There Is No Such Thing as 'Apolitical' Leadership Anymore

This podcast is brought to you by Wells Fargo Advisors. Looking for a firm your clients can't outgrow? Wells Fargo Advisors offers financial advisors full balance sheet solutions with wealth planning, investment products, banking, and lending that meet the needs of affluent to ultra-high net worth clients. Build your practice your way and on your schedule with independent and employee model options designed to meet your needs today and tomorrow. Learn more at joinwfadvisors.com. The world is complicated and nuanced. People have different beliefs, values, ethics, and morals. Yet, as the leader of a company, you have to make difficult decisions that won't please everybody. I'm business coach Steve Sandusky. Welcome back to the Barron's Advisor Podcast. Today's guest is Eric Pleiner. Eric is the CEO of YSC Consulting, which is a global leadership strategy firm. Eric is also the author of a timely new book called Difficult Decisions: How Leaders Make the Right Call with Insight, Integrity, and Empathy. Eric and I discuss the challenges facing today's leaders, and he shares a framework that you can use to make your most difficult decisions. So let's get started with Eric Pleyner of YSC Consulting. I wanna read a quote here from your new book, "Difficult Decisions," and I think it will be a great way to set some context for what we're going to discuss. So in your book, you wrote, quote, "There is absolutely no such thing as apolitical leadership. That naive fantasy is from a different era that doesn't exist anymore." So Eric, those are some pretty strong words. So I'd like to know what has changed today or maybe in recent years in terms of the role of the CEO and why they can no longer remain silent on certain social, cultural, or political issues?

I think there's an understanding, Steve, that CEOs have an accountability not just to their shareholders and investors, but to a much wider range of stakeholders than they might have acknowledged in the past. Maybe some of that was always true. We've always had a sense of responsibility for our employees and our customers. But nowadays we've made more explicit the notion that our responsibility and our accountability is to our shareholders and investors, but also to the communities that we live in, the employees that work with and for us, the customers that engage with our products and services, and to the planet as a whole. And that means that we have to be able to match their expectations of us, that when they say, well, hang on a second, I want the company that I give my money to or that I give my time and career to, to stand for something that's important to me or to stand against something that undermines me in some way. That's not something that most CEOs get a lot of preparation for. We spend a lot of time thinking about how do we lead a business, how do we engage people, but not necessarily how do we make choices about when we make political statements that don't directly affect the performance of the company.. And yet increasingly, as the mix of stakeholders continues to expand, the expectation is that we're prepared to address the things that matter most to that wider range of stakeholders.

How important was it back in 2019 when the Business Roundtable came out and basically came up with an expanded definition of the corporation? I think it was Milton Friedman many years ago who said it's basically, it's all about increasing shareholder value. But then the Business Roundtable said, no, no, no, there's really probably 5 constituencies that we have to pay attention to. Were they just being reactive to what was already taking place over a number of years, or were they more trying to get ahead of the curve by putting that out there?

Probably a little bit of both. But I think of that moment when 181 CEOs signed on the line as being a pivotal moment in the shift in our understanding collectively of what it means to lead a business from the perspective of stakeholders and not just shareholders. I think the question that remains unanswered that still ties to what Milton Friedman teed up for us is even if we acknowledge or agree that shareholders aren't our only stakeholders, does shareholder primacy mean that we override the interests of other stakeholders when shareholders' interests are not being met? I think that question is going to continue because at some point, and this is part of what I'm thinking about with the leaders that I work with and in difficult decisions, leaders are going to have to continually confront conflict between what one group of stakeholders wants and another group of stakeholders wants. I think that moment, though, will, for some time now into the foreseeable future, mark a change in an acknowledgement that had been in development for some time, that it was important to note that businesses don't run without shareholders and investors, but they also don't run without employees, customers, communities, and the planet.

