309 - Embracing Change: Why CEOs Must Evolve Their Leadership Skills with Glenn Gow

Welcome to Listening with Leaders. I'm Doug Noll, lawyer turned peacemaker. I teach executive leaders how to listen to emotions rather than words so that they can become the leaders everyone wants to follow. And I teach those same leaders how to be authentically present, available, and connected to their families despite being insanely busy. I have learned that we are 98% emotional and only 2% rational.

Learning how to listen to emotions is, in my experience, the foundational skill of life.

Stick around to the end of the show, and I'll reveal how you can be on our next guest in 15 to 20 minutes. So let's get started.

Glenn Gow, welcome to Listening with Leaders. You are a former CEO and also a venture capitalist, and now you are an executive coach. You can be found at Glenn Gow. I'm going to spell that. G-L-E-2-N-S-G-O-W, GlennGow.com. Welcome to the show.

Thank you so much. It's a pleasure to be here. I'm looking forward to our conversation.

Absolutely. Let's start off as always in most podcasts, a little bit about your backstory. Who are you and what have you done and how'd you get to where you are today?

I'll tell you what I think is maybe the more interesting part of my background. I was a CEO. For 25 years. And then I got recruited to go into venture capital where I started coaching the CEOs of our portfolio companies. And Doug, I fell in love. I fell in love with that work. And eventually I left to do this strictly on my own. And this is what I do now. It's the best thing I've ever done from the standpoint of I get enormous pleasure from watching my CEOs grow. I really studied— I study neurochemistry. I studied what is it about this that I actually love the work I do. And it's because I can see change happening as a result of my interactions with CEOs. And that's where I get my pleasure.

It sounds just like me. I left the practice of law to become a peacemaker and It was the best decision I ever made. Walked away from $10 million. I walked away from $10 million in 2000, and I've never looked back.

To me, good for you. Now, I have some, I have a secret sauce, which is while I was a CEO for 25 years, I had a CEO coach for 17 years.

Yourself?

Myself. And that was transformational for me. What's interesting about my CEO coach is while I was— I'm very good on the business side. I can talk about any issue that comes up in business. My coach didn't actually know all that much about business, but what she knew a lot about was the mind of the CEO and how does the CEO think and how do they communicate and how do they frame the world. Therefore, how do they act?

Right.

And she helped me shift and understand how to continually shift the way I approached the world, the way I communicated, the way I thought about things so that I could grow.

So how did that change? How did that change you?

It changed me in every way imaginable.

I get that. And I'm just curious specifically What was it that were, what was the before Glenn and the emerging Glenn and the now growing Glenn?

Sure. I'll simplify things because humans are complex. But if you look at the simple version of Glenn when he was a CEO without a coach, he viewed the world in black and white. There was a right way to do things and there was a wrong way to do things. And I was always looking for the rules. If you just tell me the rules, I'll go execute against the rules. Little did I know that human beings actually don't operate that way.

That's right. And not even close.

And right. And so, when I'm trying to understand the rules of managing human beings, they're not working because there aren't really ultimately rules. There are ways of being, there are ways of listening, there are ways of communicating. And what I learned probably more than anything else is the importance of and the way to communicate differently. Doug, you talk about listening. I talk about communicating because I look at it as a two-way street. I'm not saying you don't, but what I tell a CEO is that, you know how in a relationship sometimes you'll hear someone say you have 50% responsibility and that other person has 50% responsibility? When I'm dealing with the CEO and I do, By the way, I only focus on CEOs, and I have the advantage of focusing only on CEOs. I say your responsibility is 100% ownership of any communication, 100%. What do I mean by that? I mean that if, if you are communicating to someone, a board member, a direct report, an investor, your job is to ensure that what you're trying to communicate lands and is understood by that other person. That is your job. Now, there are simple tools for doing this, which very few people use. My favorite is active listening. So, I teach active listening as one—

we can talk about that—

as one simple tool. But then I say, on the flip side, this is the listening part, you own 100% responsibility to understand what is really going on with that person. And it's not just the words.

