Suzanne Peterson: How to Become an Effective and Admired Leader

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Great leadership is about what you do, not who you are. Hi everyone, I'm business coach Steve Sandusky for Barron's Advisor, The Way Forward podcast. My guest today is Suzanne Peterson. Suzanne is a partner at CRA Admired Leadership, which is a boutique leadership development firm with a large client base in financial services. She also serves on the faculty at Arizona State University's Thunderbird School of Global Management. In today's conversation, we explore how great leaders consistently demonstrate the behaviors that earn them the respect, trust, and admiration of their team. These leaders get results, and they also excel in the softer skills such as building relationships, communicating effectively, inspiring and motivating their teams, and making decisions that are respected even when they are unpopular. Great leaders are seen as credible, reliable, and committed to the growth and well-being of both the individuals they lead and the organization as a whole. So look in the mirror. Are you a great leader? Most advisors did not get into the business of being a financial advisor because they wanted to become a great leader someday. But over time, if they're in the business long enough and they have some success, all of a sudden they wake up one day and they've got 5, 10, 15, 50 people on their team, and now by default they have to be a leader. So why don't we just start with, if you have a list of maybe 3 or 4 leaders out there that you admire, that you respect, that you think are doing a great job, and talk about some of the characteristics that make them great leaders in your opinion. And then we can talk about how advisors can apply some of those characteristics to become better leaders themselves.

You know, one of the things we talk a lot about at CRA and Meyer Leadership is that we actually try to avoid profiling leaders. So I am gonna give you a couple names of some famous ones, but we've studied leaders since really the late '80s, starting with our founder. Starting in the late '80s, really, he did just ask one question, which is, what do the best leaders do that maybe you and I don't do? And as he went down that path and that research, what he found was that so often some of the best leaders out there are not the famous ones. And we never gravitated towards studying the famous leaders, the most senior leaders. We were looking for really specific things, which is we believe the best leaders are ones that drive superior results in what they do. So, a financial advisor, for example, that's amazing at their acumen, their ability to build relationships, whatever it is that makes them amazing at what they do, but at the same time inspires incredible levels of loyalty, commitment, followership from clients and peers and, uh, those that might report to them and their families and their friends. So when we look at a couple famous ones, cuz we do have a few that we've profiled and studied and spent time with, I give you two most people would recognize. One is, uh, Coach Krzyzewski or Coach K at Duke. He meets that criteria, amazing levels of success year after year in every level, whether it's the Olympics or what he steps in on, the level of success, it's really unparalleled. But at the same time, what does players say about him? How they talk about him, what the players' families say about him, the level of followership, the way that he built those teams and cultures wasn't just about performing. 'Cause there's a lot of athletic coaches, for example, that are amazing at, with the results they produce, people wouldn't follow them the same way outside of that endeavor or really don't have the same affinity or commitment to them. They just understand they're amazingly skilled. Another one outside of the sports realm, the late Colin Powell. Another one, right, we really followed in terms of not only his track record of success at every level and every role, a lot of the things that he did to gain that credibility in the competence realm, but also the people that followed him, whether it be a soldier or someone in the political realm, the things people said about him was just very different than when we go and talk to leaders that are just have one side of that coin, meaning really good at what they do, but not necessarily having the followership. And sometimes we have people that have the followership that don't always have the acumen either. And we don't disparage either side because we know we need people that are great at what they do and we know we need followership and we've made it our life's work to really study both sides of that.

I love talking about the sports leaders and Coach K of course is a great example. John Wooden, another great example. Another one. Been passed away for a number of years now. And yet we also have people who are the opposite of them who are maybe more in a Vince Lombardi mode, let's say, to go back a number of years. Very hard, very old school, very tough, belligerent, that sort of thing. Yet they can still get results. Would you suggest that someone like a Coach K and a John Wooden or even a Coach Tom Osborne— I'm from Nebraska, so Tom Osborne is top of mind with me, the Nebraska Cornhuskers. I put him in the mold of a Coach K and a John Wooden. They seem to have enduring success over a long period of time. Lombardi had a number of years of success, and some of these hard-nosed coaches might have limited success. Is it that first approach is more enduring, and the tough-nosed, belligerent approach might get some success for some period of time, but long-term it's probably not sustainable? Or is that just too generalizing?