Well, I want to read another quote here because I think it dovetails really well with what you're just talking about here and how the CEO job is pretty difficult because you're not going to please everybody. So what you wrote here, you said, quote, our most difficult choices rarely challenge us because we lack information. They challenge us because they require us to confront conflicts between what we think and what we do. Between our view of ourselves as inherently good and choices that mean that not everyone will experience us as good. They require us to recognize that there are few absolutes and lots of nuances, and they require us to recognize that as the heroes of our own life narratives, we are sometimes the villains in others' life narratives. And that last piece about we're a hero in our own narrative, we're a villain in someone else's, it's like, it's a catch-22. It's like, You can't win as the CEO. Now, you are a CEO in addition to being the author of this book. So you're living this every day. How should we think about that, maybe particularly in light of a lot of the corporate issues that we have going on right now? We've got Spotify and Joe Rogan blew up here a while ago. Twitter is a current issue with Elon Musk trying to buy the company. You've got Jack Dorsey, the co-founder, who is sort of cheering on Elon Musk and chiding the board of directors of the company that he founded. And then, of course, we've got Disney and Governor DeSantis of Florida that are duking it out as well. So lots of issues here. Let me just stop there and see what some of your thoughts on that are.

I think that we always believe that we're acting for good, that the choices that we're making are in service of doing something positive. Now, what that positivity looks like varies from person to person. It may be about increasing our own wealth or the well-being of our families. It may be about increasing the value of our companies or the impact on the communities that we interact with. But in general, even when we're acting in self-interest, we typically believe as humans that that self-interest has something positive attached to it. The challenge is that what's positive for me may not be what's positive for you. And so the choices that I make, while clearly in service of good from my perspective, may have the unintended side effect of being really profoundly negative for someone else from their perspective. And so when we look at the challenge that Bob Chapek is facing in Florida and the conflict with Governor DeSantis, they both believe that they're acting in service of good. Governor DeSantis believes that he's acting in service of what he thinks the families of Florida, or I would say a subset of some families of Florida, are interested in. And Bob Chapek believes that he's acting in service of what many of his key stakeholders believe in. Disney customers, Disney employees who have been quite vocal about his lack of stance in opposition to legislation that they found problematic and troubling. And so who's right? Well, the truth is there is no clear right or wrong. There's the perspective that each of us holds and the actions that we can take that can create harm or create help. Depending on the context that we live in and that we operate in. What does that mean? Well, back to your question, Steve. It means that the CEO, every CEO, has to get rid of the idea of making people happy as being part of their job. The reality is every time we make a choice, some people will benefit from that choice and some people will not be happy with that choice. And the idea of trying to please everybody means that it's pretty likely that we're going to end up pleasing nobody. That's a version of what Bob Chapek is facing right now. It's a version of what Spotify faced even just a few weeks ago. It seems like old news almost because the news cycle of difficult decisions is so intense right now. But on the one hand, you had artists and listeners saying, "Hey Spotify, we don't want to continue to be part of something that provides a platform to someone who's offering objectionable content." And then you had hundreds of thousands of listeners saying, "Hey, actually this is not objectionable content." This is content that we value, that we're choosing to listen to, and we don't want you to silence the person who's creating that content. What choice does Spotify have? Either way, somebody is going to be unhappy. The opportunity is to think about what does the company want to stand for and what does it not want to stand for and to make choices in line with those decisions.

It seems like in years gone by, political leaders and big companies were pretty much in bed with each other. It's like the big companies, they provide campaign financing and the political leaders, you know, they vote the way the big companies want them to vote. But now it seems like it's almost reversed in that, again, using the Florida governor example and Disney, that now we're purposely trying to go after certain companies to score political points. And it almost seems as if it's reversed. Is this something that's like for the foreseeable future, people may be, using corporations as punching bags and as ways to elevate themselves to certain constituencies? Do you think this is maybe more of a temporary thing? Is this just a big company thing that we have to worry about, like a big visible company like Disney? How should we think about that?