That's right.

It's the underlying message that they may have trouble sharing with you.

That's right. And most importantly, making sure that person feels heard from that person's frame of reference.

Exactly right. Now, I'm very lucky, Doug, because I'm married to a wonderful woman who has taught me that early on in life, it wasn't my fault. I was born without the empathy gene.

Oh no, that's not true. You have the capacity for empathy, but empathy is a skill that must be learned and mastered.

Precisely my point.

Okay, it's not innate. We got to learn it, and that's what I teach, right?

So yes, I agree with you, and my point is I wasn't expressing very much empathy early in my career and relationships, and I can't even tell you I'm good at it today. However, I'm a lot better than I used to be because it's very intentional now. I practice consistently in an attempt to make a connection at the emotional level, because I used to be oblivious to that. Part of this was my coach helping me understand.

Excellent.

And one of the, one of the powerful phrases my coach used was, the world shows up differently for everyone. And so when you're in a communication with someone and you're thinking, how can they possibly think that? The answer is they have a completely different perspective, a worldview, a history. And if I can get to a place of saying, I now understand how that person came to that viewpoint, and I can express that I at least understand where they're coming from. I can make a connection and therefore I'm going to jump to something here. The hardest job of the CEO is what I call human behavior change. And yet that is a core part of the job. If I want my team, if I'm a CEO and I want my team to accomplish certain things and they're not all AA players, and they're all not all perfect. And guess what? None of them are perfect. I need to work with them to enable human behavior change so that they can perform at a higher level than they are performing today. And this is an area of huge struggle for CEOs.

Absolutely. So I teach a concept that I call listening others into existence.

Ooh, tell me.

Because what I have found It's— this started out in my work as a mediator and peacemaker, is that all conflict is emotional and almost all conflict arises from people's failure to listen and validate the emotional experience of others. And I define empathy very specifically as— there are two kinds of empathy, cognitive and affective empathy. Cognitive empathy is the ability to read, assimilate, interpret, and reflect back the emotional experiences of another human being. Very precise definition. And it's— and the skill of that is called affect labeling, which is— brain scanning studies have shown inhibit the emotional centers of the brain and reactivate what's known as the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex. So it's all science-based, very powerful. And I've deployed these skills in places as diverse as maximum security prisons, training lifers how to be peacemakers to stop prison violence. And I've been at the Congressional Budget Office teaching senior analysts how to de-escalate members of Congress. So it's very powerful, very effective. And this is the kind of thing that you're talking about. I'm curious about, and so when you do this, when you use this skill, you literally listen another person into existence almost invariably for the very first time, whoever you're listening to feels like they've been heard and understood for the first time in their life. If they've never had the experience before, it's really crazy. I'm curious, tell me about active listening. Active listening gets me a little fired up. Uh, the term was coined in 1956 by Thomas Gordon, who is a, a, a psychologist, PhD at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He was a mentee of Carl Rogers, the great humanist psychologist. And I've researched this in depth, and a lot of his work has been completely misconstrued over the years. So when I hear active listening, I'm always curious about what people mean by it, right? And do they go back to the old, to the concept that Gordon developed in 1956 and '57.

Let me share with you how I approach it, and, and I'd love to learn from you.

Absolutely.

I'll use an example. I'll say to a CEO, if you want a direct report of yours to accomplish something, you need to have a communication about it. Let's assume it's verbal to simplify things.

Sure.

When you're done with your communication, simply ask them to feedback to you.

There you go.

Their understanding of what you just said, you said. And I will point out that about 90% of the time they won't get it right.

That's right.

And now it's your opportunity to make the tweaks and corrections to get them to understand it. Exactly the way you meant it.

Exactly. That is called speak, check, reflect. And we— I teach this as a part of our curriculum when we were working— when we developed the curriculum for the Prison Project back in 2010. That was one of the techniques we teach our people, our incarcerated students, very early on, is exactly that technique. That is one form of listening for understanding.

