like a good matchmaking friend who knows a lot of people and ideas, having worked on the ground in 40 countries, more than 40 countries and having touched hundreds of companies, I feel like I am a good facilitator of bringing people and ideas together to make things better. I appreciate that. I think I think you are and you've operated at such a high level and such large organizations. And then also on top of that, you have a mess around with your education either. I don't think I know too many people that have a PhD in business. So what are the what are the lessons? What are the learnings? What are the problems in the world that you wanted to solve for after you've operated at C suite in multiple, probably fortune 500, if not fortune 1000 organizations and your PhD that you've learned some of the psychology of what makes business work and what makes people tick. What is the thing that you're trying to solve in the world right now? Yeah, I think there's two components. Good work comes out of good leadership. And we have a leadership crisis right now. And if we were to backtrack about why we have either a gap in the number of leaders we need or the amount of poor leaders we have in the world, in my opinion, it's a root cause issue of being really not great at determining leadership potential and picking the right people to begin with. And so I've dedicated a lot of time and space to helping solve for that not only with clients in company organizations, but also a large amount of research dedicated to that. And then I have a book coming out this summer. It's on pre-sale now dedicated to that topic. So that's one big thing that I want to flip the script on, which is helping people get the joke about leadership and then using that as an enabler for organizational transformation. The second piece is we get in our own way in companies. We add a tremendous amount of complexity and it's non-value about it. And it gets in the way of not only productivity, but actually getting the results. And I have a trademark framework that I designed based on working with high performing companies, but also helping companies to become high performing. And that trademark framework is called fast, simple, good, done. Because when companies work those four things in tandem, then you are able to alleviate yourself to a lot of the things that are just anchors from your productivity. So culminating all of the experience in the work and the PhD, those are two big nuts that I want us to crack. And particularly with the first one, the leadership piece, I want to do nothing less than change the world because the fish rods from the top at least see it day in and day out. Okay, so I want to go into everything, but I also want to understand, give listeners some context as to what do you learn in the business PhD? Because I got the MBA and I already thought with an MBA, I was like, well, I've already figured out more than I'm learning in my MBA just by doing. So what is the PhD add on? Yeah. Yeah, it's a great question. So you do learn so much in the environment and that practicum experience gives you a good cadre of different things to try. What the PhD does for you is it gets you deep into thought leadership. It gets you deep into research to pull out a lot of big ideas and see what people have done with them from a scientific standpoint. And so academia in and of itself has a purpose, but a lot of times it doesn't necessarily link back that thought leadership into the workplace and make it real. What I wanted to do is I wanted to bridge those things and to become more powerful by a database approach, fueled by thought leaders, fueled by me as a thought leader that came from a lot of my practicum experience and married the two so that we have a better hit rate in what we're trying to do. And so there was a huge immersion in understanding the science of how companies have been successful, a real deep immersion in different leadership methodologies and philosophies and theories, et cetera. And what I have found is I'm good at sorting through that stuff and stripping away a lot of the fluff and pulling out some big ideas. So for example, if I sit with a client and they're wondering about anything, employee retention, I will have current knowledge on where we are in terms of how to think about employee retention. And it's not just because I work with hundreds of companies, but it's because I'm very tied into the people who are doing deep research in this area. Does that answer it? It does, 100%. And I think that that's something where unless you're a large organization, you would never have access to those kinds of data points. So you're getting the information not as it's happening, but you're getting the information that's eventually disseminated to you through your mentors or your peers or through YouTube or whatever research you're able to do at an early stage. And that's where it's difficult for founders to really be on the cutting edge, even if they try their best. You can. You definitely can do your, you know, you're an auto-died act. You do your research, you do your learning. But still, it's very difficult. So when you speak about things from the most current data sets and trends, now let's go into leadership. Let's look at the things that impact leadership. Let's look at statistically and maybe with less, with more granularity, why leadership is broken. Let's look at the things that we know don't work because a lot of people speak about they leadership is broken. And I'm going to