Brungardt Law's Lagniappe
A little extra perspective from Brungardt Law conveyed through conversations with individuals of various backgrounds exploring the interplay of practices, policies, and laws with decision making and leadership. An opportunity to learn how to navigate towards productive outcomes as well as appreciate the journey through the experiences and observations of others.
Brungardt Law's Lagniappe
Creating Certainty: A Conversation with Mike Mears
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In today's episode, Mike Mears imparts the observations he has made and lessons he has learned regarding decision making during his journey from the military to the intelligence community and to the private sector. Mike is a West Point graduate, former Central Intelligence Agency Chief of Human Capital, and Leadership Theoretician. Mike is also the author of three books - Leadership Elements: A Guide to Building Trust; Leadership Wisdom; and, most recently, Certainty: How Great Bosses Can Change Minds and Drive Innovation.
Hello, this is Maurice Brungart with the Brungart Law Podcast, where we discuss what makes for good practices, policies, laws that enable effective leadership decision making, and vice versa. Today's guest is Mike Mears. Mike retired as CIA's chief of human capital and he founded and headed the CIA Leadership Academy. He currently trains and consults on advanced leadership and management approaches. Before his tenure at the Central Intelligence Agency, Mike was senior vice president of GE Investments. He earned his undergraduate degree at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and is MBA from Harvard Business School. During his military career at one point, he served as commander of a nuclear missile site. Mike is the author of three books: Leadership Elements, Leadership Wisdom, Interviews with CIA executives, and the latest, Certainty: How Great Bosses Can Change Minds and Drive Innovation. Welcome to the program, Mike.
SPEAKER_00:Well, thank you so much. I'm delighted to be here.
SPEAKER_01:Would you like to give us a little more about your background for the benefit of the audiences?
SPEAKER_00:Well, I think I could just tell them when they get to be as old as I am, they can have as uh varied a resume as I do. Uh the missile site, I had to chuckle that you mentioned, was uh believe it or not, a nuclear missile site in San Francisco. Can you imagine that? This was back in the day of the old Nike missile uh program. And if even today, if somebody lives in San Francisco, go across the Golden Gate Bridge, driving north, take the first right, circle around, and you will see the site that I commanded. It's now a national park. Can you believe that?
SPEAKER_01:I can. A little unexpected that there was a missile site in San Francisco across the bay, but you know, that's life. It's full of surprises.
SPEAKER_00:Absolutely.
SPEAKER_01:Well, diving into your latest book, Certainty. Uh I mentioned to you that there's a particular line in the book that I thought would be nice to open up with, something different. And that is, you stay here, we appear just as irrational to the rest of humanity as they do to us. Well, we go ahead and start off with that in terms of leadership and decision making.
SPEAKER_00:You know, I didn't realize till you asked uh the question that that was really my major breakthrough in trying to crack the code on leadership, uh, which is uh the the fact that if you think of man as irrational, uh you come up with a lot better solutions for leading and managing people than if you just assume they're rational. And let me give you some examples. Um the uh I kept uh running into people who tell me as recently as last week, CEOs will say uh the levers don't work. That um uh gee, I told my people I want them to embrace AI and they're not doing it. What Mike, why is that? Well, the the reason is most of our day is not spent in the rational, concentrating, logical part of the brain. That's that's used very little because it uses up like a great deal of energy, glucose. Most of our day is just on autopilot, and the auto-brain is full of uh habitual behavior that we engage in, it's full of cognitive biases, it's uh it's full of all kinds of routines, emotions, all of that. So people will push back a little bit and say, well, uh, you know, we can be rational, therefore we are. And and uh that's just not the case. So for example, how many times in the last year did you see two friends arguing about politics? And each is throwing facts at the other back and forth, back and forth, very rapidly. Uh and let's assume the facts are correct. So there you have reason going back and forth, but politics doesn't dwell in that logical part of the brain, it's in the auto-brain. It's there with all the belief systems and so forth. So politics is not logical. How about love? Well, remember in uh in college you were trying to pull your uh your roommate back, no, don't date that girl or that guy, they're no good. Uh it it logic doesn't work with love either. And um, how about economics? Well, there was a guy named Daniel Kahneman who wrote a book called Thinking Fast and Slow 15 or 20 years ago. Uh he got the Nobel Prize for completely upending economics, which was in my day, back in the day, it was the rational man theory, man meaning man or woman, uh, and he proved that no, we're we're rational. We we run on heuristics, we we run on um um all kinds of uh various cognitive biases that make up for if we're not getting enough information, we make it up, or if we're getting too much information, how we screen it. And those cognitive biases generally work, but they don't work uh all of the time, and they take the place of reason. And I know that's a that was a long-winded answer, but it's so important that uh to understand that since the 1990s, that's when psychologists first started realizing people are not are irrational. Doesn't mean they're crazy, it just means that we're all irrational.
SPEAKER_01:We're we're operating more from a sort of gut or instinct, are you saying?
SPEAKER_00:In fact, you know, the old the old uh because we say, well, use your head. Well, that would be the what we refer to as logical concentrating functions. Or we say, go with your heart. Well, that would be the emotional, which is in the that auto brain. Or we say what you just said, which is go with your gut, and that's that instinctual human drive type stuff, which is a little deeper. Uh, but yeah, it's it's all it all goes back to we're on auto mode, and therefore that's where you have to approach people with all of this. Um, your your interest is uh law, process, uh, and so forth, and um uh which is uh extremely logical, but in many cases you've gotta you've got to get down at that other level, I think, to to push people or get people to to move or adopt or change.
