#90: Truth, Enablement, And Transformation Of Business with Colin Nanka

Welcome to The Conscious Pivot Podcast with international speaker, business mentor, bestselling author of Pivot, and your host, Adam Markel. The Conscious Pivot shares the stories and wisdom of people who have successfully reinvented some area of their business and personal life. You'll gain powerful insights into how you can fully embrace new opportunities, increase your performance, and master the art and science of innovation and resilience. So please join Adam as he guides you on your conscious pivot.

Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of the Conscious Pivot Podcast. I'm your host, Adam Markel, and I'm incredibly happy to be alive in this moment. I hope you're all smiling at that because I'm not the only one who ought to be happy that we're alive. If you're listening right now, it is a blessing that we get to be awake and alive And it's a beautiful day regardless of whatever the weather might be outside. Internally, our weather is set for it's a beautiful day. It's an incredible opportunity today. And what a blessing it is to be just here and now and in this. So, thank you for tuning in. Thank you for loving this show. Thank you for loving on our company, our team, and the people that we have as guests. I've got incredible guests to share with you today. So, Starting with my gratitude for it being again a new day, for the fact that for Randi and I, our marriage is healthy and strong after, gosh, almost 29 years. It's scary to say that. And our kids are healthy and all is well. So I hope all is well with you. That's my prayer, that everybody is experiencing a moment of wellness right this second, that we can all breathe into that. I'm gonna take a deep breath myself, appreciate the wellness that is everywhere, that that is our natural state of being. You know, it doesn't always feel like that and certainly there are things that are contraindications, I suppose, things that would otherwise have us believe that there's some state of unwellness and this is more of a belief than it is anything I could prove but I truly believe that our natural state of being is wellness and sometimes we just have to be reminded to come back to that understanding and that truth and that we have to allow for it as well. So I'll leave it to you to unpack or unravel that mystery a little bit but I've got somebody that— That really embodies that principle, I think, right now. Somebody that lives in wellness, has been doing incredible work in the world for a lot of years, has been taking care of himself on the inside as well. I think somebody that has committed a good portion of his life to following his passion, to pursuing a mission, and not selling out, so to speak, selling out that mission and that purpose for the almighty dollar or for corporate career, even though he's managed to cultivate a really great corporate career. So what I think you're going to find today is a gentleman that has discovered what some people might call balance. I'm not a fan of the word balance, frankly. You think about what balance looks like, I think it's somebody that's on a tightrope. That's too much work, man. That's just too much struggle and the risks are too great. But harmony, there's a word that's different. So I think this gentleman, Cullen Nenka, is somebody that embodies and is modeling harmony in the world. He is the Senior Director Enablement for North American Sales and Leadership Development at the world's leading customer relationship management company, most likely have heard of, Salesforce.com. He is a proven sales leader with more than 20 years of sales experience, including time at Salesforce and at Xerox Corporation. Colin completed his business degree in Canada, we're not going to hold that against him, at the University of Alberta. And in his spare time, he competes in multi-day self-sustained adventure races in the world's most treacherous terrains, including the Sahara Desert, Gobi Desert, Iceland, Grand Canyon, Antarctica, and most recently in Patagonia. He has a passion for writing, collaborating, learning, and empowering his community to go further. I think you're going to really enjoy this talk today. I know I am going to enjoy it thoroughly. Welcome to the show, Cullen. Thank you.

Adam, pleased to be here. Thank you.

Yeah. What a pleasure, buddy. We were chatting before we hit the record button and I was saying I hadn't met Cullen before. He's referred through somebody that my wife and I came to meet, somebody that we've had on our podcast. And Randy was the person that spoke to Cullen first and she really was taken by this gentleman. So Cullen, I say that after all the years that I know this amazing woman that I get to share my life with, when she likes somebody, she's usually right. She's on it. So I'm not putting out big shoes I don't want to do this for you to fill or anything. I want you to just be yourself, but you already come with like a really great, great—

It's amazing. We had a great rhythm in our conversation. I could tell in talking to her that I was really going to enjoy talking to you. So I'm excited to be here today.

Yeah, way cool. Let me ask you something. That's a wonderful bio and introduction. What's not written in that bio that you would love for people to know about you? Resilience. It's the unsung hero in every success story that you will ever hear about. And in times of massive change and disruption, the kind of rapid change that we're all experiencing as leaders, as business owners, as entrepreneurs, we have to learn how to not only increase our own resilience, but that of our teams. So right now we have a powerful opportunity for you to find out just how resilient you are. Some years ago, my team and I created the resilience assessment that more than 5,000 business leaders across the globe have taken. And all you have to do to get your own free resilience leader assessment Is go to resiliencerank.com. It takes less than 3 minutes, and it's our gift to you for being the leader that you already are. Other free resources and tools will accompany your score instantly. So go to resiliencerank.com and find out just how resilient you are.

As you're reading it out, I was like, I think I need to shorten that a little bit and also get to the essence. Of what I'm about. But the first thing that comes up to mind for me is I'm a lifelong learner. I'm a teacher, I'm a collaborator. You know, I like blogging, I'm a creator, and I really love giving back. And so for me, when I wake up every morning, and I love the way you open with gratitude and how you talked about harmony, because I do feel that I am focused on harmony and focused on presence every morning. is I just love learning every single day. And I am grateful for the 1, 2, 3, or 4 little nuggets that I'm able to kind of take in and I get excited about it. And I often share those back. I blog every morning and I share those back with a community that I've been building. And that's part of what gives me joy and kind of gets me fired up every day. And that's not part of my job. That's just who I am and what I love to do. So That really spoke to me.

It sounds like you're regenerating something inside of yourself when you do that work because it's work nonetheless. I mean, it's just a question of, right, we're going to work hard. The question is whether we make hard work of it.

Right. Yeah. It's a, you know, I make time for it every day. I know we'll talk about rituals at some point in this conversation, but it's one of the first things I do. It gets me into a positive state first thing in the morning and just really allows me to hit the center. Every day.

