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LEADERSHIP | Who are you as a leader? w/Adam Bryant

October 16, 2023 Craig Moen & Shye Gilad | Business Owners | Entrepreneurship | Small Business Episode 234
LEADERSHIP | Who are you as a leader? w/Adam Bryant
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Business Owners Radio
LEADERSHIP | Who are you as a leader? w/Adam Bryant
Oct 16, 2023 Episode 234
Craig Moen & Shye Gilad | Business Owners | Entrepreneurship | Small Business

Ready to uncover the secret sauce behind transformative leadership? We're pulling back the curtain with Adam Bryant, author of the captivating book, The Leap to Leader. Bryant, a leadership guru with 12 years of interviews with over a thousand top-tier CEOs under his belt, reveals the pivotal mental shift that catapults individuals into leadership roles. We delve into the significance of transparency, humility, and authenticity, and explore the intriguing concept of 'accidental entrepreneurs' - those who unexpectedly find themselves steering the ship and navigating through the choppy waters of leadership. 

As we continue our discourse, we wrestle with the ironies and complexities that abound in leadership literature. How do we reconcile the inherently contradictory advice that's often peddled? Bryant illuminates the concept of leadership as an 'and' proposition rather than an 'or', and we unpack the importance of resilience, informed decision-making, and fostering a spirit of teamwork within your crew. Whether you're an aspiring leader or an established veteran, this episode promises an eye-opening discussion that will challenge and stimulate your leadership perspective. Ready to leap into leadership? Tune in and let us guide your flight.


Listen and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, and Stitcher.

Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | LinkedIn

About Business Owners Radio:

Business Owners Radio is a podcast that brings you insights, inspiration, and actionable advice from successful entrepreneurs and business experts. Hosted by Shye Gilad and Craig Moen, our show aims to help you grow your business and achieve your goals. Join us every week for new episodes packed with valuable tips and resources.

Sponsorships:

Are you interested in sponsoring an episode of Business Owners Radio? Reach out to us at email to discuss advertising opportunities.



Show Notes Transcript Chapter Markers

Ready to uncover the secret sauce behind transformative leadership? We're pulling back the curtain with Adam Bryant, author of the captivating book, The Leap to Leader. Bryant, a leadership guru with 12 years of interviews with over a thousand top-tier CEOs under his belt, reveals the pivotal mental shift that catapults individuals into leadership roles. We delve into the significance of transparency, humility, and authenticity, and explore the intriguing concept of 'accidental entrepreneurs' - those who unexpectedly find themselves steering the ship and navigating through the choppy waters of leadership. 

As we continue our discourse, we wrestle with the ironies and complexities that abound in leadership literature. How do we reconcile the inherently contradictory advice that's often peddled? Bryant illuminates the concept of leadership as an 'and' proposition rather than an 'or', and we unpack the importance of resilience, informed decision-making, and fostering a spirit of teamwork within your crew. Whether you're an aspiring leader or an established veteran, this episode promises an eye-opening discussion that will challenge and stimulate your leadership perspective. Ready to leap into leadership? Tune in and let us guide your flight.


Listen and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, and Stitcher.

Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | LinkedIn

About Business Owners Radio:

Business Owners Radio is a podcast that brings you insights, inspiration, and actionable advice from successful entrepreneurs and business experts. Hosted by Shye Gilad and Craig Moen, our show aims to help you grow your business and achieve your goals. Join us every week for new episodes packed with valuable tips and resources.

Sponsorships:

Are you interested in sponsoring an episode of Business Owners Radio? Reach out to us at email to discuss advertising opportunities.



Speaker 1:

And now taking care of business, your hosts Craig Moen and Shye Gilad.

Craig Moen:

Welcome to Business Owner's Radio, episode 234. Our guest today is Adam Bryant, author of the new book "the Leap to Leader how Ambitious Managers Make the Jump to Leadership. As the creator and former author of the Iconic Corner Office column in the New York Times, he has mastered the art of distilling real-world lessons from hundreds of interviews and turning them into practical tools, presentations and exercises to help companies deepen their leadership benches and strengthen their teams.

