Join MINDWORKS host Daniel Serfaty as he talks with world-renowned leadership expert Betsy Myers and Denovo Ventures CEO David Shimoni as they explore the yin and the yang of what makes great leaders in today’s complex world: leadership from the head and leadership from the heart.
Join MINDWORKS host Daniel Serfaty as he talks with world-renowned leadership expert Betsy Myers and Denovo Ventures CEO David Shimoni as they explore the yin and the yang of what makes great leaders in today’s complex world: leadership from the head and leadership from the heart.
Daniel Serfaty: Welcome to MINDWORKS. This is your host, Daniel Serfaty. Here at MINDWORKS, we've been taking a deep dive into the science and art of leadership. And today I have two very special guests. As you will hear, they come from very different universes, yet they share an expertise and a passion for the practice, the art, and yes, the magic of leadership. They are going to help us explore the yin and the yang of leadership. Leadership from the head and leadership from the heart.
David Shimoni has had a remarkable, successful business career consisting of more than 30 years in executive positions at global tech companies. He's currently the president and CEO of Denovo Ventures, a managed service provider for Oracle ERP customers. Prior to that, David was the CEO of PlumChoice and Mformation Software Technologies, a leading provider of mobile device management solutions. There he repositioned the company for high growth in the Internet of things market, leading to the acquisition by Alcatel-Lucent.
David has held C-level roles at technology companies in the telecom, IOT, and enterprise software markets. He holds an MBA degree from Columbia Business School. He has also a rich experience in the leadership of organizations dealing with philanthropic donations and community leadership.
Betsy Myers is a world-renowned expert on leadership. She served as chief operating officer and senior advisor to Barack Obama's 2007/2008 presidential campaign and chaired the Women for Obama organization. A senior official in the Clinton organization, she was also the first director of the White House Office for Women's Initiatives and Outreach. Before joining the Obama campaign, she was executive director of Harvard University's Center for Public Leadership, and she was a founding director of the Center for Women in Business at Bentley University. Today, she's a nationally recognized author, thought leader, and speaker, leading workshops and consulting on the changing nature of leadership.
And finally, a personal disclosure. I am blessed to count both Betsy and David as colleagues and personal friends. I continue to learn every day from them and I hope you will learn from them too, today.
Betsy and David, welcome to MINDWORKS.
Betsy Myers: Thank you. It's great to be here.
David Shimoni: Great to be here.
Daniel Serfaty: First, we're going to explore leadership, which is a word that is sometimes mysterious. Sometimes people think that they understand it. I've heard the other day that there are more than 15,000 books on leadership these days in the market. Can you imagine? 15,000 books talking about how to be a great leader. So, Betsy, you have advised executives and leaders at various levels of the corporate and the government hierarchy. What made you choose this particular domain as a field of interest?
Betsy Myers: That's a great question, Daniel. I've always been interested in leadership, but more about this. What is leadership like you were saying 15,000 books, right? Leadership is about what gets results for what matters to you. And so from the time I was really young, I used to watch people in fascination, starting from when I was in fifth grade. What was it about my fifth grade teacher, Hugh Beaten that just made me want to work harder and do better. And I remember in the White House, so clearly our secretary of treasury, Bob Rubin, at the time used to walk through the halls of the White House. And people would almost bow in respect or another cabinet secretary would not elicit near the same response or opposite, like, oh, yeah. Right, whatever.
So that is really when I was like, okay, we have all this work we want to get done to change the world, but who actually gets it done and how do they get it done? And so that's really been my interest, even though I've moved in and out of various organizations, the bottom line is, what is it that makes one leader succeed, and one leader beloved, and one leader where people will go to the end of the earth for that person and another, that people won't?
Daniel Serfaty: It's interesting that you started when you were a child, when you were a kid looking up and saying, what is it about that person that makes other want to follow them?
Betsy Myers: Yes
Daniel Serfaty: And do whatever they say.
Betsy Myers: Yeah. And be your best self, inspire you to be your best self.
Daniel Serfaty: David, as a serial and very successful CEO. You have run several organizations, both in business, but also in the not-for-profit world of philanthropy. Over the past few years, you've done all that, what are your own experiences as a leader, and perhaps when did you start seeing yourself as a leader?
David Shimoni: Yeah. So like most people, I had the preconceived notion of what leadership is. And over time I learned that I was wrong. The early part of my career, I thought the leader is somebody who would stand up in front of a group of people. He's smarter than everyone. He tells everyone what to do and they follow him and they get to the holy grail. What I realized over the years is that first of all, a good leader actually knows their shortcomings. And they surround himself with people who can compliment those shortcomings. And secondly, they don't necessarily have all the answers about the orders. They know what questions to ask and they know how to rally an organization behind the right set of answers and making sure that they're not the ultimate judge of what is the right answer. If you don't involve the people who will execute on the right answer, it'll never be the right answer.
Because there's a lot of smart people with smart answers, but they never got very far because they looked behind them. There was no one that followed them simply because they did not get the people involved in deciding what's the right answer. And based on that, getting them committed to deliver on the right answer. To me, leadership is, again, knowing what question to ask. It's not the same thing for everyone. I made so many mistakes trying to imitate other people that I thought, wow, this is wow. Jack Welch, great leader. I'm going to fire 20% of my people every year. That's not my personality. That's not my industry, by the way, like Jack Welch, the industry I'm in. So build your own path of defining what's your leadership style. And that will make sure that when you lead people, you'll be authentic. You will not try to repeat what you read in a book about somebody else you admire, you create your own version of what you think is good leadership.
Daniel Serfaty: Thank you for sharing that. So self-knowledge is really key here already. We can check that one, David. And this notion of authentic leadership. I know Betsy is very close to your heart because as you talk about balancing that, those lessons are lessons that are difficult to learn, because when you study, when you take MBA programs, et cetera, you have those models as you say, David. Jack Welch was deemed, was that, manager of the century for the 20th century. And yet we realized today that his style of leadership work, maybe for him and for GE at that time, but certainly is not easily or even replicated, or even that's not something you should try to replicate to begin with. I have a question because the importance of leadership, a lot of the leadership models, even the leadership language comes from military organization, hierarchies, command, control, span of authority.
