I recently interviewed LPL Financial CEO Rich Steinmeier on my podcast, Thirty Minute Mentors. Here is a transcript of our interview:
Adam: Our guest today is a Fortune 500 CEO and the leader of the largest independent broker-dealer in the country, responsible for $2.4 trillion in advisory and brokerage assets. Rich Steinmeier is the CEO of LPL Financial. Rich, thank you for joining us.
Rich: Thank you, Adam. It is great to be with you.
Adam: You grew up in central Pennsylvania, and you grew up with a mom who remains a central figure in your life. She played such a key role in your upbringing, as well, working as many as three jobs to pay for you to go to college. Can you take listeners back to your early days? What early experiences and lessons shape your worldview and shape the trajectory of your success?
Rich: As you said, I grew up in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, a town that I think has very working-class roots, and I grew up in a very working-class community. It was just myself and my mom. So I had a single mom who really worked incredibly hard and demonstrated to me what grit, perseverance, and commitment to family looked like. I lived a life that felt incredibly loved and supported, and times were not always easy for us. So I got a job at a very early age. She worked several jobs, especially as I got towards college, and I just was able to take from that the learnings of what family means, what it means to be committed to someone, and also just how much it takes a village to raise someone. Because while my mom was principally my family, I had an extended family that was incredibly supportive. We have friends and neighbors, and you have folks who are really pulling for you, and even as we got into more difficult situations in time, I saw the sense of community that would come and support. So just feeling loved, supported, and an expectation that my mom would deliver against her responsibilities, those were incredibly strong lessons for me to learn, especially at an early age.
Adam: You shared so much there that I would love to unpack. A line that you shared which jumped out at me. It takes a village to raise someone, and the same can be applied professionally. The same can be applied throughout your life, if you’re trying to take that next step, if you’re trying to become the best version of yourself. Having a mentor, having someone who can help you get there, is incredibly powerful. Your mom being such a driving force for you. But it takes more than one person. It takes a village. It takes as many people, as many perspectives as possible, to help you get to that next level, to help you become the best version of yourself.
Rich: Yeah, when you go back, and you think about the people who were so selfless, oftentimes those are teachers. I had coaches that would do that. I had a coach, I remember once, who I had lost the starting quarterback role, and I was pretty upset about it, but he was also my calculus teacher, and he’s like, I’m here to tell you two things. First, and the most important thing is, you got an A on your calculus test yesterday. And secondly, I’m going to take you out of a quarterback role, but I want you to understand those in that order, and I try to remember that as I’m trying to lift people up as well. But there’s a lot of selfless people, and as people who are successful and have had the gifts of being able to experience some success, that is on the backs of so many people who have worked to lift me up and to identify. Because folks knew that it was just me and my mom, I had so many male figures in our family and in our neighborhood who wanted to help me progress and learn lessons, and understand what it means to be a father. And so when you see, at least when I see, someone who’s successful, what you don’t see are the tens or hundreds of people that have made investments, selfless investments, in that individual to try to ensure their success. And they often don’t get the credit, but I feel like I’m the sum of hundreds of contributions from people who cared more than just a passing experience to help make me successful.
Adam: I love that, and there is no greater myth than the myth of the self-made man. It sounds great, it feels great. It gives us someone to look at and say, well, if that guy can do that, then I can do that. But there really is no self-made man. We’re all a product of the people around us who are committed to helping us get to where we want to be.
Rich: And I would tell you, I can’t speak to all of the folks, but there is incredible insecurity that goes on even as folks become successful. They’re second-guessing. There’s questions you don’t know the answers to. You’re taking a leap of faith. You may do a big M and A event that seems like it’s challenging, and you put yourself out there. And in my role, I have a chairman. The chairman of our board is incredibly supportive. And so just having voices that can come and say, look, we trust you. You’ve demonstrated a path to deserve some trust, and there’s a lot of people here in support. That’s how I view our board. I view a lot of the folks that work at our firm in the same way, and I think you’re right. The successes that you see are a culmination, and oftentimes I think of a leader who has been able to engender support and followership, but has marshaled hundreds and many times thousands of people on a shared mission. And that success really should be distributed and shared. And many times you will see selfish leaders who say that’s their success. It is not. It is the success of a cumulative group who are making a combined effort.