I love the Nebraska connection because I also did a degree at Nebraska during some of the Tom Osborne years as well, so that's fun. But the idea of sustainability usually goes across domains in life. So what we find is somebody who's a great leader like a Tom Osborne or a John Wooden, they're usually also great parents, great spouses, great friends, great children, great, right? People will tend to say, I admire them across domains. Sometimes those hard-nosed coaches that are, again, so good at what they do and so competent have had still a huge degree of success. Doesn't always carry over into the other domains of their life as much. So they're very specifically successful in one thing, but maybe their personal lives aren't as successful. There's different things. Again, too much of a generalization to say for any one person. But what we find is we always like to be really specific. What we, in our view, is we call 'em admired leaders. These admired leaders are the ones that are able to sustain great success, but also inspire followership. Not to be confused with great leaders like a Vince Lombardi that we would admire, We admire his results, admire what he was able to accomplish. Bill Belichick and Nick Saban, amazing levels of accomplishment. You couldn't help but admire what they've been able to do. That doesn't mean they necessarily, for our study purposes, are labeled an admired leader, which again is gonna be that they have both these domains really strong, followership and competence, and it carries over into all the domains of life.

Let's take Bill Belichick as an example. Some people might view him as a bit grumpy. And of course, he hasn't had quite the success since Tom Brady left, but nonetheless, he's had a tremendous amount of success over the years. So if my natural personality is more like Belichick, as opposed to I want to be an admired leader like we're talking about Coach K or John Wooden or Coach Osborne, can I change stripes? Or is it just this is my innate personality? And even though I love what you're saying here, Suzanne, about these traits and these admired leaderships and followership, I'm not sure that's who I am at my core. What do I do there?

So absolutely, we are not in the business of trying to change personalities or traits or make people into something they're not. We have had tremendous success developing people into admired leaders. But you mentioned one point, they have to want to. If I want to become an admired leader, it's behavioral. It's a discipline. Leadership, we always say this, leadership is what you do, not who you are. Yeah, your personality, that's who you are. I can't change that. I'm not gonna try. And we don't get into that business.. But if you want to be different, if you wanna become an admired leader, it's a collection of hundreds of behaviors which taught over time and practice with discipline, right? Everybody can become that. We do coach people that don't really care. They don't want to change. If you don't wanna change, nobody can do much with that. But it's absolutely doable.

What are some examples of these behaviors that you could teach me that would make me more of an admired leader?

Leadership behavior falls into many categories. But if we were just to say 10 key areas, right? So we might say, let's talk about how great leaders make decisions, how they manage people through change, how they inspire people, how they deliver feedback that makes people better, how they hold people accountable, how they select talent, how they strategically communicate, how they build their credibility, build relationships. I could go on and on. So it's really hard to say what are the 3 things great leaders do. But if we were just gonna pick one, for example, maybe we'd say what we know is all admired leaders really make it a practice to give feedback forward instead of backwards. Is to talk instead of saying, Steve, I think I didn't love what you did on the last podcast. I wouldn't do that. And I would, they'd say, next time you have a guest like that on the podcast, do this instead of that. Do more of this, do less of this. Going forward on your show, you know what I'd like to see, right? Coaches, next play, try this. Next time we play that team, why don't we approach it this way? Sends the same message, but it goes forward instead of backwards, which changes the conversation and sends a message. A phrase you'll hear my colleagues and I use a lot, which is, I wanna make you better. Going forward says, I wanna actually make you better. I don't wanna evaluate or criticize you. So the motive feels different. For those of you that are just interested in getting some basic leadership advice, if you go to admiredleadership.com and you just click on something called Field Notes, completely complimentary, not an advertising channel, it's just content. Every day, 2 paragraphs, sometimes 3, leadership advice every single day. You'll get— every day you'll get them in your inbox. Just gives you leadership advice of the day, actionable behavioral stuff.

