Episode 10 | Part One: It's a TRAP!

Gregory Shepard, an entrepreneur who's built and sold 12 businesses, a recipient of 4 private equity awards, TEDx speaker, and Forbes author. This is The Boss Podcast with Gregory Shepard. Today's guest is a world-renowned expert in leadership development, a world-class keynote speaker, and co-author of the bestseller Trap Tales: Outsmarting the 7 Hidden Obstacles to Success. He's David M.R. Covey. David, thank you so much for joining me. I'm so excited for this podcast.

Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Oh, it's an honor. So, I wanted to just get this out of the way. You're the son of Stephen R. Covey, the author of the groundbreaking book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. I mean, obviously, you know, your dad was a fundamental author for a lot of people, including myself, over the years. You must have picked up some habits from your dad. Which of those habits have stuck from you? I just want to get this out of the way. We're going to talk about you, not your dad, but I just want to get this out of the way. I know people are going to be asking about this.

So, I mean, I think of all of the 7 Habits, the most impactful one for me is Habit 2, which is begin with the end in mind. You know, it's really the habit of vision. And I just love the whole concept of that you can create your own life and you need to have a vision. You know, my father was great with metaphors. He always talked about how all things are created twice. You know, he used the metaphor of like building a home. You have the blueprint and it's all created in the blueprint before you even touch the earth. And I really like that about your life. You know, that whatever's happened in the past is over. It's the past. And vision is more important than baggage, our history. And I love the whole idea about reinventing your life and becoming whoever you wanna be. And that can happen at any stage of your life.

So Inc. called you the top innovative speaker on the topic of leadership. So when you talk about leadership, what made you so curious about getting into leadership and what drives you to continue to be a thought leader in that vertical?

Yeah, it's a great question, Craig. I think that for me, leadership is kind of the X factor that enables successes to happen and to really, you know, unleash human capital. That's what my father's mission was about, was unleashing human capital. If he were to describe his mission in 3 words, it was unleash human potential. So I've always been fascinated with that. I've always enjoyed reading about and studying leaders. You know, I've recently been on this kick of reading all about the founding fathers of America and reading their stories and Washington and Jefferson and John Adams. I'm really, really interested in this whole notion of leaders, you know, being the X factor. When I say X factor, I mean being the catalyst for being the difference, not only for an organization, but for a family and also for your own life. Just learning to lead in your own life is critically important as well. I don't know, I grew up with it. I enjoy reading biographies of great leaders and distilling kind of the key principles that they take with them in terms of their leadership style and approach.

So what— let me ask you something. What is your favorite leadership style and approach? And second part of that is, how do you recognize a great leader? So if you're sitting there and you're saying, these are the elements that make great leadership, and these are the specific elements of a great leader that I appreciate most, how would you answer that?

So I would answer that the great leaders are those that inspire trust and those that inspire other people to reach their potential. I think a lot of the old-style leadership is the command and control. And I think that we still have—

Carrot and stick.

Yeah, carrot and stick. And it just doesn't work that way. You know, people want to be inspired. They want to be trusted. They want to be unleashed. And that's what a great leader does is they unleash human potential because everybody has greatness within them. They really do. And we're not always good at everything that we do. We all have weaknesses. But we all have strengths as well. And the role of a great leader is to find out those strengths of those members of your team, those individuals that are on your team, and find a way to how to unleash their potential. Leadership is really more about clearing the path. It's more about trusting people, not blindly, you know, but earned trust. And then it's about inspiring them to become their best.

It's funny 'cause I interviewed the coach of the Miami Heat, And he was talking about leadership also, and he was talking about blocking and tackling. He was like, the same sort of thing. The guy with the ball needs to be protected until the ball moves to somebody else. And the objective is to get the ball in the hoop regardless of who gets the ball in the hoop, everybody wins. And I also wanted to bring up a little bit more about this book that you wrote, Trap Tales: Outsmarting the 7 Obstacles to Success.

Yes.

