Climb to the Top with Chuck Garcia

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Everybody, here we are again at Contractor Radio. I am your host Jim Johnson, also the head coach at Contractor Coach Pro. And our whole entire job is to help you get control of your business so you can grow your business and achieve that personal and financial freedom and you were chasing when you started your business. One of the key components of that is leadership and being able to communicate effectively as a leader. And we have a guest today that is at a whole different level of that versus kind of our blue collar trades approach to leadership. I'm super excited to bring him on. He's gonna have a different spin than you may have seen before. I got the opportunity to talk with him last week about something completely different and we were able to get into some conversation about leadership. And it was just one of those things like I got to get this guy on the show because he's going to bring immense value to our listeners. It's not going to be one that you want to sit down or not pay attention to, maybe even take some notes while you listen to this podcast today. And before we get to our guest, we got to pay the bills. We're going to throw on our sponsor, one of our favorites. Guys, get the referral.

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Guys haven't checked out, get the referral. I highly suggest checking the show notes there, clicking on the link to their website, setting a time for a demo. Because referrals are the basis of our business, it's how we protect the clients that we've brought on board, is why we create raving fans, is to get those referrals. So use a tool that allows you to manage them, update them, keep your tasks straight on them and reward them whenever they give you a referral. Today we're going to be talking about leadership and I have an amazing guest today. He's the founder of Climb Leadership. He is a best selling author on Amazon. He talks about emotional intelligence, communication, a lot of things that we really need in our businesses these days because as you guys know, we talk about this all the time. Two reasons that Most companies go out of business is a lack of financial acumen and a lack of leadership. So let's bring on our special guest today, Chuck Garcia. Hey, Chuck. Welcome aboard, man.

No, thank you, Gene. It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me.

Yeah. You know, I got this opportunity to talk to you a week ago, and you were kind enough to say, I know you're a busy guy. You've got your own radio show, you've written, Climb to the top book, you do your own coaching of leaders. And so could you tell our audience a little bit of your background and kind of what got you to this level of doing what you do?

Yeah, I appreciate that. Well, when coming out of college, I was a finance major in college and I had three objectives. The first was to make my parents proud. The second was to be financially independent as fast as I could because of all the love and funding they gave to me. And then the third was a career on Wall street. And it all came through. I spent before I did what I do, Jim. I spent the better part of 25 years with three magnificent companies. But I'm going to highlight one of them. It was a couple years out of college, I joined this company that no one ever heard of. And I was 190th employee. And the company was called Bloomberg, and it was located in midtown Manhattan. I'm a New Yorker and somebody had told me about this guy named Mike Bloomberg who was bringing a different way of how information is consumed in the world of Wall Street. When I met him, it was almost as if like someone at Google early on in their career without knowing who they were. And in the world of finance, Bloomberg became a powerhouse, a juggernaut in the world of information, between buyers and sellers. So as early on in the company, it became pretty apparent this is a magnificent organization. That has to your point, as you introduce the show, it has the financial acumen. It had that because it had pretty deep pockets and it had a level of communication and emotional intelligence no one taught me in college was possible. So I spent 14 years at that organization, the last half of it, seven years. I was the public spokesperson for the company, which the job responsibility was it put me on stage all over the world as the company was building and serving the financial service community around the world. I was on stage in probably 50 different countries and probably in front of millions of people if I had them all up. What I didn't know at the time was being in that profession that I didn't even know that was a job was setting the basis for ultimately what I've come to do for the last eight years.

I would say that's pretty impressive. Bloomberg, I know, I see them on tv, Right. Is a real company. You know, you don't always see us as contractors, and we kind of tend to look down on ourselves because of that type of thing. But we really do something that we should be ultimately very proud of. You know, putting a roof over somebody's head, protecting their homes, keeping bugs out of their houses, whatever it is, we do something that we can be extremely proud of, too, and lead very well. You mentioned something there. That was a couple of words put together that I don't think we hear a whole lot in our industry. But emotional intelligence, you said that was one of the keys to Bloomberg being so successful. Could you explain that concept to our crowd listening today?

