I recently went one-on-one with Doug Conant, former CEO of Campbell Soup.
Adam: What were the keys to rising in your career? What can anyone do to rise within their career?
Doug: This is just my point of view, but let me frame it a little bit. This year, I’m celebrating my 50th year since I got my MBA at the Kellogg School at Northwestern University. I’m so old, it wasn’t even called the Kellogg School then. It was called the Northwestern Graduate School of Management Science. I’ve been doing this a long time, five decades, from a step above the mailroom to being CEO and chairman with four companies. So I’ve seen a lot, and I was putting it in perspective the other day. For further perspective, I view modern corporate America in the broader context of the last hundred years. Right after the Great Depression, regulation was reimagined, World War II was starting to happen, and the corporate sector started to grow on the heels of the U.S. victory in World War II. I’ve been working for half of that hundred years, and I’ve seen it go from a militaristic, hierarchical business model to a completely reimagined business model that invites everybody in and creates opportunities for all, admittedly not easily. So personally, I’m very optimistic about where we’re headed here.
But in my case, the key thing for me through five decades is that I’ve had 20 roles. I’ve had 56 bosses. Fifty-six. Well, actually 28, and they had 28 bosses. So I worked for my boss and their boss. Interestingly, I’m so old that 55 of them were men. There was one woman. But through all that, there are a few things that haven’t changed. Two big things. One is that it’s all about people and performance. Not one or the other, but both. I have found, whether I was managing a team of three or a company of thousands, 30,000, or when I was chairman of Avon and we had 6 million people selling Avon around the world, our performance was totally dependent on them. Totally dependent. If they did it well, we did well. I couldn’t orchestrate all that from a corner office. So through it all, I’ve realized that it’s all about the people. As part of that idea, I’ve also realized that you have to bring an abundance mentality to the leadership of those people.
My words for that are that you have to be tough-minded on standards of performance, because you have to perform. You have to. If you don’t perform, you don’t have the job. You don’t have the opportunity to lead very long. So you’ve gotta be tough-minded on standards and performance. But at the same time, you have to be kindhearted with the people you’re working with. They have to believe that you’re going to have their back if they make a mistake or if something goes wrong. If they don’t believe you have their back, it’s hard for me to imagine that they’re going to have your back when times get tough. Everywhere I’ve been, starting with my first job, where I was partnering with an administrative assistant, I worked to help her succeed. She worked to help me succeed, and one plus one equaled three. I have seen that kind of math going on my entire career, but it’s about people first. It’s about having an abundance mentality that says, I’m going to be tough-minded on standards of performance, but I’m also going to be kindhearted with people.
One way to think about that is when I talk to people about who had the most profound influence on them, because leadership is all about influence. My definition of leadership is that it’s the art and the science of influencing people in a specific direction. I would say, Adam, who had the most profound influence on you? You would think about that. You’re pretty quick. You would get it pretty fast. You’d probably come up with someone who was not a boss, probably a grandparent, an aunt, an uncle, a father, a coach, or a mentor of some kind. That’s what most people come up with. Then I’d ask you, well, did they have high standards for you? You’d be nodding in the affirmative like you are right now. Then I’d say, well, did they care about you? You’d say, well, yeah, they did. They were tough-minded on standards, and they were kindhearted with me. So I was energized by being with them. I looked forward to it. I didn’t want to disappoint.
That’s the kind of model I think is required in these chaotic times, when there’s so much anxiety in the workplace. If you want to be an effective leader, you’ve gotta be a port in the storm, man. You have to be creating something that says, we’re going to hold ourselves to high standards, but I’ve got your back. But I am holding you to high standards, and if it doesn’t work, I’ll work with you to help you get in the best possible position to do something that will add value here. Or I’ll help you find an opportunity to add value somewhere else. But we’ve got to deliver. We’ve gotta perform, and we’re going to do it supporting each other. We really don’t have a choice. So that’s what I’ve learned, and it hasn’t changed in 50 years.