This is a must-read for anybody. I actually just read it for the first time when I started talking to you a few months ago. And I would really like you to sort of talk about this a little bit because I found it to be really fascinating, especially trapologists, which you mentioned in there.

So, this is one of my favorite topics. So, thank you for bringing this up, Greg. I love talking about this. I'm very interested, you know, the American-German psychologist Kurt Lewin had a model called force field analysis. And he said, anytime you try to enact change, You always have driving forces. Those are like initiatives, things that you do. At the same time, you also have restraining forces. Those are the obstacles, or I like to call those the traps that get in the way. And I think a lot of times when we're focused on trying to get something done or achieving a goal or reaching a vision, we spend too much of our time on the driving forces and not enough of our time on the restraining forces. And I believe that by focusing more on the restraining forces, the traps, the obstacles that get in the way, we'll be able to be more successful in our life and be able to reaching, you know, our goals or vision. So, you know, my father, you know, was known obviously and famous for the 7 Habits. I've focused on the 7 Traps, and these are the 7 traps that we fall into at work. I call them the workplace These are the modern common traps that keep us and prevent us from reaching our vision or achieving our goals. They're the culprits. They get in the way. It's kind of a whole different way of looking at it. Instead of adding another initiative or adding another driving force, I'm really focused on what are the restraining forces. It's kind of like a brake. If you're driving a car, And you have one foot on the accelerator and the other foot on the brake. The way to get out of that situation is not by putting your foot harder on the accelerator. The way to improve that situation is by taking your foot off the brake. And that's, that's really what the traps are about is where do we have our foot on the brake keeping us, you know, from progressing and—

Like holding ourselves almost like a headwind, right?

Exactly, pulling ourselves back. And these are very common traps that we have, but they're the reasons why we're not being as successful as we'd like to be.

Do you mind going through the traps?

I'd love to.

And then we can dig into a couple of them. I thought when I read it, I was doing the audiobook and I was like, this is really— I actually sent it to everybody. I was like, this is really good because I never thought of it that way. I always thought of horse blinders on and The obstacles are the things when you take your mind off the goal kind of stuff. And then I realized, hold on a second, subconsciously and even consciously, we're holding ourselves back. And I realized that reading your books. I think it'd be really helpful for these entrepreneurs and investors that are listening to hear about this.

Yeah, absolutely. So we invented the word, my co-author, Stefan Mardix, who's also my business partner, we invented the word called trapologist. So a trapologist A Covey is a person or a leader who detects and avoids workplace traps and helps others do the same. So, there's 7 traps. Of course, you can't be a Covey and have like 9 traps or 5 traps, right?

You got to have 7. Yeah.

When we started this, Stefan and I, we started to work on this, we had more than 7. We had like 30, but we wanted to whittle it down to like the 7 most modern and common traps. So the first 3 traps are related to yourself that we call them the you traps. The first trap is busyness, and you can imagine the world we live in today. We're drowning in the thick of thin things. When I say thin things, these are things that are not really important. They're not essential, but there's absolutely a huge problem currently with the busyness trap. Then you have the procrastination trap. That's idling in the status quo. So many of us know some changes that we need to make and we're very aware. So it's not about not having the knowledge, it's about not acting on that knowledge and taking action. And so it's the procrastination trap that a lot of us face. The 3rd trap is the ego trap, and that's where we try to maintain this facade of perfection. And this has even become even more pronounced In the world of social media, you know, have you ever ever you know I'm sure you look at social media like I do, and sometimes you look at people and and you think wow they're always on vacation, they're always wearing the perfect clothes, and they're beautiful. They don't ever seem like they have any problems. You know, it's just like wow what a life! You know my my life is so boring and ordinary compared to them. But in reality, you know, it is a little bit of a of a facade and we try to maintain this facade of perfection. So anyway, those are the 3 traps that are related— busyness, procrastination, and ego— that relate to you.

David, I wanted to jump to the money trap. What is money myopia and why is it so dangerous?