Yeah, you bet. Well, let me just to put it into context, after my many years at Bloomberg, I am what's called an executive coach now, where I work in the service of many Wall street companies teaching emotional intelligence. I'm also on faculty at Columbia University, where I teach in the graduate school of Engineering, where I te communications and emotional intelligence. But the reason I said that, Jim, is what I found. The college model teaches you that the mark of success is you learn something, you cram it, you take an exam, you regurgitate it, and whoever scores the highest, that's the mark of success. And then I got to this company that didn't give a damn where you went to college, didn't care what your grades were, what they cared about is much more cultural than I ever considered that. The real magic in building that company didn't necessarily have to do with the features and the functions of the things that we were selling. It had to do with the things you don't see. The intangibles of how people collaborate, how they communicate, how they adapt to ever changing circumstances. There was nothing to cram, There was nothing to memorize, There was nothing to examine. But being in the presence of people who are strategic and intentional about the kind of culture they want to build in order to recruit what they believe are the best employees. That's what I learned. And by that emotional intelligence, what I found is the leadership team. And I was in my early 20s or in mid-20s when I joined. It was a team that was constantly communicating, that was always checking in with their employees that never took us for granted. They fed us, they did everything they could to ensure that we would succeed. And this isn't what I thought the business World of Wall street was. I thought, you just show up, you fight like hell, and whoever has the most money at the end of the day wins. There's a little bit of that, but this was a company that was serving that. It wasn't the Wolf of Wall Street. We were serving companies that were learning to make money from their capital. But what I learned is this is leadership. Oh, my God. This wasn't taught me in a book. This wasn't anything that, that I could have learned by reading. What we learned was resilience, adaptability, being creative, the need to be persuasive. In fact, Jim, what it hit me as I was emerging, I had read this wonderful book written in 1936 called how to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie that most of us in this world have read. And I said, oh, my God, this is it. This is what he's talking about. It's right here in this company. Oh, my God. I thought this was a dream, that this was just something he wrote about that was fun. Oh, my God. I read the book. The company was the very embodiment of the 30 principles that Dale Carnegie communicated in his book, which in the modern world has been known and is now labeled by a Harvard social scientist named Daniel Goldman, that he calls emotional intelligence. The ability to address, to read and to control and understand your emotions and the emotions of others so that we can connect with other people, to feel their pain, and ultimately to form coalitions and communities.

That might be the best explanation I've ever heard. Now, you know, Bloomberg, like, I'm assuming you, you knew him.

Oh, very well. Yeah, he was, I consider him a mentor. Yeah, definitely.

Did he, did he ever, like, cop to the fact that he read the book and he said, okay, that book is a really book. We're going to start doing that stuff in our company.

I don't know who ever talked about it. He was one of those guys that didn't even need to espouse theories, practices. He just behaved. And when you, you want to know about a person, don't listen to what they say, watch what they do. And when you're in the presence of someone who leads by example, interestingly enough, when you begin to model and mirror the behaviors of the people you look up to, before you know it, in a way, and this is how we form accents. This is why we wear uniforms on a field with teammates, you begin to look alike, talk alike, walk alike. And I don't mean that in a negative way. I mean that in a way where you begin to Unify efforts on a common mission where you identify and you relate to the people that are around you because they look like me, they walk like me, they talk like me. But here was the best part, Jim. We were encouraged to assert our own styles, to be independent in our way, but there were certain things that were not negotiable, and that was the value system, the work ethic. In fact, he, he, Jim was the first that once told me, I once made a mistake. I forget what I did. And, and I apologized for it. And he almost dismissed me with that. He said, don't be afraid to make mistakes. Be afraid of not learning from them. So he, he was very good about granting the permission to fail. As long as you tried, you didn't have an ethical breach. He always talked about, and led by example that the innovations in companies come as a result of getting a lot of things wrong before you get a few things right. That's an emotionally intelligent leader because they have given us the psychological safety to be different, to, to talk different, to act different, as long as it was in the boundaries of the culture of honesty and communication. I thank the day that I walked into that place because I was now learning the things I never learned in the textbook and the importance of the soft skills that very few people in the conventional educational model talk about. But in the professional world, whether you're putting a roof on a building or whether you're selling to Wall street, your ability to communicate and to relate to the people that you serve, even if you're putting on a roof or gutter, it might leak. And when it does, own it, be honest about it and fix it, and we're good. That was, that was the culture that's.