Adam Grant spoke at the Schwab conference. I suspect you may have heard his talk as well. And one of the things that he said related to this is he said, if we want to improve, rather than asking for feedback, we should ask for advice. And it sounds like that probably plays right into what you're saying here.

Yeah, I think certainly. And we know one thing for sure, which is that feedback is a highly charged word. Hey, Steve, can I give you a little feedback? When is that ever positive? You say that, right? So the word itself is problematic, just like change. It gets people, gives them anxiety as well. I think All we would say to add to that is when you ask for advice, to go say, hey, Steve, any advice for me? It's still harder for you to come up with something. If I go to you and say, if I do another podcast, what's one thing I can do differently next time? That's advice, but I'm actually getting a little smaller for you and telling you to give me one thing to do differently next time. Easier for you to tell me, easier for you to think of one thing. Sometimes I think advice, feedback, everything can just get a little too big.

And speaking of advice or feedback, The traditional thought is, oh, once a year we have a performance review. Nobody likes giving one. No one likes receiving one. What is the latest thinking today as far as giving feedback or giving advice to our team members? Frequency, how should it be done? What should we be doing there?

People generally have 3 reactions to feedback. One is they shut down, silent treatment, avoid you, really don't say anything, make you dismissive of it. 2, they argue it, get defensive about it, give me examples, right? No, I don't think that's accurate. What about this? They exhaust you. Or 3, they counter-confront. They blame you, blame somebody else, basically turn it into, you didn't give me that feedback early enough in the year, your expectations weren't clear. All these things, basically, no wonder we tend to say, I don't really wanna give people feedback. Any of those 3 are exhausting and off-putting. So maybe I'll just tell people good job. And I won't say much. And so reviews often are not honest enough. They're diluted into a lot of the positives because if I really gave you the true feedback, you might give me one of those reactions. So you've learned people don't want the truth. So because of these things with feedback, we hesitate. So what we know now about performance reviews and what's gonna be a little bit easier is that we know people have these reactions. So we really wanna stay again out of the backwards mode. But you go in and, and the idea is to go into a feedback conversation with, first of all, self-review. I'd be going into any feedback conversation thinking about, here's the 3 or 4 things I think I did best this year. I've improved the most. I've grown. I've developed. I'm most proud of. Be prepared for that. And then also be prepared to say, here's 2 or 3 areas next year that I really want to focus on and get better. And a manager in the other way, giving the review, should also be willing to say, here's 3 or 4 things I think you did particularly well, where you've grown, where you were impressive, so that we stay some positive. And hey, if I'm you, I look to next year, two areas. You gotta get stronger to be even more effective. That's a way to keep it positive, keep it going forward, as opposed to let's just— a performance review by definition is evaluating the past year. But maybe instead of making it about last year, which is over and done with and I can't change, let's talk about the future, which we can't interrogate as much. We can't litigate that. It hasn't happened yet. So let's talk about all the things we could do to be a more effective advisor next year, to be better with relationships, better with your team, better with your time, time to make higher quality decisions. Let's talk about some advice.

I had a person who worked for me at one point, and she was a general manager for our business, and she was so good at giving feedback because people would literally thank her after a conversation because she made them feel so good, yet gave them very direct feedback on what they could do to improve, but had a way of delivering it that it was received in the way that it was given in terms of, I'm here to help you be more successful, and here are some things that can help you be more successful. So there is a real skill to it. One thing that I have also done that I find to be effective is, along with everything you said, is to also say something to the effect of, how can I help you be more successful? What can I do to help clear the way for you, get rid of some of the obstacles that may be holding you back from being able to achieve what you want to achieve here?

Absolutely. And really quickly, what you said about the woman that you mentioned, that's exactly what feedback should be. People should say, that's a positive motivating experience because she gave me ideas of what to do differently to go forward. So that shouldn't be a difficult conversation at all. None of us would dread that. So that's, I love that she did that. But to your point of the other thing you brought up is, as I go in and I think that's how you end a great review as well, is these are the things I think you need to do differently next year to be more effective or to reach your goals or to get what you wanna achieve. And then to say, how do I help you get there? How can I support How can I support you? What do you need from me? And again, you mentioned frequency. We have the performance review, but this should be an ongoing conversation, whether it's once a quarter, once every other month, just to check in with people. How you doing on that, right? Anything I can do, right? Anything you need from me? Leaders that ask that consistently, people think you mean it. And also it lets it say, I didn't forget. Too often the performance review is an event. It's an event. See you next year, maybe at midyear. As opposed to, hey, we talked about these 3 things you're going to work on. How's it going? How can I help? What do you need from me? Really supportive leader says it, means it, and follows through.