All these things were invented basically by military commanders and Napoleon and others, and we took them in our world. Then they were done mostly because of the need to control information. But in today's world with hyper connected work, people have instant access to information. You don't need to go up and down the hierarchy to know what you need to do. Is a role of the leader being less important these days, then it was, say, a 100 years or 50 years or 20 years ago because of that connectivity between the people, so to speak, under that leader? Betsy, is that more or less important?
Betsy Myers: It's interesting because Tom Friedman wrote a really interesting article two years ago now in April of 2020. And his article was basically saying in times of crisis, he says in, "Times of crisis, like we are now with people feeling frightened and uncertainty, leadership doesn't just matter. It matters exponentially more." People are looking for leadership to bring clarity to these unbelievable issues. And they're barraged with information. And that's a really tricky part of leadership today. How do you lead in a world of misinformation? When I was in my White House days in the mid-90s, there was an end of the news cycle, the seven o'clock news. And then there was Nightline. But other than that's what you got your news. And 25 years later, people are just getting all this news and nobody knows what's the truth. So I think leadership's harder today, but yet it's more important because people are so starving for leadership.
When you look at what's going on in our world with coming out of a pandemic and black lives matter and the economic crisis and the Ukraine and guns and the school shootings and high suicide and all these issues, people are looking for someone to bring leadership to. And we always think, too, I think we think of leadership in highest places. Leadership is everyday leadership. Like who's leading our schools? And I always say to people when I'm talking to audiences, how many of you think you're a leader? I'm amazed at how many people don't raise their hands. And I always say every one of you is a leader because of the very least you're leading your own life. And even if you're a stay-at-home mom, you're leading your life and your children, even if you have an animal, you're responsible for the life of a beautiful little soul. So leadership's everywhere and people are starving for it. And I think it's gotten more important today.
Daniel Serfaty: David, you want to chime in on that? I mean, you've been the CEO of several companies actually in information technologies, but yet you have the 30 years perspective of knowing what it is to be a leader when actually this information uncertainty at the time was basically because of scarcity of information. And today uncertainty comes from surplus of information that sometimes, maybe true or not, is this a factor in the importance of the role, in your case, of the CEO of the leader in the corporate environment?
David Shimoni: Totally. I'll start with before I was a business leader, I did serve five years in the military. And to me, the military is the same as the production line, where everything is process-oriented. You can bark the order, everyone you bark the order to, will follow the same action that you expect them to. There's no need for them to interpret your order. In fact, you don't want them to, they don't need to process any information. They just need to hear the order and they'll do it. And of course, the better they do it, the more efficient they are. Then you are a successful manager because you have done more with a group of people that reports to you. That's true for the military. That's true for some industries that maybe still exist, manufacturing, et cetera. Nowadays, a lot of the work we do is virtual.
It's done virtually. It's done on building things that are not well defined. There's a conceptual idea, and you hire people to take the concept and build a product. Your leadership style cannot consist of telling people what to do. It's more about guiding them in the direction of what you want them to do and letting them process the information the way they do, the way they are able to and translate that to action that they need to take. And so if you trust your hiring process and you hire the right people, the most important part of your management style should be to take a step back after you agreed on the direction and let them go and prove to you why you hired them to begin with and come back with here is what we came up with, here is the wealth of information we looked into, here is how we interpret that information.
And here is how we think we should design the product, or we should build that project or whatever you are working on. So to me, leadership today is absolutely crucial, but it's very, very different. If you try to manage people today, the way it was custom in the past, the way they taught me in business school, 30 years ago, you're bound to fail. There's also a different generation. I mean, the people that are the age of my kids, your kids, Daniel, and I'm not sure about you, Betsy, but the point is they respond differently. They will not respond well to me, if I talk to them the way I was managed by my boss or manager 30 years ago. So you have to adjust and adapt to the new reality, the new generation, the new type of positions that are available out there; the virtual nature of work, and adjust your leadership style. But it doesn't mean that you are less important.
Betsy Myers: That is so true. David, you could not have said it more beautifully. Before the pandemic, my clients used to ask me, what's the number one issue that you need to get your arms around as leaders? And I used to say how with this young generation coming up, what's really funny is that for a long time, it was like, oh, millennials are coming. And it was like, oh no, no. They just turned. The oldest turned 42 this year. So they were in their 30s and the last 10 years and managing people and handling budgets and everything like that. And how you get your arms around this new generation and their need for flexibility. There's this great article in the New York Times 2019. So right before the pandemic, it was about millennials. Can I work when I want? Was the title of the article. And basically today's young workers have been called lazy and entitled.
Could they instead be among the first to understand the proper role of work in our lives and end up remaking work for everyone else? This generation is single-handedly paving the way for the entire workforce to do their jobs remotely and with flexibility. What's so fascinating is this is right before the pandemic. And so there was a lot of fear from the boomers that were in the leadership jobs that, well, if we let people work from home, they won't be doing their jobs. And so the gift of the pandemic in leadership is that, wow, we actually saw, people can work from home and they can get their work done, and it can be more effective when you're shading off the commute time every day.
So the world's been thrown on its head and from a leader's standpoint, what's the new normal look like, right? Most companies are three days a week or two days a week back in the office. So that's put a whole wrench in the whole leadership and how we evolve as leaders, as you said, David, you've got to understand your constituency, your workforce, the changes as you shift your leadership role to succeed and get the results.
Daniel Serfaty: That's fascinating stuff because we are all in the middle of it. And we don't have the luxury of looking at it from a distance. There is an interesting interaction, the way you describe it. One of them is work has changed. The demographic has changed, and also everything has been accelerated like a chemical reaction that needs a catalyst to get accelerated by COVID. So it's a triple interaction that we are living through and we're trying to learn from it. David, from your perspective, to go back to just the same way, Betsy just got us on this notion of that COVID being a transformative factor for the nature and the practice of leadership, to what degree the last two and a half years have changed basically, not just your job but also the leaders working for you and working with you?
David Shimoni: We all had to adjust to working 100% remotely. It used to be a mix, but we always knew there's an opportunity to meet face-to-face. During those two and a half years, it wasn't an obvious when we're going to meet again face-to-face. So we had to understand, first of all, what does it mean for people who are working for us, working from home 100% of the time? What does that mean when you talk about work-life balance? It used to be work-life balance means, Hey, I'm out of the office at six o'clock because my son has a baseball game or I got a dinner with my wife. What is work-life balance when you work from home? Honestly, we didn't have the answer. And more often than not, we realized that our employees, not only they didn't have the answer, they made a huge mistake thinking that because there's nothing else to do; leaving the house, watching a movie or whatever, I'm going to stay in my home office, get out, say hi to my family, eat dinner and come back.