The money trap is debt. And debt is just so terrible because it just kind of dominates our whole life. There's a lot of millennials, as you know, that are a lot more conservative than like a Gen Xer. I'm a Gen Xer, you know, just because they went through the Great Recession, you know, in '08 and '09. And now they have the coronavirus, you know, to deal with. And they have a lot of debt, you know, have a lot of school debt. And I try to help people get out of The debt trap, which is this life of servitude to paying interest for your whole life.

Yeah.

And you really kind of have to make up your mind and just say, look, I understand you have some maybe big decisions to make like going to school or purchasing a house. You may have to take on education debt and a mortgage, but you got to decide right now that are you going to be a person that's going to be paying interest most of your life? Are you going to be a person who is going to be earning interest most of your life? Albert Einstein called compound interest, he said it was the 8th wonder of the world. And when we are in the debt trap and where we're just paying debt, you know, most of our lives, and I think a lot of Americans, unfortunately, it's not just Americans, but, you know, a lot of other people as well, they kind of get into debt and they just see that as being part of their lives and Yeah, absolutely. They end up spending most of their life just paying on interest, which is totally crazy.

Yeah, my parents lived in debt their entire life and I remember hearing them talk about it. Let's move on to this focus trap. I really like this. So, I was really interested in this. I really like the subject of focus. So, you say the best things in life take time. How do you deal with the world getting faster and more demanding and demanding immediate gratification?

It's a great question. The technology benefits that we have is awesome. Again, I'm not one to poo-poo on that at all. It's just, it's great. But to build a successful marriage, to build a successful business, to build a, you know, a successful country or company, it takes time. It just doesn't happen overnight. And I think that sometimes we always hear the stories of the success stories, right? But for all those success stories, even those people that were successful, they'll tell you about all the failures that they had along the way. They'll tell you all of the disappointments they had along the way, the lessons that they learned. So, I think sometimes we overglorify these quick success stories and we think, you know, why is that not happening to me? But if you really talk to any of these people that have achieved any measure of success, material success, you know, financial success, you will realize that it didn't happen overnight, that there was a lot of work, a lot of effort that went into it. And this doesn't magically appear. It's not an accurate perception to think that you can just show up and do a few things and immediately have instant success. And I know it's a whole new concept because, you know, I, I have, I have a bunch of kids, you know, that can immediately get answers, you know, to any questions that they want. And that's awesome, you know, with what we had. And so they sometimes translate That into thinking, well, why shouldn't I just be given, you know, instant success? So we have to look at failure in a different way than how we've looked at it in the past. I think in the past we look at failure as something to be ashamed of or not to talk about it or to kind of sweep it under the rug. And I think we actually should look at failure as a key part of what enables us to be successful. I love some of the quotes by Jeff Bezos, the current CEO of Amazon, creator of Amazon. And he talked about how experimentation and failure are very much part of the culture of Amazon and always has been. And he even says that if you know in advance it's going to work, then it's not an experiment.

Mm-hmm.

And so, Any of the great successes and the great leaders and, and the great people that have achieved financial success, uh, and material success, they'll tell you that, uh, it just didn't happen overnight and required a lot of work, a lot of effort, following correct principles, and a willingness to kind of stick to it and follow through and, and, and persevere.

Yeah, it's interesting. Like, I know about the— I mean, the patience thing is huge, right? I mean, I've— I started my first business, like real business, when I was 19 and I'm 52, right? So it took me a long time. And I had this mentor who once told me that, you know, you're climbing a ladder and when one of the tongs on the ladder breaks, you know, you might fall and hit your face and you fall a few more, but now you fix it and you're a little more delicate next time.

Absolutely.

And eventually you climb the ladder. To your point, I think that The concept of failure is incredibly important. I mean, I try to fail all the time. I mean, when I was— for a long time, I was into lifting weights and it's all about failure, work to failure. And it was one of the places I learned the power of failure. The power of failure builds muscles and builds intelligence and wisdom. So I totally agree with you 100%. I wanted to move into— you graciously offered to talk about the 7 obstacles for management teams. And I just wanted to get on those traps and then go into the traps that management teams have so we could talk about that a little bit. I think it'd be really beneficial for folks.

