Are You a Leader Worth Following?

0:06 What's working on purpose anyway? Each week we ponder the answer to this question. People ache for meaning and purpose at work, to contribute their talents passionately and know their lives really matter. They crave being part of an organization that inspires them and helps them grow into realizing their highest potential. Business can be such a force for good in the world, elevating humanity. In our program, we provide guidance and inspiration to help usher in this world we all want Working on purpose. Now. Here is your host, Doctor Elise Cortes.

0:52 Welcome back to Working in Purpose program. Thanks for tuning again this week. Great to have you. I'm doctor Leise Cortez, your host, like Joni Lai from Dallas, Texas, which is home base for me. By wave introduction, I'm a management consultant specializing in meeting and purpose, organizational local therapist, inspirational speaker, social scientist, and author. There are many ways we can work together. Check out at leastcoretest dot com and Gusto dash now dot com to learn how and also there are some free resources I put there for you to download enjoy. Aud of this week's program with us today is Tim Spiker, who has been passionately investigating leadership effective since nineteen ninety nine. He's the author of the book The Only Leaders Worth Following and the founder and president of the APAIO, where he and his team helped people become, be and stay leaders who are actually worth following. We'll be talking about the criticality of doing deep self work to become an effective leader, discuss the two most important aspects of being an effective leader, and how being a leader worth following translates to bottom line business results. You today from Atlanta, Georgia. Tim, Welcome to Working on Purpose. Thank you, doctor Cortez. Really excited to be with you and your audience today. Absolutely. I loved your book, as you could tell. It's so well organized, it's punchee, it's I align with it. So I want to start with You're welcome, well done.

2:02 I want to start with what I considered to be a really pretty key message from your book. You tell me if I missed it entirely, but it seems to me that the heart of your book is really you say that an unexamined life is not worth following. Oh that's just good. You know. There are sometimes I never fashioned myself as an author, and I say that I spent I think I visited the library twice. In college. I was an engineering student, and so I didn't really spend a lot of time in the library. But as I set out on this endeavor to capture this research and talk about these things, there are occasionally some moments in the writing process where something comes out of the pen or as it were, out of the keyboard, and you almost pause yourself, not because you think you're so awesome, but you're like, wow, I need to listen to that too, and you keyed in on. Probably one of the most favorite things that emerged out of the writing process for me is this idea that an unexamined life is not worth following. And so, you know, when we think about the impact that leaders have on our lives, you know, the subtitle of the book ends with and how the quality of our lives hangs in the balance.

3:21 So there's those balance sheet profit loss statements, and all of those things are deeply impacted by leadership, but so is the quality of our life when we go home at night and we're having those kitchen table conversations with our family and friends, and so it really makes sense that we would want to be following leaders who have done the hard inner work to really understand who they are, to really understand what they're all about, so that that can be somebody that we could ultimately trust. But when that examination doesn't happen and leaders are just reacting without having done some of that more developed inner work in terms of who they are, then we can oftentimes end up with the result that we're not excited about. Totally agree, and we're going to dive into that in fact, just to really really start unjuicing it up, if you will, from what you talk about here, and I think this is so great.

4:13 You actually distinguish in the book that who and what leadership is for a person. You say that three quarters of your effectiveness as a leader comes from who you are, not what you do. Yes, so three quarters sounds like like I went and had a hot dog one day and looked up at the sky and like, is it about three quarters? And you know, I want to I want to burst that idea pretty quickly. The actual number we're going to be scientifically accurate is seventy seven percent. Seventy seven percent of your effectiveness as a leader comes from who you are, not what you do, and I'll share with you how that number was discovered. I was working with a small boutique consulting firm and we would have our clients up to the west side of Pike's Peak in Colorado here in the United States for a week at a time, and we gave them a series of assessments and we were looking for linkages between those assessments. Is there some kind of magical connection between personality, natural ability and leadership performance? And so my colleague, Vanessa Kailie, she was our resident number country at the time, and she said, I'll take that we had enough data, and she said, I'll take the data and I'll take a look. And I remember, like yesterday, I went into her office late in the evening. She said she had the results.

5:28 I said, what did you find? She said, she said nothing, because we didn't find any There was no correlation between personality, natural ability and leadership performance. And as I turned to go out of her office, she said, but we did. We accidentally found something that we weren't looking for, and that surely got my attention. And I turned around and went back in and said, what did you find. She said, Well, on our leadership three sixty we had eight different categories, and if you just think about a pizza swent into eight pieces, any two pieces of that pizza should be worth twenty five percent. And when she ran the numbers, the statistical software found that just two areas were responsible for seventy just under seventy percent.