Shye Gilad:

Good morning, adam. Welcome to Business Owner's Radio. Great to be here. Thanks for the invitation, guys. Yeah, we're so excited to talk to you today about the new book, the Leap to Leader how Ambitious Managers Make the Jump to Leadership. Tell us what inspired you to write the book.

Adam Bryant:

Sure, and a bit of context might help. So over the last 12 years I've interviewed more than a thousand CEOs and mostly CEOs and other senior leaders with a very specific focus about key leadership lessons and how they think about leadership. And all those interviews I've done, I've never asked any of them a single question about their companies or their strategy or broader macroeconomic forces. It's all about leadership. And you do a thousand interviews or more and you start seeing patterns and good questions emerge, and I've written four books now and my most recent, the Leap to Leader. With all my books, there's an underlying question that I find really interesting and I don't quite know the answer to, and that's sort of why I write books to help me answer the question. So the underlying question for the Leap to Leader is really focused on sort of more the internal game, the mindset shift that you need to make to be a leader.

Adam Bryant:

And when I think about leadership, I think of it in two sort of big parts. One is sort of the external game of leadership right Setting strategy, working with your team, all the things that you're doing, customers, all those things and just as important is the internal work that you have to do to be a leader, and that's what this book really gets into. Like, what does it mean to be a leader? And not about what's on your business card, your title, and you might be managing five people or just started a company with ten employees, but you are a leader and you can lead. And so that's what I really wanted to explore, and the timing has worked out pretty well, because I think that leadership has gotten you know, pick a number five to ten times harder just in the last few years, and so I feel like it's a good moment to sort of step back and say what does it mean to lead, and how do we sort of own all these challenges and disruptions and uncertainties that we're facing now?

Shye Gilad:

Yeah, it's interesting, you know, talking about sort of the strategies and the structure around leadership, company facing things like you mentioned. But this trickier part of how you walk the walk and I think, with all the disruption we've seen in recent years and the disruption surely to come, I don't think that those two things are discreet anymore. You know there is no discreet internal messaging, for instance. Right, your internal messaging is your external messaging because it all gets out there eventually. Right, and the call to transparency. And so how are leaders thinking about that challenge now?

Adam Bryant:

Well, you mentioned sort of the blurring lines between the sort of the personal and professional, the broader society, and everything is sort of bleeding into everything else. And I think that means for leaders. We're hearing a lot of more words that are important for leadership just in the last few years and you guys have heard them like humanity, vulnerability, authenticity, humility, like all these things that people want and expect from their leaders. We can spend a lot of time talking about like those are big ideas and big words, but what I think it means for leaders is just that as they're navigating the internal challenges, the external challenges, figuring out like what is the role of companies in society?

Adam Bryant:

When do you weigh in on issues more broadly, is that you have to do a lot of internal sort of excavation work and reflection about who you are as a leader, to figure out what your personal values are and why they're important to you and how they became important to you and what those look like in practice.

Adam Bryant:

And I like to use metaphors and I think if you do that work and figure out who you are as a leader, that provides a little bit of like a centerboard on a sailboat, and the point of a centerboard on a sailboat is to keep you in a true direction, keep you relatively stable, even when there's pretty high winds and a lot of chop around you. So you've got to decide, like, what's important to you, what are the hills you're going to die on, what are the lines you're not going to cross, what are your values that everybody can come to rely on and see you as being predictable in the best way. And that is a long conversation that people need to have with themselves, and so to me, like that's one of the things that this moment that we're living in, I think, demands from leaders.

Shye Gilad:

Yeah, it really describes how you start with that. First really big question is do you really want to lead? And to me that's so compelling because so many of us are Accidental entrepreneurs and so many of us, even within organizations, had leadership opportunities thrust upon us or opportunities for advancement showed up and and we raised our hand. Or maybe we didn't. Maybe we're put into those places and maybe some of us didn't really ask for this or really have had time to do that kind of work, to really reflect on what we value, what's important and what our vision is for the way we want to be in the world.