teach you how to be a better leader, but I don't ever feel like it comes from, it doesn't come from like what you mentioned data sets and trends and statistical analysis and all the different things that can really prove out thesis A versus thesis B. So let's understand that. And that's obviously what you're most passionate about. One of the two things, that's why I want to dive into it a little bit more. So what's broken with leadership based on your experience? I think the biggest thing that's broken is we're choosing the wrong people to be leaders. And in addition to this meta-analysis on thought leadership that I mentioned, I've conducted a number of sanctioned studies myself. And so one, for example, I looked at a number of different companies in the same industry and interviewed leaders at four different levels in the organization. The amount of variation on how those people think about what's required for leadership or what to look for in leaders was crazy. So how can you build a pipeline of leaders if everybody's looking for something else? All right, how do you find some good acorns to grow into Elm trees if we've got all this disjointed approach in terms of how we're thinking about them? That study was also powerful because what I found is the CEOs were more similar to each other than they were in their own company. And so it prompted a third study I ended up doing. The second study was a global quantitative study of more than 600 people. The third study, though, was with CEOs that I sat with, companies you know, the head of the CEO of Target, the CEO of Panera, Foot Locker, Build a Bear, really strong, powerful people who have ascended to success. And I wanted to get into their minds not only to see where the convergence was in their point of view, but to also give anecdotes to people on how to do this stuff well. And so what I think is the biggest gap is the fact that we're not choosing folks because of this level of variation. And we're using poor indicators on leadership potential. So for example, one of the things you'll most frequently hear is I choose leaders based on their performance. Well, that's great if the performance is the same for the same job, right? But it is not absolutely not a predictor of performance at the next level. It should take it to entry to get into the conversation to be considered. But there's actually four, in my opinion, and well researched and tested, four dynamics you should look for when choosing leaders, or even just assessing potential. One is intelligence. Things only become more complex as you go up. You got to have that cognitive horsepower because what you get with what you come with when you arrive is what you have to work with. And we've got to be honest about that. The second one is personality. I've been the chief diversity officer in two four to five hundred companies. So in no way do I advise that we only one personality type. But there's a lot of derailing personality types. I mean you and I could have an hour conversation right now about all the bad leaders you've seen along the way because they were incredibly self-absorbed or because they couldn't get out of their own way and make a decision, et cetera, et cetera. So the second dynamic is look for people who do have that fundamental gap in terms of a personality derailer. The third is motivation. You got to hire people with big engines. And if you want them to do more and be more in the future, they've got to have their own engine. And then the fourth is learning agility. We need people who are committed to reinventing themselves and also who couldn't assimilate ideas and information quickly and reapply them. So I think that the biggest issue is that companies and leaders do not really understand leadership and they don't understand how to choose leaders because if someone has those four elements, I can teach them anything. And I do. But if they don't have them, then it's a matter of compensating, masking, hiding, and eventually lack of success. Now, someone's listening to this podcast, they know the four elements, they know that great, if I had that person, everything would work out. How do you actually find that person? How do you solve for those four elements? Yeah, I think you have to have ninja interviewing skills. I reject a lot of people that my clients say, oh, we think we have somebody who's strong. And it's, although I reference having black magic as part of what I do, I really, I don't in the interview process, I just ask questions where people reveal themselves. I don't care about simple things in the interview process. Don't tell me about your resume. But how do you maintain yourself awareness? How are you most frequently misunderstood? If you were going to tell me about the most recent time you got difficult feedback, what did they tell you? You have things that are uncomfortable sometimes for us to ask. But if you ask in that way, then it's okay for people to answer. So the first is that people don't have the tools yet to figure out how to assess. And the second is that people think they're better than they are when they are, when they do assess. Oh, we know that person has this thing, but we'll coach them. We'll teach them. It'll be fine. If a horse bites you in the process of buying them, or is lame in the process of buying them, don't buy the horse. It's just quite simple. I'm curious when you speak to, because now we understand at a very high level what we should look for in leaders, but when you speak to all these leaders