6:15 She ran the data a few years later with ten times the data point and it went up to seventy seven percent. And so that's how this discovery was made, is we stepped back and we looked at those two categories and said, ultimately, what's special about those two Why are these two work so much more than the other six combined? And about three years later the light bulb went off. I look up saving everybody time. You don't have to wait three years to get the answer. But it took us a little while to get it. And then when we finally stepped back far enough from it, that's when it revealed that those two areas were about who you are as a human being. The other things are the typical things that we see in the airport books about leadership in terms of strategy, vision and the like. And I'm not saying those things are unimportant, but when you look at the data, the data said that those traditional things of leadership are worth twenty three percent of leadership, that who you are is worth seventy seven percent. Well, and I think it's extraordinary what you've come up with. We're going to dive deep just in case you're wondering, listeners and viewers. We are going to dive deep into those aspects that make the biggest difference in our next segment.

7:21 But let me also hit this one. This is really really powerful and you start thinking about the role of a CEO or leaders on an organization and just really how important who they are and who they're being and how they lead is. I love the number that you put in here as well. And you talk about how you say using data from anonymous assessments on CEOs to evaluate their integrity, responsibility, forgiveness, and compassion, and then compared to each organization's financial performance, you found that the bottom ten CEOs had a return on investment on assets of one point nine three percent, while the top ten CEOs with the highest measures had nine point three five are our return on assets, so that's a four hundred percent increase. That is phenomenal. And those words forgiveness, to compassion, integrity, right, Yeah, yeah, I was actually amazed when I saw this particular research study And if anybody wants to look it up, it was spring of twenty fifteen. This was published in the Harvard Business Review, and the study was done by an organization called KRW that's based out of Minneapolis, Minnesota here in the United States. And that four hundred percent increase based on those four things integrity, responsibility, forgiveness, and compassion.

8:33 Now, I want to point out something regarding those four measures. That's the research that KRW was doing. And I'm still amazed to this day that they were able to get people in the business space to evaluate those four things, especially compassion and forgiveness. Just amazing. And as I got a chance to look at the data that I was personally involved in researching and I look at these four things, I see a mirror in the content. And I'll point it out in this way. When you look at those four things that they boiled down who you are to start with integrity and responsibility, that's about being inwardly sound. When you take a look at forgiveness and compassion, that's about how others focused you are. I know we're going to talk about those things later on, But I mentioned those things and that even in other organizations data, we can see the same pattern in the data that we found, and so it's out there. Once we get our eyes open to it, you begin to see this message everywhere that who you are makes such a big difference, even in the bottom line. Beautifully done, tim, beautifully done, and how you situated that. So we're talking about so that whole idea of being inwardly sound and then others focused. So now if we can, since that's really about the who that makes the big difference for our listeners to sort of get the high level of view of your book, then if you would talk about the what the six measures of the what of leadership. Okay, so when we talk about what leaders do, we talk about pursue vision,

10:03 drive culture, think strategically, martial resources, ensure execution, cultivate talent, unleash motivation, and communicate effectively. Now I know that as I'm listing those off, everybody's like, oh, I'm not going to remember all of that. That's fine. Here's shorthand. If we were to take those eight things and break them into two different pieces, we would say, you focus the organization and you fuel its people. That's really and that's the broader categories. There is focus and fuel. That's what leaders do. But as we discovered, the person who's doing the focusing and the person who's doing the fueling makes all the difference in how effective that focus and fuel is. In fact, I want one of the things I wanted to talk about, which you do say in the book as well, you talk about when undeveloped people lead us, their lack of wholeness affects us as followers. And when we follow leaders who have done the hard work of becoming whole people, we feel that as well. All of us can sit here and remember and think about, ooh, I have followed somebody who didn't need to work. I know exactly who that is, and didn't know exactly what that looks like and what that feels like. Yes, yes, I mean we have felt that, and in many ways, I would say some of those more difficult experiences in my own life, in many ways that drove me into this work even more deeply the six than the awesome leaders that I've had a chance to follow, because if you look, if part of this work means that we can help leaders be better leaders for the sake of their followers, that's great. If we can also help followers make better choices about who they're going to choose to follow,

11:37 that's also really important as well. So maybe we can, maybe we can save some people some meaningful pain by helping them see some of these things that are actually driving results in the quality of our lives all at the same time. That is beautiful, Tim, And you know this just came to me as you were saying that, And so I guess what I would also like to do so and so much to what I do in the world is empowerment. Is I would like to empower our followers to be able to vote with their feet or their mouths when they encounter someone who maybe hasn't done the work and needs to work on that. So, followers, you really have a say in this matter. And I'm out to help create a world of inspirational leaders who make a difference and help you find your greatness. And so when you encounter those people who aren't doing that, sometimes they don't know, and so part of your job as the followers to help them understand as well.