SPEAKER_01:Agreed. And uh I mean something I've encountered uh prior to working for the government, I worked for four years as an attorney in New Orleans. Uh and now that I've returned back to the practice of law, uh, and I even have it on my website, you know. Uh I'm here to assist people navigating uncertainty. So I found uh your book, Certainty, it resonated in one sense that a lot of people are looking for that. Uh and although one cannot necessarily guarantee certainty for them, uh certainty does not necessarily need to be tied to an outcome. Uh that's what I'm perceiving from the book. It's also tied to, you know, what kind of stability or confidence are you engendering in the people you're interacting with? Uh and so my approach uh interacting with folks, and also I did this during my career as a special agent. It's like, well, what are the potential outcomes? What are the uh what do we need to do to achieve those outcomes? Uh what's going to align with the organizational uh strategies and and missions? Uh and so then finding the best course of action in there uh and ensuring that people have the tools to do those things. Um and then you just move forward, uh, accepting the fact you might not accomplish the mission, right? Right. Uh, but at least you've agreed to a course of action, you've laid out what the potential risks are uh and gone forward there.
SPEAKER_00:I love that. I love that. And uh I think um I have to give a talk in a couple days, keynote to uh a big group here in DC, but the I think the title of the conference is something about uh um leading through uh turbulence and uncertain times, something to that effect. So, you know, to your point is uh I don't think you and I can can bring certainty to the times that we're in. I mean, there's so much going, so much change going political and economic and so forth. Uh but to your point, it's it's how do you put certainty in the mind of another person? And the reason that's really important is that uh what I what I found when I started reverse engineering human nature to put all this together is uh you know that the basic human instinct is still survival, and it's unconscious, but it's there. Uh, and that social survival is a key part of that. Again, unconscious, we're not aware of it most of the day. Uh but uh so what happens is that our brain craves certainty because certainty is safe. We cling to the status quo in general because it's safe. We've we haven't died, you and I sitting here talking this morning, uh so uh so it's comfortable now to to keep this up. Uh but um the the problem is we also know people are capable of great things. So how do you get people from clinging to the status quo and giving them enough certainty, a sense of certainty in their head that it's okay to go to this future? Uh that's that's the crux of leadership. Um, and so basically that's a journey that that I've been on the last uh 15 years.
SPEAKER_01:Speaking of that journey, and you had used the word how. So you started and ran the CIA's Leadership Academy. Obviously, when you did that, you hadn't written certainty. Uh, I don't know how far along you've got into your publications, but how many of these ideas or observations had you already documented on your own when you started uh your work with the academy?
SPEAKER_00:Well, you know, I think that's a really fascinating question because when I when I think back, I think I had all a lot of the pieces. I didn't know all the neuroscience studies that I would discover going forward, but I think I had a lot of the pieces, but I had no way to put those together. And so what I did when we started the leadership, when I uh George Tennett actually asked me to start that up when we did that, I uh uh I reached out for best practices everywhere and um pulled uh stole shamelessly everything I could to uh uh and you can do that with leadership. Now, spying and leadership you you can steal shamelessly. Uh and I brought all that in and uh and put it together, and so I would say that would be an 80% answer. Uh but uh some of the current practices we I pulled in, for example, on uh feedback, giving feedback, are are positive still in use today or positively medieval when it comes to your brain. Doesn't like getting past tense feedback, push looking at a specific uh situation in which you made a mistake, for example. And then some of the stuff on uh change management today, uh it simply doesn't work. We just keep reorganizing over and over and expect to expect new results, and in general it doesn't work. So once the pieces were there back then, but it it wasn't a collective whole, I just didn't have the whole message, and I didn't get that until really uh Kahneman's work and other people on terms of if we look at how the brain really functions, then why don't we take all of the processes and uh the uh the organizational activities that we engage in and make them mesh with human nature? If you know the the image would be you've got a great big uh uh cog wheel, uh which is our organizations, whether it's corporations or public sector or whatever, uh, and then you've got another cog that's got to fit into it, and that's human nature, and they don't mesh right now. Uh so that's that's where uh where I'm going to try to figure out okay, so what how do we tweak on the organizational side to make that fit with human nature so that we really get the best out of people?
SPEAKER_01:Well, adopting uh to this particular uh topic, the leadership academy that you were uh leading at that time, some of the observations you made. What was the reaction of those that were participating in the course? Were they resistant to change? Did they take it as, okay, here's another sort of uh you know administrative tasking we have to go through, you know, the training? Uh how was it received? Uh was it noted that perceptions changed and they found uh value in it? And did you have a means to sort of validate the teaching uh that was going on that okay, what we are delivering to our uh personnel in the intelligence community, it is uh leading to productive changes and decision making and leadership.
SPEAKER_00:Again, what a what a great question. Uh the first off, there is, I think, a common misconception today uh that uh you you hear this a lot, everybody can be a leader. Uh well, uh let me tell you, Fred cannot be a leader. Fred was my worst boss. He was an extreme autocrat. Uh that's a hard wiring in terms of personality. So you're not going to send Fred off to some magical training program for a week and have Fred come back and bloom as an empathetic, listening, positive leader. It's simply not there. Um and in my lifetime, actually, when I was a boy, it was the great man theory of leadership, which man mean back then meant men and women, uh, which meant that basically it's all genetic. And then today we've swung through the starting in the 90s, we swung to uh uh uh leadership is is uh is basically uh can be trained, everybody can become a leader, uh we're more moldable, I guess, than uh we really are. And I think it sort of falls in between. Uh and uh ironically speaking of spying, uh the OSS was the organization that discovered that you can give people psychological assessments and predict future behavior. This was top secret, by the way, in World War II. Um because think about the edge, if you got the right square pegs and the square holes and the round pegs and the round holes, how much more efficient you'd be. Uh, and so they discovered uh leadership assessments, which now are uh done by Gallup and Talent Plus companies like that. So, long-winded answer, but when we ran the first class through, they were basically randomly selected for leadership attributes. They were all uh we started with the frontline managers because they're the easiest to tackle first. So you did have those guys in the back row with the folded arms uh and uh who who didn't learn a thing uh and scoffed. Um and so what I found is uh the Krueger-Dunning effect, basically, which is you've if you rank any group of people on anything, bottom 25% uh are um uh dysfunctional basically. Uh and uh the same is true in leadership. So bottom 25% includes the Freds. You've got you've got uh psychopaths, autocrats, micromanagers, near psychopaths, you've got a collection of individuals down that should not be bosses. They don't have the people skills, the EQ's not there. Uh and then in the top 8%, what they find is uh of people that have been assessed uh are natural leaders. And people like uh my one of my heroes is Colin Powell. I'd put he's a one percenter. This guy had with no leadership training, would have been a great leader and was. So um uh the leadership training side can have an impact, but you if if you're trying to build a great organization, I'd go for selection of people who have people skills as well as technical skills when you put them in those leadership positions.