Yeah, that's beautiful. What's one thing that you're grateful for in this moment?

So we were talking about this before we started. I am on a journey this year. I'm having my first child in less than 30 days.

Yeah, baby!

Baby

girl!

Yeah, I waited till a little bit later in life. I turned 44 this year. This is my first child, but I also waited a little bit later in life to find the love of my life. And that would be Miss Blake Ross, who's my wife. And we are just overjoyed that we are going to bring a baby girl into the world very soon.

Wow, dude, that's just so cool. As a daddy of 3 daughters— so we have 3 girls and a boy, and, you know, our knucklehead son who I absolutely adore, he's the best— girls are, at least in my experience, man, they're good for the daddy. You're getting a treat very soon. You know, it's inspiring and I think there's a lot of people now, I'm a little older than you, not much but a little bit, and people are having babies, having kids later in life. They certainly, when we were getting ready to marry and start our life and have kids, it was more prevalent people were having kids in their 20s or even early 30s. Yeah. I think we stopped having the babies sort of in our late 30s, not quite 40 but just about there. So I think it speaks to a lot of people who are putting off You know, we're living longer, people want to live longer, they have more to do, and people are, I suppose, going to be doing things much later in life. There's almost no retirement age, it seems, anymore, which is good. I don't personally want to sit in a rocking chair and wait to die.

Neither do I.

Yeah, so kids will keep you young for a long time because, man, there's always something that they're learning and you get to learn those things or relearn those things with them. their experiences of life. So you talk about a journey, you use the word journey, an adventure journey. But let's go back to something else earlier I stated about your experience in life, and that is that you've done some adventurous things. You've climbed mountaintops and walked in deserts and hiked. And I'd love to get back to the root of why it is that you've done that and how it is that you've also managed to do that in the process of also curating a great career for a great company. And I think there's a lot of people out there that would probably be really curious about how you do those things. How can you do both of those things? Because I think there are people who've given up their dream or given up things that they love to do, whether they call it their dream or not, given up their passion for things to grind it out. I mean, that was a word that you and I used before we hit the record button too. Yeah. People grinding. And I don't know that that's necessarily in and of itself a bad thing that you grind, because as we said, being in business today is a grind. It's just a question of whether it feels like a grind, whether it's grinding you down in the process of grinding the thing that you're working on. And if you're grinding something for a purpose and it gives you fulfillment and other people's lives are made better because you know how to get at the rock and grind it, fantastic. That's why I'm wearing a shirt that says resilience. I suppose it's pretty appropriate because you've got to be incredibly resilient to be in business, whether you're a small business owner, an entrepreneur, or you're working as a part of the corporate, the greater corporate scheme of things. But to keep your dream alive and to do the things you want to do at the same time that you're also working for a business agenda, whether that's your agenda or a corporate agenda, is not an easy harmonization. We'd love to learn from you how it is you managed to do both, buddy.

Well, it's very appropriate that you're wearing the resilience shirt because after what I would call a 10-year journey, and I'll go back to the start of that in recent work that I've done for myself, I've had a business coach for a decade. And so I've done a lot of internal work and we're trying to really capture everything that I've done in this last 10 years. And resilience, right, is really what we've captured. And there's a lot of attributes to go into that. But if I go back to the start, it happened out of crisis for me. I left the company. I'd been at Xerox for a decade. I had some very good experience there. One of the top companies in the world that teaches you how to sell. And then I left that company and I started a new journey with Salesforce. And I had some success in my early years. I was one of the top sales reps in the world. For a couple of years, I had some really high achievements. I got to spend some time at our CEO, Marc Benioff's house in Hawaii when he brought some of the top salespeople there and I was climbing up and I was like, wow, like I've worked really hard and I've arrived. And then all of a sudden the next year I fell flat on my face and I thought I was doing the same work or the same quality of work that I'd done the year before. But as many people know, when you went through 2008 and the market collapsed, You had to do things very differently in order to achieve just getting to par. And so I actually had 2 years that I really struggled and it really affected the faith I had in my professional capabilities. And at that time I decided I needed a little bit of space from work. And so I ran away and I'll come back around to that, to Africa. And I decided, you know, I needed to go on a little bit of journey, a little bit of soul searching. And so I went and did a climb up Mount Kilimanjaro. And during that climb, I almost quit 3 times. I got sick one day. I was just at the end of my rope a different day. I got altitude sickness, you know, near the top and literally sleeping overnight at the top of Mount Kilimanjaro after we had got there. So we had got there and I was like, nothing else can go wrong. Literally in the back of my head, I had these soft spots of what was building altitude sickness. And I thought, geez, am I actually going to make it down off the mountaintop? And so in the morning I'm green. We all start heading down and the more we get down this mountain, the more oxygen we get in. And I'm starting to feel better. And as I'm getting down and I kind of get out of that worrying state, I started to realize what I had accomplished in climbing up stage by stage and the ability that I had to grind The ability I had to work through anxiety, that I could stretch myself farther than I had been before, really physically and mentally. And I started to think about how I would apply those principles to when I got back into the work world. And I slowly started layering them in and my performance slowly started to come back to where it had been before. But what I also realized at the end of that journey, I had been raising money for a school in Africa. And this was through a friend of mine who had this nonprofit foundation, the Kilimanjaro Education Foundation, which I now sit on the board of that foundation. And I went to a local school where kids had nothing, and I was able to bring them something. I brought them books, I brought them pens, pencils, and to see the joy on their face— what that all built for me was an adventure where I learn and grow And there's anxiety, and I'm able to take what I learn back into the professional life, but where I also come back with gratitude for when things are— when I'm down and things don't look as pretty as they could, I think back often to the first time I visited that school and just seeing the joy in the children's face. I didn't realize it at the time, but that became my secret sauce for how I would approach every day. And every morning, and I've gone on to do many other adventures since then. We'll talk about a couple, but that was for me, I was slowly building the awareness for myself that I think I've captured something for myself. My connection to nature changes my perspective. So when you were talking about grind before, what I visualize is when you're grinding yourself down, you're chipping the rocks off. But when you're building something and you're grinding hard, In order to capture professional growth, you're actually building on top of that rock. And so when you were talking about that, I can see it, and that's the way I feel how I've really rebuilt my career.