12:22 So I want to empower you for that. Thoughts on that, Tim, Well, I think it's important that people interview. When you're interviewing for a job, please also interview the leader that you're going to follow. And it's very difficult, you know, in a forty five minute interview where you're supposed to be answering all the questions, it's difficult to get at that. But you know, I suggest to people, and I realized when you're if you're desperate for a job, this will be difficult to do. But I think it's a really great idea to say to the person that you're going to work for, Hey, would you be open to me to talking to a couple of people who work for you, just to get a sense for what it's like to be a part of your team every day. Now, great, they can hand you right their biggest fans and they can do that, but you have a chance then to understand perhaps a little bit better what you're getting into by being able to be also somebody who's you're not just being interviewed, but you're also doing some of the work in the opposite direction to have as good an understanding as you can. And it's difficult, but how can I understand who is it that I'm getting ready to follow? And ask some questions like, Hey, when things go wrong around here, let's say you're let's say you're working for a lease. When things go wrong around here, how does you know? What's the response? When when mistakes are made, when balls are dropped? What is it? What does it look like around here when things are really stressful and things are difficult? What is what is the lease? What are her go tos in those moments like that? Yeah, ask some questions like that to begin to understand what life might be like

13:54 if you end up taking this job. That's gorgeous town, beautiful, fantastic way to take into our first break. I'm doctor Realise FORRTENS, your host brire air with Tim Spiker, who is the author of The Only Leaders Worth Following and the founder and president of the apaio, where he and his team helps people become the un stay leaders who are actually worth following. We've been talking about the importance of good leaders doing their hard work on themselves. After the break, we're going to get into those two components that Tim talked about that make the most difference. Stay with us. We'll be right back. Doctor Elise Cortes is a management consultant specializing in meaning and purpose and inspirational speaker and author. She helps companies visioneer for greater purpose among stakeholders and develop purpose inspired leadership and meaning infused cultures that elevate fulfillment, performance, and commitment within the workforce. To learn more or to invite Elise to speak to your organization, please visit her at elisecortes dot com. Let's talk about how to get your employees working on purpose. This is working on Purpose with doctor Elise Cortes.

15:05 To reach our program today or open a conversation with Alise, send an email to a lease A l I s at elisecortes dot com. Now back to working on purpose. Thanks for staying with us, and welcome back to working on purpose. I want to share something with you. I actually had a baby during the pandemic. It's actually a book. It's called Conned How Inspiring Leaders Ignite Passion at LVA Causes now on Amazon. That was my way of interacting with the pandemic. But I really loted to turn the readers onto their passion, inspiration and purpose. I hope you enjoyed get something out of it if you're just joining the program. My guest is Tim Spiker, he's the author of The Only Leaders Worth Following. So next, what I want to get into here, Tim is and I love this is one of those zinger things that you said in your book that I think is just so right on. You say, being out of touch with the reality of our own especially negative impact as leaders, is one of the most egregious forms of leadership failure we can commit. Amen, I think that is so true. Well, I'll tell you a story related to this of a leader that I had personally had the opportunity to follow. I was working in an organization and things were not going well. We had a revolving door of leaders, We had difficult time, we had a difficult time holding on to talent, and it was just basically toxic. And one evening I was speaking with the leader of

16:40 that group, and I think he was at a bit of a not really sure what to say to the team. And an interesting thing to understand about this individual leader is that he had some He had some background through his family and through his education that resulted in him being a pretty stoic individual, just kind of always non emotive. And to give him the benefit of the doubt, I would say that he was probably trying to project stability in order to give us a greater sense of confidence about what was going on. But to this quote that you've just mentioned, he was not self aware. He didn't understand the magnitude of his stoicism or the impact that I had on us as a team. So when he asked me that night, what should I do tomorrow in our team meeting, I said, don't act like nothing's going on.

17:42 And I'll admit there may have been an expletive in there somewhere that I said. We needed. We didn't need our leader to freak out, but we needed our leader to be self aware of his stoicism enough to step out of it once while to connect with us. And in the end, what ended up happening is his self awareness around many issues, but this one in particular was so significant that eventually we just concluded, he's so disconnected from reality, like he doesn't know what's going on? Now? Did he? Actually? I guess I don't really know, but that's what it felt like. And so none of us were making any long term plans to stick around this organization because we felt like we had a leader that was really out of touch with reality. The reality of how he came off the reality of how he was impacting us, and in the end, that whole team, you know, rather disintegrated. And so it's fine thing to want to provide stability for your team, but we need to be in touch with the reality of who we are and how we're impacting other people, because it might not be going as well as as we think it is. You know what, I appreciate that so much, Tim. You know, it's hard work to be a leader. You're in the spotlight, and it does really take work to be an effective leader. And of course that's you do that work. I do that work too, And I want to make sure that people that are listening to this are like, oh my god, am I one of those people that's not worth following? Maybe? But the good news is that you can

19:14 grow and you can learn and and so what you just the story you just spoke to to me, Tim, really gets to you know, I wanted to treat the two components that you describe in your book that make the biggest difference in leadership effectiveness. So if we can, that's a perfect story to come off of. Let's talk about inwardly folk or inwardly sound. First, so there's there's five and a half pieces of inwardly sound, which sounds a little bit strange, but we've got we've got one that straddles the line between these two big topics. So we'll come to that one at the end. But the five aspects of being an inwardly sound leader that we talk about on a regular basis are being secure and settled. So that's like the opposite of being insecure. Maybe an easier way to hear that one self aware, principled, holistically, healthy, and purpose. And then that other half that I mentioned is emotionally mature. Half of emotionally mature is being about inwardly sound.

