#6: Be Bad First – Detavio Samuels.

You're listening to the Proteus Leader Show with Erika Andersen, where you'll get practical tools and insights for leading and managing and staying ready for the future. Erika is the founding partner of Proteus, a firm that focuses uniquely on leader readiness. A nationally known executive coach and bestselling author, you may already know her as one of the most popular leadership bloggers on Forbes.com. Ready for something you can use today? Here's Erika.

Hello, I'm Erika Andersen, and this is the Proteus Leader Show. And as always, it's great to have you with us. My guest today is Detavio Samuels, who's president of Interactive One and One Solution, both divisions of Radio One, a big multimedia company. iOne produces and distributes news and pop culture content to millions of people every day, and One Solution is their cross-platform sales and branded entertainment group. for the larger company. Now, Detavio is also one of the high-payoff learner examples in my new book, Be Bad First. So I thought it would be really useful to you to hear about how he uses learning to thrive through change. So hello and welcome, Detavio.

Hey, Erika. How are you doing today?

I'm really good. So good to have you.

Thank you. Thanks for having me. First in the book, now on your podcast. I feel like a superstar.

Yeah. So in both of your jobs, the Interactive One job and the One Solution job, you're dealing with a high degree of change every day, new media, a lot happening all the time. So what's a challenging new thing that you've had to learn in the past year or 2 and what made it tough for you?

Yeah, I mean, so you're absolutely right. I mean, I think just media in general is the wild, wild west. But interestingly enough, what's been the highest degree of learning for me is actually just the media side of the job. So my background before this was I was on the client side doing global marketing. Spent almost a decade on the advertising side running an advertising agency. So get creative and ideas, but it actually never been on the media side. So coming into One Solution almost 2 years ago, I literally had to learn the media business. And so that was a very difficult role and especially coming in as a president, right? Being charged with running an organization, running a group, driving growth, but not knowing the business that I was in. Fortunate for me, I think a lot of where media is going, play to my skill set in terms of the stuff that I learned on the advertising side in terms of ideas and creativity. And so I was able to bring that to the media company while learning their side of the business. On the digital media side, which is a role I just took over maybe 2 or 3 months ago, I definitely am much more steeped in media and get that. However, I've never run a digital media company, which is one of the most complex businesses that I've ever been a part of.

Yeah.

And what I can say that's a real big difference here versus from coming in from One Solution is this time coming into the role, I actually didn't have a point of view and a vision and a strategy. And so the hardest part was how do you inspire people, make people feel confident that you're a leader while you're trying to learn really, really quickly about where you need to take this company so that you can have a point of view and a vision for people to rally behind.

Well, so I'd love to hear more about that. I did a webinar last week, and one of the main questions that came back is, how do you gracefully be a learner when you're in the big chair? And I think that's important, right? Because you're trying to give people confidence. And at the same time, you don't want to fake that you know stuff you don't know. So what tips can you give our listeners about how to learn when you're in the big guy seat?

Yeah, so there's a couple of things. So for me, I always just figure out, like, how do I lean into my strengths, right, that can provide air cover while I'm learning? And so here, you know, part of my strengths, I believe, is pretty good at leading, pretty good at inspiring people. We had morale challenges here, many of which were rooted in incorrect stories. So I spent a lot of time understanding what the true story was and then reframing that from the organization. And so whether that was having monthly meetings where they could hear my voice, or every Monday I was sending messages about key wins and about my beliefs about the future and things that I could lean into so that people could see who I was.

Mm.

And then again, just championing the wins, whether they were wins because of my leadership or whether they were wins that were already set in motion before I got here, just making sure people knew that we were winning because winning is contagious. And so while doing that for the last few months, and I just dove as deep I did the data and reading and all of that stuff so that I could get to a clear point of view on where to take the organization.

Oh, that's wonderful. So let's dive into that learning side of it a little bit that you just referenced. So what are some of the ways that you use to pick up on new understanding, new knowledge, new skills?

Yes, I'm definitely a voracious reader. So it is curating the news that comes to me and making sure that it's news that I think will help me develop a point of view on the marketplace. So there's a ton of reading, articles, business articles, All of that. The other piece is just meeting with people. And so leveraging my position as president of One Solution to either have conversations with clients or have conversations with CEOs at top media companies, or I was saying media agencies, but also people at top media companies, met with people from Vice and from Vox and from the New York Times and just people who were already in the business. And I think because it's the wild, wild west, so many people are wearing the shit willing to share information because we're trying to figure it out.

Yeah.

For me, it's been a lot of just people conversations and a lot of reading, and then also just leaning into the knowledge that's already here in the organization. And I think you said it before, it's about not pretending that I know everything.

Yeah.

And so I spent a lot of time, I met with every single group in my digital organization. What's going on? What's good? What's bad? Where do you think the future is? I've clearly met with all of my leaders, had one-on-ones with them. I'm constantly pulling knowledge from them. And now, even though I feel 20 times better than I did on day one, I'm spending time literally going to some of my employees and sitting at their desk and seeing how they do their jobs.

Oh, I love that.

