Truth, Enablement And The Transformation Of Business With Colin Nanka

Welcome to the Conscious Pivot Podcast with international speaker, business mentor, best selling author of Pivot, and your host, Adam Markell. 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 Markell, 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, you're watching this 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. 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 an incredible guest to share with you today. So starting with my gratitude for it being again, a new day, for the fact that for Randy 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 going to take a deep breath myself and appreciate the wellness that is everywhere. That. That is our natural state of being. I 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. 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 that, 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 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, 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 as somebody that's on a tight, you know, like 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, Colin 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. Company mostly. Most likely have heard of salesforce.com he has proven sales leader with more than 20 years of sales experience including time at Salesforce and 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, Colin.

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 Colin 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 Colin first and she really was taken by this gentleman. So Colin, 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, like she's on it. So I'm not, I'm not putting out big shoes for you to fill or anything. I want you to just be yourself. But you already come with like a really great.

It's amazing. We Had a. We had a great. 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 an introduction. What's not written in that bio that you would love for people to know about you?

Yeah. As you're reading it out, I was like, I think I need to shorten that a little bit and also, you know, get to the essence of, you know, what I'm about. But the first thing that comes up to mind for me is, you know, 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, you know, 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, you know, little nuggets that, you know, 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. You know, that's just who I am and what I love to do. So. Yeah, 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. You know, we're going to work hard. It's a It. The question is whether we make hard work of it. Right?

Yeah, it's, 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, 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.

And that would be Ms. Blake Ross, who is my wife. And we are just overjoyed that we are going to bring a baby girl into the world very soon.

Wow, dude, that is just so cool as a daddy of three daughters. So we have three 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. So you're getting a treat very soon. And, you know, it's inspiring. And I think this, a lot of people now I'm a little, 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 get married and start our life and have kids, it was more prevalent. People were having kids in their 20s, late 20s, or even early 30s. I think we stopped having the. 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 because I don't personally want to sit in a rocking chair and wait to die. Yeah. So, I mean, 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 as they're having their experiences of life. So it is incredible. You talk about a journey, use the word journey, an adventure journey. But let's go back to something else earlier that I stated about your. Your experience in life, and that is that you've done. Done some adventure adventurous things, climb 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 giving up their Passion for things to grind it out. I mean, that wasn't a word that you and I used before we hit the record button too. People are 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, you know, 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're, you know how to get at the rock and grind it. Fantastic. You know, 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, you're working in the, you know, 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, you're also working, you know, working for a business agenda, whether that's your agenda or corporate agenda, is not an easy harmonization. So 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, you know, what I would call a ten 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 has really been 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. 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 rep in the world for a couple 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, you know, 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, you know, getting to par. And so I actually had two years that I really struggled, and it really affected the faith I had in my professional capabilities. And so at that time, I decided I need 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 three times. I got sick. One day, I was just at the end of my rope. A different day. I got altitude sickness near the top and literally sleeping overnight at the top of Mount Kilimjaro 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. And I thought, geez, am I actually going to make it down off the mountaintop? And so in the morning, I'm green. You know, we all start heading down, and the more we get down this mountain, you know, 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, you know, 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 is 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, and that became. 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, you know, 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, you know, 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. That's a gross understatement by itself. Right. How much it is we. We do truly take for granted, like clean water and a food that's free of parasites and education, the availability of education and things like that. So there's no question that in terms of resilience, gratitude plays a big piece in resilience for me.

Yes.

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

Yeah. I was thinking about this. This morning. I was having a breakfast with a friend of mine who's a CEO in a company, and we were talking about challenge and overcoming adversity. And 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, you know, kind of. It was an epiphany I had, you know, out in the middle of the desert in one of my adventures, and. And it reframed the whole situation that I was in. And 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, and it just allows me to reframe the entire situation I'm in.

That's a part of the recipe. I don't say the recipe, but our recipe for resilience involves three things. One is that we frame the situation in a certain way that's different than the way we're currently framing it. 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. So there's something to be grateful for in the fact that you've learned something. And when you actually learn something or have the recognition, 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 that 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. That idea of framing something in a positive light is so centered on the questions you ask yourself and how you. 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. You ask a shitty question. I think Tony Robbins would say that. You get a shitty 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, you know, big questions at times in your life when you're feeling. Feeling a bit lost or something like that, you ask a great question or a question, you will get an answer.

When it's time. I can directly relate to that because when I was wandering through the, you know, 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, you know, really fast. And when it came, you know, it came with, you know, a huge impact on me. When I saw I had, you know, six hours left in this race, I was excited. You know, I started to laugh. I was like, I see the end 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? Like, where. 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 blank. 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 Siegel, where Chang, the mentor Siegel, 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, you know, strip out all the pivots along the way, all the. All the time and space in between, and it's happened. Which is. 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 to use that terminology, incidentally. But she says, what's the creative opportunity? That's a question I want everybody to hear. Not, you know, 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. So please. 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, and mine, 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 is very challenging work. I want you to talk about that today as well. Enablement, what does that mean? Working with 1500 sales people at a massively, you know, incredible 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, you are pursuing your passion still to this day. You've got to be plenty resilient. And my guess is that you got to, 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.