Adam: Who are those people who you today surround yourself with, and who are those people who you want to bring into your organization, that you want to be on your team, to drive success within your organization?
Rich: Yeah, it’s interesting. I just went through this exercise last week, and so I’m on a learning journey. I am trying to continuously learn, and we went through. I have a coach that helps me, and she’s just there to support me and help me grow as a leader. One of the things we identified was that I needed to get to a personal board. That sounds weird. It’s a concept I hadn’t heard of, but that’s folks who are there, who either I love or they love me, and we have a deep, trust-based relationship. And so there are members of our board that I’ll work with. There are members of folks that I’ve worked with in the past. There are folks outside of the organization who are just there to help shape me, not as the person who runs this firm, but as the leader who is meant to continuously grow and learn and run an effective organization, let alone that it’s LPL Financial, it could be any firm. And so putting together a personal board. But most of my successes, or most of how I think about it, is shaped by the team that I work with, the team that I work with that challenges me, that feels like they’re in a safe environment to not accept that there’s a mandate coming down. I look for folks, you asked, who are sharp, driven, but also, when you think about the what and the how, where the how matters more, where how the behavior is exhibited is actually consistent with the culture that you want to aspire to achieve and affirm, versus folks who can just get it done. I would take somebody who does things the right way over a stone-cold killer, execution oriented person any day, because this is building an organization that can be sustained, and a lot of folks pay attention. And maybe last thing I would say is I have a family and a spouse who are just there for me every step of the way, but also my wife doesn’t suffer fools, and so if I’m acting in a way that she thinks, she’ll challenge me about work. And it’s pretty awesome to be able to go home. She’s like, hey, what are the things you’re dealing with? What are the things you’re struggling with? And she gives me her perspectives as well. So there’s a lot of folks that come together for me.
Adam: You shared a lot there, and a couple things that I would love to explore. When you’re talking about the value of your wife, not only as a spouse, not only as the mother of your children, but as a trusted advisor who is willing and candidly eager to challenge you, challenge what you did. Hey, you might be a Fortune 500 CEO, but that doesn’t mean that every move you’re making is the right move. That doesn’t mean that every way you’re thinking about approaching a problem is the right approach. And having a person in your life, having multiple people in your life, surrounding yourself with people who are there not to say yes, everything you’re doing is the right thing, but there to soberly assess, are you really doing things the right way? Can you do things better? Being willing and eager to challenge you, that is essential.
Rich: Yeah, I am incredibly blessed to have met her, and we met at McKinsey. So we were both management consultants. We got our MBAs together at the same time. And so she brings a lot of gravitas and a lot of experience in business as well. And so she brings that to me, but she also knows who I am as a person, and she invests in the company, meaning she invests in learning what we’re up to, what we’re doing. She asks me the things I’m particularly challenged with, and then she’ll give me another view. The role of having individuals who challenge you. I worry about, in a role, there’s a sense of hierarchy, a sense of bureaucracy, a sense of power that comes with titles as you ascend through an organization. And I’m trying to work to empower, to take decision making lower in the organization against a shared vision. But what I’ve seen, at least as I’ve ascended and as I’ve gotten to this role of CEO, is that more people are waiting with bated breath on some of the things that you say, and that can be challenging in a role, because you really want people to listen critically. There are a lot of people here who work here who are smarter than me. There are a lot of folks who have better strategic direction than I do. And through a series of circumstances, I’ve ended in this role, and I’m very proud to be in this role, and I think I deserve to be in the role. But having folks who will sit in front of you and challenge your perspectives and force collectively a thought process that is a shared thought process instead of an individualized thought process. That’s one of the dangers in a role as you get high in an organization, is that you can get isolated, and you realize you may come to internalize some of those successes as your own successes instead of collective successes. And I think that’s dangerous because it makes you less likely to be successful going forward.
Adam: An underlying theme in what you’re sharing is the importance of decentralizing decision-making, empowering everyone in your organization. How, as a leader, do you do that?