That'S actually really awesome. A couple of reasons why, number one, you know, that foundation of emotional intelligence, it's a difficult thing to do, especially whenever you're. You're wearing a bit of your heart or your emotions on your sleeve. If you translate that to everybody else, it could be a really good thing or it could be a really bad thing. You know, positive, really good. That type of thing works well. But if. And you got some bad stuff going on in your life in the background, you bring that into your business, it starts to create some drama. And that's where we'll see a lot of the contractors that we work with struggle with that, right? Like, hey, what's happening in the outside world and to them is affecting everything else in their business. And they don't see it because they're not keeping that emotion in check. So you mentioned that you're a professor at Columbia. Is that correct?

Correct. Yeah.

Are you teaching what you describe as these soft skills to college level people? Because you hear this all the time. I have three kids that have gone to college and two of them are out and on their own. And both of them have said, the real world is nothing like what I got over there. My son has a degree in business and marketing, but the real world in business and marketing is completely different from anything he learned in college. So is that something they're starting to move towards now?

Oh, my goodness, yeah. This is such a perfect entree. I teach at Columbia University. It's in New York and it's an Ivy League institution. And I'm very proud to be able to represent this firm. But here is the best part. And what I teach is in the graduate school. So I don't teach undergraduates at Columbia. I teach generally. They are adult learners. Many of them have already been in business. There's 11 different engineering majors. But try to try to get the dichotomy here. I teach soft skills to brilliant engineers. And people say what?

That does not sound like fun, Chuck.

In fact, there are 2,400 students in the engineering program, and all 2400 came out of the undergraduate model. That was what I described earlier. Cram exam regurgitate. That is the definition of how you succeed academically. It goes to the one who scores the best on the test. The interesting part about that score on the test, I don't know what you look like, I don't know what you sound like. I don't know what you do, I don't know what you wear. It doesn't matter. The only thing that matters to me is how you score on a standardized test and how you score on the exam. So that the academic performance mark of success is rooted in a number. Okay, that's good. And if you're going to learn to be an engineer, you got to be good at those things that they teach you. But here was the most interesting part and the gap that I'm describing to all parents whose kids are college bound. I was invited many years ago to speak to a group of engineers in the Columbia Graduate School who all aspired to go to Wall Street. And a friend of mine was a graduate of that program. And he said, would you mind coming in one day I'm going to put you in front of 350 what's called financial engineers. And could you explain to them the importance of communication on Wall Street? And I came in and I talked about my book, which is a communication framework for how to climb a career. And people in the audience were on staff there, and they said, your timing could not have been better. We have received communication from Facebook and Google and many of the companies saying, columbia, thank you for sending us great engineers. And then the but came. But what's happening is these brilliant engineers are coming into their careers with their aspirations, their ambitions to lead. And what happens? They get promoted on the strength of their technical competence into a job description that is radically different than what it is they did when they joined us. So immediately there's a pivot to. The skills that got them here up to a point are not the skills that they need to succeed in this new job description. Because what happens, whether you're a contractor, whether you're an engineer, an investment banker, whatever that is, when you begin to lead people, you're doing a lot less of the thing that got you to succeed. So if you knew how to put a roof on, and you're now running a roofing company where you're not putting the roof on, but you're leading people to put it on, that's a different skill set and a different expectation of what you're going to do in a day. And it's the same thing. So what happens at Columbia, these brilliant engineers who score mightily on those exams are put into those leadership positions. If they haven't been taught it and they're bombing it, they didn't know. They didn't know how to communicate. They didn't know I had to show emotional intelligence and that I couldn't just blow up at anybody when they make a mistake. So all of a sudden, Jim, this big mismatch in what they were taught in college to all of a sudden the real world, soft skills that are necessary to be able to motivate people, to inspire them to provoke change. All these things we talk about, about success in the world, whether it's business or engineering. Oh, my God. Have we just redefined what it means to be smart? Yes, we have. So the definition of what smart meant in your past is gone. That is not the benchmark for your child that graduated from college. The benchmark is completely different as toward how we going to mark his success. And that's what emotional intelligence has really helped. And it's what I teach at the college level, Jim, is exactly the same thing that I teach at the executive level on Wall Street. There is no difference in what I teach or how I teach it. Just the difference is if one is in graduate school or one is running an operating division of a thousand people. There's a context for what you would do in the service of that training. It's the same, it's universal.

So interesting conversation because we see this in our world too in a different vein, you know, we're not financial engineers, which I don't even know what that is.