of all these companies, I think that it's important to note that if the person who would actually be looking for these things does not have these things, it could be hard for them to actually look for the right person, even if they do have these four attributes. So when you speak to the leaders of target, or a Panera, or anonymous company, probably a better example, do these leaders actually encompass these things? Is this something that you see Fortune 500 CEOs have, or do you feel like leadership is broken at a higher level, and even the leaders that are building these companies do not have these traits? One of the biggest derailing personality characteristics is narcissism. And one of the more recent studies that I saw was there's a minimum of 30% of the CEOs who are narcissistic. So, it depends. It depends on who you're talking to. And the best way to get around that is to have a group that's good at a cross-functional group that's interviewing with you, or to have an external partner who can help you understand what you're saying. I coach a lot of CEOs, and the power that a CEO can bring, even if that person has narcissistic tendencies, the power that they can bring is amazing. The challenge is they often don't have someone who can be a good thought leader with them. They can think with their CFO, they can think with their general counsel, but the way things shape out for CEOs, they often meet somebody who can partner with them on their most private thoughts, or their insecurities. There's a lot of imposter syndrome out there, by the way. And when are they going to find out I'm not as good as they think they are? And so helping CEOs and senior leaders push through that and come to understand different ways of doing work, that's a lot of what I do in terms of helping them get out of their own way. Now, how does this play into your other framework, which is a high-performance framework? Because right now we're talking about finding the best leaderships determining leadership potential. That's obviously integral for a successful organization, and you even mentioned right now, like there's a lot of big companies that do it, but the high-performance piece, the high-performing framework, the fast, simple, good done. Is this leadership principle? Is this just a principle for me? I'm trying to accelerate in my career. How does that fit into the success of a business? Yeah, it's really a lens by which you should look at the work in front of you. So let me just spend a moment flushing that out. So the first is fast, speed wins the game most times. Speed is a way to help you be first to market and not lose on needless things, etc. So how do we think about the things that are going to slow us down most likely in this scenario? And then let's plan for that up front. The second is because you know the expression, give it to a busy person, they'll get it done, right? Someone has worked to them and then they can get a lot more done. And so there's a real return on that verb. Simple, complexity often doesn't add value. It just adds time or cost more money. And complexity creeps in from oh this leader said this so we have to make a change in the process or we've done it like this for so long, etc. In most organizations, if I throw a process up on the wall and I have a red pen and I say what's the shortest distance? And then I challenge all of the assumptions about how we've done it. We're able to really cut things down. But what complexity does is it creates distance from people in the work and they get exhausted or it impacts morale. So let's drive for simplicity. And then focus on addressing complexity where it makes sense, where it's a complex idea. But let's be judicious in that. Fast, simple, good. What's good enough? We have a lot of perfectionist out there in this new generation in particular is very perfectionist oriented. But perfectionism is faulty thinking. It's tricking us to thinking that something isn't good enough or it isn't finished. But here's the way to think about that. If we were to buy a house for $10, why would we pay $15 for it? Right? Why don't we take that $5 extra dollars and put it in a new house? But what blowing past good does for us is we expend energy and time and resources in ways that maybe not are a good return on an investment. There's a company in the US that if I said their name, you would say oh yes, but they're often voted the worst company in America. And your experience with them is really frustrating. They have figured out what the right threshold is for customer satisfaction. And they also know if, let's just say it's 80%. They know if they go above that, they don't get any more customers. They don't get any more revenue. It's nice to say it's a 97% satisfaction. But if you don't make money from that, don't do it. And so this idea of done, what's good enough, let's all agree upfront what good enough is, is a major transformational component because it helps us recap resources that are being spent foolishly. And then the last one is done. There is an energy when you finish something, there is a learning that can happen, but a lot of times things in organizations have a long tail and they don't really finish hard. We need to be better at finishing. The imagery I think about on this one is in organizations, if I had a sweater and every undone thing had a fishing hook and that was stuck in my sweater, we'd drag around a lot of garbage. So how do we, what is done look like, let's celebrate it because people want more positive