Adam Bryant:

Exactly and to your point. I do think that a lot of people end up in leadership positions through a whole bunch of circumstances, right, but find themselves in these roles that maybe there's a little bit of like wow, I did not know that this is what I was stepping into, because leadership is these are hard jobs, right? I mean you're dealing with people problems All day long, you're putting out fires, you there's no time to do work at work, so you're doing that in the early morning or late at night, and I think sometimes people get into leadership positions and go like it just I had no idea and they're not able to do the things anymore that they're really good at, that, that they enjoy doing. And so that's why the first section of the book is called do you really want to lead. In the word really is italicized Because I just encourage everybody to really take the time and say do you want to do this? And also do as much as you can to find out what the job is going to entail.

Adam Bryant:

Talk to people who are doing it now and ask them like, what is it like? Because I'm often struck by I mean now, like with kids graduating from high school just the phenomenon of the college tour. Right like you got to go visit 10 colleges and Parents are asking their kids like, how do you feel about how you feel and do you think this will be a good fit? And yet? So there's all that sort of rig around that process and yet people step into big jobs without doing the same kind of Research and trying to figure out whether it would be a good fit. So this question of do you really want to lead to me.

Adam Bryant:

It's one of three core questions that people need to ask themselves. So one of them is do you really want to do this and are you clear right about what it entails and your motivations? Another core question I think people need to wrestle with is what, to you, is the difference between management and leadership? Right, because there's no cookie cutter answer to that, but you should be clear in your mind what the answer to that question is, so that you make sure you focus your energies on the leading part, not necessarily the managing part.

Adam Bryant:

And then the third question is what I mentioned before is the simple question of who are you as a leader? And I always tell people you will probably go through your entire career and nobody will ever ask you the question who are you as a leader? But I think there's a really good return on investment of when you put in the time to figure out well, how would you answer that question. And I think, if you are thoughtful about it, think about, say, your three or four core values, why they're important to you, the stories about how they became important to you, what they look like in practice. What they look like in practice. I think just knowing the answer, that builds self awareness, it builds that magical quality of executive presence, that sense of common confidence that I think every leader should aspire to have.

Shye Gilad:

That's so true, there's so much in there. I really am curious because you've spoken to, as you've said, thousand plus CEOs over the years and really honed in on these ideas. So I have to put question to back to you, because what is your personal definition of the difference between management and leadership?

Adam Bryant:

To me. I use the metaphor of a playbook. So I think, to be a manager, there's a little bit of an expected outcomes that somebody is giving you. So the bosses comes to you and say, look, we've got this project. We know what we need you to do, we know what good looks like, we know what the outcome is and we're giving you resources, people, time, money etc To execute this kind of preexisting like. Figure out the playbook a little bit, but we already know what we need from you. And so that's to me what management is.

Adam Bryant:

I think leadership is to first of all, really execute the management part of it well, because you have to do the core function of managing well, to be a great leader, do it really well. But then start just the questioning process of like how can I make this more efficient? How can we optimize this? How can we transform this? I have this role, I have this job description. Like how can I completely reinvent this?

Adam Bryant:

And then start looking at your bosses plate. Can I take some stuff off my bosses plate? Can I look around and see opportunities for the company that I'm going to have the courage to raise my hand and say we should try this and maybe there are problems that the business, the company has that they don't even know about, and so it's just that you got to master the core job but then always be looking that like how do I transform this, where are the opportunities? How can I go above and beyond that sort of playbook and help the company write the playbook To me? And again, we could talk about this for hours, but that's the one I gravitate to. Like that is a very specific mindset and I like the phrase. Like in most companies there's passengers and there's drivers. Right, like a lot of people just want to join a great company and kind of be passengers in the back seat, but then there's people who have this driver mentality. They want to contribute, they want to help lift the organization and their team.

Craig Moen:

Adam, I wanted to back up just a slight bit to cover one thing regarding. You mentioned the history of management and the history of leadership and going back in time and things have changed Can you highlight some real differences between leadership decade, two or three ago and the new skills and requirements that have changed for this time period? What does it look like or what have you experienced?