Now, 50 years ago, I worked for white men who worked for older white men. That was the model. It was hierarchical. If you didn’t know what to do, you would go talk to your boss and say, how do I do this? Your boss would tell you. Now your boss doesn’t even know how to tell you what to do. We’ve got flat organizations that are operating in some kind of quasi-remote world, and a lot falls on you. So the leader has to create an environment where, knowing that a lot’s going to fall on the individual, that individual has to feel supported if you want them to be bringing you their best work every day. So that’s sort of where I’m coming from. And you know what? It still works. I was just talking to Jim Donald the other day, who is the former CEO of Starbucks, and he was the co-chairman of Albertsons in Boise, Idaho. He’s been in many operating units and on many boards. We were just saying, it hasn’t changed. The world hasn’t changed in that regard. Now, technology’s changed. The workforce has gotten beautifully diverse, which it needed to do, but that creates its own messiness. But it’s gotten beautifully diverse on all kinds of levels. So it’s good. But leaders need to recognize that they’ve gotta create the right environment for people to thrive, or they will fail. They might win today. They might win for a year. But the next year, they’ll be lapping those numbers with people who are unhappy. Maybe it’ll work two years in a row, but it’s risky. That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.
Adam: Doug, we speak the same language. Not surprisingly, the best leaders, on the one hand, lead with love. There are many things that you can do in your career at a very, very high level without loving people. But you’re never going to be a successful leader unless you love people. So on the one hand, the best leaders lead with love. But on the other hand, the best leaders lead with accountability. On the surface, those two concepts could seem conflicting. They could seem contradictory. But as you so beautifully explained, the best leaders understand that you need to be able to bring both elements to the table. They’re not contradictory. They’re not conflicting. On the flip side, if you really love people and you really care about people, you understand that bringing accountability and helping them get to a place where they’re going to be at their very best is your role as a leader. That’s your job. That’s your responsibility. That’s what will allow you to help them become their best selves.
Doug: That’s absolutely right. I’ve gotten to know Alan Mulally pretty well. He’s the former CEO of Boeing Commercial Airplanes and also the former, wildly successful CEO of Ford Motor Company. He has a Working Together model, and his words are, “Love ’em up,” for everyone, actually, in the value chain, including suppliers, everyone in the company, and everyone beyond the company who is part of the value-creation process. He says, “Love ’em up, or they’ll leave you.” So I could not agree with you more. That language sometimes scares people off, but it’s not wrong. It’s not wrong. I was just delighted to put that post up. It was so compelling that I actually pulled a little audio from my interview with him and put it out in his words just the other day.
This notion of accountability is interesting. As a leader, you have to be accountable to the people who are working for and with you. You’re accountable to them, and you’re accountable to the values that you hold dear. They have to see that you hold yourself to a high standard and that if you tell them you’re going to do something, you’re going to do it, or you’re going to tell them why you didn’t. It’s not a one-way street. Many leaders tend to think it’s one way. It’s my way or the highway. It won’t work today. It actually sort of worked when I started my career. Everything was top-down. Dwight Eisenhower was the president of the United States. It was a militaristic model for the corporate world.
Now that just won’t work. It won’t work. So this notion of “love ’em up” means realizing that accountability is a two-way street. Everybody who works for you needs to feel accountable, but you also need to feel very accountable to everyone in your operation. I couldn’t agree with you more.
Adam: I love that you brought up Dwight Eisenhower. He led the military when we won World War II, which was ultimately why he became president of the United States. The way that military leaders lead today is so different from the way that military leaders led in the days of General Patton. When you watch the movie Patton and George C. Scott portraying General Patton, you have a certain vision of, this is what a general is. When you watch A Few Good Men and you see Colonel Nathan Jessup, that is how so many people think of military leaders. It couldn’t be more contrary. I’ve interviewed so many of America’s top military leaders, and it’s the exact opposite. They embody, live, and breathe the exact characteristics that you and I have been discussing. They embody, live, and breathe the exact same characteristics that are required to lead effectively in corporate America and that are required to lead effectively in any context in today’s landscape.