Yeah. And the idea that performance review is an event. One of the other things that I like to do too is have some feedback as close to the situation happening as possible. So if I see something that either went really well or something that didn't go so well, rather than waiting until a pre-scheduled quarterly review to talk about it, it's like, let's talk about it right now. Get a little spot coaching going on. And give them some of that immediate feedback so we don't have to wait until some prescheduled period of time.

Definitely the immediacy of feedback is important. If you wait 2 weeks to say, hey, last week, let's talk about that, probably too long. You might as well just wait until something happens again or something similar. So generally the quicker, and again, make this easy. This doesn't have to be a huge, let's have a meeting about it. It can be you pop into someone's office, you send them a quick text, you give them a quick call and go, hey, one thing you might think about doing differently next time, right? Again, you can still go get into the advice, and go forward. But doing that right away. Now, there is also a situation where you can give people too much feedback. Sometimes they've had enough, right? You've given them a lot of immediate feedback, a lot of frequent feedback, and you decide they aren't quite there yet. I don't think they need another piece of feedback. This one I'm gonna hold if it's not urgent and wait a little bit or mix it with some positive feedback. Everybody does something well. Even if someone's struggling to get better in one area, find a different area that they're doing well and be able to go to them occasionally and just simply say, hey, you did really well on this and that. And save some of the constructive criticism and that improvement feedback for another time if you feel they've had enough for a while. If not, they can get paralyzed as well. Too much feedback is a real thing.

One of the other key aspects of being a great leader is you have to make decisions. And in this day and age, it seems like decisions are becoming more and more difficult because we've got social media out there. We've got all kinds of geopolitical events going on. We've got political divisions. What are some of your high-level thoughts here as it relates to being a leader, and how do we go about making some of these difficult decisions?

Certainly this falls in the competence bucket, meaning leaders who make poor decisions, have bad judgment, right, are too erratic in their decisions, right, have a bad track record, don't make any decisions, don't talk about decisions, right? This would fall into that bucket of when we talk about admired leaders being really good with, they drive superior performance and results and they're highly competent, but they also inspire followership. We put this in a bucket of the competence side, and we will talk to leaders about different things. Now, some of it is about timing of decisions, right? They just don't, they make them too quickly, they make them too fast, or they make them too slow. Other thing is about how do they actually think about the idea of whether I should do X or Y and what are the second and third order consequences of certain things. Sometimes you decide to just do nothing. And that's a decision in and of itself. So this is a big area where groups and teams— do you make group decisions, consensus decisions? Should you make unilateral decisions? When? There's a lot in there.

One of the areas that I fall back on when it comes to making difficult decisions is just values. And so I think it's really important to really clarify what your values are, both as an individual and as an organization. And so I find a lot of times when you've got a difficult decision to make, if you can fall back on your values and ask yourself, okay, based on my values, based on the firm's values, what decision would we make? And sometimes it becomes pretty clear when you run it through that filter. Do you see that as well?

Absolutely. And in fact, you said one thing that I think is important. We always are advising leaders to be a little bit careful about projecting personal values versus organizational values. Now, every leader has a right to personal values and the decisions they would make in line with their own personal value system, but your job is to talk mainly about the organization's value system. Because we occasionally, hopefully you don't have values in radical conflict, but going back and reminding people of, we do this because we value relationships above all else. We made this decision because we value service. We made this decision because excellence is one of our core values. So talking about decisions in line of the organization's values, because the assumption is if you're here, we all share those. And if you don't share this organization's value systems, then it's not the right place for you is the implicit assumption. So we love that even when mistakes are made, rather than saying, how do you make that mistake? We say that got in the way of a value. What happened there?