20:07 And I'm sure we'll talk about the other half and in a little bit here, but those are the those are the ideas that we explore with leaders around being inwardly sound, you know. And so what I find interesting about this, and you do talk about this in your book, is I think people can read those those words and go, yeah, that's me. I'm good, I got it, I'm good, And so do you. I didn't actually think about this when I was reading your book, but I imagine in the work that you do, do you have assessments to help people understand how they're showing up in the world. We are. We are in the process of working on an assessment right now. At least. One of the things that we will ask people to do is we'll just kind of in a in a hopefully in a compassionate way, We'll put some very high standards in front of them about what does it mean to be secure and settled, what does it mean to be self aware? And so we we draw them in to invite them into a lot of self evaluation, but we also invite them to check with others, check with others around them. So while we're in the process of developing an assessment around these things, we really invite people to begin that assessment or process pretty quickly on their own and then with the support and input of other people as well. It was amazing, you know, over all the many years that I've been doing the leadership work for myself, we were asked to go and find people that we know to give some feedback about us. And I was amazed at some of the things I learned about from people who I'd been spending decades with. What do you mean you never told me this before? Would keep from me? Yeah. Yeah, Well, it's important that we figure out opportunities to open those doors. And sometimes those

21:40 are formal and sometimes those are informal. But when when we have a client engage with us, we're basically giving them an excuse. This is an assignment. We want you to go have this conversation and check in with somebody. And of course we give them some coaching on how to not stop the flow of information, because if you react poorly or defensively, that might be the last bit of information you get. So we help them think through that. But ultimately we create some structure and some excuse, if you will, to begin to engage people in those in those kinds of types of dialogue. So important, so important. Okay, so another component so we talked. The first one was about being in really sound. The second one is about being others focused. So help us understand what that entails. Yeah, so five and a half here. And by the way, I don't believe in making up numbers to match each other. I don't believe that we need to make a word spell out something. And these are all the things of leadership.

22:33 I'm a bit more scientific than that in my brain. As we can label things to make them memorable. We will, but we're not going to give them. Oh, there's got to be an equal number each side. It just turned out that way. So here are the five and a half. You already know what the half as we'll mention at the end, but being attentive, being curious, being empathic, being humble, and bringing a Greek word called agapone. And then finally that other half of being emotionally mature falls into the other's focused side of things. So I want to talk about two of those things at tenant and curious. So curious for me is so interesting. I'm coaching a couple of people right now who really have this thing where they're worried that if they don't have all the answers that they're going to look like they're incompetent and why are they in charge? And so what I've really encouraged them to do is, well, be curious. You don't need to come to the room with all the answers. Be curious and let people understand, let them share what they know. So talk to us a little bit more about the curiosity aspect. Yeah, well, it's really important in terms of if you think about this umbrella we're talking about others focused. So I need to be curious, but I need to be more than intellectually curious.

23:48 You can find a ton of articles from Slow and HBr and everywhere else around intellectual curiosity. And I am not anti intellectual curiosity. I'm pro intellectual curiosity, but it takes a lot more than that. We need to be curious about people. We need to be curious about their ideas and their perspectives and even their emotions, because this is all information for us to bring in as leaders. And I'll share with the audience maybe one of the most important phrases anybody has ever taught me, and it comes from doctor Mary Shippy, and I, you know, I talk about her regularly. She had a huge impact in my own life, both personally and professionally. And it's this simplest idea. It's just this phrase, tell me more about that. Just tell me more about that. And now we've got to listen, right, We can't like, tell me more about that, and I check out mentally, but we get a chance to learn so much. And I don't mean that in a manipulative way. Think about think about being just really wondering about somebody else. About how they see the world, not in a can you give me information so I can figure out a way to manipulate that against you at some point that this is not the Spanish inquisition. This is genuine heartfelt curiosity where we go beyond just the intellectual part and say, no, I really want to hear somebody else's ideas. I'm not just trying to study up on things, but I am trying to learn about how you see the world.