Doug: I agree. I have this belief that the kind of talent you want around you. I’ve always talked about three to four C’s, depending on the day, but they need to be of high character. They need to be highly competent, and there needs to be good chemistry in the team. The fourth C is courage. They’ve gotta have the courage of their convictions. I’ve been talking about that forever. Then, a decade after I started talking about that, I actually read the Army Field Manual. The words they use are “be, know, do”: be a person of good character, know what you’re doing, and do it well with others. It’s the same stuff. I work with military leaders now in a variety of capacities in the nonprofit world and advisory groups, and they’re the epitome of high character, high competence, and working with people to get the job done and perform, but to do it right in a value-driven way. So you’re right. You’re spot on.
Adam: When you talk about a couple of those C’s, character and competence, it really speaks to an extremely important point that you shared, which is that we’re no longer in an environment where you can talk the talk without walking the walk. If you tell someone, do this, and you yourself aren’t doing it, or when you are so focused on holding other people accountable but aren’t holding yourself accountable, people aren’t going to listen to you. People aren’t going to follow you. As you said, accountability is a two-way street. Leadership is a two-way street. Before you can effectively lead others, you need to be able to lead your own life. Before others are going to follow you, you need to become a person worth following. You can’t just talk the talk. You’ve gotta walk the walk.
Doug: Yeah. We’re dancing around a concept that links to building trust with the people with whom you work. Stephen M. R. Covey, the son of Stephen Covey, wrote the bestselling book on this subject. It’s called The Speed of Trust. The subtitle of this book is the world’s greatest subtitle. The subtitle is, “The One Thing That Changes Everything.” If you create a high-trust environment, you’re working with a team of people who are team-oriented, performance-oriented, supporting each other, and highly competent. You can feel like you can do anything. If you have a team that is not particularly competent or lacks character, there’s too much uncertainty and anxiety in the room.
The two components he talks about are character and competence. You have to know what you’re doing, and you have to do what you say you’re going to do. You have to be accountable. So this subject has been studied forever, and a leader’s ability to inspire trust in an enduring way, not an episodic way, is of paramount importance.
We have a president today. We don’t need to get into the politics of it, but he plays hardball with power, and he’s not inspiring trust that, in my opinion, is going to be enduring. It endures when he is in the room, and when he is out of the room, there’s a risk that it won’t endure. So he’s not the best example for a leader who wants to build a legacy that endures. That’s not clear to people today. They think that’s the way you do it, and it’s not. There’s no evidence that I’ve seen that that kind of leadership behavior is sustainable anywhere. So I think this notion of people focus means you’ve gotta be tough. You’ve gotta play hardball and be kindhearted, and do it in a way that’s transparent, where accountability is a two-way street.
It’s really the only way to go, which is why I just launched my Higher Ground Leadership Success System, which builds on all the work I’ve done. I realize it’s really the only way to go. To create enduring value, you have to be really rock-solid in your convictions. You have to honor the people you’re working with. You have to build trust. You have to have a growth mindset. Then you have to have a higher purpose that invites your team to be part of something special. You put those five things together, and you can do almost anything. I don’t know any other way to do it. Everywhere I’ve been, whether it’s been a team of 3, 5, 10, hundreds, or thousands, it works. I don’t see any alternative unless you’re going to just try to stay one step ahead and jump to the next job before you crash and burn in this one. I just don’t see it working.
Adam: I was recently interviewed, and the interviewer asked me what I think is the biggest misconception that people have about leadership today. I thought it was a great question, and I took a minute to pause because I wanted to give a good answer. I thought about it, and I said that what I’m not going to say is that people think leadership is about yelling and screaming and fear and intimidation because most people, to your point, understand that that isn’t leadership anymore. There was a point in time when that was leadership, but as you’ve discussed in your 50-year journey, that isn’t leadership anymore. We understand that we’re past that. The people who are still leading that way, the people who are still trying to influence and impact people through fear, intimidation, yelling, and screaming, aren’t real leaders. They aren’t leaders who are going to deliver results that are sustainable or lasting, and they aren’t going to influence and impact people anywhere nearly as effectively as they can if they lead in the way that you and I are talking about right now. What do you think is the biggest misconception that people have about leadership today?