Yeah, beautiful. So many things you just said resonate with me. We have a foundation that we created a few years back called Peace Feels Like, where we contribute to the Unstoppable Foundation, which builds schools in Kenya. And we got to do that last year, fortunately enough, to be able to build a school there. It is— to say it's inspiring is Putting it mildly, it is definitely cause for a moment of self-awareness that there's a lot we take for granted. I mean, we take— That's a gross understatement by itself, right? How much it is we do truly take for granted, like clean water and food that's free of parasites and education, availability of education and things like that. So there's no question that in terms of resilience, gratitude plays a big part. Peace and resilience for me.

Yes.

So it sounds like that's the case for you as well.

I was thinking about this this morning. I was having breakfast with a friend of mine who's a CEO in a company, and we were talking about challenge and overcoming adversity. Into my first or second adventure, I really figured out the way to overcome adversity is through good questioning, good powerful questioning. I found when I was at the end of my rope, I started to build that awareness of I'm having a major Challenge here and brute force is not taking me through it, but what is the learning opportunity in this moment? And me being a lifelong learner, it just kind of— it was an epiphany I had in the middle of the desert in one of my adventures, and it reframed the whole situation that I was in. I literally started laughing and I was like, well, you're not tough enough. You're not strong enough to handle this moment. Realize that, embrace it, and just move forward one step at a time. And I've used powerful questions, and every time I get into a challenging situation, it just allows me to reframe the entire situation I'm in.

That's a part of our recipe for resilience, involves 3 things. One is that we frame the situation in a certain way that's different than the way we're currently framing it. So, and the second piece is that we extract The nugget. What's the golden nugget? Or my grandmother would call it the little gem. What's the little gem that changes your life because you have this new awareness? Is there something to be grateful for in the fact that you've learned something? And when you actually learn something or have the recognition you're learning something, it's an ownership. You're taking ownership of a moment in time in your life or an experience in your life. Usually it's a time when you wouldn't want to repeat necessarily. You're looking at it in some ways it's negative or it's hard or whatever it is. But the moment you own it, it's as if you get this golden ticket to advance because you get the learning, you get to move forward. You don't get the learning, you stay stuck. And that idea of framing something in a positive light is so centered on the questions you ask yourself. I believe questions and answers are cause and effect. It's sowing and reaping. It's like so many things in life where the one thing precipitates the other. They will work together. So if you ask a question, you will get an answer. Yes. You ask a question, I think Tony Robbins would say that, you get the answer. You ask a better question, you get a better answer. And the only thing I never can say for sure is when you get the answer. So even on spiritual grounds, you might ask questions, large, big questions at times in your life when you're feeling a bit lost or something like that. You ask a great question or a question, you will get an answer.

I can directly relate to that because when I was wandering through the the Gobi Desert in one of my adventure races in 2012, I had been wandering for about 12 hours and I had been asking questions and I didn't get that answer until much later, until the middle of the night. And all of a sudden it came upon me, but it seemed like it came really fast. And when it came, a huge impact on me. When I saw I had 6 hours left in this race, I was excited. I started to laugh. I was like, I see the end. Yeah. of the race. I see the light at the end of the tunnel because I've now switched to a positive mindset. So it was a big epiphany for me.

Yeah.

Yeah.

When you consider that the possibility anyhow that time and space collapse, and we know this because we can look back 10 years ago in our lives, where'd that time go, buddy? Where did the time and space go to? I mean, it took 10 years for that to elapse, and yet it's an instantaneous thing. It happened in a snap, just like the next 10 years will happen in a snap or in a blink.

Yes.

So, time and space disappear. We realize the illusion of it at various points, so that, yes, the answer and the question become one and the same. It's Chiang's statement from, I think it was Jonathan Livingston Seagull, where Chiang, the mentor Seagull, is saying something to the effect that the moment you decide, it's already happened. The moment we make a decision, it's this thing has happened. You just strip out all the pivots along the way, all the time and space in between, and it's happened, which is a remarkable thing. I want to close a loop too for myself, which is that when I think about empowering questions, I go to my wife because Randy has for so long in our pivot journeys, which have been really interesting and most interestingly after we started the use that terminology, incidentally. But she says, what's the creative opportunity? That's a question I want everybody to hear. I want to pass on my wife's goddess wisdom in that. What's the creative opportunity? In any situation, if you can ask that question, doesn't mean you're going to get an answer in the moment. That's the small print. That's the lawyer, the ex-lawyer in me. You will get an answer, but when? That's the mystery of it. But what is the creative opportunity that's presented? And then obviously you've got to take care of yourself as well in that recipe for resilience, framing it, creating a new frame for it, being able to see and extract, even mine, dig for the wisdom. And then how is it that you take care of yourself? Where does self-care play a role? Because the work that you've been doing, I mean, it's very challenging work. I want you to talk about that today as well. Enablement, what does that mean? Working with 1,500 sales People at a massively credible company, state-of-the-art, new frontier, new paradigm company, growing leaps and bounds, major responsibility on your shoulders, and yet you're also going to become a daddy and you're pursuing your passion still to this day. You've got to be plenty resilient. And my guess is that you've learned to take care of yourself inside and out. So I want to track into some of that territory with you, trek, I guess, into that territory with you. Yeah.