And we very quickly realized that they're burning themselves out. And that their work-life balance is being challenged in a negative way when you work virtually. And we had a response that, which I can cover in a minute, we also realized that there's more uncertainty because it's hard to communicate when you cannot meet people in the so-called water cooler. There's no chatter. There's no I'm going to walk to somebody's office because I heard a rumor that we just hired somebody or we are bidding for a new line of business. It's hard to do that when you work virtually. And so how you communicate to the people, what's the status of the business or decision that you've made, which previously you assumed everyone knew within 24 hours. How do you do that when they all work virtually? So it's a set of challenges that we all had to deal with.
And frankly, I believe that we came out of this much better managers. So even now, without COVID, even now that we can travel and see each other, we have more tools in our toolbox that we can use to better communicate. Because previously it was okay, whatever people will hear about it. Now I know there's a great way to communicate. I have a coffee with a CEO every Friday. I have that coffee, personally if I'm in the office or virtually, if I'm not, but everyone in my company knows on a Friday at 2:00 PM, East Coast, there's an hour where everything is on the table. David will tell you everything you just wanted to know. And then if you have any questions, you can ask them. Previously, it wasn't that critical. Just this one example.
Daniel Serfaty: I think there is that notion perhaps, that the distribution, the inflation of information coming at us seriously has increased ambiguity and uncertainty. And quite often I found myself, but I know from both of your stories that the leader is here also in the uncertainty reduction business, it's to clarify things beyond the level of comfort, not everything can be always clarified. But more and more of those communications, I find for myself, are about injecting clarity. It's almost like if everybody is in a bit of the cloud of uncertainty about things that before, as you say were not really an issue and now have become one.
Let's start with some examples. I would love for you to pick one situation from government experience, medicine, education, corporate management, either that you have lived or that you have observed with colleagues or with companies you are consulting with, describe one or two key qualities you would expect today's leader. And again, not necessarily the chief executive, I'm interested, as you say Betsy, everybody's a leader of something including themselves, one, or two key qualities you will demand that are necessary for leadership today. Take the audience into a world that you know and describe one or two of those qualities.
Betsy Myers: One of the leaders that I've been following through this COVID, who I've just been absolutely enthralled with is prime minister of New Zealand Jacinda Ardern. She was just at Harvard. She gave the commencement speech this year. She's amazing. She kept COVID out of New Zealand. And what's interesting about her. First of all, just piggybacking on what you just said about leaders dealing with uncertainty and anxiety. One of her quotes about leadership is, "The true measure of leadership today is to confront the anxiety of the people of your time." I love that, right? So the true measure of leadership today is to confront the anxiety of the people of your time and their time. And what's amazing about her. First of all, she's a young woman, she's the second woman prime minister to have a baby in office. She has a little daughter now who's three, but before COVID, she'd gone to the UN to give a speech.
And someone had said to her, how can you be a prime minister and have a baby? And her response was, "I don't think I'm the only working woman to have a baby." So she represents this new model of leadership. But what's amazing is that she really integrated the head and the heart in her leadership. Everything she talked about was we are a team of five million. We are in this together. So she brought the facts and the data. What is this pandemic? What are we dealing with? What are the data? And here's what we're doing. We're shutting the borders and we're going to stay at home. But then she also brought in the empathy and the care. And I'm in this with you, and she and her cabinet all took a 20% pay cut to say, we're with you. And she went on Facebook Live every day, talking about here's what was happening in my life.
Here's what I know what you're going through. And she did some very funny things. She would announce, we have non-essential workers and essential workers. And one of the days, she said, one of the essential workers was the tooth fairy. And so she just did some cute things like that. And then the other thing she used to say that the leadership of New Zealand boils down to one concept that we're pursuing here and its kindness. So she really brought in the kindness, the empathy, some humor, some her own vulnerability of being at home with her mate and her daughter. But the reality of what this COVID looks like and what needs to be done, and the hard decisions to be made, like closing the borders. I think she's about 41 or two now. So she represents this young millennial female new way to lead. And her mantra was always team of five million, be strong and be kind
Daniel Serfaty: It's interesting and that's a wonderful example, you should just box it the way it is. You never pronounce the word that the prime minister should worry about policy and strategy and all those words that are cherished world in the world of leadership. Talk about anxiety and empathy. Does that create a new intimacy that didn't exist before between leaders and their followers? It's almost like the distance between a leader and the rest of the team in a sense has been shortened by a great amount.
Betsy Myers: So that's what connects us, right? It connects us as human beings is that. That's what COVID has given us, too, by us being to see each other's living rooms and our children running by and our animals barking. And do you know what I mean? All that stuff, seeing us maybe in our sweatpants and that part of us that we're not perfect. This is who we are as human beings. And that's what Jacinda Ardern represents in New Zealand is I'm a human too. I'm home with a baby. And I'm like you, that's the piece that I'm like you, and I have things in my life. That's the whole thing about uncovering, right? So as a leader, who am I, and what struggles do I have that you can relate to? It humanizes us, humanizing leadership.
David Shimoni: I'd like to follow-up on what Betsy said as well. I think this is the highest degree of empathy that a leader could have. It does cross the line of what historically was a distance between a manager and an employee. Now it's more okay to talk about personal lives, to ask, how is your mom doing? You told me last week she's going into an operation and follow-up in a very empathic way. I think it's an important part, not only of us as human being who care about each other, but also as manager to show that person that we didn't just ask, Hey, how are you doing in passing? We remember the answer to that question. And we had that follow-up. That person, and I'm telling you from example, would do anything for you after they realized that you absolutely care. You do have that sense of empathy.
You're not faking it. You're not just following a playbook of ask those questions to make them feel like you care. You absolutely care. And the power of that is unbelievable. You talk about policy, they'll do for you, things that you don't need to police because you gave them so much energy and so much commitment to you personally. And if you could bring the entire culture of your company to be empathic, oh man, I mean, the power of that, not single person, the entire culture becomes an empathic culture. They all know what's going on in people's life. They follow-up, they send flowers, they do the things that make everyone feel like a family. People use the word family a lot, but the true nature of family, it's hard to create that in a work environment.