Right.

And then another, what we, but what we teach and what you'll hear most people talk about active listening, what they'll do is use the formula, what I hear you saying is, or what I think you're saying is, using I statements. And it turns out that I statements destroy trust. And this was the perversion of Thomas Gordon's work because he didn't teach that. Ah, it was picked up by the human potential movement in the late '50s and early '60s. And people, here's what happens when we're dealing in intense situations, it provokes anxiety. Unconscious anxiety if we are not consciously aware of it. And now our brains will do whatever it takes to get rid of that anxiety. So when we use an 'I' statement, it's passive voice, it's distance, and we're no longer listening because it's all about me. I'm saying what I hear you saying is now it's all about me. If I say instead, so Glenn, man, you are really pissed off. You're frustrated, you're angry, you feel completely disrespected. You feel unheard and unappreciated and unsupported, and you're really worried. Do you feel how that lands?

Yeah, totally.

So what's happening in the brain, we have brain scanning studies starting in 2007 out of Lieberman's lab at UCLA, and he showed that when you engage in that kind of practice, you are inhibiting the emotional centers of the brain and activating a part of the brain called the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex. Cortex, which is where emotion, the abstract concept of emotion is stored. And so now you're basically re-accessing your emotional database. So when you get escalated, you lose, that connection is lost because the emotional centers of the brain override the prefrontal cortex. And that's why you see people go crazy or why they can't listen or they can't hear because biophysiologically, parts of their brain are completely shut down. And so what we have to do is reactivate that. And you can calm any angry person in 90 seconds or less. And so you're listening, you're— let's take your CEO who's saying, right, is listening to somebody. The first thing, if there's any kind of upset at all, or it's going to be a difficult conversation, the first thing I would say is listen to the emotions, find out what's going on, make sure that person feels heard. Because as soon as they feel heard, Guess what? They can think again. And now you can solve the problem, and now they'll hear you. But I love your speak, check, reflect. And you're right, that is a skill that's not taught, and it's not practiced, and it makes all the difference in the world because you get absolute clarity.

And now I'm going to add more to— based on what you're sharing with me, what I What I say to the CEO is the reverse is true when someone is saying something to you, but you've just added another level. It's not enough for me to feed back to you to say, oh, you don't like that X, Y, and Z happened. I could use essentially the same words they use, but now you're pointing out I want to touch on what I believe they're feeling.

Right. So, instead of calling it active listening, I call it reflective listening. And the first level of reflective listening is what you just suggested, which is paraphrasing. So what you just said was that when you're listening to somebody, you want to reflect back what they said in your own words to summarize it, to make sure that they know that you heard them and heard their words and understood. That's the most superficial level. The second level is called poor messaging. And you mentioned earlier poor messaging. And you mentioned before that there is a situation where Somebody doesn't know what they want to say and you're sitting there looking at your watch, saying, "When are they going to get to the point?" Right? That's when you use core messaging. And basically what you're doing in core messaging is helping somebody find the meaning of what they're trying to say. And they're talking out loud because they're trying to find meaning. They don't know what they want to say. And finally, the deepest level is called affect labeling, which is where we ignore the words, listen to the emotions, and reflect back the emotional experience with a "you" statement. You're angry, you're frustrated, whatever it is.

Very powerful.

Those are the three, three levels of reflective listening that we teach.

Let me talk about a different kind of communication. Not that, uh, these are the all— these all overlap, I believe.

Absolutely.

Okay, but I want to talk about, uh, setting goals. Okay, so CEO's job is to help set goals.

Yep.

And My favorite framework is called the OKR framework, Objectives and Key Results, but there are many other frameworks out there to use. It's not important which framework. What's important is that the CEO needs to have a conversation with a direct report or the entire team about a goal. And the concept here is that the goal should be difficult but not impossible to achieve. It has to be believable.

Adaptive leadership. Exactly.