Rich: That’s been a lot of what I have done over the last year and a half, is try to figure out how to drive empowerment as low as possible in the organization, and so I’ll give you some of the things we’ve been working on. For me, it is incredibly important to have a shared vision for where the company or the firm or the initiative wants to go. In this case, it’s for our company, having a shared vision of what success looks like over a five year arc, and if we can build that together, and I mean usually that for me is with our senior leadership team having this shared vision for what success is, then if we’re all aligned to the same outcomes, we can work backwards. If you start five years out and say, okay, these are the milestones we should be at over the next five years if we’re going to achieve those outcomes, and then you don’t have to micromanage. At least I find that I don’t have to micromanage. Then the decisions that lead to each tranche of the outcome, each one-year outcome, as much as we start talking about how do you instrument the performance, so that you can see whether you are progressing at the trajectory that you would think. But in that scenario, those decisions get made either inside of my direct reports or hopefully for them, then they cascade that. And so a lot of what we’ve worked on recently is sharing that entire shared journey. We call it our playbook, with all of the employees at the firm to say, this is the journey. This is the aspiration for us as a firm, five years forward, and here are the objectives that we’re pursuing. We’ve got five of them, and then inside of them they each have five initiatives. We call it our five by five, and that is shared with all employees at the firm so they can start to contextualize the decisions that they have to make and how their role contributes to where we’re trying to take the firm. That’s the foundation, a shared vision, and then trust that the individuals can make their own decisions and can lead. And then obviously we have accountability to outcomes, but it leads to greater decision making. And my belief is, if you’re going to distribute decision making, then you have to be on a shared journey, so that you all know you’re headed in the same direction, because otherwise you could get very different decisions made if everyone was on their own journey.
Adam: Having a shared vision, having transparency, and in order to do that, you have to have clear communication. You’re very clearly communicating to everyone within your organization, these are our priorities, these are the steps that we need to take to achieve our goals, and without that clear communication, without that transparency, it becomes a lot more challenging to have the alignment that you need to be successful.
Rich: Yeah, that has been probably one of the hallmarks that I have believed for my entire career, is that folks are building their own careers, and incredibly successful firms are made up of really talented individuals who are motivated to be aligned with that firm at that moment in time. You see people change firms all the time, and so I don’t want them to have jobs at our firm. I want them to have careers, and to have a career, it means you’re building towards a pathway, so you have your own journey, maybe mapped, maybe it’s not mapped. But to do that, I believe you need to communicate back, this is where this firm is headed, and this is the growth we expect, or these are the twists in the road that we may or may not come, so that incredibly talented individuals can make their decision as to whether they want to be on a journey with the firm. That means you have to be overly communicative. That’s one of the things. It’s either a strength or a flaw, but for my personal leadership style, I’m overly communicative. I’m overly vulnerable. Sometimes I share too much around here’s where we’re headed, and that’s counsel that I’ll get back. But I have a bias towards sharing more with the employees, certainly, and our clients, as to where we’re headed. So because everyone has a choice, clients have a choice to work with the firm. Employees have a choice as to where they want to spend their time and talent. And so the goal here, I find, of a leader is to convince either clients or employees or vendors or community members to want to work with our firm. If you don’t communicate and you think they’ll learn by seeing what we do, that’s a big leap of faith that you’re making there, that they’re really going to be able to interpret all of those actions into an intentional strategy.
Adam: You mentioned your focus on ensuring that everyone in your organization understands that this isn’t a job, this is a career. Being invested in career development, and I’d love to dive into your career journey. You mentioned that you were the beneficiary of a series of circumstances that led to you becoming the CEO of a Fortune 500 company. What were the keys to rising in your career? What can anyone do to rise within their career?