Doug: The biggest misconception is that rhetoric will carry the day, that what they say matters. It’s what they do and how they perform. Performance matters. So I hold any leader accountable. They say they’re going to do something, they do it. Competence, character, and they can say anything. It’s how they perform against the bar that they created, and they just think they can talk their way out of it. It won’t work. Stephen Covey had a great line for me once. It wasn’t about me, but, well, maybe it was. I don’t know. But he said, “Doug, you just can’t talk your way out of something you behaved your way into. You’ve gotta behave your way out of it.”
I used that on my teenage boys during high school, and they got the message. They were a little slow, but they eventually got it. Some leaders think they can talk their way out of it. They can’t do it. You’re going to be held accountable. It’s just a question of when. So people fall for the rhetoric. They fall for the social media post, and then there’s another one, and then there’s another one, and then there’s another one. Before they know it, they’re in the land of rhetoric. Rhetoric won’t carry the day. Performance carries the day. It’s all that matters.
I just did a blog. If I talk about highly effective leaders, I talk about highly effective leaders as being leaders who are time travelers. They live in three different time zones simultaneously. It’s part of the abundance mentality, actually. They learn from and honor the past. They perform in the present, and they’re always looking to perform in a way that creates a more prosperous future. All three time zones. It’s not about the here and now. It’s about all three. People think leadership is all about the present and all about the headline. It’s not. It’s not the rhetoric. It’s the performance over time. If you say you’re going to cut spending, you cut spending. If spending is up, you’re accountable. You can keep saying, well, the dog ate my homework, and there are reasons for it, but ultimately, you’re accountable. So that’s what I think about leaders, and this is corporate leaders. I’m talking about corporate leaders, not even necessarily political leaders.
Your board, your stakeholders, and your shareholders are going to hold you accountable for performance. Not only for performance, but performance that isn’t mortgaging the future in order to deliver in the present. Those boards are there to safeguard the future while delivering in the present and honoring the past. The best leaders live in a world that says, I’ve gotta be very fluent across all three of those time zones. The best boards are the same way, and they are. I look at Satya Nadella as an example. He’s managing all three time zones beautifully. Tim Cook, I think, did. He’s on a bit of a hot seat now, but for the longest time, he succeeded an iconic guy and delivered on all three time zones. He was his own authentic self, too. There’s a woman, Beth Ford, who’s been running Land O’Lakes for a long time now, over $20 billion now. She’s done the same thing. She’s led it in an inspired way, learning from the past, delivering in the present, and setting the table for a more prosperous future.
She’s done it in her own authentic, accountable way while loving up her team. So it’s really the only way if you want to create enduring value. There’s something called the Power Principle. We won’t spend a lot of time on it. It was created by Blaine Lee. He said there are three ways to create power. Fear and intimidation power and transactional power are the first two. Fear and intimidation will work in the short term, but there’s no evidence that it is enduring and will work in the long term. It typically creates a reservoir of ill will that ultimately is the undoing of the person who is perpetrating the fear and intimidation. I’m talking corporately. Forget politically. Transactional power is really the way we run our markets. It’s, you do this, I’ll do that. It’s pay for performance. If you hit your targets, you make more money, and that works.
But we go back to the people we were talking about at the very beginning of the broadcast. You think about the people who had the most influence on you. How often did they use fear and intimidation to get you to do anything? They didn’t. How often was the primary way they influenced you transactional? If you do this, I’ll give you a quarter. No. It’s the third way. Blaine would talk about influence with honor. They honored you. They had high standards. In Alan Mulally’s language, they loved you up. They had your back. They were accountable. Those are the people who really had the impact. The Power Principle and the concept of honoring people, honoring all the people in your value-creation work, is awfully powerful. Awfully powerful. In fact, I don’t think, in the fullness of time, it will work any other way.
Adam: I couldn’t agree with you more. Your exercise challenges anyone consuming this conversation to think about the leader they have been around who they admire most. My question is, is that a person who modeled behavior that you admire? Is that a person who not only talked the talk, but walked the walk? The answer is going to be absolutely, every single time.