I did a conversation earlier with Eric Pleiner, and Eric is the CEO of YSC Consulting. And he had written a book called Difficult Decisions. And we talked really about this particular topic. How do you make difficult decisions? And The way that he framed it, he had 3 lenses that he would look through, and one lens would be morals. So based on my personal morals, what would I decide? Second was ethics, which is more contextually dependent on society and what does society say is ethically okay here. And then the third is role responsibilities, meaning if I'm the CEO of the company, I have multiple constituents that I'm responsible and accountable to. And so in that role as a CEO, I think maybe this gets back to your point of when you're making a difficult decision. I may have my own personal morals or values. Maybe it's different than what my role as the CEO of a publicly traded company might require me to do, because I've got constituents that go beyond my personal belief system. And so he uses those three frames and he says oftentimes if two of them are in agreement, it can help, you know, inform the decision that you want to make.

I think there's a lot of frameworks we might agree with. But when we tend to coach, we tend to coach more from that lens, so of a behavioral lens. So for example, we might go to a leader instead, and instead of going through a framework, we might ask a question like, how quickly do you have to make this decision? I really want to make it by Thursday. To get it off your plate or because it must be made by then? So we're actually trying to get them to think about the timing of that decision. Would it be better to wait? Or if you have to move on it, you have to move on it. But if not, and they start to go, gosh, maybe I should apply that to all my decisions. You'd find in the admired leadership content that it's a lot of things leaders can say, I'm gonna go try that with this next decision, as opposed to let me put a framework around it, which again, good advice, not bad. But that will be where we're a little different with very prescriptive tactical behaviors.

Being a great leader, of course, one of your most important roles is to get results. And oftentimes to get results, it's going to require some level of power. And I had a conversation not long ago with Professor Jeffrey Pfeffer, who wrote a number of books on power, and I was really fascinated by it. But how do you think about the role of power in leadership, and how can we help ensure that leaders use power for good as opposed to bad?

Yes. So as Professor Pfeffer would say, for sure, there's all different types of power, right? There's 5 sources of power and different types. Some are good, bad, different, indifferent, all that. I think at the most simplest definition, power is the ability to change behavior. Somehow we think power is a negative term, but I think we all would like to change the behavior of our kids, our spouses, our team, like our clients. Like, just do what I say, right? It'd be nice to change. So when you have power, by definition, you're altering people's behavior. So I think it's not a bad thing to want or to strive for, but probably we look at it more as leaders focus more on influence first. Influence is, can I change your perspective on something? Can I influence your behavior versus can I just change it? Influence you to potentially think a different way, or if not, just get you to engage in a new behavior. Because we know it's hard to just convince people and sales pitch them into something. But if you can convince them to engage in a certain behavior, they might actually behave their way into a new belief system, new perspective, or new attitude. So we focus more on how leaders have influence, but even that can sound kind of high level. And how do I do that tomorrow? We think influence occurs through 3 ways generally. One, it's going to be through the message itself, right? Do you have an influential message? Have you framed it correctly? Is it crafted correctly? Is that something I'm drawn to. Two, it's through you as a messenger, meaning, you know what, good message. I don't like you as a messenger. So sometimes people are very influenced by an argument, but not influenced by that messenger. Give me a different messenger and I would've bought the argument. I find you off-putting or uncompelling. And three, relationships. Really hard to influence people that you don't know or trust. If I wanna go influence people, I'm gonna be more influenced by people I have a relationship with. When we start talking about a leader's influence, call it power or whatever, they want to get change. They want to drive change in people and in behavior. A lot of times, it's really looking through, is it, do you have the right message? Or is it you stylistically, messenger-wise, no one's going to want that? Or is it you just haven't really worked on relationships? Because good luck influencing your peers over here that you only reach out to when you want something. You might want to invest there, and people will be more influenced by you.

And I find this whole area really fascinating as well. So we've got Professor Robert Cialdini, who you probably know.

Yeah.