SPEAKER_01:Focusing on Colin Powell, if I can interject for a brief moment, considering at one point he was our Secretary of State. Yeah. Um and he had sort of a lackluster academic background from what I understand. Um and he had some formal leadership training, having joined the military. When you use the word natural leader, could you expand upon that by natural? Because some people I think might interpret that as, well, it was in his genes. Uh, but I think we could both agree that it's a mixture of nature and nurture, so to say.
SPEAKER_00:So I'll give you an example. Let's say um in my past, uh, had I been a uh an operative, uh, and I was selected to be a deep cover operative, uh, with all that psychological testing, what they would look for is somebody who has a little bit lower empathy than average. Uh I'm the kind of person where, oh yeah, go ahead, throw me in the briar patch, leave me there for six months, and then then retrieve me and I'll get the job done. Uh most people can't do that. Uh my wife especially, she's she's got huge amounts of empathy. Well, empathy is uh uh you can work on it and you can change it, but it's somewhat hardwired trait. Um and uh so what they found early on with the OSS when they were when they were uh working at the farm to uh launch this first uh leadership training assessment program. Uh and what Gallup, for example, does today is they they assess people and they find great leaders are people who are first off driven. Uh they're driven to improve uh the organization by working through people. Unlike a teacher, a great teacher is also driven. Many of the same attributes, but they're driven to improve the individual. There's a different type of drive there. So uh they're very driven people, uh balanced with empathy, so you don't get fret, right? If you just have the drive and you don't have the empathy levels like me, you'd be tend to be a little more autocratic, and that's not what you want to do. Another trait, positivity, uh, is um again, you can work on that if you're a negative person, but it takes a lot of work uh for a long time to be able to alter that. Um another talent that we call them talents now, not traits, but another talent is uh is a learner. Uh so people that we find that the this eight these eight percenters are people who like to learn as well. So it's interesting. Uh yes, we can uh we can improve ourselves, but I think we overestimate how easy it is to do. And again, back to that drive. That's a pretty hardwired trait that if you find someone who doesn't have that innately, uh, you're gonna have to be putting them through school for years to to try to fine-tune that. So the point is pick the pick the right people right up front, and everybody's gonna be happier. Because uh people that it's the Gallup theory now, people play to their strengths, uh they blossom because that's an intrinsic motivator, is accomplishment. And if you're accomplishing things that you enjoy doing, then you probably have a strength in doing that.
SPEAKER_01:Well, for potential teachers out there teaching high school or professors in college, whatnot, when you have, say, a low academic performer for a student, well, there can be a tendency to associate that with the individual has no drive. And so going back to the example of Colin Powell, he did not have stellar grades, so to say, but obviously he has proven himself to be a capable leader. Um what can we say to folks out there to be how they can approach individuals like that, not confuse one thing for another, that whether they're high academic performer or low academic performer, a stellar athlete or a mediocre athlete, uh that they're not necessarily indicators of drive. Uh and they are at the same time.
SPEAKER_00:I must say you do ask good questions.
SPEAKER_01:Well, I maybe you gotta think we all have lost the word.
SPEAKER_00:What's interesting about that, I've been talking with another guy who's more of an expert on this, is what do we uh, for example, what do we do with the bottom 5%? Bottom 5% anywhere, bottom 5% in an organization, the bottom 5% anywhere. Um and I think in some cases, uh when a leader comes in and they they salvage somebody in that bottom 5%, boy, that is the ultimate leadership accomplishment. When you've taken somebody who's given up, uh highly disengaged, as Gallup would say, and and you propel them. But the trouble is you can't do it with the entire 5%. It's only only a selection, right? So you've got some people who legitimately are bottom 5%, uh, and and you know, the in general uh the only thing is to find a comfortable off ramp uh for people like that, or to find them a totally different job that more or less matches their strengths. And um one assessment company I've talked to, uh they they they can show in any population, uh they rank about 12 different strengths in people, and and there's only about five percent of the population has no nothing above average on those those 12 categories. Kind of interesting. So if you do have somebody who's um under strength everywhere, um then uh try to find what is their greatest strength and can you find a role for them, and then if not, maybe an off-ramp. Um uncomfortable discussion. But I'll give you a personal example back to Colin Powell. Uh his a buddy of his uh was my professor at West Point of a class called uh Mechanics of Solids, which is a branch of physics. Never take it. It's the most hideous class that you could take. And so what I did, I stopped studying and uh quickly fell to the bottom of the class in that one subject, uh, because they test you every day, every class at West Point, and they post the grades, and I could just see myself going down. I knew I was headed for this last section, headed by this uh bear of a man. Uh and I remember reporting in the first day, and he's growling and and uh in the background and uh yelling at us as we're trying to write on the chalkboard these crazy equations. But what we found is we could get the guy off topic uh in a couple days, and so we would. We would conspire on how to get him. And uh finally he uh uh I got more and more interested listening to his stories, uh, and I picked up the book. Anyway, today it's one of my favorite classes uh that I've ever taken. And so he in the teacher role uh managed to take somebody who'd given up completely just because I just had such a dislike for the course, and it hit a spark and and uh and I took off. Uh so uh the the question to the audience is guess the name of the teacher? He was a friend of Colin Powell. He was a major in '65, so who would that have been? And and the answer is Norman Schwartzkoff.