There are some lines that you're not supposed to cross socially, but I can tell you that emotionally, if you can bring the entire employee base to treat each other like a family, to care about them, to feel for them, to show sadness when they suffer, to be happy with them when they're happy, what you create is a powerful, powerful machine or company that will go far. I mean, deciding where to go, deciding how to get there. That's always important. But if you don't have that energy that comes from this powerful culture that cares about people, it doesn't matter how smart your idea is. You'll not go very far.
Daniel Serfaty: It's amazing that we are rediscovering that. I remember reading when I was much younger, I was an Eagle scout, everything I learned about leadership I learned in boy Scouts. But learning about Napoleon, he was not exactly the softest person on earth. He crowned himself emperor from being basically a young officer in the French army. But he had the thing, and I don't think it was fake, because he knew the first name of every single member of his Imperial guard, some 300 or 400 of them. And every morning when he was reviewing the guard, he was addressing them by their first name. Now he had a phenomenal memory, but that's another story. But my point is that being empathetic and being personal and minimizing that distance you talked about doesn't mean that you cannot be a very tough and decisive decision-maker. These are not the two polarities.
You can be both at the same time. And that's really something that for some reason, a lot of management theories or leadership theories emphasize a latter rather than the former. And now we are rediscovering that other dimension that, yes, is very humane, but can also be very pragmatic because it achieves results. It's this balance between the two. There is a notion I would love for you to chime in on that. It's almost a cliche, but it's a good question to ask these days. Some early theories of leadership in the literature say that leaders are born, not made. And obviously, there's a content theory that no leaders are not born. They are made. What do you think? Is there something innate when you were a little girl, Betsy, and you were looking around all these adults, some of them had that thing called leadership and others did not. Were the people born with that or their professional as a trajectory made them that way?
Betsy Myers: I think we evolve as human beings because we all come into this world with a blank slate, right, and we have personalities. So I was always a huge extrovert that was helpful to me, but some of the best leaders are introverts, right? But our leadership is tied to our story of who we are. So for me, I became very interested in leadership. Well, for two things I saw my father was very, very interested in leadership. He was a test pilot who became a big executive at Lockheed and he read every leadership book. And so he's the first person who turned me on to people like Tom Peters back in the 80s in search of excellence. And my mother went back. She was a stay-at-home mom, had dropped out of college. At 19, married my dad had three little babies before she was 23. And when I was a teenager, she went back to school, finished her degree, got her master's in psychology, and started teaching women's reentry programs at a college nearby.
So those are my two, for me, growing up, I was awake and particularly to the women's, I watched my mother transform her role in the family and step into this leadership role. And she was so happy. She stepped into her authenticity and this was the glorious Steinem times where women were stepping out and stepping up. So that awakened me in my interest in, oh, that's really interesting. And then I just gravitated towards anything that was women's leadership in the beginning. I think as leaders like Bill George's work on True North and he interviewed 100 leaders from 18 to 93 to find out, well, how did you get into that role and what was your story and your evolution and your self-knowledge awareness? So I think leadership is a journey. And also, I don't think you ever get there because you get into these roles and you always have to keep evolving and assessing and growing as a person.
And so are you a leader that's always open to growth? Do you have a growth mindset as a human being? I always thought by the time I was 30 or 40, oh, I'd have it all figured out. And we realized, wow, maybe we never have it all figured out because you're always growing. And just what we were talking about, David, before, which you mentioned so beautifully, which was wait a minute, I've been a leader. And all of a sudden there's a new generation that doesn't respond the way it responded to the old leadership model of, do as I say, or else. So now as a leader, who, if you're in your 50s or 60s or 70s, you're like, oh, I need to really shift how I was showing up before, right? So I don't think you ever have it figured out. You need to ebb and flow and grow in your leadership.
David Shimoni: For me, I never thought I will be a leader because first of all, I defined it differently than how I am today. So I held myself against a standard that I was never going to be able to meet. I was never going to be able to be the polished executive that I saw on the screen. And I evolved into who I am today. And to be honest, until today, when I wake up in the morning, I remind myself that there's 140 people in my company that could have worked somewhere else, could have reported to somebody else, but they chose to work for my company. I am fortunate for that. I need to remind myself that actually I work for them as much as they work for me and be very humble in how I interpret leadership. Never show up and expect that just because you are the senior executive in this company, you could talk to people in a certain way.
You could expect them to react to you as if you're God, you're not. You are a human being who was selected not only by your board, by the people who work for you. When they came to work for my company, they selected me indirectly to work for. And I need to remind myself that I cannot take that for granted. I need to be very careful in how I manage them and how I give them the opportunity to really discover on their own what they are able to do and not necessarily try and micromanage them and push them in a way that I believe is the right way. So for me to be a leader was an evolution. It's something that I still don't believe that I am doing it. And I frankly will keep reminding myself up until the last day where I'm no longer leading people. That I'm just a human being like everyone else. I was elected to be on top of an artificial org chart that somebody created. But in the end, we're all born equal. We're all dying away equal. And so I cannot take this for granted.
Daniel Serfaty: I appreciate both you confining those intimate feelings with our audience here because you made the case, which is very encouraging to the younger people in our audience, that you don't have to be the quarterback of the football team in your high school, or to be the Eagle scout or anything like that in order to feel like a leader. In fact, both of you talk about this notion of self-knowledge, of understanding who you are as a point of departure and eventually finding their way through life and eventually ending in a leadership position. And Betsy, you work with some of the top leaders in the field, both in the government and in the business world. If you had the magic wand and you could develop a leader, what experiences you would take them through in order to optimize or maximize their chance to end up being a leader, what would that be?
Betsy Myers: Leadership is really when you fully step into who you are; you know when we talked about the Jack Welsh theory, right? Because in the 80s, wow, everyone wanted just to be Jack Welsh. And now every article about him is like that is the worst kind of leadership for today. He took us down a road of only care about shareholder value, which we're still digging our way out of and doesn't work anymore. It's important, but you get shareholder value coming out from a whole different way, which is your people. And so I think the most important thing is how do you help people to step into who they really are? That's the authenticity part of leadership development, right? So you get what gets you to you? So many people spend their whole life trying to be somebody else because their mom thought they should get an accounting degree or society says they should be like this or whatever ideas they have in their head.
