Lessons - Why We're Surrounded By Horrible Leaders | Dr. Kimberly Janson, Author & Leadership Expert

Welcome to Lessons episodes of Success Story, part of the HubSpot podcast network. These lessons episodes will be shorter conversations with past guests, valued members of the success story community, and myself. They'll be focused on teaching you actionable, insightful takeaways that you can use to upscale your personal and professional life. 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? 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 CEO of Target, the CEO of Panera, a 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 while 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 fortune 500 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 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? What's that? What is that? 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 the 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? Yeah. 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 and 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 the five 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 up front 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 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.