Rich: One of the things for me was trying to get a broad set of experiences. I saw a lot of different industries. I started as a management consultant, and as a management consultant I had the benefit of seeing a lot of companies. I got to see a lot of different initiatives in their companies, and I got to see successful firms and firms that were relatively less successful. And I had an engagement manager who one time, we were working with Victoria’s Secret catalog, and he had said to me, this is a winning company, and if you find a winning company, stick with a winning company. And interestingly, what he meant by that was firms that when they’re presented the opportunities to make decisions, they make them. If they have the set of information they need, they either say yes or they say no. They say it very clearly. They cascade that decision making. There isn’t second guessing once the decision is made. And if they don’t have enough information, they say, I can’t make this decision right now. I have these five pieces I need, and then give me those five pieces of information, we’ll make the decision. You can see it in the alignment across the firm. Interestingly for me, no disrespect to the places I’ve worked subsequent to that, but until I got to this firm, I never saw that manifested again after Victoria’s Secret catalog in a really winning company with an aligned culture. So getting a set of experiences so that I understood what good and bad was, and then being very pragmatic about understanding what my strengths and weaknesses were. I can tell you, I was talking to some of our leaders here, might have even been talking to our board. I’m a change agent. I drive change. So if you wanted me to manage a railroad, keeping trains on time is not an area where I have incredibly great strengths, but reimagining a network, reimagining in the face of a changing technology environment. So being aware of my strengths, and I’m a reasonably good problem solver, I learned that through management consulting. So maybe knowing my strengths, I’m a change agent, and then I had a real passion for taking decisions and being held accountable to those decisions. I wanted to be able to lead people. I liked leading people. That filled my tank. Maybe that’s one of the other things in my journey, is learning what filled my tank at work instead of what drained my tank. I’ve had roles in the past where at the end of the day you just feel like ugh, and realizing that that’s a choice to stay in a role that drains you. I’ve had roles and I had elements of roles always that were filling, and so trying to find the things that filled my tank so that work was additive to my personal life. I’m a passionate person, and when you line up passion with the ability to feel like you’re filled at work, it’s really harmonious. My wife said when we moved to San Diego, I’ve never seen you so fulfilled. You’re thriving because there’s an alignment there. Something’s changed at work because you come home more energetic than when you leave in the morning. That’s really healthy. And I can tell you, when I found that environment, it didn’t much matter whatever happened at this firm, I was going to stay here for the rest of my career, because it’s really an awesome thing to be able to find that.
Adam: I love that. When I give keynotes, a couple of the questions that I pose to audiences to really reflect on what fuels you, what energizes you, what fires you up, what gets you going, and an equally important question, what can you do all day, every single day, without getting bored, and why? And those are questions that you ask yourself as you were rising within your career, and help you figure out, well, I might be good at this, I might be better than other people at this, I might get promoted if I continue down this path, but am I ever going to be truly great? Am I ever going to be my best self? Am I ever going to reach my potential by spending my time doing things that don’t fill me up?
Rich: I think people become really risk-averse. You can be successful at things, but if you’re not fulfilled, it’s hard to thrive. There’s a woman that I work with, her name’s Anereja, and she is thriving in her role. And gosh, that is so incredibly fulfilling to me, to see someone who, once you’re able collectively to craft the role together, who thrives. And there’s a pep in the step that shows up. There’s a confidence in the execution, there’s a mastery. And so people can become really risk averse and just say, hey, I’m in a role, I don’t want to rock the boat, I don’t want to take the risk. But there is this tweaking to get to roles that allow you to thrive. People that thrive, you can see it. They almost exude an aura, and everybody’s capable of thriving. It’s just a mix of the capabilities that individuals have and then the positions or roles that they’re put into. And I would tell you, one of the things I try to talk to folks who are building their careers, it’s great, and I know we’re on a mentorship podcast, but it’s great to have mentors, but understand there’s a single individual who is responsible for your career development, and that is you. And so taking that control back and not saying, oh, the organization put me in this role, the organization put me in this role, the organization put me in this role, but being in control of your own career and being the captain on your own ship. I know I had a job, I was the Chief Digital Officer at a previous firm, where 96% of the job was managing the development of technology, which just wasn’t my bailiwick. I mean, I like technology, but managing development just wasn’t where I thrived. I was doing a passable job, probably passable plus, but it wasn’t anywhere where I could demonstrate my skills. And individuals taking that responsibility to marry, okay, where am I, what fills me up, but also where can I thrive, and putting those together, and then seeking roles and telling an organization these are the things I think I could thrive in. Organizations are more likely to be responsive to that than them individually identifying the roles that people can thrive in.