Adam Bryant:

Yeah. So I think leadership was a lot easier when you go back decades. Right, it was much more of a top-down militaristic. The world was more stable and predictable and the function of business and management leadership in some ways was to sort of optimize what you were already doing, right? That's the sort of Six Sigma and lean manufacturing and all those things. And so now I think again I keep coming back to this idea that leadership has gotten a lot harder. And then you ask yourself well, why is leadership so hard?

Adam Bryant:

And the framework that I use and the way I like to think about leadership is that it is a series of balancing acts or paradoxes or contradictions. And I always tell people if you're setting out to learn how to manage and lead people and you start buying books and reading articles and things like that, I always tell people get a neck brace, because you are going to get whiplash from all the contradictory advice out there. Right, because everybody's telling you lead from the front or you got to lead from the back. You got to create a sense of urgency, but be patient, right? We're hearing a lot about compassionate leadership right now. People are going through a lot. You have to be compassionate, but you also have to hold people accountable and make sure that they're driving performance, and so, to me, part of the art of being a leader today is understanding that all these paradoxes, these contradictions, those are not or propositions.

Adam Bryant:

And if you find yourself thinking about, well, am I supposed to do this, or am I supposed to do that, or am I supposed to act like this or that, you have to understand that it's not an or proposition anymore. These are and propositions. You need to do both, not at the same time, but you need to understand that leadership is a balancing act and then be able to flex based on what the moment demands, because there's sometimes you need to really listen and make sure that your team is heard, get all the input, but then there's also a moment where you really need to be directive and say, hey, everybody, this may not be a popular decision, but we're going to go left, we're not going to go right, but I want you to know I've heard everybody. And so to me, that's what leadership is about and why it's so hard. But I think that paradox is balancing acts, contradictions, if you will provides a little bit of a handy framework for you to diagnose whatever challenge you're dealing with about leadership at any particular moment.

Craig Moen:

That's some great insight. I appreciate that so much. One of the things that comes to mind is everyone has their favorites. If you will, I'm curious are there any current favorites that you have as far as leaders, as examples?

Adam Bryant:

I don't, because I feel like, look, we all know the sort of well-known leaders out there, but you never quite know if the sort of how the person acts day-to-day matches the publicity around that person, right? So it's hard to know.

Craig Moen:

Maybe a better question is who are you watching these days?

Adam Bryant:

Well, I'm intrigued by the big brand name CEOs, just like everybody else's. I think it makes for interesting reading. There's some big personalities Everybody's reading about Elon Musk these days and others and I will say that my approach to understanding leaders is and I use this in pretty much every interview that I do is to really ask questions about their early years, when they were a kid. Who raised them? What were the circumstances? I bring this up because I think we need to acknowledge that I'm repeating myself that leadership is really hard, and I think there's a simple question of why do people want these jobs, right? I've interviewed a number of people over the years, and this phrase comes up often that people are drawn to the fire, right, and so there's a sort of big, complicated problem and they are drawn to that, whereas other people might feel like they want to run from that because, like, that's like, why would I put myself through that? And so I'm always intrigued by what motivates people to take on these jobs, and I've done a little bit of my sort of it's a qualitative database, right, all these interviews that I've done, but some of the patterns to me are pretty clear, and I'd say that one bucket, if you will, is that there's just people faced a lot of adversity early in their life, right, and for whatever reason, that adversity had spurred them on to want to have a greater sense of control of their sort of destiny of their life and that motivates them to have these jobs.

Adam Bryant:

And another common theme is some version of sort of the immigrant story. Right, maybe they're children of immigrants and that they were the first in their families to always be doing new things and that, frankly, just becomes their comfort zone. So leadership challenges are just another new path and they've been on the new path for a long time. And so those are a couple of the common themes. But when I'm watching leaders and trying to understand their behaviors, I always do want to go back into the early years and try and figure out, like where does that drive come from? Where does the stamina come from? What are they running towards? What are they running from? Because we're all a combination of those things.