They're trying to help you figure out how do you pick what will Google be priced out on the stock market in two minutes. But I don't think it's any different technically than what you do. You come to the site with tools and you are expected to construct something and that something has a set of blueprints. It's no different in financial engineering. It's all the same.

Yeah, I think what my observation is, there's a very technical aspect to that. If I do this, this and this, this will happen and I can repeat that over and over again and similar result in most cases, which is a very practical type of job. Although, you know, some you gotta be smarter at some than others. Maybe we're different kind of smart. We see this a lot in our world. In the sales aspect of things. Somebody's a really great salesperson. He's out there just knocking him dead, closing everybody he talks to. And the owner comes to that salesperson, says, you are an amazing salesperson. I want you to be my sales manager. So he moves from sales very technical and very skill oriented in a very technical and practical fashion to management, which is a leadership aspect of things with a bunch of soft skills, communication, like you said, emotional intelligence. And he thinks just if he follows what he did over there in sales, over here on the managerial side, everything's going to be great. And he gets, you know, wildly surprised that that's not the case. And it's usually one of the biggest mistakes we see in these companies. And it would be the same thing as a guy putting a roof on. He's putting the roof on. He's doing the same thing each and every day. This many nails, this line, pop that line, do this thing. Okay, now I want you to lead the crew. He has to do something completely different. You know, he's got other sets of skills that he now has to put into place. Because while he's been able to do that thing, whatever that thing may be, he's never coached that thing, he's never taught that thing. He's never explain something to somebody they've never done before and have them do it, which is a difficult thing to do in A lot of cases without some skills. So in your book Climb to the Top, it sounds like you're moving them up that ladder or climbing that mountain. Is that, is that a fair assessment?

Yeah. In fact, what you're describing, I want to comment on that is I think the salesperson to sales manager is apropos to everything that I've described. It is the same thing. The skills that got you to be good at being a salesman are not necessarily the skills that are good as a sales manager. I will also say to anyone listening who's been in the armed forces, I know that a soldier who was on the battlefield has a certain set of skills and if he does, he or she does it well, they be promoted to general. We don't teach generals to fight on the battlefield. We teach them the art of diplomacy. Look at the skills that got him to be general. What is required once you're there? Completely different. It's the same in every industry.

And I'm guessing here, I don't even know. I haven't had an opportunity to read the book. I can't wait to do so. Maybe you'll send me a signed copy or something like that. But I'm going to bet that to go from that practical technical aspect to a managerial aspect to a C level aspect or executive, that's a whole nother step and a whole nother set of skills. Or are they very similar?

It is a much more refined set of skills. And I do, I think it's important I lay down what the three skills are in the 21st century, irrespective of industry, that are the top skills that are helping people to emerge. And let's set that aside for just a second. And I appreciate you asking about the book and I do want to comment on that because what in writing the book, it was really what when I set out to do it, it was all for the intent of helping people to climb careers. So the title of the book, A Climb to the Top, is used as a metaphor because the subtitle of the book is Communication and leadership tactics to take your career to new heights. So let's examine the keywords leadership and communication. I'm a mountaineer. I climb mountains all over the world. And in order to climb those mountains, I always had a backpack that had a set of tools. And I knew that if I didn't know how to use the tools correctly, it can be. It could kill me, and it does. But I also knew that in addition to the toolkit, there was always a team. And that team Is critical because you climb and you ascend with that team. You cannot climb mountains alone, you cannot climb careers alone. Anybody who thinks they can has got to be crazy. Doesn't mean you have to be best friends or that you have to fall in love with everyone you work with. But there is a certain modicum of respect and collaboration that is going to help you ascend faster. So a climb to the top as a metaphor was really written to help people look at the metaphor that to climb a mountain takes setting goals. It's one step at a time. There is no shortcut to any mountain I ever climbed. And then the third part, the important part, it can't be done alone. Now the tools. My entire career was rooted on my ability to communicate, to be able to move people to the cause by which I'm trying to convince and persuade them to buy the thing that I am selling. So the tools then in a climb to the top, it's divided up into 10 different chapters. Each one of them is a different tool or communication technique. For example, one of the techniques is called the power of the pause.

Well done.

Thank you. I've had a little bit of practice.

You might have said that a time or two.