SPEAKER_01:Interesting.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. So years later, when I was starting up the Leadership Academy, uh, you know, I felt better about myself as he gained rank. Every time he'd get a star, I felt good about myself because I outsmarted him. And when he uh when I started up the Leadership Academy, uh, I started pawing through boxes of old courses, and I found these series of case studies on how the army uh turned itself around from the time I left in 75 to first Gulf War, how to go from kind of a flat on its back to this uh best army in the world. And it was it was the leaders like Powell, who were uh they were lieutenant colonels at the time, and uh and Schwarzkopf and so on got together and said, you know, we're gonna turn this place around, and they did. And there was like one part of the case study uh cut study was on uh Schwartzkopf, so I quickly read that and it and it broke his career down. It said, West Point, 1965. So I read it, and this is what he said. He said, you know, sometimes in in class I would shut the book and I'd set it on the counter, and I would lean back on the desk and I would talk, and we would have discussions with the cadets, and we would talk about history, we would talk about the ethos of the warrior class, we would talk about history, and he said, I did that because it was more important to develop them and develop character in a good leader than it was to learn about friction and and ball bearings and so on. So he tricked the old bear tricked me. I didn't trick him. But that that's one of those examples of you if you can spark somebody then lower 5%. Boy, what a what an accomplishment that is.
SPEAKER_01:That makes me think of, say, two traits or skills. Uh communication, uh, which I find was a commonality among the interviews you uh conducted in your book, uh Leadership Wisdom, uh, interviews with CIA executives. But it also highlights the second trait from your certainty book, and that is about social bonding. So it strikes me that what uh former General Schwarzkopf was doing with you all, one, using communication, bonding with you all, allowing everybody else uh to bond in their class as well, and giving them an opportunity to also communicate. Uh could you speak to those two areas? Because you know, communication is what leads to social bonding. Communication can be in the form of you know written uh emails, it can be verbal, it can be that sort of pat on the back, uh, which nowadays uh it's unfortunate, but sometimes even a pat on the back with some uh members of the population, they can misinterpret that. Yeah. Uh and it's like, do we do ourselves a disservice by restraining ourselves from the natural human touch? Um so please speak to communication and social bonding as part of leadership.
SPEAKER_00:Well, doesn't social bonding sound uh kind of soft and syrupy, and and here I'm the old curmudgeon, uh low empathy. And uh I was flying out of Moscow one time and landed in Frankfurt Airport, ran into my old grad school psych prof, and I didn't care for that course. I mean, I loved the course, I didn't care for him, but I learned uh to you know, just so learned to respect this guy because what what I didn't know in class as I was studying case studies is this guy was the leading expert in the world on human drives. And um uh so once we rekindled the relationship, uh I started working with him, and he had he and uh uh the dean at Harvard Business School wrote a book called Driven, uh, and they basically looked It literally was a meta study of everything, and uh came up with four basic drives bond, acquire, learn, defend. Uh no surprises there except for the learn, maybe. Uh but the he told me, he said, Mike, don't ever forget that that bonding drive is first among equals. And the reason for that is we're social animals, which gets us around to your question on this communications, that uh we we need communications much more than I ever thought, since I'm not a real communicator. Uh, but it is a deep human need. Uh, and I'll give you an interesting example. There's a guy named John Gottman who runs the Gottman Institute, which is a marital institute. He's done experiments on what he calls bids. Uh, so he'll put uh married couples in a in a in a house that's got video and audio recording in it, sort of like a bugged CIA house, and he watches couples during the day. And he calls this a bid, where one would say, um, looking at a newspaper, say, oh, there's a new Thai restaurant in town. That's a bid that they've given out. And then the other side of that would be, do I answer the bid or reject it? Uh and if I ignore it, that's a rejection, or if I say I'm working on my computer, that's a rejection. Uh but if if you answer the bid, you just say, well, we ought to give it a try, or something to that effect. So this is all these are little pings like sonar. And if you think about that concept, you see that in the workplace all the time. Uh boss, how's it going today? There's a ping. Now, how does that boss respond? Uh and so there's a uh a really deep uh social need, psychological need, and it's absolutely fascinating if you you can type this into Chat GPT. Give me examples of human pings or uh bids with each other. And it actually comes back with some wondrous stuff.
SPEAKER_01:Is it stealing from Gottman?
SPEAKER_00:Well, it's stealing from Gottman and a bunch of other psychologists, and but it's absolutely fascinating how we do this throughout the day in the smallest way. Um and and I think it goes back to that basically certainty in the brain, brain craves certainty because that's safety, and so we will periodically ping out and and try to say so. That's why these two-way conversations are so important, you know, getting back to your question. And that I think that's why active listening is so critical too. And by the way, you do that a lot better than I do it. Uh I'm still working on it. Uh, but it active listening means you're you're taking into account, and uh it's a real trust-building uh trait to have or aptitude to have, um, to be able to really listen to people, figure out what they really are saying, and then you can, before you, before you respond, an answer. But this stuff is so important, and uh remote work, you know, we're we're losing that. We we pick up a lot of benefits from remote work, but then then we're losing this the interpersonal side, um, which is where you really uh get the sparks going, good sparks going between people.
SPEAKER_01:Well, you had mentioned in your book and so about remote work and the impact it has on that ability to connect among peers, colleagues, subordinate superiors. And so remote work can enable an organization to be successful, right? Yeah, absolutely. Okay, but you used a key word in there, and that is, but you don't have a vibrant organization. Comment.
SPEAKER_00:Well, it Gallup came up with an interesting poll last week on remote work versus, and what they found is uh almost every, how would you say, negative uh uh emotion uh is higher for workers in remote work than it is on-site workers? For example, uh remote workers are slightly more sad or they have uh slightly more anger. So it's these negative emotions that are actually higher. And is that a result of the lack of live interaction? You know, I'd say could could well be. Um, however, the workers like remote more than the other. Now why? Well, because who wants to drive 20 hours a week in a closed can to and from work uh when they could spend that with their family? So there's the dilemma. So so yeah, there is some, there's definitely some loss on the remote work side. And now how would you how could you bring that back? And what I push, uh what I tell clients is uh steal a page from Adobe, which has started doing check-ins. Now, all a check-in is, is every every boss, every frontline manager will take five minutes a week to check in with an employee uh and ask some very simple questions. Could be uh well, how are you doing? What can I do to help you? Have you had any roadblocks? What have you learned this week? Uh what one thing are you proudest of this week? Um it's just a quick, quick interchange, but you're uh uh but it uh from what I can see, and talking again with I've been working working with Gallup on this, they're looking at what happens when you give somebody an at a boy or an at a girl. Uh and it appears to me that that glow from a compliment lasts, has a half-life of about a week. So if you could give praise every week to every employee, I think it's game-changing. Um, you can't do it in remote work, it's hard to do. So you'd probably have to to really make it effective. Could you use email? Yeah, you could. But uh picking up the phone and making a direct call uh would be far one one-on-one would be far more effective. It's so much easier, obviously, in a workplace where everybody's together because you you see somebody at the water cooler or whatever, you can you can give them an out-a-boy or out-a-girl. Um but that's just the way we're geared. You know, you've given somebody a jolt of certainty with that uh praise or with that check-in uh that that uh Adobe works with, uh, and that seems to last for about a week, uh, which is great.