Absolutely. I think, you know, I'd love to. There's two things that come to mind, as you mentioned those, and I'll take a step back, you know, let's say five or six 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 is a yoga instructor. We started doing some one to one training and she noticed that 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 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 and just even as I think about just taking that breath as we're talking, you know, 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 five minutes in that race we're at 40 plus degrees Celsius. For my Canadian friends out there, we're 110 plus degrees Fahrenheit from 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 presence in every moment and start chunking down into five 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 five 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 11am meeting, but I've got a challenging 12pm meeting coming up in between those meetings. For five 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 a thousand 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 will 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 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, you know, 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, so glad that you just brought that up as well, because people talk about pivots in a particular way. Don't you 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, two things come to mind. It's 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 two things that come to me when someone says pivot Exactly.

And I think 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 to moment pivot to us that the essential pivot, which is your next thought, but your 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 head space. So heart space, instead of headspace, which is more about guarding, this is about guidance and this is about guarding. It's a protection device in many ways. Got to figure, figure stuff out intellectually so that I can make a move that keeps me alive, keeps me, you know, 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, and it is this interplay between that intellectual space and the heart space that we're writing about. Curious about. So I love the idea of pivot shift. Pivot shift, pivot shift. And you think about what that it's very clear and not simple and 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. Isn't it 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.

Yeah, so we were talking about this a little bit before and it's, you know, enablement comes from a history of people doing training within 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. You know, we've developed our own sales motion over the, you know, 15 years that I've been around at Salesforce. I've been here 13 years. But since we've been, you know, 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. You know, our goal is to grow to, you know, double that within the next four to five years, which is just, you know, 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 before, 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 will 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. It's a, a, 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 good practice. So those are a couple of the areas that, you know, you know, 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. It sometimes we, we talk about the terrible T's being toxicity and turnover. So when I was CEO of a company was tiny, tiny company compared to you guys, but 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, you know, public speaking, big stages, small stages, TEDx stages, things of that sort to get their message really cascaded across, you know, 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, 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 T's 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, 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 looking actively looking for another job on the company's dime, which I was a CEO, so that always still sort of irked me, you know, that 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 that 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 you know, 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. Because 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 the 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 you know, when you sell something, when you sell your time and your, and your precious life energy for money, and in the end, the company, the family that you're with, takes care of you, that there's a, 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, that they thought they, you know, that was, 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, keeping creating a growth edge for people and helping them to be working toward that. That's phenomenal.

I love it. There's a couple 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. There's two components to trust. We are a cloud company, and so if our platform is not working, we break the trust, 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 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 you know, the way I work is when I have, you know, trust in my leader, you know, 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, you know, 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, you know, and 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 so people feel heard, that's table stakes. But unfortunately a lot of companies out there aren't doing it. In a recent survey I saw it said 50% of people 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, you know, what their career aspirations are, what's the best way to communicate with you? What happens if we run into conflict some point down the road, we're very likely to, you know, how should we Handle that. Just some simple questions, 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, and I couldn't, I mean, to me, that's what everything's built on in any relationship. What is a business 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. And what's the essence? What's the most important thing in a relationship? Trust. So what is. What is transparency? Or where does transparency and vulnerability play a role, especially in a business context?

Yeah, I mean, I've learned through having leaders who are very transparent and learn 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 a thousand of our top managers in the company. Typically it's in San Francisco, sometimes it's in Las Vegas. Our CEO, Mark 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, you know, from the office. We have viewing parties, you know, from the office. So everyone is exactly on the same page as he is. And so I think, you know, Mark has set an unbelievable tone for our organization. And then I think from a, you know, 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, you know, the next quarter, the next couple quarters. And of course, there's always some confidential information that 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 two 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 Five Dysfunctions of a Team is a great book on the topic of what it is that 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 for. From the 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's a little dry. I mean dude, I'm not. No, knock on. 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's could be the philosophy that you sort of the central, you know, the king, the queen and you know, the 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, you know, 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 that, we're projected to double in size over the next three, four 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, we talked 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 two people coming together and deciding what the path forward is. You know, 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, you know, continually tell my people what to do. I want to show them the opportunity and the challenge and then let them figure it out themselves. 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, you know, 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. It's 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, tracking your KPIs pretty seriously.

Yes.

Yeah. So what's.

Yeah, I'd say two places I learned accountability from. One is one of our executive vice presidents. Tony Ridoni is a longtime mentor of mine here. He was always big on the acronym dwizziwig. 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, you know, 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, you know, 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, you know, 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, the of on down inside. Salesforce.

Yeah. Beautiful. I love the fact that you're using colors as part of the. You know, 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. It's like so many. Yeah, wonderful stuff there. I want to, 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. I hadn't heard it called that. There's a motion that is the methodology, so to speak. Is that how you're using.