But who are you really, and what's the gift that you're adding to the world? And then in leadership training, it's so important to be like, well, what's keeping you from you? What are the behaviors, I call them the sticky floor behaviors. And my friend, Rebecca Shambaugh wrote a book for women's leadership, but it applies to everyone. It's not about the glass ceiling, it's the sticky floor. So what are the behaviors that you're doing that keep your feet stuck to the floor?
And so many people are operating unconsciously, showing up in the workplace in ways that actually sabotage their most success. I mean, my friend, Christine Porath wrote a book about leadership and incivility. And her research is amazing because she talks about how today's world, the number one issue that will blow up an executive's career, is abrasive, and bullying behaviors. And so many leaders do realize that that isn't effective anymore. So in teaching of leadership, I think what's so important is what gets you to you? Who are you and what gives you energy? And then what keeps you from you so that you can step to fully be your full human being and be in the place in the world that is best for you.
Daniel Serfaty: What about you, David? As you say, you didn't start as a leader or even with a desire to become a corporate leader. What are some of the experiences you went through that you think were formative in a sense that pushed you, or accelerated you through that path?
David Shimoni: I strongly believe in evolution. And I think that it's a collective set of experiences where you find yourself in a situation where you don't have necessarily the authority to lead that effort. But since there's no one else, you step up and you start rallying up everyone, you start leading people without having the authority, getting that experience of reaching out to people and saying, look, this is the problem. There's no one here that will tell us how to solve it. Let's work together and let's do this. You evolve into that. And when it works well, you decide, Hey, I'm going to try it again because I really like that. I see the result and you evolve into it. And then somebody recognizes that behavior and it becomes official. You get promoted. To me, that's the proper way of elevating people and giving them an increasingly more authority.
Unfortunately, in many corporate environments, people make a mistake of, if you are good at what you do, then you need to get promoted and lead a bunch of people that do the same thing. And that often is a big mistake because there's a lot of professionals that are not interested in managing people, are not interested in telling people what to do. They know how to do the work. They do it better than anyone else, but once they need to explain it to somebody or lead somebody, they become impatient. They become a micromanager. Do it my way because I've done it really, really well before. And that creates a backlash. And unfortunately, a problem where you end up losing good people because you promoted them thinking that, Hey, they're so good. Let's give them that position of authority, hoping they would be able to bestow their goodness on a number of people.
So to me, that's the wrong way of doing that. My good friend, Aron Ain, explained to me that it's now UKG used to be Kronos. You could get promoted and make more money without beating people. There's a career path where you remain an individual contributor, but they expand your title and your compensation based on the fact that you are better at what you do over time without having to manage people. That's how Kronos UKG is dealing with the fact that promotion is not for everyone. Leadership is not for everyone. In many cases it backfires if you select the wrong people to promote.
Daniel Serfaty: I like this notion, absolutely. The mistakes of just assuming that everybody has people leadership skills, because they're good at what they do is classic mistakes. I like the fact that both you, David and Betsy, have defined basically leadership almost outside of the followership, outside of the unique followers. As you say, in your own example, you work on a project and suddenly you take the initiative, you are a leader without the authority, and you call that Betsy, the leader of you, I think.
Betsy Myers: Yes, the leader of you.
Daniel Serfaty: Or something like that, yes. So this notion is really powerful because for most people, indeed, leadership is leading other people that are followers, but you're making the point that, no, the best school of leadership is when you actually take an initiative and you lead with your idea, your actions, et cetera, and then people around you, your team follows you along that path naturally. You have no supervisor authority on that. Is that an important factor for people to take those initiatives or to look for opportunities to take those initiatives in order to follow a leadership path?
Betsy Myers: But, consciously. So what I mean by that is that you have to be aware of what your environment is, in order to get this project done or what matters to you, how does it fit into the broader goals of the organization? Who do you need to talk to? Who do you need to collaborate with? I think sometimes people, they just go forward with excitement, but there's another piece to it, which is how do I be strategic wherever I am.
I would say the leader of you is understanding that I took this role in this organization. So how do I be effective? And our followership is that's tapping into the heart aspect of leadership, right? Is that your followers put the passion into your purpose. And they do that by feeling included and heard and acknowledged and cared about and listened to, right? And so by getting people to come along with you, as your initiative is tapping into that heart part. Leadership today is the fully integrated person. You might have the greatest idea in the world and all the great data and facts. But if people aren't interested in coming along, you'd be a one man person and leadership is a team sport.
Daniel Serfaty: We'll be back in just a moment, stick around. Hello, MINDWORKS, listeners. This is Daniel Serfaty. Do you love MINDWORKS, but don't have time to listen to an entire episode? Then we have a solution for you; MINDWORKS minis, curated segments from the MINDWORKS Podcast, condensed to under 15 minutes each and designed to work with your busy schedule. You'll find the minis along with full length episodes under MINDWORKS on Apple, Spotify, Best Proud or wherever you get your podcast.
I want to take us into a couple of questions here about decision-making. And one of the things that a leader does is making decisions sometime in a very collective fashion and sometimes in a very lonely fashion. What are some of the most difficult decisions you've seen a leader make or has to make either yourself or people that you have advised as leader? What are the real, real, difficult decisions? Can you give me a couple of examples from your own experiences?
David Shimoni: I can start with the obvious, which is terminating people. Sometimes people that you actually hired. It's never easy, but you learn over time. First of all, not to surprise people, but to give them the warning sign, and when I say, warning, it's the wrong choice of word, to actually give them the opportunity to get your feedback and improve and avoid the final ultimate act of termination. I also believe that there's no such thing as bad employee. There are employees who are not the right fit for the environment of that particular organization or for the culture of that particular organization. So when you position it this way, when you don't make it personally, when you don't say, Hey, Joey, you are really bad at what you do. No. Hey, Joey, I don't think that your skillset is aligned with what the company is expecting you.
I honestly believe that we put you in a bad position by asking you to do things that are outside your comfort zone, or outside your circle of expertise. I truthfully believe that there's a better environment for you out there. And in fact, I'll be more than happy to be a reference for you and help you find this other job. So it's still tough; what I'm explaining is how to do it the right way. But that to me is always the toughest part of a management position.
Daniel Serfaty: Letting go of people.
David Shimoni: Letting people go, yeah.
Daniel Serfaty: Let's see another difficult decision you have witnessed maybe somewhere else.