Yeah, absolutely. So, I mentioned the 3 traps around you: busyness, procrastination, and ego. Then, there's 3 traps that relate— again, these are workplace traps. So, these 3 traps that relate to your interactions with other people or with your team. These are very common traps that we see in the workplace today. The first one is the trigger trap. And that's allowing emotion to taint your perspective. All of us have certain triggers, things that set us off at work. And a lot of times, we don't have a plan on how we're going to manage those triggers when we are set off at work, which is a big problem because then we have either a major disaster.

Yeah.

Most of the approaches are a fight or flight kind of mentality, which is a fighting mentality can be very negative trigger. And then a flight can even almost be worse. I spent a lot of time living in Japan, and I can tell you the passive-aggressive approach can almost even be worse than the conflict because you can't even understand what's happening. It's just, it's all underneath.

So one is where you're combative and the other one is where you sort of roll over?

Or you actively avoid, you know, you just never take on the big issues. You know, you just try to sweep them under the rug. And of course they're never swept under the rug because they come out later in uglier ways. So we have these triggers, things that, you know, that trigger us, you know, that we need to get control over. So that, that, that's, that's the first one. The second one in the team traps is the silo trap. And that's where we operate as an independent on a team. And so many of us work on a team and we're supposed to work interdependently, but we still operate very independent. We operate as if we're not part of a team, as if we're working just separately on the project. Interdependence is a very, very hard concept. There was a study done that said, how many people think that teams are important? 94% of the people said, yes, teams are important. And then the next question was, how many of you like to work on a team? And 75% said, no, I don't like to work on a team. So, we think that teams are very important but not for us.

Yeah.

And it's very hard for us to work interdependently because we think that we know better Our way of doing things, you know, is the better way of doing it. And we also believe we have this concept that working with others will slow us down.

That I hear all the time. I love working with other people, but I like executing alone. So it's kind of— but you're right. Most people don't want to work with other people. And most of the time I have to, you know, in the RACI model, I have to make sure that everybody looks at the consultant and say, all right, who else should be making this decision with you? I mean, collect all the information, then make the decision. But I think that you make a really good point, and that statistic is just fascinating, but it totally makes sense.

Teams are important, but not for me.

Yeah, it totally makes sense in our portfolio companies. You know, they're like, you know, I want you guys to collaborate on this. And then you come back and then we collaborated, and then you ask them individually and go, no, he never talked to me. So it's fascinating.

You're right. You have this in a marriage as well where we operate as a married single. We get married and we're supposed to now be a we. We're supposed to be a team. But instead, we continue to operate like we're a married single. We're married but we operate like we're still single. And so, it's a problem also in a marriage. Anyway, the third trap as related to teams is is called the settling trap. And that's where we're losing the passion and inspiration in our professional work. If you look at the engagement scores, they've been doing it for 30 years now where they're measuring engagement at work. And there is massive disengagement. A lot of people are highly disengaged. Some are somewhat disengaged. But overall, globally, not just in the United States, all over the world, We have this massive disengagement. People are not engaged or happy in their jobs. And it's because one of the one or 2 or 3 or 4 of the needs that are not being met. And we have 4 needs as it relates to our work life. The first need we have is to be paid fairly. And the second need that we have is to be used, our mind to be used creatively. And the third need is that we have this need for having passion for our job and for the work that we do. And then the fourth need is what I call spiritual need, is the need to contribute, the need to make a difference, the need that you matter, that your life is contributing and that it matters.

Yeah.

And the reason why we have this massive disengagement in the workplace, most of the time it's not the money. People don't leave their jobs because of the money. They leave because they don't like their boss. They fire their boss because their boss has a command and control leadership style. They don't trust them. They don't inspire them. They don't clear the path for them. They don't provide ways to unleash their potential.

Or challenge them.