Adam: Rich, I love that. It’s your life. You have one life. It’s yours. Get in the driver’s seat. On the flip side, what makes a great leader? A great leader is laser focused on understanding the people who they lead, understanding intimately the people around them, and getting them to a place where they’re going to thrive, getting them to a place where they’re going to get the most out of what they have. And if you’re not fortunate enough to be around a leader who’s going to help you get to that place, don’t use that as an excuse. It’s your life. But as a leader, it’s your job to help the people around you get to that place 100%.
Rich: It’s so weird. When folks see organizations that move and reshape the organization, they think, why isn’t it stable here? Why do they make org changes all the time? And I don’t know what all the time may mean, but I’ve been through, everybody’s been through a lot of organizational changes, and the thought is more often, at least as I’ve moved into being part of an organization that got shaped versus trying to shape the organization, the contours and the alignment. It’s about putting people in the best position to be successful. And it’s not just always people. Sometimes it’s efficacy of the alignment of functions inside of an organization. But I happen to still adhere to this. This is super dated. So there’s a Tom Landry leadership model, which is Tom Landry was the coach of the Dallas Cowboys, and he would say, I’d rather have a team full of incredibly exceptional, talented individuals that I then shape the system to, versus having a system that I then need to find talent for. And so I believe more in finding incredibly talented individuals and then being malleable to those individuals, versus telling people this is the box you need to fit into it, and dynamically shaping boxes to get the most out of individuals is an incredibly important role of the leader, as you had said.
Adam: You can’t go wrong quoting Tom Landry. I think the Cowboys wouldn’t mind having him back. Yeah, that’s true. You mentioned that you’re an agent of change, and you figured that out early on. What are the keys to leading through change? What are the keys to driving change?
Rich: Part of it is not pursuing change for change sake, but understanding the context of the market environment you’re in. It’s incredibly important to understand the relative strengths of the firm that you’re at, so that when you craft strategy, the strategy is crafted in the context of the market as well as your relative market position. And so the first step in that is actually having a strategy that has a bias towards being successful. If the firm is acting in a certain way, if you want it to act in a different way, you need to have well-crafted strategies that contextually have the likelihood of being successful. The second is then, as you’re making that change in that context, you need to share back, here is our market position, here are our relative strengths, here’s why this change is being pursued. Either we’re going after a different market opportunity or we’re going to pursue the current market opportunity with different offerings. Otherwise, it just looks like mandates. I am not a big believer in structural power. You can say that you’re making a decision because you have a title. It’s how the military operates. Again, tons of respect for the military, but where senior leaders make decisions, and then those are executed below. But that hierarchy in a dynamically moving environment is where I would rather say, okay, here’s where we’re headed. Do you guys have a challenge with that? Is there other ways we should do it? Are there things we should be doing differently? So crafting strategies that have the probability of being successful, revealing the logic of those strategies, moving those into decision making. And so much of this is about bringing people along for the journey. The other is you have to make sure, when changing strategies, that you are instrumenting the outcomes so that you can see at a very early stage, are we having the success that we thought we would have, or are we not? And if you’re not, moving on quickly from that change in strategy, either reverting back to the old strategy or pursuing a different pivot. That is about quickly not being so connected and so committed to a strategy or pursuit that you become a little bit blind to the outcomes. So here, when we do that, and we fail, and we give leaders the opportunity to take on those initiatives, we don’t penalize them for that failure. We try to work really hard to say, okay, what did we learn on that, and how do we pivot quickly? So we espouse one of our fundamental beliefs, is pursuing disruptive strategies, but it’s not just disruptive to other firms, it’s also disruptive to our firm. So how do we innovate out of even what we’re doing today into a different tomorrow? So for me, to synthesize that, it’s about having strategies that can succeed, revealing them to the whole firm and the logic for them so that they can be along on that journey, and then not being so wedded to that strategy to think that it’s infallible. If you get instrumentation and you get outcomes that say, hey, this isn’t working, then you need to be able to change and pivot pretty quickly.