Okay, but it's a stretch. And then after we agree, oh, I want you to achieve this much over this period of time, there's what I call a deeper level of conversation, which is a commitment conversation. And this is very rare for CEOs to do this, but the commitment conversation goes like this. Let's pretend, Doug, you're the one who just signed up for this, this aggressive goal. Commitment conversation is, Doug, are you ready to commit to this goal? Yeah, you said yes a few minutes ago, but I'm talking about making a commitment to me as the CEO, that you're going to do everything in your power to make this happen. Because the CEO might say, I don't want you to commit unless you truly believe you can give it your best. Maybe this goal is too aggressive. And that's very rare for a CEO to say, maybe it's too aggressive. And you don't believe it's possible. Maybe you're worried about how you're going to get it done. Let's have this conversation today rather than at the end of the quarter to discover that you never really believed in this goal and you weren't committed to it. Because that's not the kind of relationship I, the CEO, want to have with you. I want to have a level of commitment that you're prepared to make to me.

Let me give you one other tool. But that's great. And let me give you one other tool to add to that. So you can ask about commitment, and if you've got a great, honest relationship, You can probably have a good conversation. But what if you ask the question like this? What are all the things that are going to get in the way of you not fulfilling this goal or achieving the goal?

So that's going to uncover things they have in the back of their mind but haven't put forth yet.

Exactly. And then the next question is, and so what happens if something goes wrong and we fall off the wagon? What do we— what's going to be our process? For getting reignited. So you're anticipating failure in the conversation.

That's right.

And talking about it.

That's right. Now, now I do that through a slightly different process, which is if we agree on the goal, let's say for the quarter, the next step I ask the CEO to do is say, ask, okay, Doug, I'm going to ask you now bring me a plan.

Ah, there you go. I love that.

Okay. Because we're going to do the hard work upfront.

There you go.

What's today? January 3rd. We're going to do it at the beginning of the quarter, right? Not at the end of the quarter. And I'm going to work with you, Doug, to review that plan. We're going to test the feasibility. We're going to make sure there's buffer in there. We're going to anticipate problems. Only then are we going to be comfortable that we have something that's possible here. And by the way, every single week we're going to meet and I'm going to ask you to report to me how are you doing against the plan.

Accountability.

Because if you're not falling behind somewhere, we don't have a good plan because things— the plan will never survive contact with the enemy.

That's right. There are a couple of things I really love about that. Number one, the CEO is now acting as a coach. What I think the primary role of a CEO is. Have you ever read the book Leadership Without Easy Answers by Joseph Heifetz out of Harvard? No. Make a note of it. It's a really great book. Leadership Without Easy Answers. He talks about the difference between adaptive leadership and technical leadership. And you actually defined, I said adaptive leadership because you were saying we're gonna, we wanna set a goal that's Difficult but not impossible.

Ah, yes.

And he talks about all the challenges that come up when you do that. However, but the point that I'm making is that you want, number one, you're acting as a coach, which I think is the primary job of CEO. And number two, you're making the other person do the work. So the gorilla comes off your back. And number three, you're providing accountability. Brilliant. Brilliant.

That's right.

Listen, what's amazing to me, I'll just, that what's amazing to me is that this isn't common sense to CEOs. It's so obvious to me and you, but to them, no.

This is why we're here to, to help educate, right? There's another level, which is when that, when I, I'm gonna go back to, I'm the CEO, Doug, you're the person who signed up for the goal. The third week of the quarter when you start falling behind and, and it goes from green to yellow or red. There are two things. One, I'm not going to be the one asking about how it's going. It's your responsibility to report to me how it's going. Now, I'm going to solve that problem by putting it at the top of our agenda. It's just going to sit there and you have to report. But the minute it turns yellow or red, you need to bring to me your recommendation on what to do about it. I'm not here to solve your problem.

That's right.

I'm here to support you in solving your problem. But you talked about where the monkey's sitting on, on, on whose back.

That's right.