SPEAKER_01:Well, something I find that remote work aligns extremely well with it's engendering trust. I trust you enough to be out there on your own. Yeah. Uh and the individual also in the ideal situation probably feels or believes or thinks that you know the organization believes in me enough that I can be on my own and I am going to produce uh work uh and productive uh outcomes. Um the check-in that actually reminds me, and this going out to any fellow lawyers and in the audience, something I find that uh we can lose sight of as attorneys, we can get sort of tunnel vision on the legal matter and what we can do for the client, but we forget to ask the fundamental question of the client because now they are experiencing stress and uncertainty facing a legal matter. It's how are you doing? You know, you know, just you know uh you know and I find that's a bit of a check-in, as you say.
SPEAKER_00:Uh I love that. Uh first off, they I hadn't I hadn't thought of remote work as a uh uh symbol of trust, and it is. I hadn't thought of that, but it's like the andon cable of old Toyota, where any any employee could pull that cable down and stop the uh stop the assembly line. Did they do it? No. But they had the ability to do it, which meant the organization trusted them. And so remote work is is a sign of trust of an organization. So if you're going back from remote to partially on site, uh that's something to keep in mind is what else can you do to show that you trust the employee to offset that that possible move. Uh but uh I think the other issue you just mentioned, the the tunnel vision when you're dealing with somebody, um, I think this is a huge issue. I think it's a cognitive bias that we have. In other words, uh we have uh a tendency to uh, for example, we'll say we're gonna hire somebody uh for this management position who's got the technical skills. They're the world's greatest salesman, or the I their IT skills are wonderful. Uh but we're gonna take uh their people skills in into account too. And then what happens uh is companies don't do that usually. They will opt for the technical skills. And it's uh the tunnel vision there, the tunnel vision you're talking about is we tend to forget the people and the soft and the culture side. Uh and it's uh there's a term called tangibility bias, but it's not a real cognitive bias, not official. Uh but I think that's very, very real. Is when we get down to it, we will always go for policy uh or process or or some procedure which is more concrete and forget about the people side. When you and uh you you triggered this by uh up front when we were talking about the discussion, is you've got to look at the whole picture, the whole organization, or whatever. And there were two fellows uh from Harvard Business School in Stanford that that came up with something called a congruence model, which I I loved. It's an old old-fashioned model of an organization, but it it had uh basically the tasks uh in in one box, and below that is structure, like your organizational chart. And then two boxes along the side uh are people and culture. And and so if if you if you think about that, the the vertical uh boxes are the hard stuff, which is the structure, procedures, processes, and so on, and then the the uh the the horizontal is the is the soft stuff, people and culture. And we tend to give lip service to people culture, but it is hard. Uh, and so when it comes down to it, we'll automatically gravitate. Managers certainly do this, gravitate toward the the hard part, which and we'll we'll come up with a new policy or we'll come up with uh a new organizational structure by moving boxes around, and lo and behold, we have to do the same thing in two more two years from now.
SPEAKER_01:You mentioned trust, I mentioned uh tunnel vision, um, and then you added on people, you know, not not overlooking that element. And it brought me back uh to a time uh when I worked in a field office, I supervised a unit of agents, uh, and there were other supervisors, and I went in to talk to a fellow supervisor, um, and while we were chatting, one of his agents walked in, and it was timesheet uh period, so people are turning their timesheets, and he left that with the supervisor, and my colleague then looked at his agent and he said, You're forgetting something. Like, oh, oh, that's right, the uh vehicle mileage report. And I'm thinking to myself, well, it's not that time of the month for the vehicle mileage report. So the agent came back with his vehicle mileage report, and he added, and I saw him actually add it to the timesheet. Now I'm already starting to come to conclusions, but I'm just waiting for this to play out. Agent leaves the room and I look at my colleague, and you know, I intentionally put sort of like a perplexed expression on my face, and he looks at me and says, Oh, well, you gotta cross-reference their hours with the vehicle mileage to make sure they're not, you know, adding hours on as part of work when it's actually just commuting to the office. And I looked at my colleague and I was flabbercasted, and I just responded with, you do that? And he said, Yes, you don't. And I said, Absolutely not. We've already indicated to these individuals we trust them with firearms and to make you know life-impacting decisions in a split second should the need arise. And if I have to cross-reference vehicle mileage with a timesheet, that sends the wrong message. And I shouldn't even let the agent out of my sight at that point. I mean, to me, my personal philosophy is I will give you the benefit of the doubt until I have a reason not to. Um so I use that to sort of segue into what are some of the mistakes you have found from your personal experiences as you've uh led at the Leadership Academy at the CIA, your interviews with folks. What are mistakes that people in positions of leadership typically do? I know I've committed mine and I always uh engage in self-reflection. Uh so what did you find? Uh leaders that there are the mistakes we make, and then there are just the consistent mistakes we make and should not be any position of leadership.