Betsy Myers: It takes me back to my younger days when I worked in the White House and President Clinton was having to make these... Presidents are remembered for the legislation they pass. And so President Clinton, I remember I was in the White House. I lived through this whole experience where he had promised during the campaign to make changes to welfare reform. And so his election was coming up in '96, it was so long ago, but it stuck with me because he vetoed two bills that came to his desk that weren't quite right on welfare reform. And in the whole aspect of these bills, he was very collaborative, worked across the aisles, worked with his own poverty experts, worked with all the constituents that had anything to do with this bill. And the third bill came to his desk, and it wasn't perfect, but he thought it was good enough.
And he went into the press briefing room in August and said to the press, and not prompting his staff exactly that he was going to sign this third bill. Those are tough, tough decisions that presidents make every day. In the end, after all of the collaboration and all the information, I'm going to go down this road and make a decision. It reminds me when Obama, same thing when he made the big decision about healthcare. When Senator Kennedy, Massachusetts passed away and Scott Brown, Republican replaced Kennedy. The president realized, Obama, that this was his chance where he had a democratic-leaning Senate, that he might be able to get healthcare through because that's what he promised. And when he promised Teddy Kennedy that he would do this and he made this big decision that some of the advisors that said Rahm Emanuel had been the chief of staff said, "No, just do bite size, bite size changes to healthcare because that's what people can manage."
But Obama, in the end, after all the advice, he said, "I'm going to move forward on this because I can get it done." Now he suffered greatly after that with all of the reaction and people trying to destroy it or strive pieces of it. But those are decisions that presidents and leaders make all the time that are big decisions, and it takes guts to make those decisions. But they also, in both cases, those two examples, both of those presidents in those pieces of legislation, had a lot of input and a lot of collaboration, but in the end they pull the lever. That's what makes a leader. And Mary Barra of GM talks about that too. Mary Barra is one of the most collaborative leaders. I've watched her career from executive assistant to CEO of GM. She has always said, I always ask questions and I always listen. But in the end, the leader is responsible for the decisions of which they make.
Daniel Serfaty: Yes. Thank you for both those examples, David, and Betsy. Both of them have to do with the courage of alienating another human being or other human beings. In the case of David, that's a person that you will let go. In the case of the presidential decision was that basically people on both parties are going to be mad at you, but you have the courage to do that. So we all through different media books and movies and experiences, know about some examples of successes and failures of leaders, sometime that we have witnessed personally, sometime that we have seen in a particular situation. Could you describe either a success or a failure from a leader that you have observed, you work for, you work with, you've consulted with and analyze it, and say, what will be the remedy? If that's a success, that's a failure, and how to reinforce that if that's a success, what's the start?
Betsy Myers: I'm happy to go. What's amazing about this example is that it was an amazing success story. And then it became an amazing failure story, which is former governor Andrew Cuomo. And Governor Cuomo did an amazing job during COVID and his daily briefings. What was amazing about his briefings was I think everyone in the US was tuning in everyday, no matter what your time was, to see what Andrew was talking about. During those couple months, he was the most perfect example of an integrated leader. So he had all the facts and data and details, and was able to also show here's going on in New York, here's what's going on everywhere else in the country. Here's what we're doing about it. Here's why it matters. But then he brought in the heart part, and that was the part, my family, my kids, how it impacts me. The heart-wrenching stories that he would tell every day, it was amazing.
His popularity sorted and people were saying, oh, you should be the next president. Or in four years, you should be the next president. And then, boom, he fell out of grace. And I think at that moment, he went towards his own. He went more to the individual part. He lost the well, we were here, in the collective healing of our city and our country to take advantage of his popularity and go down writing a book, and it exposed himself and exposed some other weaknesses.
What it also exposed that he didn't do a good job of, he had an old leadership model before COVID where he was slash and burn as he went up in his success in his career. He didn't have as many friends along the way. And so when things started to unravel, he didn't have the base of friends around him to save him. It's a sad story, really, because he's such a talented person who gave a lot to New York and cared a lot, and has had a whole career of public service. But he's a recent example. I think, of where he just got out of integrity in his leadership and it caused him to have to resign.
Daniel Serfaty: So he was both. When you have those school of thoughts about the transactional leader, the inspirational leader, the ethical leader. He really pushed to the max that inspirational part and the transactional part by sharing data and saying how he was managing. And then he violated one ethical rule, basically, that almost cancel all these achievements, which is perhaps a question about the high stakes that leaders are playing with. I know that the average length of tenure of a CEO has shrunk considerably in the past 20 years. It's now something like four years, I think, and my feeling is it might have to do with the economics of it, but it has to do also that we expect success. And we're very intolerant of failure of our leaders. And we don't show any empathy when our leaders fail. So the reverse, certainly in politics, it can be fatal.
Betsy Myers: Yes.
Daniel Serfaty: David, any story you want to share about success or failure?
David Shimoni: I was going to give an example of people that I interacted with, or reported to, but Betsy got me thinking political figures. And so without getting into politics, I would say that the great moments for me when the leaders of this country showed a lot of empathy, President Bush, after 911, when he primed up this pile of rebel and was talking to the nation or Barack Obama after what happened in Newtown, when he spoke to the nation, after he met with the parents. It's not part of your job description. You hope you will never have to do what Bush or Obama had to do. But in that moment, something that wasn't on the resume was tested and brought to bear, which is you are a human being. You have to speak to the nation at a personal level. This is very hard to do for anyone over the TV and their ability, both of them, to connect with the audience and give them a sense of hope in the middle of a very, very tough moment for our nation.
To me was a great example of leadership with a lot of empathy, the highest level that a person could have. The opposite side, and again, I'm not being political, but I think some of our leaders and Trump is a good example. The rule by divisiveness, they cater to this few who support them. They don't think that their leadership applies to those who don't support them, that they have to also embrace them, not agree with their ideas, but take them into account, acknowledge them, and not demonize them, and make them feel like, Hey, there's somebody in the White House that doesn't really care about me because I'm not supporting views that they disagree with. And I think it's true also in a company. I mean, there's always going to be those people who, they support everything you say. They try to make you feel like they're 100% behind you, but then there's the few that will stand up and say, well, David, I disagree with you respectfully and I'll tell you why.