Doug: Yeah, always. I do an exercise in our book, The Blueprint, that was co-authored with my editor-in-chief at ConantLeadership, Amy Federman, where we have people create an Entourage of Excellence. My kids used to love the television show Entourage on HBO. They loved that show. So we said, well, it’s not just one person. There’s a whole group of people who had a profound influence on me. We started calling it the Entourage of Excellence. I’ve got this collection of people I think about who had a profound influence on me. If I’m ever not sure what to do, I think about them and ask, what would they do? It becomes crystal clear. It’s not complicated. Stephen Covey had a big influence on me. Warren Bennis did. My wife’s grandfather did. My mother did. Alan Mulally talks about how the two people who had a profound influence on him were his mother and father. If he’s not sure what to do, he just thinks about what they would do, and he gets closer to the right answer.
All of us have this entourage of people in our lives that we can call upon 24/7 in our mind’s eye, and they will help us find our way. It’s a powerful concept. We teach it in our Blueprint Boot Camps, and it’s probably the most impactful thing we do. We really get people to go into the parking lot of their lives and examine the people who had the most profound influence on them and how they’ve impacted these individuals in ways that they hadn’t thought about in a long time, if ever. The other thing that we discover as we do this right now is you are enough. You are enough just as you are. You have the experiences in your life that can help you lift your contribution profile tomorrow. You know what great leadership looks like.
You’ve actually experienced it with one of those people who influenced you and multiple others. You know what it looks like. You just need to examine it and think about how can I bring that into the practices that I bring to working with others? Everybody has this ability to contribute at a higher level, and it’s right there waiting for them. The way to do it, as we say, is that the only way out is by going in. You’ve gotta go into the fabric of your life history, your life story, and pull out the pieces that really speak to you. Then find a way to build them into the way you show up so that you can feel good about it and act with conviction because you know that way is the right way for you.
You lived it. So many of us are so busy trying to please everybody out there, and we can’t win. There’s so much shit coming at us. It’s overwhelming. The only way to deal with this is to lock in on your convictions as an individual and how you’re going to engage with all the stuff that’s coming at you. You can’t react enough. The world won’t let you. It will overwhelm you. We get a tsunami, each one of us, every day. So we’ve gotta sort of fortify ourselves.
Our life story is where we have people start. I had a conversation with a young lady today who just finished my Boot Camp program, and she built her leadership model. She was amazed at the insights she got by going through this process and examining, “My life. I have the answers. These are the three things that matter most. I’ve gotta start showing up that way. And by the way, nobody’s going to give me a hard time with this. I will have more impact, and I will feel better about it because I’m going to be myself.” So this is available to everybody. That’s why I am still chomping at the bit to change the world. That’s my story. I’m sticking to it.
Adam: I love it. A lot of what you’re talking about speaks to the importance of leading with values, having a deep sense of who you are, what you believe in, and living it. Oftentimes, we see leaders who enjoy high levels of success and don’t necessarily have a great value system. I understand that that’s not necessarily the norm, but how do you reconcile that? How do you, as someone who believes so strongly in values-based leadership, square that circle?
Doug: First of all, I think that’s a bunch of hooey. I know hundreds. I’ve probably known a thousand CEOs, and over 90% of them are amazing people who are trying to do the right thing. Nobody ever talks about them. They’re humble, and they’re soldiering forward. When Jim Collins wrote Good to Great, he discovered these companies that were the best-performing companies over time in the United States. He was astounded to discover: here’s a guy who’s working at Stanford Business School, and he’d never heard of any of the CEOs of these companies. But they were just quietly doing their job, and he did some more work.
He said, there’s a Level 5 leadership structure here. What really differentiates these leaders, who represent most of the leaders I know, from others is that they are incredibly humble and they persevere. They have fierce resolve to do the right thing the right way. By the way, they were creating more value than anybody else. I see that if somebody talks like that, people think, well, that’s for show. But I would tell you, that’s for go. We tend to look for the aberrations in the marketplace, and there are plenty of them. But there are thousands and thousands of companies and thousands and thousands of CEOs. You’ve talked to a lot of ’em. You’re not running into a lot of bad seeds here. They’re trying to find a way to do the right thing in very difficult circumstances.