I don't think this is an issue only facing big companies. I think there are plenty of places around the country and even around the world where people are finding themselves inspired by the actions that they're seeing employees and consumers of large companies taking to try to inform the way that they're engaging with smaller or even local businesses. That doesn't always work. But what's worth noting is that anybody that engages with stakeholders, and that means any business leader of any kind, has to be thoughtful about what do I do when somebody says, I'm not happy with the choice that you're making, or in the case of Disney, I'm not happy with a choice that you're not making, meaning that your inaction is affecting me the same way that a particular action might. It means that we cannot expect to be all things to all people. And so the opportunity is to choose what do we want to be and to make sure that we continue to operate with integrity. In the book, I talk a little bit about two examples when Coinbase and Basecamp both made the decisions to say they were no longer going to allow any political discussion within their companies. Initially, there was tremendous backlash. Both faced a flurry of resignations from employees. And as small companies, even a handful of resignations had a notable impact. But certainly in the case of Coinbase, they made a choice to say, actually, we'll pay you a severance if you're not comfortable with this. And a number of employees left under those terms. Looking back even a year later, they would argue that their choices were largely successful. I think it probably depends on your vantage point, but they would say, look, we wanted to create a workplace that was largely apolitical, and we've been able to do that. The challenge in that perspective, I think, is that the workplace is still political. And certainly we see companies of all sizes continuing to engage with politicians in part because it benefits them. It's part of their job to make sure that government creates policy that is supportive of corporations and their attempt to be able to do the work that they're delivering. It also means that they've had some knock-on effects that many of them weren't expecting. What does that mean? Well, for instance, in the case of these two companies, real questions about what's the impact on their diversity and inclusion agendas. That's language that may be uncomfortable for some people, but the reality is that lots of companies are putting out statements about how important diversity is to them. The notion of being apolitical often means aligning to a particular political point of view. And for individuals who already experience themselves as marginalized in the workplace, it means that their desire to work in environments that are explicitly apolitical often goes down because it means that they don't want to be in places where who they are is suddenly seen as political just by virtue of being themselves. You asked also, Steve, about the notion of whether going after companies was something that we're going to see for a short period of time or something that will go on into the future. I think what we're experiencing is a shift in our understanding of the roles that companies play in our broader political system. That was one of the complaints of the Disney employees, was that while the company purported to be apolitical on many of the kinds of issues that Governor DeSantis was promoting publicly, that in fact Disney had given money to a large number of candidates who were equally supportive of those issues, thereby being political. Disney would say in service of its own interests, and certainly actions to reduce its autonomy would suggest that that's political as well, but ignoring other issues that were important to employees and customers. You can't have it both ways. That's the key message here, is that if a company or its leadership are going to engage politically, That means engaging with the full spectrum of political issues and potentially experiencing the backlash that comes from politicians who then choose to target those companies in return.

We can't be hypocrites.

We can't be hypocrites. That's part of the idea behind the book is that if we operate with integrity, if we're transparent about what we stand for and what we won't stand for, then the accusation of hypocrisy isn't one that hurts later on.. But if we attempt to do things behind closed doors or without transparency, the risk is that hypocrisy becomes the very first bullet fired in our direction.

Well, I think that's a great segue to talk about a framework that you outlined in the book in terms of how do we make these difficult decisions so that we avoid being a hypocrite. So you talk about values, you talk about morals, you talk about ethics. I think that's a good place to start here. Let's talk about how do you define values? How do you define morals? How do you define ethics? And what are some of the, you know, the differences between those three? Because some people might think, well, maybe a couple of those are interchangeable.