feedback, by the way. And then let's learn from it and then let's really repurpose those resources towards something new. When do these problems start to creep into companies? Because I'm now looking at it from an entrepreneur, I'm starting and I'm listening to this and I'm thinking, I don't want this to happen to me. I know that right now I'm a solo printer and then I hire my first team member, then I hire five, then we have 10 people and 20 people. One of these problems start to creep in. How do we avoid them from the get go? Yeah, they start with one because I'm just, you're like any other person I've worked with, you've added needless complexity, you're losing time spending time on things that are non-value added. I mean just even make a list of on the left, what are the things I'm doing someone else could and what are the things on the right that only I can do and I need to do more of? If you have things on both of those, then we already are starting with the base and sometimes especially entrepreneurs, we get in a mindset where we're desperate to do things and to create our footprint or to build a company and we say I'm going to do it all. It's not a necessarily good return on the investment of the time and so sometimes a little expenditure of money over here that frees you up can really repurpose to a much higher level. Now you add in more people, they all have their own lens by which they're looking at things and now you start to add in complexity and you start to slow things down, etc. So a group starting with an individual that says, okay, how can we be stealth? How do we have this fast, simple, good, done framework and then how do we be able to look at our projects and our work that way ongoingly? That's a group that's going to really be higher performing. And when you look at organizations, I find all the perspectives, so we look at the CEO, the CEO that you're optimizing, we look at the talent and the people that you're optimizing, but even when you go into an organization as a coach, as a trusted advisor and a mentor to these companies, because I know a lot of people that try and follow in your footsteps and they try after having so much success, they want to go into this advisory position where you can help companies optimize and you look from the outside in, but I've tried it. It's not easy to do this, like it's very difficult to to describe it, diagnose and prescribe all these things for these different companies. So as a coach, and I don't want to use the word coach, but as an advisor to companies, when you go in, how do you look at every single facet of a business? How do you wrap your mind around a Fortune 500 company that has a billion and one moving parts and properly understand which levers to pull? What's the formula for going in and sort of diagnosing? Yeah, so it really helps that I've been in a number of four to five hundred companies at the most senior levels. And so that, along with my skill set of being able to think at a systems level perspective, it's an organism, right? It's got to work in concert with each other. What you often have is individual lines of businesses or functions that are operating as unique entities, and that doesn't work as a unit or a machine. So the first thing I start with, frankly, is culture. And what is our belief system? And culture gets a lot of press, but people don't really understand culture, and in my experience, and I define culture simply as a set of shared beliefs. So if we want to be this thing over here, what's the belief system by which we need to subscribe to to get there? So for example, if we want to be first to market agile, grow, et cetera, and I think of the responsibilities in terms of lead yourself, lead others, and lead the business, and what's your responsibility in that area? Under lead yourself, we have to have people who have a can-do attitude, for example. It has to be a shared belief, because my beliefs, my values, drive my behavior. We need to have an overt agreed upon set of shared beliefs. That's the place map for everything else. We then need to look at where we want to go. So let's plan to flag in three years. We're going to be x, y, and z, and then we have to back into it with an operating plan for you one plus two plus three that will get us there. That's the macro view of it, and then we say, okay, marketing function, sales function, finance function, what's your piece of this work for year one? And then they should take a piece of that and shape it out, but we should then be working to help that function be its best self. What's working? What's not working? How does the leadership look, et cetera? Because over all of that, you should have a talent plan. We should know our talent is a great expression from Bank of America where we would say, know the talent, know the role, grow the talent, move the talent, and that was a self-sustaining mindset where we were always in motion knowing that the talent was the solution to everything. So as you set your culture, you tick and tie your cultural beliefs and everything, communication, hiring, et cetera. You then plant a flag three years out, you're back into operating plans. Now you've got to get your functional areas to pony up and figure out where they're going to contribute, but then you have to make each of them better. And one of the biggest barriers to doing that is often the senior leadership team is made up of very capable people, but they're functional heads. What you have is a team of leaders, functional