Well, if I had to write the book again, I would probably move the power of pause to chapter one. Because when I meet people, students, executives, even people on radio shows, they are speaking at 100 miles an hour. And especially in New York, I'm New York based, we tend to talk faster and we speak at about 150 words a minute. People cannot remember all of that. In fact, they won't remember most of it. They'll never forget how you make them feel. That's the emotional intelligence component of communicating. And they will likely remember the first thing you said in a sentence and they might remember the last thing you said, but they won't remember anything in between. So when people start to speak and they're in rapid fire, just about everything is lost. So what's one of those tools? Just like I did now, allowing the listener time to absorb my message, allowing me as the speaker to think about what it is I'm going to say next. Which leads us to another chapter that I think is worth. Worth.

I think that's a great segue. I think that's an amazing segue because we need to pause. We need to give a few minutes here to one of our sponsors. We'll come right back. I can't wait to hear the second. Like that first one was awesome. Cannot wait to hear the second one. Give us just one minute here, guys, and we'll come right back and check.

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The power of the Pause. We paused for just a second to hear from one of our sponsors and they're powerful, no doubt about it. If you're trying to get engagement with your customers and prospects, Signposts is the way to go. Go check them out, click on their link in the show notes and tell them Contractor Coach Pro sent and they'll take great care of you. Chuck. Soon to be Chapter one. Power of the pause. Gotta rewrite the whole thing, right? Yeah, I'm in the middle of writing a book too, and I'm like, okay, order and format and all that good stuff. That's a lot of fun. So you, you had a second thing, you said this. Yeah, lines up with that.

So, so, so to our listeners, the framework is there's 10 different tools. Tools. The power of the pause is one of them. But I'm going to ask you to key into what it is I'm about to say. And I want to use this as a reputation of what I hear from so many people. And I don't necessarily have to coach them to hear this. But imagine one day you are in your office or wherever you are, and someone, let's just say a student of yours comes in and has something to say. Okay? That situation actually happened. And Michael walked into my office. Michael was a student of mine. And this is what he said. So, you know, this pandemic, like, I kind of think that, you know, we might sort of, I mean, open like this new chapter in our, like, history. It's literally, you know, like, yeah. And I thought about the punchline. Like, yeah, that's called the recency effect. You remember the last thing someone said to you? And then I thought about all those other noises that he made. You know, I mean, like. So chapter three of a Climb to the Top is called Speak with Conviction. And when Michael spoke to me, there was not a shred of conviction in there because it was so polluted by noise. Verbal crutches and filler words that crowded out and drowned the very thing he was trying to tell me. And as I sat there and I listened to him speak to me in that way, I said, oh, Michael, I would not be a good teacher and I certainly wouldn't be your friend if we just dismiss what you just said to me. This is a learning opportunity because if you walk into a meeting with, let's just say, Mike Bloomberg, and you said, so like, you know, or you got on the debate stage for the Republican presidential debate, and you started to lace everything you said with verbal crutches, people will stop listening to you because you're exhausting. That's another chapter where instead of teaching someone to do something, we're actually teaching them to stop doing something. About the power of that is if you were to train an athlete, you're training them to do things, you're training them to stop the bad habits. They both have to be there. So now this, like, pandemic, that's how people talk. That doesn't mean that that's okay or that's an acceptable manner by which you engage people simply because the rest of the world speaks that way. Somehow it's okay if you do. That's a very low bar. And so that second tool, the ability to eliminate the bad habits and to speak with purpose and power and enthusiasm and speak as if you are convicted, that the words that you are saying matter to you and they matter to the people that you're communicating with. That's conviction that, Jim, is the emotional intelligence that. I don't just hear the words, I feel your words, and I am moved to do something.

Yeah, we. We talk about that from the aspect of absolute belief. If you have absolute belief in something, you will be convicted in your approach to it. You will have the perseverance when necessary, and you'll have the faith in yourself that it's worth the effort. And it's funny, whenever we. It's one of those things where we're competent about something, we gain some confidence about it. It's much more likely to speak with that conviction. And when you do, people start to look at you as a bit more of an authority, maybe an expert, somebody that they can rely on when things are in a pinch. That is incredible. It was funny as you were talking about that circumstance. I felt like my mom was talking to me.

It goes to all generations.