25:15 How do you see this problem at work? You're on the shop floor, you're closer to it than I am. I'm trying to help us be more efficient. But tell me about your experience and tell me about your opinions. By the way, we don't have to agree with people when we're curious. We just need to make sure we're asking the questions and listening to the answers. And so curiosity very simple idea of just tell me more about that, right, And I really think it's good for leaders to recognize that you really don't need to have all the answers. In fact, it's just not possible, it's statistically not possible for you have all the answers. Well, if you're a leader, and I know This is a struggle for many where they feel like they have to have all the answers. You've I think you've probably misunderstood the role of the leader. And by the way, if you show up with all of the answers, there's going to be a label that your people are going to develop for you, and it's called arrogance. Now you might not be arrogant, you might just be scared. But if one per I mean you just imagine if there's a person that walks in the room and says, every time, I've got all the answers, what do you think about that person? You don't usually think highly of them. And so the idea of leadership is not having all the answers, but it's helping the team get to the answers. And so, yes, you're going to ensure in the end that there is an answer. But when you don't have to be the smartest person in the room, you're going to create a whole lot greater opportunities for yourself and your team. Yeah, it's so much more fraying too.

26:44 And so one of the other things that you said in the book that I just thought was just so smack smart on as you talk about you distinguish that attentive leaders communicate in such a way that they actually say, basically through their listening, you are seeing, you are heard, you matter. That is so profound, well, so much of what this who not what work has uncovered, it's really just about the human condition at least, and we've got to keep in mind that we're all a part of that equation. And I don't mean in the kind of global we all hold hands standpoint, but I do mean we've got a lot of common characteristics. A story I like to share around this you are seeing, you or heard and you matter is last year, I was dropping one of my kids off at school, and we have a three year old daughter, and she was with me, and as we were in the fouryer of the school on the way back out, there were a number of bookstands around and she wanted to squeeze in a quick game of hide and go seek. So I thought, all right, her name is Aleen. I said, great, Alet, we'll squeeze in a quick game of hide and go seek. So I said, you go hide, And I stand around and I look at the wall and I cover my eyes and I count to ten. And it's a fair. It's a pretty small room, so it's not going to be too tough to find it around.

28:00 I start looking for her, and I do that thing that almost every dad in the universe does. You just automatically look in the opposite direction of where you know your kid is hiding, so we can make the game go on a little bit longer. And so I wander to the other corner of the room and Aila, I hear her. She's over here at the side, and she says, I'm over here. I'm over here. Now. I know, on one hand, somebody might say, hey, that's just the story of a three year old kid. But I think the youngest among us sometimes help us remember what's really true in life, even when we're much older in life. I'm forty eight years old now, and I think AILA's communicating something that's true for all of us. We want to be seen, we want to be found, we want to be acknowledged, we want to be heard, and that doesn't go away when you become a teenager and get into adulthood. So the idea of being attentive is that I'm dialed in.

28:59 I'm fully present too, and fully engaged with others in every interaction. And I know, leaders, I know you're stretched. I know you got a million decisions and a bunch of information. I get that, But what would happen, what would happen to all the work that you have to do over the long haul if each time you engage with somebody you were fully present with them and then by doing that and you're the leader, by the way, And I say that because your attention means more to people than just kind of the average person who might give them attention. When my leader gives me her or his full attention, it says to me, at the core of who I am, those three things you are seeing, you are heard, you matter. I think my three year old daughter understands that without even having to think about it, and I think that she's just representing something that's true of all of us. And when our followers are seeing and heard and matter, it creates a totally different dynamic in that leader follower relationship. Well, of course, when you say something like that, I mean, I think you also mentioned Bob Chapman in your book, but he's been on the show and I've developed a relationship with him. I completely believe in what he's doing.

30:07 But the idea that everybody matters and truly human leadership. And then you go on to say, which I think is also just brilliant. You know, you say the leader is the most emotionally influential person in the room. We must be conscious of this if we are to be leaders worth following. That is just so spot on, right tim Well, as we're working with leaders and leadership teams, they seem to have an extremely keen sense and awareness that they are the strategic hub of the organization, but they seem to lose track that they are the emotional hub of the organization as well. And you know, a car doesn't go anywhere without gassing the tank. And so we have to think about the emotional environment that we're creating. And I don't mean hugs and ping pum all the time. I don't mean that. I mean we have to be real in order to move things forward, but we also have to have environments that are engaging to be in. And we have to keep in mind that as a leader, the emotion that I'm feeling right now may not be what the organization needs right now. And I'm not suggesting that we be inauthentic. What I'm suggesting is that we'd be thoughtful about how and when and where we engage with the organization emotionally, and that we take responsibility for that. So, yes, every leader, you are emotionally the most important person in the room, and it's really important that we not forget that.

31:34 It's profound him so important. Let's grab our last break. I'm ELISEE Cortez your host Bruner, a Tim Spiker who is the author of The Only leaders Worth Following and the founder and president of the aperio, where he and his team how people become be and state leaders who are actually worth following. We've been talking about the two most important components in leadership. After the break, we're going to talk about how effectiveleadership translates to results. Stay with us, We'll be right back. Doctor release Court tes as a management consultant specializing in meaning and purpose and inspirational speaker and author. She helps companies visioneer for greater purpose among stakeholders and develop purpose inspired leadership and meaning infused cultures that elevate fulfillment, performance, and commitment within the workforce. To learn more or to invite Elise to speak to your organization, please visit her at elisecortes dot com.