Adam: That last piece, flexibility, adaptability, essential at all times, but especially important in times of change, in times of uncertainty. You don’t have that, you’re really going to get hit hard.
Rich: Yeah, and sometimes you can find organizations are incredibly inflexible. I’ve worked at organizations before that were incredibly inflexible. I worked for an auto manufacturer years ago. We were talking about different ways to bring out prototype vehicles, and we were in conversations. This was in the early 2000s, where somebody said, we tried that in 1968. I kid you not. We tried that in 1968. Of like 1968, we probably have some learnings and some innovation over those decades. And you have to be aware of the organization that you’re in as well. Some organizations are change resistant, and so coming in with a big change agenda, when the organization is not flexible or hasn’t demonstrated that flexibility, that goes to the strengths of the organization. You have to make sure that you’re building in an awareness of what’s possible inside of the organization as it stands today. Now, I joined this firm almost eight years ago. It feels like a completely different firm than I joined eight years ago. And so some of the things that I’m espousing at the firm I’m at today, I wouldn’t have espoused eight years ago because the firm wasn’t ready for them. And we’ve grown more flexible. We’ve grown more aspirational. We aspire to change the industry, to drive the industry. We wouldn’t have said that eight years ago. We said we aspire to be competent at different functions. And so there’s a journey that’s on by the firm. But also part of this is, are the chemical elements there for the equation and the alchemy to be successful?
Adam: Understand your ecosystem, understand the environment that you’re in. That’s critical. When you shared this story of the moment in your career when you realized you’re working at a company that is playing from a playbook that was written in 1968, the importance of challenging assumptions. Just because we’re doing something today that is working well doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s going to work well tomorrow. And having the mindset that what I’m doing now, it may not be the best approach, continually challenging your approach, continually challenging others, and fostering an environment where challenging people is not only acceptable but encouraged.
Rich: I’m so aligned with what you just said. That’s relevant at almost any level in an organization. If you work in a call center and you become a sales leader or a leader in the call center, the best source of input are the actual team that you’re managing. And you may feel that you’re still close to directly answering clients and calls, but you’re less. There’s a level of abstraction that occurs inside of an organizational structure. And so for me, I feel so abstracted away from the clients that one of the most important things I can do is listen to the people who serve the clients, and listen to the clients directly. And as you get further and further away, you have to be much more intentional about having listening posts that allow you to hear either what your employees are experiencing. And so we’re working on, we have input that we get from our clients every single month. We get input every single day. But we used to do NPS, and still do it, that it’s quarterly, but our goal is to move that to monthly. In the same way, we used to get annual employee sentiment scores, and then we’d have a semiannual, more minor input. Now we’re trying to move that to monthly as well. The more you can get from your clients, from your constituents, from your employees, the more the folks who become abstracted away from the day-to-day can stay connected to the day-to-day. I think it’s incredibly important. Organizations are led not from the top. They are led from what would look like an organizational chart would be the bottom. We call it, I think Nordstrom coined this, we are trying to follow this inverted pyramid. And that is the most important people are the clients. And as you get abstracted away from the clients, your goal is to support the people that are closer to the clients. It’s just inverting that concept of how leadership really should be demonstrated.
Adam: When I asked you who you surround yourself with, the first thing you shared is you surround yourself with people who possess a deep trust base. How, as a leader, can you cultivate trust? How can you become a trusted advisor to those around you?