He talks obviously a lot about influence, wrote probably the seminal book on influence, and he's got his 6 or 7 aspects of influence. And then we've got someone like, uh, Jim Collins who has written a lot. And one of his things is this idea of the Level 5 leader, the quiet, humble person who gets a lot done. But isn't the power person per se. And then we have this idea of charisma. So I'd love if you could somehow meld those different ideas of influence and power and charisma and humility. How do those interweave, or do they interweave among each other to become a great leader, to become a person of influence, to become a person who can actually get great results while not leaving a trail of destruction in your wake?

Yeah, that's right. And again, we could go through, we're definitely gonna be in the business of talking more about trying to get out of the personality realm. We're not gonna tell people to be humble, be charismatic, be a Level 5, be a servant leader. Stay away from that language, not because it's not fair and good advice, but because people are still left saying, what does that look like? What does that look like behaviorally on a day-to-day basis to be those things? But to your point, we will go through and, and our thoughts would be whether it's a Level 5 leader or whatever we wanna name it, all great stuff. We still would really go through and, and have this sense of most things that are in that personality realm, like charisma, generally speaking, I don't know that can be developed. Partly because that has a different definition by diff— from different people. It's not a normative definition. Somebody might find that charismatic, that not. But what a tall order to tell people you need to increase your charisma.. And we know so many leaders that are not charismatic, right? Even Jim Collins's prototype of the Level 5 probably is not a charismatic leader. So we know it's not necessary, but we do know you still need to influence people whether you're charismatic or not. You still need to change people's behavior in some way, whether you're charismatic or not. So charisma certainly is gonna help probably with rallying the troops and inspiring and big orator and, and these types of things. But beyond that, it's still gonna come back to those 3 things, taking any leader and saying, whether you're, we wanna label you a Level 5 or a servant leader, or, and we're gonna wanna say, listen, what do we need to do probably around those 3 things, something around the message you're sending, something around you as a messenger, or something around the relationships, or something about how you're making decisions is not making people respond to you as well. And we'll get pretty quickly into just a behavioral lens.

Let's talk about the message here for a moment. So you mentioned you've got message, messenger, and relationship. Usually advisors, I'd say, are pretty good communicators interpersonally with their clients for sure, but perhaps not always as effective when they're communicating with their team members. So what thoughts do you have in terms of how do I do a better job at delivering my message? Are there certain behaviors around the delivery of the message that I need to focus on to improve?

One could just be basic framing, meaning sometimes we communicate in the frame that we live in, right? If what's important to me is leadership, I'm going to frame almost everything in leadership. But that might not be what's important to you, so it doesn't resonate with you. So sometimes it's just a question of, hey, I don't think that's the right frame that you're using to really inspire your people. You're using your frame, but that might not be what inspires them. Other times it could be too much jargon, too much lingo. It could be the wrong situation whereby you're not focused on the right outcome, that they care about different outcomes. You're not succinct enough. You're not as clear a communicator as you think you are. Often we tell leaders just to start out with the assumption you're never clear as you think you are. So how do you get that clarity, get the simplicity, keep the main thing, keep people focused on values, going to the simplest common denominator is probably where you're going to get the most resonance with people.

I'm interested in the idea of the psychology of followership. And so we see a lot of what I might call blind followership these days. How should we think about the psychology of leadership in people that want to follow an admired leader? Is there anything in that realm in terms of behaviors related to psychology that we should be discussing?