Shye Gilad:

And it really speaks to your earlier question about who are you as a leader and what do you value. And in that reflection, I think it can be helpful to look back and try to understand. What are the things that make me tick. Why do I show up in this way? What's caused me to gravitate towards these positions?

Adam Bryant:

Yeah, and I think there are limits to how much we can shrink ourselves right and there are limits to self-awareness. But there's a key insight from one CEO that I interviewed this young woman named Layla Janna, and she died tragically a few years ago. But when I interviewed her, she was telling me about her upbringing and it was really tough childhood. I mean, she moved a lot, was really bullied at school, really rough relationship with her parents, and yet she seemed to have this incredibly positive attitude. And so I asked her like where do you get your positive attitude from? And she said five words that I've never forgotten. She said reality is just source material, and what she means by that is like we go through our lives, we have experiences and we sort of say, okay, well, this is reality, this is our reality.

Adam Bryant:

But I think we need to be aware of the fact that we are telling ourselves a story about our experiences, that we are in effect, writing history books about ourselves or editing film, if you will, about what we just went through, to create a story. And I think that insight alone lets you and helps you step outside yourself and just ask the question well, what story am I telling myself? And as leaders, you need to be aware of certain traps as well as leaders, but just as human beings like, there's the victim trap that people fall into. I mean you stuff could be going wrong with the business you're trying to build and you start thinking like why is this happening to me? And that's the victim narrative and that's not productive, right? Or there's the unfairness narrative that sometimes people have, and that's not productive either. So to me, like that's a really key insight just around self-awareness and again, you can hire a professional to help you with self-awareness, but I think you can do a lot of work on your own.

Shye Gilad:

Yeah, and I think a lot of that speaks to surrounding yourself with other people that will challenge your ideas right, and that can help identify those stories, even within the workplace. One of the challenges that seems to emerge is that we know that many great leaders specifically like to surround themselves with people that will check their biases right Not everyone, but many great leaders do use this type of a technique.

Adam Bryant:

But just to build on your point. There's a very specific tactic that I heard from one leader that I thought made a lot of sense, because your point is well taken. Everybody has their blind spots right. But one leader I interviewed she will say not only to her board but to her executive team she just says up front, I have blind spots, everybody has blind spots. It is your responsibility to help me work my blind spots. So essentially she's sort of saying this is part of your job. I'm not just asking you to give me feedback or anything like that, but just to say this is your job to help illuminate my blind spots.

Shye Gilad:

I mean that right in and of itself. What a leadership lesson there. Right? Just that tactic of naming that and setting that expectation, because the flip side of that is it's also my job to name those for you Exactly when we wonder, like, how do we develop the next generation of leaders? Every leader says they want more, right? I know that you talked to a lot of corporations, a lot of boards, a lot of CEOs. Part of what this book speaks to is being a tool to help others that aspire to be the next generation of leaders. So how are they thinking about this challenge?

Adam Bryant:

Yeah, it's a great question and I, you know full disclosure. I work for consulting firm that does leadership development. That said, I mean in our work. I think one of the insights that we hear often, whether it's from boards or leadership teams, is that the historical thing that people have looked for in leaders and high potentials in upcoming is that sort of domain expertise, the technical expertise like can they drive performance?

Adam Bryant:

And I think there's this sort of awareness recently. It's like wow, like all these soft skills, right, and the soft stuff is the hard stuff, but the authenticity, the humanity like, do people trust this leader? Are they good communicators? People are suddenly realizing, wow, that's just as important as the hard stuff. And when they find a leader they sort of latch onto them. Go boy, this is the person. And I think there's a sort of growing recognition that we need to have more of a almost infrastructure leadership development infrastructure that teaches both the hard stuff and the softer stuff. And in some ways I think business schools are reflective of that because their roots are in the hard stuff, the accounting and all that. But I don't know if any business course or business school has a course on how to be a better listener, but I think every business school should have a course on how to be a better listener.