leaders, rather than a true leadership team, where they're like the Avengers, where they lock arms and they lead across the enterprise together, because when you do that as a unit, then you can support each other's people, you can care for each other's functions in a way that you care for yourself. So a lot of times my next work will be at that leadership level to make sure that they have made the shift, and most haven't. I would say 80% of the organizations that I walk into haven't made that shift yet. But when you do all of that, then we can solve both macro problems and then make functions stronger because you've got a whole different level of engagement and transparency in how you go about it. I just want to take a second and thank the sponsor of today's episode HubSpot. Now, because at this time of the year, we like to think about new ways to solve problems, right? New year, new you, we like to think creative, innovative, scalable solutions that make our jobs easier in 2023. That's where HubSpot comes in. It's a connected all-in-one CRM platform that serves as a single source of truth for managing customer relationships across all your teams so that you don't have to worry about the time-sucking management and mind-boggling costs of multiple solutions. Best of all, it's free to get started. Learn how HubSpot can help your business grow better and get a special offer of 20% off on eligible plans at HubSpot.com slash success pod. Two questions out of that. First question would be at the macro level, then I want to go into the actual functional leadership and how we get that unit to be cohesive and all those individuals to be cohesive. But first, at the macro level, how do we, culture is the main thing that you have to figure out that will sort of bleed into everything else and form everything else? So how do you build that culture? How do you hire for that culture? What are the tactical things that a business can do if they haven't really figured out that culture that they can do right now so that they have something functional to work with? Yeah, it's a great question. I'm doing that work with three clients right now simultaneously. The first thing you need to do is to get a handle on where their pain points are. And you got to get a handle on where they want to go. And by pulling key leaders into the conversation and asking a set of robust questions, we're able to decide what are the biggest things that are going to be transformational. And that's I call it a leadership model. And from there, you need to see that in the organization. We've got to say, this is our belief system. We write questions to hire against it. We put it in our performance management process, which is not only the what of what you're delivering, but the how counts as much and we compensate based on that. So the how is a leadership model? Or whatever we said are the most important attributes that we drive towards. You talk about it with talent planning. When you do CEO level recognition, you talk about people who have demonstrated these things. Your communication weaves in big ideas from that. When you're in a meeting, you'll say, hey, we value can-do attitude. You just killed that. That was awesome. That's a great example of can-do so you synthesize it into the fabric of the organization with all the people touch points. And then it's about recognizing as people operationalize it or if they don't, then holding them accountable for that. And so that also means rotating out people who just aren't willing to demonstrate the behaviors that we said are necessary to get us where we want. And one more question on this. What would be the best example of a company's culture that we should aspire to move towards? What's one person that does this exceptionally well? You know, there's a lot of public examples of companies. You'll hear about Disney, but you'll hear the counter story to Disney. You'll hear about Google, etc. I'll tell you a company that's doing it really well right now is a company called Buckingham Companies. They're a real estate development company. I have never seen a group of leaders who have have could join around this idea more brilliantly than any other company. They're good people. They are willing to be coached. By the way, coachability is job one, right? Like if people aren't willing to be coach, we have no room room for them. But there were some interesting dynamics with the CEO taking on a civic second responsibility. And it created an opportunity for people to step up. It created an opportunity for them to come together in a way that hasn't happened before for them. They are the absolute poster child on how to do it well. And we're going to reap the benefits of that that will then contribute to their aggressive growth strategy. And so it doesn't have to be big magnificent examples. That's a midsize company who got the joke and are all in and they're going to completely flip the script on how they did it. And they're going to reap the benefits of it absolutely. Okay, perfect. That's exactly what I was looking for. And then now I think that as you give this one example, part of my next question is already answered, but I'll ask it anyway. So when you look at the second problem you're solving for us, you figure out culture, but then you said the second problem you're solving for is all these different individual leaders leaders across an organization that all seem to function in their silos. How do we how do we bring again? You're obviously maybe maybe managing some