SPEAKER_00:Uh first, you know, first off, going back to I love that trust story because uh and this goes way back to a guy named Rensis Lickert. You probably heard of the Lickert scale on when you do one of these uh uh any kind of a an assessment or test five five question thing. Anyway, he was a psychologist back in the 50s and uh did some some work on this. And what happens is in distrustful organizations that that do all of those checks, uh what you'll find is you'll the the individual tends to pull themselves in and and they'll be much less innovative type organizations. People take less creative risk, they'll take less risk, period, because they know somebody's looking over their shoulder. Um and so um um the uh trusting organizations, you know, get get a lot further. Now you need to do the old Reagan trick, which is trust and verify, but I I remember when I worked for GE in its heyday in the 90s, and uh uh we used that old um uh industrial age model of you get your uh report once a year of how well you're doing and so forth. And what a what a terrible thing to do to people. I mean, you go for a year with uncertainty of how am I doing, and then once a year you get slammed with whatever you're uh and and Welch realized, even though gee, he had invented that a hundred years before, he realized that was wrong, so he quickly converted, he said he wants people to talk more, uh, the boss to talk more to the individual during the year, and he scrapped that system. Uh and so that was a uh sizable change in the old industrial model of being very untrusting of individuals to being trusting. Um and it even flowed through the uh the system of looking at expense reports, where he developed a way where instead of sitting down and writing down all this stuff and my mileage, the POV mile, all this stuff you were talking about, that he just used push your ri receipts in a bag, uh put your name on the bag and date of the trip, and send it in. So it took maybe less than a minute for a person to do it, but then there was a 5% audit. So it keeps us uh honest, right? But then it allows us to have a sense of that trust. Um and now look what I've done. I've forgotten what your question was because I went to what are the mistakes that are. Oh, right, right, right, right. I think one is not realize we talked about what who are you innately? Uh and I've been to my I've been to something that none of your listeners have, which is my 50th high school reunion. And I could tell you everybody is still the same. The the people that were positive and happy and outgoing are still positive and happy and outgoing. So there's there's certain things that we carry with us. So I would say step one is to know who you are. Um, and of course, the uh the way the mind works is we have a great ability, human ability to fuzz that up. You know, I'm I'm the greatest thing since sliced bread. Well, maybe in everybody else's eyes you aren't. Other people perceive it. So knowing what are your weaknesses, I think is really important. And there's a uh uh a little Gallup uh survey called Strengths Finder 2.0 that you can take. I don't know, it's 20 bucks online. It gives you uh all of your top five strengths which you want to play to. You really want to push those, but it also tells you uh, you know, what's in what's in that bottom part that you should be aware of and not so much to fix, but to get other people to help you. Uh so in my case, you know, going back to the empathy, uh, I would always look for uh deputy, say, who had high empathy levels to help put the whole package together. So step one is know your weaknesses and and work with others. Uh and it's uh in boss world, it's okay to admit weaknesses. In fact, uh when the boss doesn't admit weaknesses, and autocrats don't do that, remember the bottom 25%, we tend to be very suspicious of them because we know humans are weak. So when the boss says, uh, geez, I'm disorganized, I'm gonna need your help uh as we go along, keep me straight, if you would. That's a that's a real trust-building comment. So know your weaknesses and and uh and collect help, pull in others to to help you compensate for that, and I think you'll go a long way. And then that gets us back to you've also got to do get feedback, which is not a natural act for us humans, but bosses really, really need to get feedback to see where they are, what are other people thinking. It's always different than what's in the boss's head.
SPEAKER_01:So speaking of feedback, you actually specifically reference in your book that traditional feedback is ineffective. Could you elaborate upon that?
SPEAKER_00:Well, there uh what I look for, what are brain-friendly ways to uh, in in every case, to interact with other people? And so on the feedback side, it this is just a simple brain trick. But for example, if I if I uh said to you, uh do you remember that uh PowerPoint presentation you gave yesterday to the group? Uh well, slide 27 said such and such, and it should have said XYZ. Uh that's my way of giving you situational feedback. Uh and your brain, because it's past tense, uh, picks that up and interprets it as criticism. If I had only said, boy, that you did a great presentation yesterday, and I've got an idea for you on slide 27. If you change this to XYZ going forward, it'll have even more impact. You see what that little subtle shift is? Future tense. Uh, when you're talking to somebody in future tense, they think you're advising them, you're giving them help. Uh, and so that's one of about 16 little things I've discovered on feedback that we just need to tailor it to better fit how that old silly brain of ours actually operates. Um, and and you can have a lot more impact and make it easier on human wear and tear, uh, on giving uh becoming a coach and and an advisor as opposed to a critic.
SPEAKER_01:Interesting. Uh I was recollecting as you were saying that about traditional feedback, reading uh agents' reports and investigations, and you know, they could vary anywhere because it could be just a a write-up of an interview they did, or it could be the actual comprehensive report of the investigation. So from a few pages to you know just scores of pages. And I'd go through these looking at multiple agents uh reports, and I'd find typos, right? Yep. So at that point, it's like I have a decision to make. Do I correct the typo? That seems the practical, the pragmatic, the efficient thing to do, or do I kick it back to the individual and say you need to correct your typos, right? Um and so I would play with this in a variety of ways, and then also thinking, you know, reading the report when I write back to the agent. Uh to me, letting them know that I found some of these typos, I went ahead and said, you know, I I corrected them. Uh, you know, the intent was to let them know I took the time to read it, right? You know, I did catch this, but you know, I went ahead and fixed it because that makes more sense. Uh we can move this along. But there were also times when I knew that even though that was my intent, they're gonna probably just focus on, oh, he's harping on my typos. So it's like, you know, you're between a rock and a hard place, right? Um, and so I think sometimes one has to accept that sometimes the message will get misinterpreted and kind of have faith that it's sort of in one sense a marathon in interacting with folks, that over time they'll realize I do have their best interests at heart and this is what I'm trying to accomplish. Uh, but I also need to let them know that they they have to pay a little more attention uh and make sure the the report is up to speed. Um so with that in mind, what what are some small leadership actions that have an outsized impact from your perspective?