I'm not taking on your problem. Now, if this is a critical project and I think you're failing and you can't solve the problem, then I have a bigger problem, which is you. But I might step into a mode of deeper coaching to help you get through this. And if I think you can grow through it, then you're what I call a keeper, someone I want in my organization. I might have to work hard to train you, to coach you, to mentor you, but I want to keep you. But if you can't get beyond, even with my coaching, then you're probably not a keeper, someone I want in my organization.

Yeah, I love that.

That's really good. And that allows you to then make have set points. How long are you going to tolerate this? And then, and give you some things to look at, measurable outcomes that you can look at to determine whether or not somebody is— are they the right person for the job?

Exactly right. Now, there's another level here. One of my CEOs said, Glenn, I did this and everything was green until the last 2 weeks of the quarter. And all of a sudden it lit up like a Christmas tree, lots of yellows and reds. So we talked about what really happened there. And what really happened there is that people were afraid to share with the CEO that things were not going well.

That's right.

So the issue—

big deal—

the issue was the way the CEO was being.

And that's an issue of trust and an issue of emotional safety. I'm going to go back to the Aristotle Project, Google's Aristotle Project. And that's where my skills are important, because if you don't have the trust of your team They're going to hide stuff from you, and you're screwed. So what you have to do is build that trusting relationship where it's okay to be— it's okay to fail, it's okay to make mistakes, it's okay to— as long as we can talk about it. Nobody knows that they're not going to get punished or penalized, they're not going to get their head snapped off. We're going to solve this problem as a group or together. That is essential, and that's a hard skill to learn. Yes.

It is. And it's hard to recognize when it's happening. So my CEO at this time didn't even know it was happening.

Right.

He thought he was not a person who would suppress or, or inadvertently suppress bad information.

Yeah. No, you're right. That, that whole concept of, in Heifetz's book back, this book's 1997, he writes about the psychological functions of a leader are focus, direction, and safety. In that order. And safety would then obviously built upon, you know, a decade ago in the Aristotle Project at Google, where they looked at what are the— what's the— what separates the top 10th of 1% of our teams from everybody else? One thing: psychological safety.

Fascinating.

That's the only difference. And, and how do you create psychological safety? That's the function of a leader, to prevent the kind of problem you were just talking about, where things look like they're going along really great, and then you come to the end and the whole thing explodes because people were lying to you.

Beautiful.

Yeah, we could talk forever. Really interesting work. So I can see why you're so satisfied, why this work is so satisfying with you, because you can watch these CEOs who probably come at the, come at their problem with really great technical skills but don't always have the best leadership skills. And these are skills that have to be learned. It's not—

that's right, that's right. There's a fascinating statistic in the venture world which is within a 5-year period, about 60% of those CEOs are going to be fired.

Right.

Now, you step back and say, why is that? Now, the easy answer is because they're not growing the companies fast enough. There are expectations about growing a company and they're just not doing it. And so they get removed. But if you go the next level down, you say, why is that CEO not growing the company fast enough? Now, What's interesting is the CEO was probably the right CEO when they went to raise that round. They were the right person at the right time. They made the right pitch. They had the right team. But that was a company at a point in time. And the minute they got that next round, now they have a new company, a new set of requirements, right? And a new set of skills that are required to grow the company. And many founders can't break out of their initial set of skills.

That's right. We see this all the time.

So I—

go ahead.

I was just gonna say, you're absolutely right. Companies go through an evolutionary process. And unless you're one of those really rare talented people that can grow with the company, there's gonna come a point in time where the company is no longer something you can lead because you don't have the skillset for it.

That's right.

And there's a difference between startup, first seed, and now you're starting to scale, the scaling process, and then finally you reach maturity. Very different leadership skills through those different processes.

Very different. And there are many steps along the way.

That's right. I summarized something you said.

You need a new set of skills. So, I talked to CEOs about neural pathways and I talked to them, I called them, I said, you're a CEO, you have, I'm going to call them success patterns that have gotten you where you are. And what do we do as humans is we rely on those success patterns. Why? Because they work. Until they don't.

Exactly.