Or challenge them, yeah. And a lot of the challenges that comes to your mind where you feel like, Hey, the company cares about what I think and will listen to my ideas. And if you're asked never to share your ideas or when you do share your ideas, no one listens to them or it's just discounted or disregarded, what are you going to do? You're just going to say, forget it. The company doesn't care about me. It doesn't care what I'm going to do. I'm going to find my pleasure and joy outside of the workplace, not at work.

Yeah.

So anyway, you have a lot of people that have already settled. They're settling in jobs because they need it financially to support themselves and their families, but they hate it. They don't, they don't have passion around it. They don't feel like they're being utilized and they don't feel like they're making a difference.

Yeah, it's, it's true. I was talking to a mentor of mine in leadership and he was like, look, that person that works at your company right now that you think is not working very hard or lazy or whatever, that same person when they get off of work is the coach of a baseball team. These people work really hard. They're running marathons. They're doing a lot of things that's contrary to what you think about them. So the problem isn't theirs, it's yours. That's an interesting way of thinking things. And when I heard that, I was like, wow, that's crazy. So I did a survey when the last business I owned, I did a survey and I asked people about personal things like, do you Do this? Do you do that? What was the last thing you've done that's incredible? And it was really amazing to me how many people answered questions with things that I was like, wow, you have to be motivated and driven and have focus and enthusiasm and optimism to do something like that. And yet at work, you know, there's somebody that's on the chopping block. So you ask yourself, who's failing who?

Exactly. And I would argue that it's the leaders that are failing A leader has 3 main roles. The first role is they need to model the behavior they want to see. That's really who you are. And then, they need to have a philosophy of trusting people. That's how you lead. Abraham Lincoln said, I would rather trust people and be disappointed every once in a while than never trust and be miserable all the time.

That's brilliant.

And so, a lot of people think that trusting people is Pollyannish. And you're naive and you're going to be taken advantage of. Not true. It's not blind trust, but you need to extend trust to people. Think about anybody in your life that believed in you and trusted you and extended trust and told you something about yourself, about your potential that you didn't even believe in yourself. You would run through brick walls for that person.

Yeah.

You would do anything that you could to not disappoint that person. And that's what happens is that when we trust somebody, they are willing to just show you their best self and give their best effort. And then the third thing that we need to do, so we need to model, we need to trust, and we need to inspire. David Brooks, the New York Times columnist, you know, had a book, great book called The Social Animal.

Mm-hmm.

And in it, he just talked about how human beings have the need to understand the why. It's not a matter of just getting people say, hey, you know, do this, do that. You need to connect them with the why, you know, why it's important, why it matters. And that's what, you know, when we inspire our people, then we help them see the why, not only the what, but the why, why we're doing it. I use an example and it said, you know, when I teach this course, I say, let's say that I was going to pay you $200,000 for digging a hole 6 feet deep and then filling it up again. Now I have one requirement. You can't ask me any questions as to why you're doing it. Just know that I'm gonna pay you that money. You're gonna make good money, but you can't ask me any questions. Well, I would tell you, Greg, that somebody would do that for a while. They may do it for a month, may do it for 2 months, may even do it for a year. After a while, they're gonna go crazy. You know why? Because they want to know why they're doing it.

Yeah. Yeah.

And the fact that they're just making good money is not enough. They need to understand the why, the purpose behind things. And that's what we need to do as great leaders is give our employees, our teams the why. Why? No, here's what we're doing and here's why we're doing it. Here's why it matters and why your contribution is going to be so needed and required for us to achieve this. And when people understand the why, wow! They're able to move heaven and earth to make things happen.

David, I hate to do this, but we have to stop right here. But when we come back for part 2 of my conversation with David M.R. Covey, David tells us what he thinks made Steve Jobs a great leader.

I love Steve Jobs in terms of his leadership that he showed around focus. Incredibly focused person. Now, I don't think he's necessarily was a necessarily a nice guy or not even a a nice, a great boss. He wasn't. But man, that guy learned how to focus.

Thanks for checking out the BOSS Podcast with Gregory Shepard. Get more on Greg's Business Operating Support System, BOSS, at GregoryShepard.com. This has been a production of Forbes Books Radio.