We assume that people want to be inspired. But the truth is they're not just inspired because someone's smart or good at their job, right? They're really inspired largely by how they show up from a character perspective, meaning what are the small things you do every day that make me want to follow you? And you'd be surprised that they can be quite small and little things that make perfect sense. And I think leaders often think that I've gotta inspire followership through these big grand gestures and again, be charismatic and be inspirational. Back to the B language, as opposed to every day. We know people come to companies and they leave leaders, right? Generally, right? They leave because they're not getting what they need. They're not inspired to follow that leader regardless of the great company they might be with. And the same thing, people sometimes stay they're not gonna jump for just a little bit of different money, monetary gain. They might jump for a big monetary gain, but a very small monetary gain, or when they say, look what I have here, look at this leader. You might think of something just as small as the idea of, are you gonna follow somebody who really sends a message of, I'm gonna tell you all these things you have to do, but listen, I'm above doing those anymore. So let's think about financial advisors, right? Are you gonna follow somebody who you have somebody that now leads the group who's telling you, make sure you put everything to Salesforce, make sure you do all these processes, make sure you show up at these types of events, make sure you say these kinds of things to clients, make sure— they keep telling you what you should do. And they're not wrong that those are things that could be the recipe of your success. But you go, you don't really do it anymore. You don't show up for those events. You don't do those things with clients anymore. You don't enter your data into Salesforce anymore. All those things you think we need to do, you stop doing. Doesn't make them less smart or less successful or that they don't have great results. But you go, who are you gonna follow? A leader who really says, listen, I ask a lot of you, I'm not above doing any of it versus you're somebody who I ask you to do it, but I don't do any of that anymore. So we have a lot of these small little behaviors that sometimes people have to check and they say, I don't think I'm above doing those things. But then they start to go even something on the home front. How often do we tell our kids, pick up your room, get off technology, don't binge shows like that, go to bed early. And yet as parents, we're on our phones, maybe our room's not cleaned up, we're binging some show, we're staying up too late, we're not eating the right foods. We tell our kids lots of things and we mean really good things for them. We believe these are keys to their ultimate success. But even a child kind of goes, hmm, why don't you do that anymore, mom? Right? Why don't you obey your own rules? So there's a lot of small behaviors like that that again, quite actionable, easy to do.

Yeah. And ultimately, if you want to be a great leader, you have to walk the talk. I'm going to wrap up with two things here. So one is we all know we live in a very complicated world. There's so much stuff going on. Yet we still have to run a business. We still have to take care of clients. We still have to make some money here. We still have to provide career opportunities for our team members. What would you say going forward are going to be some of the key behaviors or skills or attributes of great leaders that are going to enable them to be successful regardless of whatever the world is going to throw at them?

I think it is about consistency. The world is changing around you, but the most leaders are pretty consistent in their behavior, right? What can people count on? They know, listen, again, no matter what, this is how we're going to show up with clients. This is what's going to stay the same. So much around change is about reminding people what isn't changing. And so the idea of being able to say, regardless of what happens, this is what we stand for. Regardless of what happens, this is how we're going to operate. Even if this changes, what's not is this. We're going to keep these rituals. We're going to keep these norms. We're going to keep the same meeting every Friday. During times of change in particular, I think great leaders go, let's elevate and highlight all the things that we're going to keep the same. You find that more people can accept change once they know what's staying the same. And that's usually the best advice.

Yeah. And to your point, it reminds me of something that Jeff Bezos said a number of years ago where he said a lot of people talk about change and what do we need to be doing different. And he said, I tend to look at it a little bit differently, which is, I want to know what is going to be the same 10 years from now in terms of what our customers still going to want 10 years from now. And he said, really, there's 3 things. Number 1 is they're always going to want low prices. Number 2, they're going to want fast delivery. And number 3, they're going to want vast selection. And so he said, that's what we're going to do. We know those things are still going to be in demand 10 years from now, so we can have a long-term time frame and we can invest in those things Whereas a lot of other people might get caught up in the next shiny object thing, but we're gonna do the long-term investing on things that won't change. And lo and behold, they're one of the highest market value companies in the world.

I love that example cuz it doesn't matter how Amazon delivers things or the technology or all these things, right? But those 3 things, they're not gonna change. So they need to keep meeting that over time. It's a great example.

And the final thing I wanna ask here is what haven't I asked you? So what's something that you just wish that we talked about here? What's something important that maybe we haven't touched on here as it relates to leadership?