Rich: One of the things to think about so trust is often a shared experience over a period of time, and so it just doesn’t come immediately. Being consistent in the way, what you say is what you do. One of the other things that I have thought about as I’ve changed and ascended across organizations is that the timeframe for outcomes. I used to be pretty maniacal about we have this goal, let’s achieve it tomorrow. Okay, we achieved that in one week; let’s achieve it in half a week. More often, when you think about leadership and followership and building folks who are aligned, I spend more time now. It’s crazy because this is the antithesis of how I lived as I was building my career. I tell people, immediate outcomes are not as important as actually bringing people along on the journey. And if it takes a month instead of a week to get to an outcome, but people feel like they were part of it, it’s probably a more sustainable outcome. And so trust is about demonstrating that. In that scenario, hopefully, folks have been developed because they’ve been given more opportunities. And we get into this a little bit, and maybe Adam, one of the other things that’s a little tangential, but we crafted a new set of values at our firm. And one of the values, which you don’t see at many firms, was create and share joy. And that is that sometimes work is called work for a reason, because it can be difficult, it can be hard, and it is work. And so if you can try to engender an environment where people are giving each other high fives, because it isn’t always real difficult, and when the good times roll, acknowledging people, having fun with each other, celebrating successes, those are incredibly important, because there are going to be difficult times. And if we’re transactional in nature, and you and I only engage on the performance, and how did the performance go, okay, do it better, versus getting to know each other, investing, celebrating successes. When the difficult times come, and they inevitably come, and we have to bunker up together, we are more likely to be a connected, cohesive unit, because we’ve trusted and invested in each other over a period of time, and we have learned about each other individually. And that for me, those personal connections, the part where you’re not supposed to say love people at work, but I love the people that I get the chance to work with, and having love and care and compassion and empathy and demonstrating it so that people know that you’re invested in them as a person, not as a cog in a wheel that is executing a task, that engenders trust. And so when you have to say, oh man, we’re going to take some hard actions, there’s a bias for folks to say, wait, you’ve had my best interest over a period of time where I’m not sure you had to demonstrate that, and now you’re telling me something challenging. I’m willing to take the leap of faith with you. Now again, you have to make sure that those actions are taken with the interest that you’re saying. But trust is a longitudinal game. It takes place over a period of time. And as folks say all the time, it takes a long time to earn it, and can be given away in an instant. And that’s true. I would say I spend a lot of time thinking about this for our organization and how we’re building trust with our clients, and how to not give that away as we continue to perform.
Adam: Rich, what can anyone listening to this conversation do to become more successful, personally and professionally?
Rich: Understanding what fills your tank often has a bias to performing better. There’s a sports analogy here. I was a reasonably good basketball player, but I was reasonably good at setting picks and getting rebounds. So I didn’t go out and step out to the three point line to try to shoot that. Understanding where your strengths and weaknesses are, and then where those strengths and weaknesses are valued on a team, in an organization. And by the way, for whatever it’s worth, I really got fulfilled when I took a charge. If I get fulfilled by taking a charge or boxing somebody out or setting a pick that the other person scored, I was like wow, that was a fun game for me. I don’t show up a lot on the score sheet, but it made me feel better. My team got successful. And I think putting yourself in a position, owning your own journey, those are important things. Then again, being a contributor to a great dynamic. People, all things being equal, there are two equal talents. If somebody is additive to the team and gives atta boys and sometimes brings in donuts, or whatever. You’re in LA, so they probably have to bring in smoothies. But I’m in San Diego, I don’t even know what carbs are here anymore. Being a good person who contributes to the team, that leads to people’s successes, because people want you to succeed. When you have other people who want you to succeed, not the alternative, which is like, oh, you’ve been this very difficult person to work with, and they want to see you fail to ascend in your career. You do not do this individually. You do not do this individually. You succeed in your career because others make you successful because they want you to be successful. And so recognizing that, that often starts with selflessness and how you represent yourself. Again, a tactical person that can achieve great outcomes individually should be an investment banker, because that’s where individual successes matter. But as you get into organizations that dynamically fit together, it’s incredibly important to make sure that you recognize that your individual successes are only afforded by having others who are motivated and want you to succeed.
Adam: Not everyone is going to be born LeBron James, not everyone is going to be born Luka Doncic, but there’s a role for Jarred Vanderbilt. And Jarred Vanderbilt has done more than okay in his career, done more than okay in his life. Understand who you are, understand what you bring to the table, and be the best version of that. Totally. Absolutely. Rich, thank you for all the great advice, and thank you for being a part of Thirty Minute Mentors.
Rich: Thank you, Adam. I really enjoyed this conversation, and thanks for the opportunity to be part of your podcast.