Yesterday with a young lady who does social media. I'm going to do it next week with a young lady who does RevOps. But for me, I'm just diving now deep into the details because I have a much better handle on the bigger picture.

So you're clearly not averse— you don't hesitate to ask those real curious questions like, how does that work? And why does that happen? And what can you tell me about this? and those kinds of questions?

Yeah, not at all. I mean, I think in this day and age, people value transparency. I think one of my key lessons as a leader growing up is people don't want perfect leaders, right? Because nobody believes that you're actually perfect. So I've learned how to lean into my strengths and my gifts, which show people and give people confidence and credibility in who I am. But then that also allows me to be vulnerable and ask the really stupid questions.

Oh, I love that. And I also love the thing that you said about observing. I think that's something that a lot of leaders don't I don't understand. It's such a powerful mechanism. Everybody reads, and I want to put that aside for a sec because I want to ask you more about it, but just watching people at their jobs. I mean, that's— for thousands of years, people learned by apprenticing, and the idea that a leader can apprentice, but to just watch people, what they do, listen to them, watch them interact, watch them do their jobs, I think that's a great way to learn.

Yeah, it's amazing, and it's amazing what you learn. I mean, A, you learn clearly the intricacies of the jobs and what these people are doing and what their approach is, which is also valuable, but it also just allows you to learn Yes. The lady I sat with yesterday, to see her passion for the numbers and her drive for the data and what excites her. So you get to learn about the people and also create that kind of personal connection while you're learning about the job and the role.

Oh, that's lovely. So let's go back a little bit to reading. A lot of people, quote unquote, learn by reading. But I'm of the opinion that a lot of people read and don't learn much. I mean, for instance, I was just talking about this to somebody the other day, somebody, a leader that I know who had pretty much read every leadership book you could possibly read.

That's right.

But he wasn't a very good leader. So, a lot of people, it's sort of like they think that if they just take in a lot of information, they're going to be great. But obviously, that's not true. So, how do you translate what you read into real learning?

Yeah. So, there's probably 2 things that I do. One is at the end, and I'm a fast reader too. So, I mean, I will skim in a heartbeat. But at the end of skimming, I always try to say, what are the 3 things I'm going to take away from this? Oh, great.

That's it.

Also kind of just like in my mind trying to lock that in. And then 2, the other thing is everything that I read that really awakens something in me or excites me or something about what we're doing or not doing, I send to my leadership team and then I push them to lead. I mean, I push them to read it and then force us to have a conversation around it, right? So now it's not just— now we're all working with similar knowledge and then I'm also forcing a conversation. So I'm getting different perspectives on whatever ideas are in the articles and concepts.

Oh, I love that. So, it's not just going into some long-term cold storage in your brain. You're really figuring out how do we apply this, how do we use it, how do we make it make a difference?

Exactly.

Oh, that's fantastic. So then, let me just— dear listeners, the example that I used Detavio for in the book is Detavio is great at aspiration. He's great at getting himself to want to do things. So, let me ask you about that. I mean, when you come up against something that you know you need to learn but you're not particularly inspired to learn, how do you get yourself to want to I mean, it's largely based on what you just said.

I'm so inspired and driven by what the future can be and recognizing that I'm not there now that I pretty much want to do anything that's possible to help us get there, right? And so feeling like, you know, every day I can come in and help this team become trailblazers in the space that we're in, then motivates me to do even the smallest of tasks. And then the other thing is just, it's just a very real realization that your ability to do your job well impacts people's ability to feed their families and take care of their kids. And so, you know, something that might seem like a big deal to me, but again, it's something that's as small as me just taking the time to learn can have such a profound impact on people. And I think between just kind of like my aspiration and vision for the future, and also just my very real recognition that the decisions that I make in this seat will impact other people push me and motivate me to do even the things that I may not be super excited about.

Oh, that's great. That's such a good example of what we talk about in the book of you can get yourself to want to do things by connecting with benefits that are real for you. And clearly, that future that you want to create and that future where people are— other people than you are successful and are supporting their families and doing what they want to do, that those are really motivating benefits to you.

Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, at the end of the day, Erika, like, I never feel like I'm at the finish point. So I always want to learn because I'm just like, the only way for me to get to the further destination that I believe is possible is just to continuously be learning and trying and learning and trying. Um, certainly I just believe in that process as well.

So thank you so much. I always, I always promise my listeners that this will be a short, snackable 10 minutes or so, and you have just You packed so much inspiring and practical stuff into this 10 minutes. I really appreciate it. So, thank you so much, Detavio, for being on the show. I hope to have you back again at a future point if you're up for it.

Yeah, of course, my pleasure. And everybody go read Erika's book because it's fantastic. Thank you for having me on the show today and, of course, thank you for featuring me in the book, Erika.

Oh, thank you so much. And for those of you listening, I completely support what Detavio said. Please read my book, Be Better First: Get Good at Things Fast to Stay Ready for the Future. And also, if you're interested in finding out where you're starting from right now as a learner, I suggest that you go to getgoodatthingsfast.com and take the quiz that you'll find there. So thanks again, Detavio.

Have a wonderful day.

Thank you.

Take care.

Bye. Bye, everybody.

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