So I tend to look at this as the glass is more than half full. It’s 90% full or more. There are aberrations, but I also believe that the aberrations will experience their undoing, going back to how they’re leading. It’s not sustainable. They will be found out. They will be caught. The board will catch them. The media will catch them. Their employees will catch them. To me, it doesn’t look sustainable. It just doesn’t. The only difference would be if they’re an entrepreneur and they’re not accountable to anybody else. We’ve got some of that going on, particularly out in California, where people are wildly successful in Silicon Valley and can sort of write their own rules as they run their startups and things.
But that’s not the norm. The norm, to me, is people who are of high character, highly competent, trying to do the right thing, and who feel very accountable to all their stakeholders. So I just don’t buy it. People want to look for villains. It’s like a soap opera. You don’t see a good CEO on TV or in the movies. They’re all evil, doing evil, taking advantage of the poor. I think it’s a bunch of hooey. Just my opinion. It’s being foisted on a public that doesn’t know any better, people who don’t work in the corporate world but are served by it every day. So that’s an insider’s point of view, but it’s an informed point of view.
Adam: I have the same perspective that you do, and that is that the vast majority of successful leaders are following the playbook. There is a certain set of guidelines that the most successful leaders understand are required to lead effectively. When you look at the leaders who are able to lead effectively by breaking the rules, there’s probably something that they’re bringing to the table that is extraordinary, that allows them to defy gravity. For the rest of us who aren’t bringing that extraordinary element to the table, we have to follow the rules. Because if we don’t, we’re going to fall on our face.
Doug: The tough thing is the game’s changing all the time. So the playbook, I talk about what’s the same over the five decades of my work, but there’s so much different that the playbook keeps moving around on you. The company you go to has a different playbook than the company you left. I remember McKinsey wrote an article, gosh, probably 30 years ago, that I found incredibly compelling. They said, in the future, there will no longer be any source of competitive advantage. We used to talk about always looking for your unique selling proposition, your unique competitive advantage versus your peer group. McKinsey said, with technology and everything else, there’s not going to be any sustainable competitive advantage.
The only competitive advantage you can have is organizational agility and the ability to flow your resources to deal with the issues at hand smartly. I think that’s true, and I think it’s also true for leaders. We’ve gotta be incredibly creative with our problem-solving now. In this Higher Ground work, we added two values explicitly. One was kindness, and I’ve talked about that. But the other one was creativity as a leader because the problems we’re encountering are new. Who would’ve thought that since COVID, we were going to have to be working with these hybrid workforces, in and out and all around, and the people who supply us and the people we serve? The game totally changed overnight.
Leaders had to figure out, how am I going to lead a remote workforce? So it’s just really hard. Now, I don’t want to make this sound easy. It’s hard for leaders, which is why I think you’ve really gotta get well anchored in who you are and how you want to show up. Because if you’re not, you’re going to be swept away. The playbook that you have today is probably going to have to get tweaked tomorrow. That’s what I found. I’ve had to operate completely differently since COVID, for example. But before then, too. I wish it was that easy. If it was just easy, here’s the playbook, and go do it, and everybody will live happily ever after. It’s not that easy. But then I would also tell you, it never has been.
It felt really hard when I started 50 years ago. We didn’t have technology. We had one terminal on my floor, and there were probably 300 people on the floor. You had to sign up to get on the terminal for an hour, and you had to do your job. So it was not easy then. Then we had a globalization effect. We were dealing as national economies, and then global competition came in, and then demographics came in, and then gender came in. It’s not for the faint of heart, which is why you have to be really well anchored in what you believe, because that’s the only thing that will carry the day.
Adam: What should leaders understand about how to lead in today’s landscape, understanding that the rules have changed, the plays have changed, and the game has changed? There are new issues and challenges that leaders are thinking about, staying up at night worrying about, and opportunities that they’re excited about. What advice would you share?