Yeah, she was my communication coach early on. She's amazing. Ladies always sent words with every single day, as long as I can remember word with me to school. Come home. Define it, use it in a sentence. In this short little story, anytime I was saying or like or any of that kind of stuff, and I still do, I try to control it. I know that it comes out of me and I know it's there. I'm much more mindful and aware of it than I used to be. But this idea of the way people speak today and saying, hey, that. Where does that come from? Have we just not cared as much from an education standpoint? Is it something social and social, cultural? What is it that's bringing that about in the first place, that I don't remember it being quite that way? Or maybe I'm just misremembering things because I'm older.

Oh, it's a little bit of both, I think. The educational model. Think about us as children. We're taking math and English and science. We're taking all these things in school. And us, they're all equally weighted. We don't know any different. They all matter. So if you've got five courses, you're putting 20% of your efforts on all five. But the thing is, when you become adults, you're not doing any of those five things. You're doing one thing. Now, you may do a lot with that, but the reality is, as you go through, as you grow up, you're continuing to filter all of these subjects that you learned until you dismiss most of them. The communications, or what I'm describing is the manner by which we engage. There is no place for that in the curriculums because that's not what the educational model was meant to do. But. But if you think about what we do when we get out of the educational model, we're expected to do the very thing that we weren't taught. Because in order to succeed, you're selling, you're moving, you're emoting, you're trying to persuade and convince somebody. Buy my house that I'm selling. Buy the shingles that I am selling. You are. This is the second chapter, Jim, is called the Power of Emotional Appeal. The word emotion is derived from the French, which means to move. So think about that motion. What you're doing is you're motioning. You're moving someone. By my shingles, by my PVC pipe, by Kohler Kitchens or Kohler Bath, whatever that may be. Success comes with the ability to persuade and inspire people to buy your agenda. And I don't mean that in a selfish way. I mean that in a way that this is how we choose to succeed. Things don't sell themselves we persuade people to buy them. People don't buy on logic. They buy on the big decisions. They buy on emotion. And I'd imagine in your business. I know I had my house built big, beautiful house. Contractor from. They broke ground. It was a very emotional thing for us. It was no longer about the money. This is where I'm going to raise my children. That the roof could not leak the. You know, all those things, that's what mattered to us. It was. We were more emotionally invested. So we wanted a contractor who felt our pain, who understood how important it was to us, that this was not just a bunch of wood and shingles. This was our home. Not a house. A home. There's a big difference. And I think the good contractors who treat it such that I am selling you home to raise your children, that is a far cry from a tent that I could build in the woods. That has no emotional value. And I think that's what we do. And that's what I tried to teach in the communication tactics of. How you show up matters because people see you and people hear you. What are the impressions that you want to form? It's up to you. If you want to hit them with ums and us, they'll tune out. But if you stick to them with.

Purpose, they don't 100% agree with that. To the point that, you know, people definitely buy on emotion. We wouldn't. That would not be a true statement. If we. Not every single one of us, I mean, to a person, we walk on a car lot, which vehicle do we go to? We go to the nicest, most beautiful one that we picture ourselves in, and everybody else seeing us in that vehicle and going, yeah, he's amazing. Then we look at the price tag and we go, I don't know. Right. Like, that might not be in my budget. And we. We may buy that one if we can, but if we can't, we start to step down instead of starting at the bottom and working our way up. And we talk about this in sales, is that people are attracted to the best and the most. The thing that creates the most emotion, the most, feel the most joy and comfort, all of those emotions wrapped up. But when you can apply that with a practical process, the decision is aligned emotionally and logically. And when you can make that magic happen, your closing ratio goes through the roof. It's not only like, this guy's great. I can see this picture. I can see myself in the house. That's going to be beautiful. But they do this and this and this and this and this. That takes all the stress away from every example that I've ever had before in my life, which is also an emotional thing. But it's backed up by logic, going, definitely got to go with this guy, right?