Sure, they sound pretty similar, and it's easy for us to conflate them because they are so often lumped together. But I do make a distinction among them, and I think the distinction is helpful for people thinking about where they stand and what they hope to do in their relative leadership positions, whether that's as a first-line leader or as a CEO of a major corporation. Values are what we stand for. That's, uh, what's important to me. I think values are aspirational, and I often say that they're asymptotic, that we are moving towards the axis but never getting there entirely, that our ability to live our values is sometimes more challenging than it is to state those values ourselves. We like to say what we believe in, what matters to us, But actually, there's no real consequence if we don't live our ostensible values all the time. Morals are a little bit different. If values tell us what we stand for, morals tell us what we won't stand for. What is it that we absolutely cannot live with? What can we not allow in our workplaces, in our communities? Morals are a definition of right and wrong. What do we believe is right in the world? What do we believe is wrong in the world? And why do we think those things matter to us so much? A lot of people find that when they start investigating their own ostensible morals, that actually what they really believe about right and wrong is a little bit different than what they thought they believed. Understanding where those come from, what comes from our families, what comes from education, from our faith backgrounds, is a really great way to help clarify what are the things we absolutely I won't stand for. That's morality. Makes people nervous to talk about it in the workplace because I think often there's this view that if I say that something is right or wrong, will I alienate people? But in fact, we operate with that mindset all the time. It's not our job to influence other people's morals. Most research indicates that for most of us, our general view of morality is pretty well set early in life, right, like around age 10 or 11. So rather than trying to influence other people's view of right and wrong, We can try to understand our own and each other's views of right and wrong as a way of figuring out how we want to operate together in shared contexts, like in companies. That brings us to ethics. Ethics are not determined by individuals. Ethics are determined by a shared context. If I think about morals as being something that's internally defined but externally referenced, I try to understand what's right and wrong where I live and interact in the world. Ethics are the inverse. Ethics are externally defined, but they're internally distilled. I make sense of them inside of myself. And ethics tell me what's helpful or harmful, what's beneficial, detrimental in a given context. So if I define an ethical code for my organization or my community, or I put out an ethics statement, that's a shared view of what's good or bad, helpful or harmful, beneficial or detrimental in our shared operating context. You can see how those things get conflated, right and wrong versus helpful and harmful. But in fact, while they're related, sometimes they come into conflict with one another. And understanding each of those— how does the greater good get defined versus how do I define right and wrong— can go a long way towards helping leaders to figure out how to reconcile difficult decisions or conflicts.

A lot of the people listening to this show are in the financial services industry. And it's very common as a coach, as a consultant, to talk to these advisors and say, You need to get clear on your values. You need to put the proverbial values plaque on the wall, but of course, we can't just put it on the wall and forget about it. We have to walk and talk and live and breathe and behave according to those values. You're also, again, as a CEO of a big company, but you also coach and have coached some of the CEOs of the largest companies in the world. So as you coach those individuals, as you coach their companies, do you say, "Yes, we need to come up with values, we need to get clear." Do you then say, "We need to get clear on what your morals are. We need to understand what your ethical framework is." And do you encourage companies to actually publicly proclaim and show what those are, or is maybe values is more external-facing and internal, maybe morals and ethics are more internal tools that you use. How do you think about all three of those as it relates to how you promote those, whether internally, externally?

Yeah, great question. I always encourage every individual to spend time getting clear about their morality for themselves. That's where it's most important. I think it's important and in fact useful for leaders to be able to be transparent with the people that they interact with on a regular basis about what that morality is, meaning where do I draw the line with something that I absolutely cannot live with? The advantage of being transparent about morals with people with whom you have those closer relationships is that it's easier for you to come to agreement, to achieve consensus when you know your respective starting points. It's easier to know, hey, this is something we can align on, or actually, we're never going to find middle ground here. I don't recommend broadcasting that publicly for the simple reason that absent context, it can be really easy to misinterpret someone else's morals. And for a leader, that could create more trouble than it's necessarily worth. Ethics are different though, because ethics are collectively agreed. I think sharing that ethical code, that sense of what do we believe together is in our shared interest as an organization, as a community, as a company, is actually really advantageous to say these are the things that we believe to be helpful, these are the things that we believe to be harmful, and we work in service of these things and against these. That I think is really important for any collective organization, again, whether it's government, whether it's a private company, whether it's a nonprofit organization, a faith-based institution, getting clear about what's helpful or harmful in your context and sharing that is important. The advantage of sharing values, Steve, is that you can articulate what we aspire to, and that's important. We can say what we hope to be, what we hope to achieve, what we believe we stand for. That gives us a little bit of protection from the potential risk of our morality being misinterpreted. But the individual leader needs to get really clear on what she or he stands for and won't stand for as a way of informing their conversations, their relationships, and indeed their most challenging decisions.

In your book, you, I think rhetorically, asked yourself, well, why can't we just say, do the right thing? So as it relates to morals and ethics, Can we simplify it to simply do the right thing?