Doug: Well, I was fired from a job once, and I was talking to another guy who was fired from a job and who also had the same outplacement guy. I didn’t know that until last month. I discovered this. We were talking to each other, and I said, “Neil McKenna was your outplacement counselor?” “Oh, he was my outplacement counselor.” He also helped run the outplacement service at Harvard Business School.
Neil’s language, which this guy and I remember to this day, was this. In fact, there was something posted the other day on LinkedIn, and I sent it to the guy and said, does this remind you of anybody? There are four words that you need to carry with you. The four words are, “How can I help?” You’re there to help. You’re there to help your boss, your team, and your company prosper. How can I help? Then you have to have the personal guardrails to define how you’re going to do that in a way that you can feel good about. But it’s all about helping individuals, teams, and organizations reach higher ground.
For me, higher ground is not just higher financial ground. It’s having a healthy, thriving enterprise that’s helping make the world a better place. It’s where people are wildly engaged in the work. As long as you’re focused on helping people thrive in difficult times, you win. It’s not about you. It’s about them. Even when you start and you don’t have anybody working for you, it’s about how your team is going to thrive. If you want to go into a team-based environment, if you want to be an individual contributor or an entrepreneur, that’s great. This would work, too. But if you go into a team-based environment, it’s all about helping the team thrive. It’s not about you. It’s about them, and doing it in a way that you can feel good about. So the question you ask is, how can I help?
I have found when I was going out to interview, I was a terrible interviewer. God, I was awful. I was so nervous. It was a long time ago. I’m an introvert, and I just couldn’t get out of my own way. Neil said those words to me. He said, “Doug, this is all about helping your boss, their team, and their organization thrive. You want to come help?” That opened a door for me to talk about helping the organization thrive. Eventually, I finally got a job right before my severance ran up. So it worked for me. I commend it to everybody else. How can I help?
Adam: Such a basic, simple mantra. Such a basic, simple challenge. Yet how many people out there ask themselves that question, let alone ask themselves that question every day? How can I help? What can I do to help the people around me? Who do I influence and impact, and what steps can I take to help them get to a better place? That’s leadership.
Doug: In my own little world, it’s in my circle of influence. I don’t have to change the world, but I can change how I approach the world that I live in. If I am clearly trying to be more helpful in that world, I will be appreciated, and I will learn, and I will grow, and I will have more opportunity to help. In many ways, this is not that complicated. It can appear that way, and the devil’s in the details. But if you bring that mindset to the work, I have found it works every time.
Again, I’ve been in four companies. I was fired from one. The other one was sold. I retired from one. I had 20 different roles. I had 56 bosses. As long as I was trying to be helpful and I was committed to excellence, I had opportunity. Everybody on this call will, too, especially if they’re focused on being the best version of themselves. When I say you are enough, I just want to encourage people to think about what is the best version of you, and how can you bring that to whoever you’re working with, with the mindset that says, how can I help? You win. You will win. Easy to say, hard to do, but…
Adam: It starts with wanting to help. It starts with thinking not only about how can I become the best version of myself, but how can I help the people around me become the best versions of themselves? Thinking not only inward, but thinking outward, thinking beyond yourself.
Doug: Yeah, you have to have skills, too. You have to develop the skills. If you’re in technology in a particular lane, you’ve gotta have the skills to contribute in that lane. So that’s a must. But then you get in there and you’re working with people. If you’re part of a team, you’re working with people, and helping them is more important, I have found, in the fullness of time, than being 10% better on my skill set. Ideally, you’re both, but it’s not just about your skills. What differentiates all these leaders that you talk to over the years is their ability to attract, develop, engage, leverage, and retain talented people. You do that with a mindset that is all about helping.
One last thought. I once was sitting in an audience as a manager, and this motivational speaker was talking. He said, “I have 10 two-letter words that are going to define your level of success.” He had these little dashes up on the screen, 10 two-letter words, and nobody could figure it out. Then he put the words up, and the words were, “If it is to be, it is up to me.”
You’re the only one who can craft this journey in a way that it works for you. You can’t count on HR. You can’t count on a buddy. You have to do it. You have to put in the work. We encourage people to put in the work and go in, in order to have impact outside of themselves. So if it is to be, it is up to me.