Shye Gilad:

Couldn't agree with you more, and I think we should banish the term soft skills. It would probably take a long time to make it go away, but in it of itself, I mean, that's just set a negative connotation for what may be one of the most important disciplines, exactly.

Adam Bryant:

Yeah, and we talked about this for a while, but the words that I would like to get rid of, I mean, I think it would be an interesting thought experiment if the entire business world stopped using the word strategy and instead replace it with the word bets, because to me, in this era of so much disruption and unpredictability and instability, that we need to be more honest with ourselves and as leaders and with our teams is that what companies do is they make bets. They call them strategy, but strategy documents are often highly polished, with spreadsheets that go out 10 years and projecting profits down to the penny right, and the world doesn't work that way. And it's not just any bet. It's put down a random bet, it's an educated bet, it's an informed bet. But I think every company is in some stage of transformation and one of the challenges is transformation is getting people up for that journey, like recognizing that there's some risk here. And I think one of the ways you get everybody on board with the idea of like there is risk involved in what we do is to call things bets. Because, again, I just keep coming back Companies make bets, right.

Adam Bryant:

They're betting on consumer behavior, macroeconomic forces, whatever it is. They are making bets and to underscore that, I always make the points like you imagine being in the pitch meeting when Airbnb the founders were pitching to VC firms. It's like strangers are going to stay in strangers homes. I don't think that's going to happen. Well, it turns out what they will. Or Uber strangers are going to get in strangers cars? I don't think so. Well, it turns out they will. And that's what companies do? They make bets. Sometimes they pay off and sometimes they don't.

Shye Gilad:

Yeah, and that leadership mindset of recognizing that and putting that into your language, because you have to set that tone for the game that we're all playing right. The other thing that I'm hearing in there, at least, that it's making me think about, is, by calling it a strategy, it's almost like you're suggesting that it's going to lead to a knowable outcome. It's a fallacy there, right? It's like you know you're making a bet, just like a coach is going to come up with a strategy for a specific game, and it's going to be based on tendencies. This is how we think the opposing team will act, based on the film we've watched or what we see. Right. But in the business environment, you're working with so many different variables and so often, despite your best efforts to learn more about the other players in the marketplace or the folks you're trying to attract and sell to, you're just never going to have perfect information. So at best, as you said, you're trying to reduce that probability. But make no mistake, the risk is definitely there.

Adam Bryant:

Yeah, and it's like the sort of dated cliche of business, is the Glossy Business Magazine cover shot where you know and we all know, we can see it in our minds I write the CEO, their arms are folded across their chest and this look in their eye and the whole image is like this person sees the future right.

Adam Bryant:

Like they've got so much conflict because they know they can see around corners and it's like nobody's buying that anymore. And I think one way to build a sense of cohesion and teamwork is to have a more honest conversation. Like nobody knows right, you just. You make informed and educated bets, ideally based on data and analysis, but at the end of the day, it's a bet.

Shye Gilad:

Yeah, and being willing to name that and accept this idea that you're not always going to know right, and that's part of the process. So I mean, there was one part of your book that was really compelling when you talk about this stoplight thing, where you find yourself at the stoplight like your face with such a big problem. And everyone listening right now has been in a case where they have found themselves in a situation where they got some news that was so bad that they thought it might jeopardize payroll the kind of stuff that keeps you up at night. Or you've just lost your biggest account, or you know what are we going to do? Or this piece of information that could turn the company inside out is going to become public. What are we going to do? And in that moment you don't have the answer, and the way you describe it is you know you're at the stoplight and it hits you, or you get that call and the light turns green and you're still sitting there because you're just almost frozen in that moment.

Adam Bryant:

And I think one of the sub themes of that challenge and you described for business owners trying to make payroll and stuff that I think one of the challenges for all leaders and business owners is like how much of the challenge do you fully absorb and act as a buffer for all your team to kind of protect them, and how much do you share with them? Right, and I think that's another balancing act, right, Because either extreme isn't right. You shouldn't shoulder at all but you shouldn't be sort of just a pass through vehicle for like the daily stress hit, right, Because that's going to rattle the team and sort of figuring out how to hit that balancing act. And I often think about the theme of resilience, which everybody talks about like more is better, right, in terms of resilience and its quality we want for ourselves and our kids and all that other stuff. But I also find that I don't think people talk enough about sort of that.