32:25 Let's talk about how to get your employees working on purpose. This is working on Purpose with doctor Elise Cortes. To reach our program today or open a conversation with Alise, send an email to Aleise Alise at elisecortes dot com. Now back to working on Purpose. Thanks for seing with us, and welcome back to working on Purpose. Another announcement besides the baby that I had, I want to share with you that we've launched Gusto now, which is a growth and transformation e learning platform featuring the signature of Violin Squired living in meeting from Purpose program we launched a couple of years ago and some of the professional development courses, and we do that in English, Spanish and Portugues, which are my favorite languages in the world. I offer a twenty percent discount to listeners, so and for tuning in, it's just you just use WOP twenty at checkout and you'll have it if you're just joining us. My guest is Tim Spiker from Atlanta. He's the founder and president of the IPAIO or.

33:31 He and his team helped people become the en state leaders who are actually worth following I'm your host, Doctorles Cortes. So for this last segment here, the first thing I want to do, Tim, is I just I love, love, loved how you let us in to your beautiful kimono and wis you went through the book here and you talk about your passion for impacting the lives of your followers, and you say, but I've discovered that my deepest passion within leadership is for followers and for what they have left to invest in the world they've been read by us. That is beautiful, Tim, That's so beautiful, and I know it just tugues at your heart strengths to being able to get present to that mise that's so important to you. You know, I don't really know how that developed, Honestly. I think a friend of mine was asked to kind of comment on the work that I do a colleague, and he said, you know, sometimes people pick a job and other times the job picks the person, and he kind of feels like the letter describes me. So I suppose in my perspective, I feel like God just put it in me to be passionate about this. But it wasn't like since I was, you know, three years old. It was really in my late twenties when this just really kicked in as a passion point. And for the longest time it was leaders or the passion point. But as I began to have my own experiences and broadening my horizons in terms of the different leaders that I work for, and especially I mentioned earlier having some of those bad experiences, I begin to realize that it's not just those bottom line of

35:02 results that are being produced by following leaders. There's also a quality of life impact. And then I think back on my poor wife, who you know, is a saint to have endured me in the years when I was following a really bad leader, because you get home from work and you're either completely spent or you've got to process, and she was a trooper. I'm more of a processor, and so you know, two hours later, that's the end of your evening. And that happens over and over and over again when you work for underdeveloped leaders. And so even through my own experiences, I just think about, could we help people avoid the emotional toll of following poor leaders? Could we just make that happen a little bit less, And if we could do even just that, we would have been making a meaningful impact in the world. You distinguished that so powerfully. Tim. I think everyone listening to this can relate to what it feels like to follow a leader that hasn't done the work and a shrapnel that comes from that. Right, And you're right. You know the people around us that after listen to us talk about how bad or a day was. Yes, yes, a lot of a lot of ours, a lot of a lot of emotional energy. Yeah.

36:25 I want to talk about the about the cost of insecurity. But before we do that, actually I want to there's a question here from Michael. Michael Mitchell, thanks you so much for listening in to an end. This would be probably from our first segment, and I'm just now seeing it. Yes, what if what if you ask for feedback as a leader and you're not getting a response? Well that that can be a complicated question, as simple as it is, because, of course it leads us to the question of why. Yeah, and we have to be careful about how much we assume. This is one of the things about curiosity. Let's fight against assumption, let's lean into wondering. And so in some cases when we ask for feedback and we don't get it, it could be that it's on the other person's side of the street, that they're just a fearful person who doesn't want to put themselves out there. Again, in leadership, we've we've got to remember that it is difficult for anybody or almost anybody to be a better way to say that, to speak truth to power. And as the leadership position, you might not think of yourself as powerful, but if you're holding somebody else's employment in your hands, you have power. And so it could be that the other person just doesn't have the of their own development, their own ability to kind of speak their truth, and so they don't want to participate.