Absolutely. I think there's 2 things that come to mind as you mentioned those, and I'll take a step back, say 5 or 6 years. One of the things that helped me get through my second adventure race— and we'll probably talk about the first one at some point— in the Sahara Desert, which I actually had a giant failure and I rebounded from that. But in the second race in China in 2012, I did all of the physical and mental training and really doubling down and preparing for that. But one of the things that I trained for kind of by accident was spending some time with a good friend of mine, Nikki Poole, who's a yoga instructor. And we started doing some one-to-one training and she noticed as I was going through my poses, whether you're in downward dog or you're in star pose, for anyone who takes yoga, is that I was, as I was opening up, I wasn't breathing. She goes, you go from one side to the other without breath. And so we just worked on breathing. Ah, and just even as I think about just taking that breath as we're talking, it relaxes me. It brings me presence. But why I share that is the single reason that I got through that race is because of breath, breathing in and breathing out. I actually wrote it on my wrists, breathing in on the left wrist, breathing out on the right wrist. And it just reminded me to breathe and be present because every 5 minutes in that race, we're at 40+ degrees Celsius for my Canadian friends out there, we're 110+ degrees Fahrenheit for my American friends. And your brain is just getting fried during this really tough terrain. And you just need to remember where you are and just come back to present in every moment and start chunking down. into 5-minute intervals. And mentally it can be super taxing when you know how long you need to be out there. But if you think longer than 5 minutes ahead, just that how much you're taking on can overwhelm you. So I learned to chunk things down into smaller bite-sized chunks. And that goes back to the reframing that we talked about. When I get put under pressure, when I'm in my job, when I've got a heavy week ahead, I've learned that when things don't go well in a 11:00 AM meeting, but I've got a challenging 12:00 PM meeting coming up. In between those meetings for 5 minutes, I'll just sit and I'll breathe and I will recenter myself and just get refocused to go take on that 12 o'clock meeting. I actually learned that from our Chief Financial Officer, Mark Hawkins. I had the opportunity to have dinner with him and a group of people a number of years ago, and he goes from Speaking to 1,000 people to doing our earnings call the next day to flying to Japan in order to run the Tokyo Marathon with his son. I was like, how do you do it? And you'll love this. He said, I pivot and then I shift. I'm only focused on one thing at the time and then I pivot to the next and then I shift my mindset back and forth, back and forth. And he compartmentalizes. And that so resonated with me. because of the experiences I've had out in these extreme races. And that ability to pivot or to reframe has been a big reason why I've been able to take on more in this job.

I'm so glad that you just brought that up as well, because people talk about pivots in a particular way. So I just want to follow this thread just a little bit here. Oftentimes the word pivot, like when you hear the word pivot, what do you typically— I mean, outside of the context you just created, what's the normal standard definition of a pivot to you?

2 things come to mind. It's a— a pivot can be a downward turn that you have to rebound from. So it can be coming off a failure, like a larger pivot, or you're making an adjustment in the moment. Those are the 2 things that come to me when someone says pivot.

Exactly. In the context of business and entrepreneurism and even life, pivots have this pejorative, this sort of negative connotation. Like you say, rebounding from a failure, And all that type of thing. And the book that we're developing right now, which is the next phase for the pivot work, for our body of work, is all about the moment. It's the—

I love it.

To us, that's the essential pivot, which is your next thought, but you're the next embodiment of something between. And for us, it's the heart. So it's this, how do we engage the heart to be able to activate the heart's wisdom in every— or in the next moment, in this moment and in the next moment? So that we're making decisions from that place, from that place of guidance versus the headspace. So heart space instead of headspace, which is more about guarding. This is about guidance and this is guarding. It's a protection device in many ways. Got to figure stuff out intellectually so that I can make a move that keeps me alive, keeps the species going, keeps the money coming in, keeps the food on the table. It's always sort of figuring things out and it is this interplay between that intellectual space and the heart space we're writing about and curious about. So, I love the idea of pivot shift. Pivot shift, when you think about what that— it's very clear and not simple necessarily, but it's definitive, which is empowering. And I know that a lot of the work that you do in this company is to empower people, to enable them, which is, to me, enablement is a word of empowerment. Share a little bit about what your role in the company is and what enablement looks like for you day to day. Sure.

Yeah, so we were talking about this a little bit before, and it's— enablement comes from a history of people doing training with organizations. You typically have vendors that come in and they do sales training, or they do coaching training for leaders, and a lot of companies have brought that internal into their organization. So it's really a combination of when you bring outside vendors that have expertise in, we manage that. When you have a sales motion or how people sell, especially in the technology space, we've developed our own sales motion over the 15 years that I've been around at Salesforce. I've been here 13 years, but since we've been really defining our sales motion, and then how we use technology and how we scale. We used to do a lot of in-person training, but as we grow, we're 30,000 employees now. Our goal is to grow to double that within the next 4 to 5 years, which is just Crazy. So we need to put systems and processes into place that will allow us to scale. So we need to use just-in-time training methods. We need to have videos that people can learn about our product or some of the different components of a customer just before maybe they're talking to that customer or as they're researching. There's so much to know inside Salesforce. As I say to our new account executives that start with us, You will think the— and I'm holding my hands up like the size of a watermelon. When you start, you think the spout of water that is coming towards you is the size of a watermelon. And then you get started in the company and it's the size of a beach ball and you just get blown over with all of this knowledge and information. So how do we help chunk that down into real small bites that people can understand? And we're really focused on retention. Traditionally, a lot of companies would focus on let's do training, and then those people, they're trained, and then they will go talk to customers and they get the job done. But that's not the way we learn. We need to focus on retention. Training is not a one-time process.

Mm-hmm.

It's a process over time and where we slowly chunk out the learning. And so that's— we're basically trying to drip the learning to our account executives and our leaders. So that they can understand the concepts, put them in play, practice them, come back, get a little bit more learning, and go again. And we do that both on the sales rep side, and we also do that on the sales leader side. And we're revamping our whole coaching program right now on the sales leader side so that we are dripping it out over time so they really get practice. So those are a couple of the areas that— it's a lot about what I think about every day when I get up, and a lot of how we're focused. in this model of teaching and scaling and growing our people?