SPEAKER_00:I wish I wish I had something more dramatic, uh, but uh it goes back to something you talked about earlier on the the simplest of human interactions and communications. Um and so when I started reverse engineering human nature and say, okay, what fits that managers do, what should we keep doing? Um what what things should we stop doing? Like we talked about the feedback and the uh we talked about the change management, uh, and then what new things should they start doing never been done before? And that gets into things like uh Discovery the Brain's Insight Mechanism and some some other interesting things that managers should do that they're not doing. But when I went back to that first category of what should managers keep doing, it is all the basics. I mean, it is walk in in the morning and smile at people. It is say hello to them. Believe it or not, if you as a boss swish by and you don't acknowledge people, don't look them in the eye, uh, their little alarm bells are already going off. And I've got stories and statistics on that. I mean, it sounds crazy, but we are very, very attuned to these social interactions. So smile, say hello to people in the morning, have one-on-one conversations. Oddly enough, you know, the old curmudgeon says have chit-chat. It's it's vitally important to the human relationship. Not too much. I mean, you don't want to take up somebody's day with chit-chat, but a little bit is is needed, and we can actually see that on MRI scans of how it soothes the brain. Uh give praise, recognition. If I had my career to run all over again, I would give everybody praise once a week. Um, because what I had in my mind was my A players and my B players know they're good. So I don't need to praise them. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Everybody needs praise and reassurance to inject that certainty. Um, so so that is another part of that.
SPEAKER_01:How do you avoid the trap of give of giving praise for praise sake?
SPEAKER_00:Oh, I've got uh I've asked that question to psychologist. Um one of them, uh well, two of them were at Gallup, um, and I said, Can you give too much praise? In other words, can you appear to be a sap? Uh and um uh one of them said uh he you know just off the top of his head, he said he thought, well, you could give praise 30 times before it would start to somebody might question it. And the other one said, well, no, it's infinite. Uh and and so I think there's there's no limit to the praise you can give. But I don't want to praise you to your point. I don't want to praise you because you you you really wore uh uh a good-looking shirt today at the office. Um I mean I could do that, but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about praise that is directly related to something you did to improve the mission of the organization. Um and so quite often if if someone did wrote an exceptional uh report or something, you could give them praise for that. But quite often the boss doesn't know. And so the trick there is, because the boss doesn't see everything. And the trick there is simply to uh during a little check-in, say, what hey, by the way, what one thing were you proudest of accomplishing this week? Invariably you're gonna find out something you didn't know about, and they'll tell you about something that occurred out of your eyesight, and that gives you an opportunity then to give them the praise. So this is, you know, it is it's really uh a crucial function that we tend to overlook.
SPEAKER_01:Here's a comment I'd like to share with you from a colleague years ago. Uh we were in London as a fellow agent, and I think this is really important in terms of the decisions we make in a governmental organization, especially in a position of leadership. And he he had higher military experience, and he said, you know, Maurice, I find sometimes the best courses of action for us to take in government is to do nothing at all. Do you find that sometimes when we work in government there is that temptation, that subconscious sort of bias or motivation, I have to do something, we need to take action, and you're you're now executing a an operation that perhaps does not need to take place. You've uh turned you you got the wheel starting, and that has all sorts of ripple effects, uh, just even at an administrative level, right? As opposed to we we don't need to do anything, but there's so much pressure to look like we're doing something. Any comments about that? Wow.
SPEAKER_00:Uh I was forced into uh, and I'm glad I was, into going into a Six Sigma program, getting to be a black belt under Jack Welch. And so what that is is simply basically you can crack any process. And and I found in GE, every process we worked on, we could reduce the length of the process by 85%. Uh but what that required was they found uh it's not just using equations and graphs, it's you've got To pull in the employees to do that. And so poor government, which is where really I've spent the bulk of my last 20 years on, is saddled with all these processes and whatnot. So you could have an individual that just throws up their hands and says, geez, this is not going to work because of the bureaucracy. Or today, especially, you might have somebody who's politically opposed to some approach and they might they might stall and try to sideline it. I find that though almost all the government employees I've worked with the last 19 years have are really have good hearts and really do want to do a good job, but they're frustrated in many cases of pushing up against one another and problems haven't surfaced correctly. And that's where the that's where the answer, what is the answer to that? Well the answer is really let's focus on on good leadership again. How do you treat people to get the most out of the human inside of them? How how do you uh uh select really good bosses up front to make sure that gets done? How do you how do you train them adequately? What do you train them on? Um how and basically going back to how do you get the best out of human nature? Because uh I'll give you a quick, quick example. I I worked uh last year for a group at the State Department, about a thousand people. Um I have never seen as toxic a unit as I walked down. The boss was absolutely hideous, uh, Fred Squared. Uh they had um the good a lot of good people had burned off. They had a 25% vacancy. Can you imagine that? And this is the real the real statistic. They had a seven-year backlog. They were so jammed up. So this is almost terminal. Uh however, new people came in, uh, and uh I started working with them, and they they uh used simple ways to get uh everybody's input, uh not brainstorming, not that kind of stuff, but something where literally every brain in the place got engaged. Uh and the it had wondrous results. And so in eight months, the people who had left are now coming back in to the organization, rejoining, uh, and they've cut that backlog uh well over half and things are starting to tick again. So there you go. You know, on the the part one, we had sort of disgruntled employees and and maybe wanting to block things, like you said, and then stage two, because of good leadership and good leadership approaches, uh advanced leadership approaches too, they they have been able to rebirth themselves. And uh it's done, it's turnaround done very quickly, but it was it's basically good leadership now versus toxic leadership. It's amazing what difference that made.
SPEAKER_01:In in government, uh among those that are career government officials, it's difficult to transition good leadership upward at times. It's difficult to transition poor leadership in a different direction. What have you found in your time in government that worked to actually make those things happen? Uh here's an individual who's obviously uh good at decision making. Uh they can lead others, but we need to put this individual in a position of leadership or the opposite. We need to transition this person out of a position of leadership. What practices or policies have you found in government that actually contributed to that?