Adam Bryant:

It can be a double-edged sword because very often people who are resilient faced adversity earlier in their lives maybe and they can follow into a trap where they're saying to themselves it's like I'm going to put all this on my back and figure it out because I am resilient. I've been in tough positions before. I've gotten myself out of them, and this sort of default can be. Well, I need to put all this on my back and figure it out and, like a lot of our mentors at our firm and a lot of CEOs, like the lesson is you can't fly around with your Superman cape or Superwoman cape, right, You've got to reach out to your team, frame it up and say, like these are the challenges. I need your best thinking. I'm confident that we can figure out a way through this, but I can't do it alone. I need your help, and I think that will inspire people to really pick up an ore and help row.

Shye Gilad:

Yeah, I think that's exactly right, and it does really speak to one of these modern challenges that you address so well, which is we say we want transparency, we say we want authenticity, now more than ever, because we're surrounded by so much fake media in 100 different ways, so much information and misinformation, and it's very hard to know what's real, and so I think that's why people are so starving for more authenticity. And then you also have to balance this out of what do you share and how do you share, and knowing that when you are the leader, people are always watching your behavior, you know, all of the time for cues.

Adam Bryant:

Yeah, it keeps coming back to this idea of boy like. Leadership has always been harder, but I think it's gotten a lot harder and I have really deep respect for people who appreciate the responsibility and the privilege of leadership and want to take on the challenge. I really do, because ideally the motivation is that they want to build and lift an organization and the people around them and help people have fulfilling careers and grow and develop, and those are all great things.

Shye Gilad:

Yeah well, we certainly respect your contributions All of this time. You've dedicated such a large part of your career to understanding these really hard problems and offering us some ways of thinking about it, and this new book certainly gives us more language to think about how to do exactly that. So we thank you for that, adam. Appreciate it, appreciate the conversation very much.

Craig Moen:

We could go on for hours because Adam's experience is phenomenal and the way he's put his book together is really a contribution. So there's so many topics in this book that have true relevancy to great leadership, and it's really things like the due to say, race show network without networking. Navigating office politics Now, navigating office politics is a whole episode in itself. Getting this book is really an elevation, so it's really a must. Really impressed with what you've done, adam, and we really appreciate your time today. That means a lot to me, thank you.

Adam Bryant:

And thank you so much for joining us today.

Craig Moen:

It was a great conversation and I really appreciate the smart questions. Is there anything else you'd like to leave with our audience today?

Adam Bryant:

Happy to. My personal website is adambrionthbookscom. My firm is the XCO group. We're a leadership development firm and our website is Xco leadershipcom excoleadershipcom. And just encourage all the listeners to subscribe to my interview series on LinkedIn. So I've got four interview series with CEOs, heads of HR, boards of directors and others, and it's not about me. It's about what you can learn from all these leaders, because it's my focuses on leadership, and I'm all about insights and great stories that bring those insights to life and how to put those insights into action. So invite everybody to jump into the pool.

Craig Moen:

Joining us in the studio today has been Adam Bryant, author of the new book the Leap to Leader how ambitious managers make the jump to leadership. You can find out more about Adam, as well as find links to his book and resources, all on our website at businessownersradiocom.

Speaker 1:

Thank you for joining us on Business Owners Radio. We hope you enjoyed today's show. As always, you can read more about each episode, along with links and offers, in the show notes on our website, businessownersradiocom. We want to hear your feedback. Please leave comments on this show or suggestions for upcoming episodes. Tell your fellow business owners about the show and, of course, you would love the stars and comments on iTunes. Till next time, keep taking care of business.

The Leap to Leader
The Complexity of Leadership
Importance of Leadership and Informed Bets