of them out is a solution, but you say you go into an organization, you don't want to you don't want to fire like 20, 30, 50 people. That's not ideal. So what do you what do you do to get all these people synced up and aligned? Yeah, well, building off of that last point, many people don't know the blind spots that they have. You know, many people haven't had someone be courageous in helping them understand how they show up or the impact. So the place I start is individual leadership assessment. And that's typically a combination of a qualitative engagement, interviewing a bunch of key stakeholders on their behalf and creating a leadership report. And then combining that was something like the Hogan executive assessment. It's 10 million people have taken it. It helps you understand where you are on a normative comparison. It's really insightful. But the combination of those two things gives you the inside out perspective, but then the outside in perspective of how people are experiencing you. That's essential before you walk in the room because you got it on your stuff. And how can people own their stuff if we're just assuming that they understand how they're showing up or etc. And so once we get them in the room, you've got to have the senior leader, the CEO, for example, be willing to hold these people accountable for being different. And they have to be different with them. But it starts with an organic conversation. Let's talk about who we want to be and do really good work about what great looks like for us as a team. And then let's take a step back and say what does it look like today and be really honest with that. And then we focus on the Delta. We solve for what needs to be different based on the difference between what we said today looks like versus tomorrow looks like. Through that set of commitments or the work or specific projects, we then have to have a lot of accountability. And then we need to communicate that to the organization. And if leaders are not demonstrating those commitments, that's when we need to hold them accountable. And if they don't demonstrate those commitments over time and also work on their own stuff, then they're not the right match for the organization. But I'm with you. Like don't go in and with a fire starter and blow up place. There's a lot. There's a lot of value in the organization typically. Okay, so I want to, you know, we're speaking previously about horses and your love for horses. And I want to go into that for a second because there is a business point to that conversation. But before I pivot, was there anything else that you wanted to go into that you were working on or working with companies in leadership potential and or individual potential that we didn't touch on that you wanted to highlight? Yeah, I think one of the big gaps in organizations is people don't have a strong ability to diagnose and assess. You mentioned that earlier. You know, how do we get those good skills like anything like a golf swing? That stuff comes with practice. But you've got to be intentional about knowing what to look for. You've got to have the tools in the science and then you've got to apply it with an expert. But if we had more people who could size up who's in front of them in a more easily way more easily done, then we wouldn't have the level of discord we have with different people. And it's not hard to do, but it does take some practice and it's some discipline. And when you can meet people where they are and then walk forward with them rather than standing where you are and try to yank them to you, the results are exponentially better. And there's some great instruments just even from a style instrument. You know, ones that you might know are like the disc has been around forever. A colleague that I used at both Hasbro and Hines wrote a great book called The Power of Understanding People. He's got an assessment in that. There's a lot of availability of resources. But what I find is people don't take the time to really immerse themselves in this space and learn different styles and then figure out how to adjust their styles based on who's in front of them. And so I had one CEO say to me, Kim, like, why do I have to adjust my style on the CEO? Well, you don't technically. But here's the thing. Do you want this person reacting to the packaging of the message or do you want them to get after the message more quickly? And if you can package something in red because they like red or green because they like green and they hear it differently and better, why wouldn't you? Well, the reason why we're not is we don't have that skill set. So that's a hugely transformational very subtle skill set that I think we need to do more with organizations in that space. Okay. So my last question or point is like, this is something that I thought was interesting. Like, there was a point of you mentioning, you're writing a manuscript that is titled Leadership Lessons Through Horses. I know you love horses. I feel like I feel like there. I feel like that's like a passion that you're like combining the two things that like mean something in your life together. So walk me through why you're doing this. What leadership lessons do we get through horses? Or something there? That's why you're writing a manuscript on it. Like teach it over. Go ahead. Yeah. So I'm more than love horses. We've parlayed that into a business. So it's a family business, legacy farms, buys or breeds, high end show jumpers. And so with both us trying to position my son