Yeah. I mean, there's so much there. Sometimes we talk about the terrible Ts being toxicity and turnover. So when I was CEO of a company, it was a tiny, tiny company compared to you guys. It's a middle-level company in a lot of ways and the largest personal and business development company in North America at a certain point as well. We talked a lot about transformation and even in the curriculum that we still teach in our smaller company now, it's more designed for people who are thought leaders or people who want to get a message out in the world and want to speak to do it. So get on public speaking, big stages, small stages, TEDx stages, things of that sort to get their message really cascaded across a wider band. We're talking about transformation and I was speaking with somebody not in that space an executive at Microsoft, and we were talking about this age of transformation that we're living in, especially in the business space, and how it is that talent is acquired. How do you acquire great talent? How do you keep and retain talent? And we talked about those terrible Ts, toxicity and turnover. If a company could create some better systems and processes and really a better culture to retain its talent, to attract great talent and retain its talent, I mean, the numbers are massive in terms of what it costs a company when they are retraining and reacquiring talent, and when the talent they've got is looking elsewhere, which is 55% of people across the board, according to Harris Polls, are looking, actively looking for new work. So, half of your workforce— I'm not saying this is the case at Salesforce, but if they're no different than any other company in that respect, half the workforce is actively looking for another job. On the company's dime, which I was a CEO, so that always still sort of irked me. That was what was going on behind the scenes because it also creates toxicity in a company when people are not happy there, when they're not fulfilled, when they're actively or engaged even on company time in some respects looking elsewhere, right? So, how it is you retain that talent, I think, is really important and something I'm passionate about. So, when I speak or train in corporations as well, we talk about how it is that you do retain talent. And I think that word transformation has a big part to do with it. Something you said earlier with respect to yourself and the work that you're doing in the enablement space is giving people access to their growth, to tools and support for their own personal growth. So, constant and never-ending self-improvement is not just your personal mission, but it can be the mission of the entire workforce who isn't looking to grow. I mean, why will a person stay At a company when maybe they could get a quicker advance to a different position or even more money elsewhere? Well, they would stay where they feel heard, where they feel seen, where they feel that they're growing, where there's a community that supports their personal transformation. You talk about age of transformation, I think that corporation is undergoing a massive pivot as well. And millennials have brought this to bear because... For older folks, they don't know how to deal or don't understand millennials well. Millennials are not tough to understand. We have millennial-age kids. They want to be fulfilled. They want to be purpose-driven. They don't want to sell their soul for money like they saw some of their parents do. And when you sell something, when you sell your time and your precious life energy for money, and in the end, the company, the family that you're with takes care of you, that your future is assured, You know, you can rationalize it because that was the compact, that was the promise that was made 30, 40, 50 years ago. And then when those promises start to get broken and people find that they're laid off at age 50 or 60 or whatever it is and they don't get their retirement or they don't get the promise that they thought that was made, it's breaking that covenant, breaks the trust. So, it's not that difficult to understand why people today going into the workforce are not trusting necessarily of those promises and are looking for more of their own personal development and their own personal transformation as part of the grind that they're in for the company. So, I think what you're doing is totally state-of-the-art, creating a growth edge for people and helping them to be working toward that. Wow! The pace of change over the last couple of years has been rapid. And if you're a leader, a business owner, an entrepreneur, you know Exactly what I'm talking about. Every day it's something different and something new, but the one thing that I've learned in performing at the height of all of those roles has been that we must be resilient. In fact, it's the unsung hero in every success story that you will ever hear about, and it's the reason why my team and I created the resilience assessment that more than 5,000 business leaders across the globe have taken. And all you have to do to get your own free Resilient Leader Assessment is go to resiliencerank.com. It takes less than 3 minutes, and it's our gift to you for being the leader that you already are. Other free resources and tools will accompany your score instantly. So go to resiliencerank.com and find out just how resilient you are.

I love it. There's a couple of things I want to unpack there that you said, and trust is our company's number one value. It's been our company's number one value ever since Mark started the company. But there's 2 components to trust. We are a cloud company. And so if our platform is not working, right, we break the trust, you know, the bond with our customers. But the second, and the part that is becoming bigger on that, is the trust and authenticity that people have in us that we will do right by them. We'll do right by our customers, the individuals within our customers, but that also we do right by the entire market. Our CEO Mark has recently stood for inclusivity, for diversity in the marketplace, and he's standing for other people where maybe they don't have the voice and he does. And that's something that we in the company are so proud of. And so he's creating this bond of trust with our whole ecosystem, and that downward, that creates this bond of trust inside our organization. And so we're inspired in order to do that. And I have always been, I would like to say, like a trust detective, because the way I work is when I have trust in my leader, I will give them 150%. If I don't have that relationship, I'm not someone who can fake it. And so I've had leaders in the past who I didn't have that bond with and they didn't get the best performance out of me. But when they do, they get the best out of me. So I'm very aware as I've come through the life cycle of my career how important trust is. And often trust is just understanding and hearing people, you know, asking them simple questions. What is the best way or how do I get the most out of you? When are you at your best? Just sitting and listening and engaging. And a lot of times we get feedback through our surveys that leaders aren't spending enough time having weekly one-on-one conversations. And if they are, they're talking about what they want to talk about, but they're not sitting back and listening to the challenges and coaching and helping their sales reps or leaders. Everyone has one-on-ones and a command chain, but just to sit and listen and be present And so people feel heard. That's table stakes, but unfortunately a lot of companies out there aren't doing it. You know, in a recent survey I saw, it said 50% of people are leaving companies because of the company, but up to and more than 50% are leaving because of their bosses, right? When the bosses aren't engaging and listening and setting that foundation of trust. And it's so easy early on But a lot of people don't do it. When you first take on an employee, just to sit and ask them what their career aspirations are, what's the best way to communicate with you, what happens if we run into conflict at some point down the road— we're very likely to— how should we handle that? Simple question, but it really opens up the conversation and creates those bonds of trust.

Yeah, that's incredible. I want to ask you, what's the place of transparency? In establishing trust? Transparency and vulnerability, because when you say trust is the most important value, to me, that's what everything's built on in any relationship. What is a business? A collection of people working together for a common goal of some kind. It's people in relationship. What's a marriage? What's the relationship with your kids? Everything in this world is built on relationships. What's the most important thing in a relationship? Trust. So what is transparency, or where does transparency and vulnerability come in? play a role, especially in a business context?