SPEAKER_00:I think they again going back to everything we talked about, that the the trick is to make the right decision up front so you don't have to try to alter that individual too much. You want to polish them uh with uh programs uh uh like FEI and so forth that aren't there right now to support them. But you want you want to polish them, but but uh make sure right up front that your selection validity is good. And what that means is get away or continue to use the the uh process that you currently use of interviews. Uh but the trouble is you and I are layman interviewees, so you always you want to add something with higher statistical uh validity uh to your process, and that would could be a 30-minute psychological assessment, it could be a structured interview conducted by a professional, not HR, unless they're schooled in behavioral backward-looking structured interview. But just add add something extra. Make sure that you're keeping that bottom 25 percent of leaders who maybe uh, as one leader told me, gee, Fred uh breaks a little China but he gets things done. Well, that's not who you need in SES ranks. Uh that's not who you need in the in the top parts of government. So just step back and make sure that we select people. They got the got the people skills to do that. Uh I I do worry right now, uh we live in an odd time. Uh so many good people have gone out the door uh in top leadership positions in government that uh you you're uh sitting in something I call uh that psychologists call social pain, which is long-lasting emotional pain. And so the fear of uh of what uh the doge activities have done, uh while they've reduced headcount, uh there's a permanent scarring that's gonna occur. It's gonna take a while to to heal to get uh get people back to normal.
SPEAKER_01:Hmm. Could you elaborate a little bit on that?
SPEAKER_00:Uh I worked with a group uh called, for example, for uh in December, just a few months back, um I worked with a group called CISA, which is the Cyber Infrastructure Security Agency, part of DHS, it's uh three, four thousand people. Um and we put in a world-class training program for them. And actually uh the problem with leadership development of training is a lot of times we find people aren't practicing what's preached. And the what are the reasons for that? Well, it's back to the human brain, it's habitual behavior. So they may adopt one thing. So let's say they go and start smiling to employees when they walk in the morning. Well, that's great, but usually uh what we find is either they adopt one thing they've learned or nothing. And the reason again it's that habitual behavior. So we we put in a uh really whiz-bang course, and so uh uh uh but but then we put uh polite accountability in there by in this case requiring that they do check-ins. We taught them how to do those, and then they have to fill out a weekly report, very simple, four or five bullets of what did I learn by doing a check-in with my people, or what did uh did my people learn? Um very positive. And then after 90 days, we kill the report because you don't want more bureaucracy. But what that did is that created habitual behavior because they had to do it, the boss gets the report, uh, and and so over time now they're doing their check-ins. Anyway, long story that I would give that whole training system an A plus. But in the last three months, what happened? Well, the the head of CISA, uh the director, Jen Easterly, great leader, uh, left. Uh the chief human uh capital, uh they call it uh chief people officer, um uh stayed and then finally buckled under the pressure and left. Uh the chief training officer disappeared somewhere, I don't know, and the clo, the chief learning officer retired early. So what you have there is a vacuum with a complete loss of institutional memory. So whoever gets fleeted up into those positions just doesn't know a whole lot. They don't know what was done before that worked, what was done before that didn't work, who can I trust of these uh contractors, who can I not trust, uh, who what direction are we going into? Um and so I think there's gonna be uh a cost of that for a long, long time. It's not simply turning a switch to start rehiring people that have been taken out of positions. So that's what I mean by long-lasting uh scarring.
SPEAKER_01:With that in mind, for those that are listening and that are currently working in in an organization uh and you know they are in positions of impactful decision making andor positions of leadership, uh, government, private, otherwise, no, what guidance would you give those individuals?
SPEAKER_00:Well, first off, is obviously these are stressful times, so take care of yourself. And I'm not an expert on that, but that means you know, the old stuff of get sleep, get exercise, eat the right food. Uh uh definitely uh want to uh uh kind of reflect, relax at times. Um but then uh the second part is think about your people. Um and I'll shoot you an interesting uh article I posted. There's a really neat website called govleaders.org, govleaders.org. And I posted something on what tips on what a manager can do to relieve stress in the workplace during stressful times. And it's the the manager can't reduce the stress of doge and all of these external things, but what they could do is uh make sure you do give praise, especially now, uh to give people a psychological boost. Uh make sure that uh uh you you do conduct these uh check-ins. Um make sure you say, I don't know. This is really important. Instead of uh what happens during stressful times uh is that uh workers need about five to eight times more communications than they're getting, and the leaders tend to communicate five to eight times less. So just make sure you get out there, even if you don't know. By saying you don't know, it's actually a trust-building measure because you don't know. You're you're admitting uh admitting that. Uh and to let them know as soon as I know something, I promise you I'll I'll uh I'll let you know. Um so it's just getting out and doing the old management by walking around, uh, which actually does work if you actually chit-chat, use chit-chat and talk to people, uh, or you are on the bottom level you're using those check-ins, but just make sure you take a little bit of time to get out and show the flag and reassure people. Um, and uh anyway, I've got uh nine points that people can do, so if they head for that website, they can see them.
SPEAKER_01:Understood. So as we're coming here to a close, any final thoughts, observations you'd like to share for the audience at large?
SPEAKER_00:Um again, I'd go back to just looking over my career. Um I wish I wish I'd told, for example, more stories. That's the way the human brain operates. It doesn't operate by being told what to do. I wish I had given far more praise than I did. Uh I wish I had used that check-in concept uh much more than I did. Uh I wish I'd taken more trust-building measures, which is nothing more than just getting basing it on the law of reciprocity. I give periodic gifts. You mentioned earlier consistency of behavior that uh lets people know you have their best interest at heart. So make sure on this law of reciprocity that you give people little gifts every week of uh information, data, feedback, uh praise, uh uh challenge. Uh you know, you can you can make a list of a lot of gifts that leaders can give back. Uh so just uh I guess in closing, don't do what I did. Uh do what do what do what you and I have been talking about today.
SPEAKER_01:Agreed. Well, again, I I appreciate this opportunity, the time and attention you you've given this topic, sharing your insights and experiences with the audience. Uh so once again, this is Mike Mears, uh author of the latest book, Certainty How Great Bosses Can Change Minds and Drive Innovation. Thank you again for uh sharing your time with us.
SPEAKER_00:Absolutely, it's been delightful. Thanks so much, Matrice.