so he can get to the world cup, we are also building a cadre of high performing athletes. And just like the athletes who have a Olympic level training programs, we approach it the same way. So the lens by which we think about the horses, there's so many parallels. So for example, each one of the horses, and these are Grand Prix level horses where you think about the Olympics, they jump the big jumps. Every horse has on average four interactions every day. And it could be that they're on the treadmill. Yes, they have a treadmill twice a day. They're turned out, they're lunged or they're ridden. Everybody's ridden six days a week because athletic people have less injuries. And so if you think about being physically fit but also mentally fit coming into work, there's less injuries. There's less emotional noise. There's less opportunity to get pulled off your track, et cetera. But then the other lessons to horses are really quite simple. People do more for you when you use a positive mindset. Right? Nobody wants to come and walk into a situation where they're crossed. We know people who work for horrific people. And the horses will jump these big jumps for one of those red and white star lightments that you get walking out of a restaurant. They'll do anything you want for that. And if you, if I walk in the barn and I have that and I go, and they hear it, they'll lay their life on the line for me. So sugar cubes work. You know, positive reinforcement works. Another big lesson through horses is, as you engage, it's about influence, not force. And if you think about leadership, where you can get someone to think about this being their own idea, then they're going to internalize it and do it more often. If you force somebody and aggressively go after them, they're going to do it as long as you're standing in front of them. So this 2000 pound animal, if you influence them and present good choices to them and encourage them, and oh, by the way, an influence could be you're jumping a five foot fence, and you just have a bar on an angle to help them jump more in the middle. That's influence, rather than, you know, really aggressively ripping their mouth out or Big Spur event. So there are a number of principles like that that are very applicable to the workplace. And I often will offer a practicum here on the horse farm, where we teach vital leadership principles, and then we go out and we work with the horses and have a practicum approach to it. Because I also found that when you pull people out into unique settings, that they can learn differently and they hear differently, and then it becomes that much more memorable. Very smart. And I, yeah, I think that if you are, if you're in a corporate boardroom and you're watching another PowerPoint, some of it ends up being white noise after a certain point. But if you, if you, if you look at it and you're like, how do I, you know, how do I manage this, not this, not this employee that's dependent on a paycheck, but how do I use some of these principles to manage something that doesn't care about me could kick me in the face if I don't treat it properly. Then I have to start to think outside the box, because if I yell, they're not going to care. They demand respect, right? Yeah. But we have as everyone, as everyone should, as everyone should, but doesn't. Yeah. Okay. Very good. Okay. I'm going to ask a couple, like I'm going to pivot into some rapid fire stuff to close it out. Any other things you wanted to touch on. So open floor doors, but also give me your, your social, your website, all the, all the links you want to send people. Yeah. So we're really trying to do a lot around thought leadership. I am, I write for Forbes, Boston Business Journal, I write a blog. We have a couple of hundred thousand Instagram followers on Jensen Associates. My life's work is about trying to help people get the most out of their life. And so inserting big ideas daily is what we're trying to do. And that's both on LinkedIn and Instagram. The other big thing is, as I mentioned earlier, there's a book coming out determining leadership potential. It's on presale now. So if you Google that on Amazon, you'll get it. But we want, I wanted to put a lot more on that book so that people could use it with their groups or think through things. And so we built a website determining leadership potential.com that will have good articles, lots of ideas, interview questions on how to get after some of this stuff. When the book comes out, we're going to put a bunch of case studies on there, etc. So whether it's jensenassociates.com or determining leadership potential.com, check in there for things to use for yourself, for your team, etc. Amazing. Okay. Perfect. And I'll link all that stuff in the show notes as well. So let's do a couple rapid fire. You've had, you know, an incredible career, a lot of success. But what keeps you up at night now? It could be a problem you're trying to solve in the world. It could be something in your own, in your own business that's stressing you out. What keeps you up at night? So I sleep like a log. That's good. The things that are on my mind is I'm barely started. I feel like I've been a bottom feeder to this point and there's so much to be done. And I'm running out of time. I only have like 150 more years to live. So that's something that creates a little panic in me at times. What was the biggest challenge that you've overcome in your own life? And how did you solve for that? What did you learn from it? The starting