This is, this is the greatest frustration of CEOs when they apply their success patterns and they're not working. Oh, the company isn't growing as fast. We're not getting products out. I have high turnover. I don't have a good relationship with one of my board members. I keep trying to do what I've got, what I've, what has made me successful.

And it's not working.

And it's not working. And so massive frustration here, rightfully so. A lot of my work is helping CEOs understand that first of all, this is why this is happening. And secondly, we need to develop new success patterns.

Wow.

That's not easy. That's gonna be difficult. It's gonna be really uncomfortable.

And it's sometimes it's shaming and embarrassing and humiliating to, well, you gotta learn a whole new set of skills. You thought you were competent, now you're not.

That's right. And guess what? You may have to step into areas that you don't really want to do. This is not what you signed up for. I hear this a lot from CEOs. This is not the job I signed up for. And yet, no, now you need to work on HR and finance and marketing and manufacturing and other things that maybe didn't bring you to the party in the first place. But as a CEO, you need to have skills to be able to understand those functions, manage the people in those functions, manage new customer and investor relationships, all things that you didn't know know coming in. So I'm here to help you, right, develop those skills and nudge you out of your comfort zone to go do what you have to do to be successful.

And there you go, in a nutshell, that's what you do. I got one more question for you, Glenn. This has been a great conversation. We get going forever. We can't because I got to get— keep it under a timeline. What is one thing about yourself that we would never know about unless you revealed it to us?

I am an adventure nut.

Really?

So every chance I get, I want to be outdoors doing some kind of adventure. So I am a big biker, road bike, gravel biking, mountain biking. I do that as often as I can. I ski. Alpine skiing is my preference, as much as I can. I am a beginner wing foiler.

Oh wow.

I won't even describe what that sport is, but I—

That sounds scary.

I switched from kite surfing to wing foiling.

Okay.

And so I'm on this big—

Oh wait, that's on a board that has the thing under the— it's a surfboard, but it's got a wing underneath it. Is it electric or are you pumping it?

Both. Okay. So I can do e-foiling and I can do wing foiling.

Fun.

I'm very big into learning curves. If I'm on a learning curve, I'm very happy about it.

Yeah.

And I'm into balance. Not balancing on the wing foil, but balance in my life.

In life.

So I have a wonderful, supportive family, and my wife and I spend time elsewhere as often as we can. For example, I live in Silicon Valley, except during the summer where I live on the East Coast. In the town where my wife grew up, just north of Boston. We go there every summer. And at least once a year, we're going to go away for a month.

Wow.

Now I'm going to work part-time while I'm gone, but this year we're going to New Zealand for the month of February.

Oh, fun.

I'll work part-time, but we will have a blast while we're there.

Good for you.

Doing as many adventure things as we can.

We have a lot in common. I'm a Level 3 certified ski instructor. Used to do a lot of mountaineering and rock climbing. That's where I lived, near Yosemite. Kayaking, whitewater kayaking and rafting and—

Fantastic.

Yeah.

Clint, it's been a real pleasure chatting with you. I know my audience is gonna love this show, so thank you so much. And I wish you the very best in the year to come. And amazing. You're gonna, you're just an amazing guy. Thank you again.

Thank you very much. Enjoyed it, Doug. I learned a lot from you.

Absolutely.

Doug Noll here. Thank you so much for for listening to Listening with Leaders. If you are a successful executive leader who would like to be on this program, please visit podcast.dougnull.com/podcast. If you got something out of this interview, would you please share this episode on social media? Just do a quick screenshot with your phone and text it to a friend or post it on the socials. If you know someone that would you think would be a great guest, tag them on the social media to let them know about the show and include the hashtag #ListeningWithLeaders. I love seeing your posts and guest suggestions. We are regularly putting out new episodes and content. To make sure you don't miss any episodes, go ahead and subscribe. Your thumbs up, ratings, and reviews go a long way to help promote the show and mean a lot to me and my team. Want to know more? Go to my website, DougNoll.com. Or follow me on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram. That's @DouglasEnoll. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you on the next show.