A question that we get a lot and one you had highlighted is people are asking a lot about with the world having changed, right? So again, now it's a hybrid world, a remote world, right? We're still dealing with people coming back to work, offices, not offices. There's all that. There's a little bit of messiness in there still as well. And people will say, gosh, how do leaders respond to that? So two things. First and foremost, we'll say again, great leadership's great leadership regardless of the context, right? So for example, whether you're in an office or you're not, the behaviors that inspire followership are the same. If you're not going into an office all the time, you still need some kind of visibility strategy, whether that's through virtual, whether that's how you visit a certain amount of time, how you connect frequently with people. It can be different, but you still need that. Again, a lot stays the same regardless. The other part is I think we do have to take a look at— we've had a shift for sure that we've noticed. Some people will claim they're more productive when they aren't in offices. Not sure that's true. We've found that A lot of people have lost some edge, lost some productivity, aren't quite as sharp, aren't as connected, certainly aren't as good with relationships as they think they are. There's definitely been a little bit of a tide where I think the employee side is taking advantage of the employers more. Meaning pre-COVID, if somebody didn't just say, I have a dentist appointment at 11, I'm out of here for an hour and a half, you'd figure out I can't do that right then. And now it's, I have a personal life. So although we are trying to find a yin and yang, we want people to have balance and be able to have some flexibility. And so how do we do that so people are fulfilled and happy without it feeling like people aren't as productive, they're taking advantage a little bit, they're a little lazier? How do we find that spot? So I think it's a real challenge leaders are facing. But at the same time, back to consistency, how do I show up relationally? How do I inspire followership? How do I hold people accountable? How do I give them feedback? How do I move people through change? The leaders that stay consistent regardless of what's going on around them tend to be the most effective.

Yeah. And I remember a sports coach, going back to sports coaches here for a moment, said that one of his key roles was not to get his players to work hard, but was to get them to want to work hard. So we talked a little bit about inspiration. Michael Nathanson, head of the Colony Group, a big RIA firm, he said to me one time, that he thinks of himself as the CIO, and he defined that as the Chief Inspiration Officer. Great leadership. There's a number of things that you can do, but certainly one of them is inspiring people to want to work hard for you. So this example of the hybrid situation where we're not going to be checking up on them 24 hours a day to see what they're doing at home or whether they're going to the dentist at 11 o'clock, but if I can trust my team if I have inspired them to want to follow me, if they buy into the values and the culture of our, of our organization, they're gonna do what they need to do. And if that means I gotta go to the dentist at 11 o'clock and I'm gonna work till 6 or 7 o'clock tonight, or I'm gonna do something on the weekend, I'm gonna do that. And so that may be part of that yin and yang as you talk about there, that, that bit of an adjustment that if I trust my team and they trust me as their leader, we're going to get this stuff done and we're going to win in the end and clients are going to be happy and everything's going to work out well. So maybe that's pie in the sky, but I think that's an aspiration and an ideal that we can all strive toward.

That's where we would absolutely say it's really— it's about the leader. People want to work for leaders, not companies. And they say, I get up every day and I work hard because I want to make my leader look good. I want my leader to be successful. I want great things for us. I'm inspired every day. That fire that's lit under me— now, there again, as you heard when I spoke at Schwab's Impact, I went through a few inspiration behaviors. What does light a fire under people? What are those things? And so there's a way to do that. And then there's the other way of, to your point, it seems there's certain people that they're working hard, they want to accomplish, you're on the exact same page. Those people should be doing whatever they need to and taking care of their lives. It's when we have people that are less inspired that is the problem. And is that the job of the leader or is that the job of the follower? And it really depends. Some people are uninspirable. We, we've identified those types of people occasionally, but most of the time great leaders can inspire people again if they want to and they wanna put that work there. Doesn't mean it's easy, but it's doable through behaviors.

Well, Suzanne, what's the best way for folks to connect with you and stay in touch and learn more about what you're doing?

You can go to admiredleadership.com. There's a couple things you can do on there. One, again, just sign up for the Field Notes, complimentary Field Notes. They come day to day with to your inbox, great pieces of leadership wisdom to keep leadership top of mind. Two, that same website admiredleadership.com, There's a lot of complimentary content on there, videos by some of the coaches, things we think about, how we talk about things, events coming up that you might be interested in. And then third, there is a subscription model there. If you wanted to join our community and actually get access to all our leadership content, there's that option for you there to do so. So 3 different ways to connect, and you can get us that way. We're very passionate about leadership. We really want to just make people better every day. We hope you want to join that with us as well.

All right. Well, Suzanne, appreciate you being on the show today.

Thank you.

Appreciate it, Steve.

All right.

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