of the business was great the first year. The second year I had quite a lot of commitments on business development. And for all good reasons, they all fell through. It was a horrific time. It's scary because I also have this other business that at the time, kids in high school and college, etc. And it was a very transformational moment for me. The first part of that is don't ever assume that things are going to go your way. So second and third level planning. Do business development before you need it. That's a big one for all entrepreneurs. It's a crux of doing the work versus getting the work and figuring that out. And so I think I've helped a lot of small businesses with that. But then the third is you figure out who the people are, who are real in your life. When you, I've had a lot of success. People like to be part of success. When you trip and stumble, it's interesting to see how people react to that. And so it was some really good life lessons to kind of kick me in the teeth on some things. And I think I've parlayed that into helping people as they've handled other similar difficult things. So that, I would say that was the biggest challenge. And I still carry it with me. And I still have that sense of, I don't want to get in that place again. And I think it propels a lot of my success as well. But we're about to hear nine. So I'm pretty excited. That's pretty damn good. I mean, you get all that stuff out of your system. You're two and you're good. But I get it. You have to go through that. And it's better to go through that year two than year nine. For sure. Yeah. If you had to choose one person, obviously, there's been many. But if you had to pick one person who's had a major impact on your life, who is that person and what did they teach you? I have to say, I'll have to be, I'm going to cheat on this answer. It was a couple, which is my parents. I mean, they were unbelievably outrageous role models. You know, my mother was, she's 96. She lives on the horse wine with us. She's a wild woman. She plays Christmas music during the year to keep her positive, et cetera. And she was one of the early women to go to Brown. She ran a whole nursing program for Rhode Island Hospital. She had 10 kids and never thought about herself, et cetera. My father started as a box boy and a steeplejack and ended up being a CEO of a large jewelry manufacturer. And family was always his priority. And he could have, he could have run Google or any of these. And he got to a very good level of success, but family was always a big priority. And so I've dedicated myself to my, God bless my husband. He's a saint to my husband and my children. And at the same time, both of them said to me, you grew out of a very fortunate set of circumstances. You were born with a lot. You were given a lot because of, you know, the talented people around you make a lot of it. And so that's a big message I've carried coupled with if you can, you should. And so those are, you know, I can't differentiate my mother from, from my father because they really were tight in it and had such a profound impact on me. I love that. No, it's okay. You're allowed to cheat on that question. It's fine. If you had to pick a book or podcast or some source that's had a major impact on your life, that somebody should go check out, what would it be? Yeah. Leadership in self-deception is a book. I encourage people to read once or twice a year. It's a quick read, but it's like, you know, a V8 moment whenever we read it because we always, not always, we often look outside for the reason why something's not working. And so much of it is within us. And even though the book, the secret is a little hokey in terms of the extreme pieces that it will take, you know, with all due respect, there's some big ideas in that book as well in terms of the power, positive thinking and to create energy by giving energy, et cetera, et cetera. Those are two that I'll take some of the big ideas out and use it to give myself an infusion to making sure that I've got a very strong mindset that's about personal effectiveness and high performance. Amazing. Okay. If you could tell your 20-year-old self one thing, what would it be? Man, oh man, I tell her so many things. I would tell her, don't be so hard on yourself. I would tell her, when people say that the child years go by fast, don't take that as a, oh yeah, yeah, I know, but really listen. And it just, I mean, my kids are 23 and 26 and amazing kids. I'm just going to be more proud of them. But when I'm trying to do so much and be so much and if I could sit on the floor and take a breath and being the moment a little bit more, I would do that if I could do it again. And last question, what does success mean to you? Success means I have a large thriving business because that means I'm personally effectuating change for a lot of people, whether that's at the individual or the organizational level level. I want to make, I want to help people be wildly successful, like that's it, that's everything. And so the more robust my business and thank goodness, it's really strong and thriving and growing, 95% of my business comes from referrals. So it's, you know, at a great point, but the bigger the footprint that we have, that means the more people that we're helping, and then it's like the pond, the pebble and the pond, it has a ripple effect because those people can go as they go home and have dinner with their family, they can make that that situation better. So that's, yeah, I think that's it.