You got to be prepared to take those challenges, to take those people who don't agree with you and maybe embrace them even more and not dismiss them as the few that I don't care about because they don't necessarily agree or follow everything that I say. So to me, that's the negative part of leadership when you only cater for the people who agree with everything you say. By the way, you lose a lot in that process, because you missed the opportunity to listen to the people who are giving you a perspective that if you embraced it, you would probably make better decisions. But instead of doing that, if you shut down and say, I don't care about you, because you don't follow me. You don't agree with everything I say, you miss so much in your ability to make the right decision.
Betsy Myers: David, that's such an important comment you made because part of the job of a leader is creating a safe environment so that people who don't agree with you feel safe enough to tell you they don't agree with you. And that's really, really important because if someone thinks that, oh, I disagree with the leader. I'm going to be hurt by that in some way. I'm not going to say anything. So how do you get the best input is by creating an environment that people say, oh, he or she needs to know this.
And that's another thing Mary Barra has done, right? Is that she goes around and says, it's important she walks her plants. And she talks about this. It's like, "I walk my plants." She goes to people on the front lines, says, tell me something that I need to know that I don't see, right? And so how do you create that environment across all the levels? Tell me something that I need to know that I might not be seeing because all of the information comes from our people that's right down the front lines, whatever that is, right? So you were spot on on that.
Daniel Serfaty: I fully agree. And sometime, actually, I would surmise that you have to seek the disagreeing voice more so than you see the agreeing voice, as difficult as it is for you as a person that needs reinforcement as a leader. Sometime you have to go as far as possible away from your domain of expertise, where you sit in the company and listen to that voice at the end of the hall that may actually give you that insight that you need. Even, and maybe especially when you disagree with your prior hypothesis. So seeking [inaudible 00:54:25] evidence is really something I look for leaders, because it's a sign of courage, but it's also a sign of sound decision-making.
Betsy Myers: One of my colleagues, Elliott Masie, who had a big leadership company in New York, but he's always said that, "Leaders who have guts will ask the people around them on a regular basis, what are the behaviors that I'm doing that might be getting in my way or our way?" And he said on a regular basis, so that people will start to tell you and feel safe enough to say here's what I think needs to shift or this, whatever it is it's getting in your way, our way. And then you create a transparent organization where people are not in fear.
Daniel Serfaty: Yes, that's very good. You brought those examples from the corporate world, especially in the technology-intensive corporate world, and government. And my question is the following. It has to do with cross-domain competence in a sense that if you are a great leader in the military or if you're a great leader in the medical community, are those leadership quality transferable? Will you be a great leader also in a nonprofit philanthropic organization, or if you are a great leader in government, would you be a great leader in the corporate world? Are these things that are not transferable? Can you think of examples of leaders that actually successfully cross the border between domains and others who did not?
David Shimoni: I've seen people who moved from a very extreme military environment where they were leading a group of soldiers to becoming great leaders in a company, not an easy transition by any stretch, but what was common to those people who made that transition successfully is understanding that your power doesn't come from the command and control part of your responsibility. It comes from the ability to inspire people and make them want to follow you and do what you wanted to do. That to me is what's transferable, the ability to understand the soft skill of leadership, the ability to understand what makes people want to act on your direction and how to give that direction, how to do it in a way that you empower people to decide how to get to the destination, but agree on the destination, but not on how to get there. So you empower people to do their work. These are the successful transitions.
Daniel Serfaty: I would agree with every word that you say, David, but one. And that's the word soft in front of skills. Those, I think, are not soft skills anymore. I know the literature is full of that denomination. I think those have become, even from your stories of the past hour, the essential skills. They're not the accessory skills, the other skills may have to do with how you understand the nature of the market and the business, et cetera. But those skills that you're talking about that aren't transferable, perhaps between domain are not soft anymore. Very essential.
David Shimoni: I agree. I meant soft not in the sense of important or not. They're less, I don't know, the framework is less defined by how you make people do that. It's more of a, I don't know, it's just-
Daniel Serfaty: Sure. Yeah, no, you're right. I mean, support of the word, but that's a tradition in this field. People have been talking about hard skills and soft skills. And I think if we learn anything that there is an inversion of these two these days and what we thought were soft skills are more essential skills. The rest is transactional. We need to have a further conversation about this particular thing.
Betsy Myers: It's true, though, what you're saying, because soft skills used to be a nice-to-have, oh, that's really great. People like that person, or want to follow that person. But now it's a must-have, leaders must have that because that's what, when you're looking at retention and engagement of people, it's the soft skills, the heart skills is what gets people to connect and be their best selves in whatever organization it is. Every leadership book now that's being written. If you look at all the books, it's all about lead like family, lead with love, lead with create healing organizations, leadership creates a feeling. So all of that, right, is that's the big shift in the leadership field, and that comes from people writing books about what they're seeing works and gets results.
Daniel Serfaty: So let's go back to being a leader in the times of COVID, you've talked wonderfully and deeply about your own experiences, as well as what you have observed during this acceleration of the transformation of work that we are observing during COVID. There are leaders in our audience today, and they would like some advice. They are maybe seasoned leader. And they would like some advice about the actions or the behaviors that they should have more of during COVID. You talked about communications earlier, you talked about those things. Could we give them a piece of your mind, advice and insights to say, Hey, emphasize this as opposed to that. Look at it as you are now the consultant of the audience. What would you say to them?
Betsy Myers: So I would say the one piece of advice I would give because people are okay, number one, it's like we don't have this all figured out yet. So we're all trying to figure out what's a new normal look like, right? In a hybrid world of some working at home and working at the office. And the biggest thing I think is really important is letting your people know, what does success look like? What are they held accountable for? In my research, I used to ask leaders, what's the number one reason why someone failed on your team? And 90% of the responses was they weren't clear what their job was. So now that people are working in different places, the clear we can be as leaders about what the expectations are and what success looks like and what they're held accountable for, and then let them do their job, right?
So that piece of it. And then, of course, everything we've been talking about, the second part is the human connection part, which is how do you help people be their best selves, bring their whole self to work. How do we, as leaders, you have to uncover first, meaning you have to show up as your authentic self so that your other people can show up authentically. And adding that to the time in your calendar as leaders to get to know your people, whatever that is. And it can be, you can have connected conversations via Zoom or FaceTime. That's not an afterthought that has to be part of your calendar. If you say, I'm going to try to make time for my people. It'll never happen. But if you schedule it in to your calendar and everyone has to do it in their own authentic way, to connect in the way that it works for them, and those are the two pieces of advice I would give.