Yeah, it's— I mean, I've learned through having leaders who are very transparent and learned from leaders who haven't. But I think a good beacon in our company that I've seen over time is we have a worldwide management meeting to start off every year, and there's 1,000 of our top managers in the company. Typically, it's in San Francisco, sometimes it's in Las Vegas. Our CEO, Marc Benioff, will stream that meeting Live to the entire company. He is setting the tone for what we are going to cover for the entire year, and anyone in the company can watch that meeting from the office. We have viewing parties from the office, so everyone is exactly on the same page as he is. And so I think Mark has set an unbelievable tone for our organization. And then I think from a departmental standpoint, I've always been the mind of when you have that trust with the people that you work for. You give them as much openness as possible to what's coming down the road, the next quarter, the next couple quarters. And of course, there's always some confidential information that, you know, you're not going to want to share, but I think that needs to be less and the transparency needs to be more because the more you let people into what's happening, or maybe the personal challenges that you're going through as a leader, the more that team will stand with you, behind you, and help drive you forward. And so I've learned over time to be more open and more transparent with the people that I work with.

Yeah, there's 2 books that come to mind for folks that are really curious about this topic, whether because you're an entrepreneur building a team, building a business, or you're in a big business or somebody else's business, you're an employee. The book by Patrick Lencioni, The 5 Dysfunctions of a Team, is a great book on the topic of What it is that actually creates really strong teams. We adapted that at my last company and I still teach this concept of how you create an unstoppable team from the ground, sort of that place of trust upward. But then there's another book called The Future of Work, Thomas Malone. And I'm in the middle of this book right now and devouring it, loving it. A little dry. I mean, dude, no knock on Thomas. He's a great writer. He's a Harvard professor. So I would love to sit in on one of his classes at some point. He's worked at MIT as well on faculty. But The future of work and the idea that we've got this move toward decentralization, and this is a movement away from sort of the command-control hierarchy of things. And it's interesting because empowerment is a big part of that. The idea that when you disperse power, you know, there could be the philosophy that you sort of— the central king, the queen, and kingdom somehow is losing power when it spreads out and allows power to be felt in— Or allows autonomous power to occur in areas of the company that are not in the hub, so to speak, in the senior leadership space. But I think what you're talking about with a company that's going to double in size over the— or projected to double in size over the next 3, 4 years, it's interesting whether more trust will be extended further out, sort of like in a tree, outer branches, right?

You just can't grow at that pace if you don't Empower everyone that surrounds you. I think when you were talking about that, and we talk about this in some of our leadership courses, I think people need to earn the right to earn your trust and earn your respect as a leader. But that goes both ways. That's not a one-way conversation. That's about 2 people coming together and deciding what the path forward is. I feel as a leader that I need to earn your respect as someone who works for me. And I do that by being a champion for your career. I help find opportunities. I also show you what good looks like. I model the way, and then I ask you to then take over and do the job that we are set here to do. At the same time, once they prove that they can do that, that's where it goes to empowerment and autonomy. And I don't want to have to continually tell what to do. I want to show them the opportunity and the challenge and then let them figure it out for And that's in the same way that we teach our leaders at Salesforce, is how to empower the people that work for them, and how to create an autonomous relationship so that they are more guiding and driving, as opposed to pushing down to get people to get the job done.

Yeah. Do you have a philosophy about accountability? Because I know that's another one of those areas that's always, within any company, it becomes a— well, it's something— it's important. I don't say it's an issue, but it's important in every company that— There's a culture for accountability.

I do. I do.

And obviously you're in a sales, not just a company called Salesforce, but you're running a sales, a huge sales team and the numbers matter, right? I mean,

you're

tracking your KPIs pretty seriously.

Yes.

Yeah. So what's—

Yeah. I'd say 2 places I learned accountability from. One is one of our executive vice presidents, Tony Radone, is a longtime mentor of mine here. He was always big on the acronym DWYSIWYG, do what you say you will do, which many people may have heard that, and that's by modeling the way and showing up by action. And as I've come through the arc of my career, I haven't always been accountable. You have to learn by mistakes and when you don't feel good about the way that you showed up. And the second person that I've learned that from is my business coach who firmly believes that with the discipline of accountability, you phase in and out of accountability. Meaning if you miss an opportunity to be accountable in a moment or in one day, it doesn't mean you're not accountable, right? It gives you that opportunity to come back in alignment and to get back in alignment with accountability and to show up physically and mentally and be accountable. So that's where I have learned my accountability. And then in the business sense here, we've got an accountability matrix based on your responsibilities to drive certain pillars of our business. forward. And we have visuals of red, green, blue based on how accountable you are against where you're at. We very thoughtfully drive accountability from the top on down inside Salesforce.

Yeah. Beautiful. I love the fact that you're using colors as part of the way people learn in different—

Makes it clear.

Yes, it does. It's a visual, right? So the auditory learners, well, now we're going to hit up the visual learners. And the kinesthetic learners is like, yeah, wonderful stuff there. I want to also come back and circle since we're talking about sales a little bit. You said something called sales motion. Now I would have called it sales philosophy or something. Heard it called, there's a motion that is the methodology, so to speak. Is that how you're using sales motion?

Yeah. I think people in the past may have called it a way you sell, right? Spin selling. For those who learned that back in the '90s. We have used a number of different methodologies through the years. We've tried to take those best practices, but there's certain ways that are just intangible that we know through history and experience of how to get the job done at Salesforce. And frankly, it's something that we're still working on. But when we talk about motions, it's about a tactical motion. How you open up a meeting, how you bring credibility, you generate interest, you do good discovery, you magnify some of the challenges that they're having so that you can then bring KPIs in and talk about business cases and impact. But there's also larger account focus, like how do you approach an account and that one account is your entire livelihood. It's a much different motion than if you're working with many accounts. And so we have different strategies that we use inside the company, and we're always iterating. We are very open to new ideas. If we have new people that come to the organization with big success, you know, our rule is we are open to new ideas. We're not going to change our methodology or our motion just based on one interaction, but if what you show us is beneficial to everyone and it uplevels our skills, We will certainly adapt our motion. So, I think we're continuing to adapt, and I think that's the secret of Salesforce, is that we are able to change quickly to market pressures, and also to changes from external factors in the business, and adapt and move quickly.