37:43 Now that's one of the explanations. The other explanation could be that you've created an unsafe environment that you've been you've been you may have been angry in the past, you may have been defensive in the past, you may not have responded well to feedback in the past, and so now there's an environment in which that person doesn't want to come forward because you've created that around you. And so that's the first place is kind of wonder why and if possible to check in with the person. Ultimately, you want feedback, and so you may have to just up and ask some other people if that person wasn't able to give it to you. But bear in mind, if we're going to be emotionally out of control when people share feedback about us with us, then you can expect the feedback to dry up pretty quickly in any leadership position you might be in. So we just have to be very careful even when we hear feedback that we don't agree with, to not click into not It can be defensive or just I want to explain, we've got to kick, We've got we've got to kick into greater curiosity. So at least what we're learning is how the other person sees it, So we probably need to go ask some others. But we should also investigate and wonder why is this person not able to come forward. It might be on my side of the street, it might be on their side of the street. We don't really know until we ask a few more questions. Awesome, thanks him, and thanks Michael. Okay, so I do want to talk about insecurity. Insecurity is

39:15 a really, really important thing that all of this experience, and certainly as a leader, that's just it shows up att large. So I want to talk about the cost of insecurity. And I don't know if you want to give the example from the book about Chen, if you've got something else you want to showcase, but help us understand the cost of insecurity, Well, I'll tell a short story. I can tell a shorter story that'll get us there pretty quickly. And that is I'm in an organization. I see the senior leadership team. The president is instituting kind of a cost cutting measure that goes across every department. And people have been in this situation so many times. Look, people, we need four percent, Go find four percent, go reduce your cost by four percent. And there'll be a variety of reasons why we needed to do that, and it's timely. And so that edict goes out and the particular leader of this department goes to the team. And I was there in the room when it happened, and not the quote Hamilton, but I was there in the room when it happened. And the first question once the entire department was together was this, what do you guys think the president wants to hear? I'm like, hold on, what do you think the president wants to hear? Is maybe the worst opening question. Ever, as we're moving into a project like this, it doesn't matter what the president wants to hear. What matters is what can we do and can we not do? How can we get there or how can we not get there?

40:45 We're not going to get together and strategize how to tickle the ears of the president. We need to have enough security in who we are to deliver a bad message to the president if that's what needs to be delivered, and hopefully it's not bad news. But what happens when you set your team up at the very beginning, the very first question, and you say, what do you think the president wants to hear? And I'm like, oh my goodness, Now I happen to have some inside information. I was not only in the room, but I knew the players, and so I knew a little bit of the backstory, and the backstory on this particular leader was significant insecurity. You're talking about a senior leader in a many hundreds of millions pushing billion dollar organization. So size of companies doesn't necessarily mean anything, but I share that to say for many people, that would be a larger organization.

41:39 You know, if you're thinking about local businesses, that would be a larger organization. If you're thinking globally, that's a small organization. But the point is, I don't assume that the number of zeros behind the revenue of a company means that there aren't leaders like that at the very top, because it could happen. And so there was that leader asking the exact wrong question because it was based and rooted in his insecurity and wanting to not have the ire of the president rather than going back and delivering a true answer and doing that work. So's that's what can happen. We can have the exact wrong conversation if we're being led by insecure leaders. Oh my gosh, that's so powerful.

42:22 So I wanted to I want to talk about trust, but I'm going to fold it into another question here. Just we're getting very close to into the program and I want to make sure and talk about how it gets to the bottom line here. So you have a whole chapter or two I think it is on trust and how important that is and how much work it takes to communicating work with a manager leader when we don't have trust. That's just so you just explained that so beautifully. But what I want to get to here is you talk about when leaders are more trustworthy, motivation and engagement increase, and of course the motivation engagement increase, results and performance rise, and that's where we get to the bottom line stuff. So it's a little bit more to that. Yeah, I do an exercise with our clients where I will read an email to them and in the first iteration of that email, it comes from somebody that they know personally, who they really really do not trust. And after I've read that fictitious email to them, it's about an opportunity. It's about a new thing for them to invest in. It's going to be hard, but it's going to be very valuable for you in our company. And I ask them to write down a number of how excited they are about the opportunity after hearing that message from somebody they really don't trust.

43:29 And then we do that visualization exercise the second time, and the only thing we change is who the message is from. The second time, we say, insert the name of somebody who is really really trustworthy in your life. And when I do this with groups of people, every single time, the average engagement in the room from round one to round two goes up by over two hundred percent, and the only thing that we changed was the trustworthiness of the people delivering the message. The reason that that matters is that there are over three hundred studies worldwide outed a meta study on all of the other studies around engagement, and there are a bevy of bottom line financial impacts to having employees engage. So ultimately, we want to be trustworthy leaders because that drives engagement, and engagement drives bottom line results. So that's the connection between who you are and some of those harder quantifiable things that people oftentimes talk about in business. Beautiful, Tim, we do have a little bit of extra time here, so I think it would make a lot of sense if you can presence for us. And just like what you talk about in the book is just how much work it takes, how much effort, how much communication, how many attempts it takes to be able to communicate with a leader or manager where there is no trust? Oh goodness, I mean what happens? And again here I may or may not be speaking from personal experience at least, but you know when you're engaging with the leader that you don't trust. We approach the exercise completely differently. Think about the mental gymnastics and emotion that you