Daniel Serfaty: Great pieces of advice. I'm going to take them myself. David, you want to add another piece of advice?
David Shimoni: Completely agree with everything Betsy said. I would add to that, we all get used to speaking in front of a camera and it was awkward initially, but now we have to agree on what's the proper etiquette for that going forward. A lot of people basically say, you know what? I don't feel like I should turn on my camera. So we've decided, at my company that that's okay, but if you speak, turn it on. And the reason for that is the body language says so much. I personally am very good at understanding when a person says something, but then don't really believe in what they said or they don't agree. I know what to do with that afterwards. I reach out to people and I make sure that whatever disconnect I saw on the screen. So it's a powerful tool if you know how to use that by reading people's facial impressions or body language, for that matter.
Another thing that we do at my company is we never hire people at a certain geography, we don't care where they are. Sometimes we don't even care what part of the day they work because some of the work that they have to do does not require collaboration, just as Betsy said, we measure them on KPI. Everything we do can be defined and quantified. And we argue over the definition and the quantification. But once we agree on the set of KPIs, we measure them every quarter based on that, people know where they stand.
They know what they need to do to improve their performance. And they know what they need to do to get rewarded for meeting their performance. So by doing that, you allow the team to be remote. You allow them to be away from you in a way, but at the same time, you don't lose the control that you need as a manager, because you know what criteria you will measure them on, and they know that too. There's no misalignment, there's constant ability to make adjustment based on that dashboard of KPIs that makes it very, very effective in the new reality we have to manage people remotely.
Daniel Serfaty: These are very good insights. Thank you. I want to conclude, perhaps, with asking you to do a wild prediction about the future. After all leaders are known to see perhaps a little further away than the people in their organization. And that's how sometimes they make decisions that may sound a little outlandish it's only because they try to optimize a future that is or a horizon a little further away. So give us a prediction. How do you see leaders or leadership look like in 10 years? Is it going to be significantly different than leadership today? Or is there an evolution? I love the fact that Betsy, that you work, for example, quite a bit with women leaders, and as slowly as we see them, there is still a progressive increase of women leaders at different layers of organizations. Give us a prediction of leadership in 10 years, or if you're there even further away, how does it look like? Is it just like today or things are going to change?
Betsy Myers: We're making progress. Although, sometimes it feels slow with women in leadership, but I think we're going to see an increasingly diverse workforce that matches our customer base. People are demanding it now. Companies just can't just ignore it because people are also voting with their pocketbooks. And I see in universities, students will look at companies that they want to work for and they say, wait a minute, how many women or people of color do they have on the board in the C-suite? Do they look like me? Is that a place I can succeed in? And so things are moving and although sometimes it feels so awfully slow. I always say two steps forward three back, but we are making progress. And I think that's what we'll see 10 years from now, it'll be a dramatic shift. And here's the other thing, in the diversity world. It's diversity, inclusion, and belonging, right?
So, wow. Yes, we have diverse availability of workers. Inclusive is how does that diverse workforce feel? How do they succeed in our company? And how will we know that it works is when they feel like they belong. And so to go back to the beginning of our conversation, which was the millennial generation is basically shaking up how we think about work. They want to be in places and the Z is below them, the same wanting to be in places where they can bring their whole selves to work. So I think there's a shift going on whether we like it or not, whether the older generations boomers like it or not, it's happening. There's something like 10% of the population is working, I think, they're calling it the nomad generation where they're just moving around the world and working remotely. So all of the shift going on, it's exciting. Exciting, and scary at the same time but I think we're going to see driven by the younger generations a different way to work, but one that is more diverse and integrated.
Daniel Serfaty: I like the way you analyze that. If you wish, a leadership layer that is more reflective of not only the demographics of the organization itself, but the larger demographics as well. That's a very interesting prediction. And I don't think the baby boomers are scared about it. At that point, they won't be there anymore.
Betsy Myers: Yeah.
Daniel Serfaty: David, you want to dare a venture prediction here?
David Shimoni: First of all, I agree with everything Betsy said. I will look at this on a different angle. The role of technology, I think, is going increasingly be more and more important. Daniel, you know that very well, that automation, artificial intelligence, the need to hire and replace human labor when things can be automated, that's going to continue. And so that will make the role of leadership change dramatically. First of all, the ability to understand what technologies are out there and how to use them effectively for your business will be dramatically important in your ability to compete. What's the role of technology in allowing you to better manage people? That's another thing.
How do you measure performance will change over time. It's hard for me predict, I do not believe that there'll be less need for people. I think the role of the people will change because the machine will take over what they do. GM needs more people, even though robots are building cards, they still need people to do other things. So I think the challenge will be for a leader to be able to evolve, understand how the technology evolve and evolve with it, and make sure that you keep up with the tools available there, you select the one that makes the most sense for your use case, for your company. And based on that you hire the right people and you manage them using those technology tools.
Daniel Serfaty: I like your prophecy. It's interesting. This notion of technology is almost like a mean, yes, technology will change, but I think intelligent technology, it's going to change the role of leadership. I haven't figured that out yet, but as you know, the first guest in that series of podcast was actually an artificial intelligence called Charlie that we developed. And Charlie is actually the first employee, and the designers of Charlie insisted that she had the title of employee. Now, you can look at it as a gimmick, or you can look at it as a way by which leaders of the future should be able to manage different kind of intelligences as part of their workforce. And location will be even more irrelevant because it doesn't matter where that artificial intelligence reside or is, but it's certainly a future between this and between almost a democratization of the C-suite and the leadership layer by having a more diverse, more belonging, as you said, Betsy, workforce. I think it's a very bright future. I'm personally excited about imagining what leadership will mean for the future.
David Shimoni, Betsy Myers, thank you so much for your insightful and thoughtful and humorous view into leadership. I'm sure our audience will be very excited to try some of these recommendations that you had about how to be better leaders because after all we all leaders.
Thank you for listening to MINDWORKS. This is Daniel Serfaty. Please join me again for the next episode. We welcome your comments and feedback as well as your suggestions for future topics and guests. We love to hear from you. You can tweet us @MINDWORKSPodcast or email us at mindworkspodcast@gmail.com. MINDWORKS is a production of Aptima, Incorporated. My executive producer is Ms. Debra McNeely and my audio editor is Ms. Lindsay Howland. To learn more and to find links mentioned in this episode, please visit aptima.com/mindworks. Thank you.