Yeah, agility. I mean, you said it earlier, just-in-time training methods. I mean, my father-in-law coined— he called me JIT for so many years, which was so— Which always was a little bit of a jab because he's an early guy. He was always a real early guy. And I was a lawyer for 18 years and I had a lot of— I mean, still have tons on my plate. And I would always make it to family gatherings and everything just in time.

Just in time.

So he would call me JIT. JIT, J-I-T. I've not heard it used since some other context, which is really incredible. So just-in-time training methods. I mean, That is adapting.

Yes.

That is adaptability. That's pivot. To me, that's the idea of how it is that you can utilize change in the landscape in the moment effectively.

And to millennials—

That's alchemy, right?

Well, millennials learn differently, right? They won't sit down and watch a 10-plus minute video, but they'll watch something that's less than 5 minutes. They prefer to watch something that's less than 3, and so you can chunk out those those pieces of learning, then they'll take, internalize, and move forward. And oh, by the way, people like me who've been selling for a while, we appreciate it too.

Yeah. The motion or the methodology. I love the fact that you, when you say we're open, we're open to new ways of doing it because that's innovation. That again, that cultural sort of DNA. It's something that you either are cultivating in a company or you're not, which is this openness to change. open or reward for innovation. So, I mean, does your company reward innovation or innovative behaviors?

By nature of the platform that we live on and build on, we are innovating every year. Innovation is typically every year our 3rd value. And so, it's funny how it ties to the technology, the platform, but how it really speaks to us being innovative inside the organization. One of the things that Mark does, and he's really, he's a master marketer and really brilliant with PR, but we have a big theme in our company of philanthropy. We've got a 1-1-1 model and that we've got thousands and thousands of nonprofits who use our platform, but he drives that importance of philanthropy and how many hours people give in the communities outside of our company. And so a number of years ago, he invited the top 10 volunteer champions inside the organization. Didn't matter what level they were inside the company, whether you were a first year, very junior in tenure, been a couple years, 3 years, 4 years, to the executive management meeting that had presidents and executive vice presidents. He's like, these are our top 10 volunteer champions across the company, and they're going to be joining us for the entire worldwide management meeting. How exciting is that for someone new in their tenure, but that has been giving back in a way that he really appreciates? What message is that for the rest of us to show just because you're new to the company doesn't mean you can't contribute, doesn't mean you can't get rewarded?

Yeah. Beautiful. Listen, last question, and I say this, I'm already lamenting the fact that this interview is going to end because I think there's so much That people can really dig their teeth into, that's really helpful to them. So I appreciate your transparency and, Colin, how it is you yourself are modeling. That to me is the key ingredient for being a great parent. So ahead of your having a baby, you're already doing something really important as dad-to-be, which is that you model it. And kids don't listen to anything we say, I don't think. They listen to very little, but they watch. They watch everything we do. And I think it's the same exact thing in a company. Employees watch. So, you're describing the actions taken by the person who's the founder of the company and others in the company. That's so much more powerful than the rhetoric or policies or core values that sit, you know, in a framed plaque that sits on a wall or something that people kind of pay, you know, the wave at. So, I would love to know with The mission that you have personally and the work that you're doing, which is so powerful, what are some of the rituals or even one ritual that you have that keeps you moving forward, reminding yourself or being reminded of the most important things so that you can keep going after the things you truly want in your life?

You know, one of the things that I was thinking about earlier as we were talking about pivots was meditation. So I tried a number of different meditation apps, tried to go to a number of different meditation retreats, and it just really wasn't sticking for me over the years. And it wasn't until probably 2 and a half years ago that I had a meditation kind of guru that I knew in Toronto. And he just, we sat down and we talked about, you know, the value that he'd got through meditation and just being present. And then I was actually beta testing an app called Muse that was based out of Toronto, Canada, and they brought it to market and they gamified it. Right. And it was like 5 minutes a day, 3 times a week, 10 minutes a day, twice a week. And they, you know, it got me hooked. It took me a year to build my practice to 20 minutes a day. And I'm now at my goal for this year is a minimum of 25 minutes to maximum of 30 minutes a day. Did it this morning. It was amazing. But what I was visualizing as we talked about pivot, It actually— I have a headband that sits on my, on the top of my forehead. And after I can see kind of where the brainwaves have kind of gone up and down and you see recoveries and it counts the number of recoveries that you have in that 20 or 25 minute span. And what those are is those are opportunities within the start of my day that perhaps I'm pivoting, I'm recovering, I'm losing focus, but I'm coming back in focus. And so before I actually go through my entire day, I have— how I feel is, you know, been able to overcome some obstacles in a 25-minute time period. And then as I go and start my day, I'm much more patient through the day. And, you know, a lot of people know the benefits of meditation, but I'm definitely more patient. I am more thoughtful of the way I approach obstacles. And I'm definitely more grateful for the way that I take myself through the day. So I'm a big proponent of meditation. I sometimes use it when I go to bed, but that is my number one ritual. That's the way I start every morning and I highly recommend it for those who haven't taken it on. Like a few years ago, I had not.