And I think there's another part of this is if you put someone in a Ferrari or if you put them in a Hyundai, both of them are going to get you to your destination at the same time. One will not make you any earlier or later than the other one. But what you're describing, and I think this cuts across every aspect of our lives. When you're with that salesman, you're going to forget what the salesman said. You will, you'll forget. You'll forget what he wore, assuming you'll forget he shined his shoes or he didn't. But you never forget how that salesman made you feel, how he led you to the car, how he asked you to sit in it, how you smelled the leather, how it felt to grip the steering wheel. There's nothing in what I've just described that is fact, a feature or function of the automobile itself, because that's not what the buyer is thinking. How do I feel sitting in the seat of that Ferrari when you're selling a home? When I was selling Bloomberg, all I was going for is, how are they feeling in the buying decision? This is where emotional intelligence comes in. Because as the salesman, you want to feel what they're feeling, feeling. You want to bring that matter of empathy. That's a matter of style, not technical competence, but the style of how you are winning someone to your cause because of how you made them feel, not necessarily of the features and the functions that make the Ferrari a better car than the Hyundai. And I think that is the most misunderstood aspect of our educational model. My goodness, I don't feel anything. In a cram exam test that I've taken, okay, you're got the highest grades. That doesn't speak to the heart. It speaks to the mind. And in the end, we're feeling machines. We feel first, we think second, the conventional model flips it and it's wrong.

That is, I think you really hit on something there, because that scoring that we do in school, you know, hey, there's the. There's the valedictorian salutatorium and all the top 10 and A's, B's, C's and D's. That score that we receive makes us feel a certain way, whether it's elite or, oh, my goodness, I'm. I'm not so hot, right? But it's not a true measure of how we're actually going to turn out.

Not at all. There may be some causality, but I think that because. And I don't dismiss the work ethic. And you know, I was no genius, but I had to work hard to compensate for the fact that I'm not good in math. All right, whatever. I think that everybody brings a certain ethic with you, and you decide what you want to take with you when you get out of that model. But what you're not taking with you is something you never learned. And that's everything that we're describing now. And even to my colleagues, students at Columbia, this is a revelation to them. It's like, oh, my God, when they finally got out to Google or Facebook, I was like, oh, oh, my God. People are confounding. People are unpredictable. I used to think if you did A, you get B with human beings, you do A, you might get D, F, Z. You have no idea. I'm even afraid to turn on the news. What, what are the they going to say about the next variant? I don't know, but you can't get that out of a book. And I think, oh, and Jim, I want to come back to one thing, and that's we said earlier, and this is an important message to our listeners, and that's about the refinement of the leadership skills. What are the three key skills that are getting people to the top of the pyramid? And I say this even though I am speaking from my experience in financial services. What I'm about to say cuts across every industry that I've ever been exposed to. And I state that because I was once. I've served on a succession plan which, which means we were helping to appoint the next CEO. And we did an identification of what are the traits among this very large company that you want out of your next CEO? Turns out that there were 34 traits. And we said, well, we can't hire someone who's good at 34 things. That's just crazy. So we narrowed it down to three. But here are the three. And I think if anyone is listening, as a guidepost to your career development, I urge you to focus on these three. The number one skill set that thousands of employees asked a number one top of the list must have this skill is called grace under fire. Think about this. This is the ability to stay calm under the weight of enormous expectations. Did they teach you that in school? No. It's important in this day and age because everything is on a camera now that when Things are bad and people are asking you for a response. The minute that you lose your temper, they immediately are forming a social judgment that you're not cool under pressure. Number two, the ability to resolve conflicts effectively. Think about the conflict resolution. What everyone who runs a company will tell you, that they spent a lot of their time, and I don't mean this, that the conflict is necessarily negative. It's not always negative, but there are disagreements and they're very passionate people who often are now in a conflict because they're not agreeing. The Beatles had it, the Red Hot Chili Peppers had it. The sport, great sports teams have it. It's prevalent and it's often a good thing. But your ability to effectively resolve it rather than leaving it open and unresolved is a critical leadership competency. And then the third, and this, Jim, is where EQ stepped in. The third is stylistic. That in this day and age, In December, November, December 2021, people want a leadership style where the CEO shows empathy and emotional intelligence. And I feel your pain and I know how hard you're working and I know you want diversity and inclusion. We hear you and we're doing something about it. The days of commanding and controlling employees is over. No one is going to be led by that because they'll tell you, take the job and shove it. So this is now stylistic, where you were promoted on the strength of your technical competency. And you're good at that thing that you do, but that's not the expectation that your follower is looking for. They want you to become. They want you to communicate in a way that resolves conflict. And they want you to be vulnerable and to show, show them that you are emotionally intelligent, that you can read the room, that you can feel their pain. This is a leadership model that I no idea when I was in college.