45:01 spend on trying to figure out I've got to say the right amount, but not too much. They might use it against me. Can I trust them that? No, I can't. So I've got to shade that all of that energy is sideways. Think about what all that energy is not going towards. It's not going towards the goals of our department or the goals of the organization. And so you spin all those wheels trying to figure out how to navigate an untrustworthy leader. This is why, this is why low trust organizations are actually inefficient. It's not just does it feel good around here, It's actually like pouring, as my colleague Vaness Chili says, it's like pouring gravel in the gears of the organization, Whereas when we have the organization full of trustworthy leaders, it's like pouring in oil. And so we just spend so much time and energy when we don't trust our leaders, and we don't have to waste all that We can turn our attention to the challenges when we're working for leaders who are trustworthy. You're just slightly passionate, tim just so great, and let's just talk about that really quick. Right, So, when we are turned on by what we're doing in the world, what a difference we get to make. Right. So, one of the things that I was happy to have you on is I could see the second I saw your book. Normally I talk with my guests before they come on here, but we're seeing each other for the first time here. But I as soon as I got your records, right of reading it, I knew that your passion was totally there. And of course I like the way you wrote your book, so it's important. But I really appreciate how passionate you are. It's fantastic, and isn't it a great way to live and work? I feel

46:36 very blessed. I feel like I feel like this thing found me. And I know that not everybody gets to have that thing that they're so deeply passionate about for so long. But I'm so I'm so thankful that I get too, And I love the work that I do, and I'll share with you that we get a lot of bottom line interesting stories. We also get a lot of stories from home. I mean, just earlier today I was visiting with clients, had two different clients. One story was about a family relationship after twenty five years that was estranged and is no more because they decided to lean into the idea of being humble. And another person had a similar story that was also decades in the making. That's not because I'm a superstar or this work is. That's because they were willing to do the work. They were willing to do that hard work. They looked in the mirror and they said, I can be more humble in how I approached my family members, and the relationships were healed. And so credit to them, and I get to be a witness to it, and I'm so thankful for that. Isn't it amazing to watch molecules change in front of your very eyes? Well, you're right, you're right about so here we are. We've already we've already done it. Tim that the time has gone. So I want to give you the last word, if you will. You know, this show is listened to by listeners across the world, and we're all about trying to create workplaces where people actually want to come to work and can be fulfilled. We create it'spiracial leaders who are actually stuarding businesses that actually do good for the world.

48:05 What would you like to leabal listeners with well, a couple of things. First, the things that we've been talking about here. It's important to think about the global side of this because the various research bodies that have leaned into this, especially if you look at the work by Human Synergistics, it's from around the globe, and my work has been in Asia, Australia and North America and so in that this is not a North American phenomenon that we're talking about. This is a human condition issue. And so that's one thing I would want to emphasize for people that are listening from all over. The other thing is just in terms of a very simple first step is that is leaning into the courage to look in the mirror. If a leader can lean into the courage to say, I'm going to look in the mirror, I'm going to look to see what's real, and I might find some stuff.

48:50 In fact, I'm probably going to find some stuff that I'm not that excited about that I'm not that proud of. If you're willing to do that as a leader, gosh, there's almost nowhere you can go. If and nowhere you can't go, I should say there's no limits, because if you're willing to look at those hard things and learn and make adjustments, then there's so much opportunity. And so I just encourage every person. It's hard at times, it can be painful, but it is so worth it if you're willing to do that work, both for you and for the teams that you lead. Beautiful way to finish. Tim, I'm so very glad to know you. I loved your book. It's such an important contribution to the world that I really appreciate you sharing your heart and your soul with our listeners. Thank you, Thank you, Doctor Corotes. If you want to learn more about Tim Spiker, his book The Only Leaders Worth Following, or the workiness seeing do at the Perio, go to the Only Leaders dot com. You can also go to the impaio as well and the Appario. By the way, it's really cool. I love that whole name. It's it's thh and then a P E R. I O. Last week you you missed a bit live showing I was Keshybere recorded podcast We run the Doctor. Joshua Spodek, who is an executive coach, Keynote and three time ted ch speaker host of this sustainable life and daily blogger, author and teacher of the initiative, a proven method to bring passions to life and work. We talked about his passion for sustainability, what's wrong with the education system that doesn't encourage entrepreneurship, and how to stoke our passions. Next week will be on the air with the next fantastic speaker. I'm actually going to be doing a special creativity show next week with a guy from Italy and will be midnight his time. It's going

50:22 to be a full moon and we're talking about creativity. I'll see you there. Remember that work is at least a third of our life, So let's work on purpose. We hope you've enjoyed this week's program. Be sure to tune in too, Working on Purpose featuring your host, doctor Elise Cortes, each week on the Voice America Empowerment Channel. Together, we'll create a world where business operates conscientiously, leadership inspires impassion, performance, and employees are fulfilled in work that provides the meaning and purpose They crave See you there. Let's work on Purpose.