I really hope you're enjoying this episode. of the Change Proof podcast. If you've not yet gone out and gotten your own copy of Change Proof, it's not too late. You can get your copy right now by going to changeproof.com and not only getting the book and all the bonuses there, but getting access to our proprietary resilience assessment tool. It'll just take you 3 minutes to do, and it's something that will really help you to utilize the book even more effectively to create practices and rituals and habits that will increase your mental, emotional, physical, and even spiritual resilience for the long term. Again, go to changeproof.com to get your copy today. Yeah. Randy and I have been I've been listening to meditation before at bed now for several months. And this is a pretty— I mean, I think mindfulness training and the stillness practice, which is what meditation can, I think, sometimes be misunderstood or people just try, you know, I can't quiet my mind. And they think quieting their mind is actually what they're supposed to do or they would be able to do, which we know is BS because that's just not going to happen. I mean, we get just— to me, stillness is different. You still have thoughts and you still recognize that your mind hasn't shut down, but that you've quieted yourself, gotten still, and that something else can make its way through, which is a guidance of a different kind. It comes from a different place, potentially. So without getting far down that road, I just really appreciate that that is something that worked for you. I also want to point out that you've been coached for 10 years. You've had a coach, a business coach for 10 years. Somebody that's listening to this might think, well, geez, I can't afford a coach, or had a coach and didn't work for me, or something like that. And I really want to underscore the fact I've been mentored, I'm still mentored, I've had mentors my whole life and been coached also, even while I was running a company as a CEO, I still had a coach. So it's successful people or people that are Achieving at pretty high levels are also looking for support. That's a part of creating that recovery is to have support. Whereas I think other people might think, well, geez, it's the people who haven't made it yet that need the coach, right? When it's, it's really not the case. I think it's the whole way through, throughout the whole cycle. It's important that we have people that can show us our blind spots, people that have been places or done things we haven't done. That can mentor us, coaches that know how to point the direction when we don't see it or hold up the mirror when we're blind to the ways that we're playing small or that we're taking ourselves out, you know, that we're not keeping our word, right? Accountability is so important with that. Yes. And you said training recovery, that meditation also, that practice that is for recovery is so important because bouncing back is everything. I mean, I can't think of anything that's more important. in life than the ability to recover quickly. And if you don't believe me or if I didn't believe me, I'll add some cred to it by saying there was a Harvard Business Review article and I'll put it in the— our team will put it in the production show notes for this. But Harvard, they had examined the highest-performing athletes in the world, I mean, the best athletes with business executives and entrepreneurs to compare them and see if there were any commonalities. in that high-performance space. And what they found was the highest-performing athletes recovered. The one thing that was different about them than the people that were finishing second or third or not making it onto the podium or whatever it was, their recovery time. Yeah. So you just triggered that for me. The recovery time is the key. It's not that they don't have setbacks, not that they don't lose a game or lose a set like in tennis, but how fast they could get themselves back to a recovery state was the most distinguishing feature in the winners. And it was the same for business entrepreneurs and executives who are under strain and stress more than athletes. Like people in business, you're under that strain almost 7 days a week these days. There's almost no boundaries between you and work given this device that we're all sort of attached to. So, that recovery period is so important, what you do to create resilience and recovery and meditation. Or stillness practice or prayer.

Mental break, right? Nutritionally taking care of your body, sleep-wise, allowing your body to recover, whether it's in sport or you're a high performer in business. Those are the keys to being able to rebound and start fresh the next day. Absolutely.

20-minute walk, the, the health benefits. We wrote about this in Pivot, that just 20 minutes of walking You're working in the city, you're in Manhattan. What a beautiful place to walk. I mean, not in February perhaps on a brutal day, but take 20 minutes to walk around the block. Take 20 minutes in Carlsbad where we live to just go out and look at some swaying palm trees or whatever the case might be, but 20 minutes of light exercise even. Well, this has been an incredible opportunity to explore a lot of things, man. We opened and closed a lot of loops in this conversation, Cullen. Thank you so much for being on the show. Thank you.

I really appreciate being here. I really enjoyed the conversation.

And congrats on the impending fatherhood. And you and your wife are—

Thank you. We're very excited.

Beautiful, brother. For everybody out there who's enjoyed this, hopefully you've enjoyed it. You've gotten some really great nuggets and things that you can apply. Most importantly, we'd love to find out, get your feedback. Feedback is so important and we want to be held accountable. That's the essence when we teach and work on creating accountability in organizations, we always go to the essence of how we all provide feedback, how we receive it and how we provide it and whether or not it's welcome. So I want to say this, we welcome, we live on your feedback. So you can comment at adamarkel.com/podcast and comment there. You can go on iTunes and leave a review. We will respond to them. We relish them and they're so important. So thank you for that. If you want to join our Facebook community, which is really growing in wonderful, wonderful ways, you can go to pivotfb.com or go straight on Facebook to Start My Pivot community there and join. And we want you to be, if you do join, ready to receive support, also a great giver, that's a key ingredient, but that you're willing to be transparent and vulnerable because that's what we believe is going to build trust quickly within that community. Thank you so much again, and I will wave a virtual magic wand by giving thanks and saying a prayer that we all get to wake up tomorrow. Same that we got to wake up today. This was a blessing. There was no guarantee that we got to do this today. So tomorrow, I wish, I hope, I pray that we all get to wake up our consciousness so that we're a little more awake and a little more alive and a little more— present tomorrow than we have even been today, and that that's something to be truly grateful for. So the 3 steps to the waking ritual that we love to share is wake up, recognize in that waking moment as you're taking that breath— I love how Colin was saying earlier, breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out— know that as you're breathing in and breathing out, there are people who are taking their last breath who are breathing in And will not breathe out in that moment. That makes this moment sacred. It's holy. It's special. So it's easy in that moment to feel something akin to gratitude. And lastly, if you're willing to do it, no requirement at all, but from your bed or when your feet hit the floor, if you want to say these words out loud, you can declare, I love my life. I love my life. I love my life. It's been a blessing to spend this time with all of you. Hope you have an incredible rest of your day, your evening, wherever it is that you're consuming this, and we'll see you again soon. Ciao for now, everybody.

Thanks for listening, everyone. We hope you now have the tools and greater insights to navigate your own pivot. Help us inspire others by sharing this episode and leaving your comments over at adammarkel.com/podcast. For more tips, strategies, and insights, For strategies and support as you consciously pivot into a new business and lifestyle you love, join our Pivot Community on Facebook at pivotfb.com.