Yeah, I wish we could. It would make the book a lot shorter, but it would also make life a lot easier. The problem is that we don't all have the same interpretation of right thing. And so while we can all say to ourselves, well, why don't I just do the right thing? Remember, if I'm the hero of my own story and the villain in someone else's, the thing that I think might be the right thing could actually cause harm for somebody else, potentially somebody else who has a stake in the outcome of my decision and whose caring, involvement, investment, and maybe even financial investment in what I'm doing actually will affect what happens afterwards. So it's not as easy, uh, as it sounds to say do the right thing unless we're really clear for ourselves and each other what we mean by right thing.

Okay, so this show, we try to get very practical. So we try to make sure that folks listening to this, they've got something that they can take away and that they can use. And one of the great things in your book, among many others, is you have this triangle consisting of morals, ethics, and role responsibilities. So how do you use that as a lens to understand what we view as right and wrong? And how can we use that as a lens to make some of these difficult decisions? And after you explain that, I'll probably give you an example of, here's a situation, how can we then use this lens to think through how we want to deal with that situation?

This is a very practical tool and one that you can apply right away. The first thing is to recognize where's the conflict coming in. Am I conflicted because what I believe about right and wrong is interfering with what I think my job is, what I think I'm supposed to be doing here? Is what I believe about right and wrong interfering with what the community or some of my stakeholders are saying is important? Or is what What is one group of my stakeholders saying is important conflicting with what another group of stakeholders say is important? Okay, once you've figured out what the source of the conflict is, get clear on what do I believe about each side? What does that mean? Well, for morality, what do I think is right and what do I think is wrong in this situation? Or for the ethical context that I'm operating in, what will the aggregation of people that I interact with say is most helpful or most harmful right now? And what's my understanding of, of that? And then for my role responsibilities, who are my stakeholders and what do they expect of me? Whichever two are coming into most obvious conflict, look to the third one. And the third one will tell us a bit about what direction is most likely to have the most net positive results for me as a leader and for the organization and the people that I'm leading. Let me give you a concrete example that doesn't sound quite so academic here. A lot of leaders face the challenge over the last year or so of what to do about policies with regard to COVID vaccination ahead of reopening their offices. So let's take a leader who believes that people should have bodily autonomy. You should be able to decide for yourself whether or not you want to get vaccinated, whether or not you want to wear a mask. Pretty straightforward. You can set the policy and say, I think it should be up to each individual. But let's say that same leader also says, but I also believe in public health. And what public health is telling me is that our collective risk is reduced if most people get vaccinated and most people wear masks. Now, what do I do? What I believe morally and what my ethical context is telling me are in conflict with one another. And I have to make a decision about how I'm going to bring people back to an office. Well, you can say we can look to the law, and that probably gets a lot of us out of trouble plenty of times, but it doesn't really solve the dilemma. The dilemma can then be resolved by looking at our role responsibilities. What's my job? I'm in charge of a company. I'm not an expert in public health, so I need to make sure that I'm looking out for my employees, looking out for my customers, and doing what is going to allow us to get back to business as quickly as possible. With that in mind, I'm probably needing to make a decision that aligns more towards the ethical context, which says create a policy in service of public health, because that will help the most people to get back to business as quickly as possible, rather than what lines up with my personal morality, which is that I think everybody should get to decide for themselves. Take the two that are in conflict, figure out what the source of the conflict is, and then look to the third to inform the best decision. Now, will that be the most popular decision? Probably not. Depends where you are, depends on the context that you're operating in. But will it be the best possible decision for the interests of the company?

Probably. Well, as we're talking today, a federal judge, I think in Florida, said that you no longer need to wear masks on airplanes. And so I just happened to be flying the day after that, and I'm thinking to myself, it's gonna be really interesting to see how many people are wearing a mask at the airport and on the plane and how many aren't. And I was on 2 flights the day after, and I would say maybe 1 out of 20 people were wearing a mask. So very few people were wearing a mask in the airport or on the plane. Yet I'm on Twitter and I see all these people say, I'm not going to fly this airline because they don't require masks, and all these people are upset. So I was going to ask you about COVID and masks as the example, but I think you've already given that to me. And it's pretty clear for the airlines that— and I think in their case, they wanted the government to have a law that— or a requirement— either we're required to wear masks or we're not, because they didn't want to have to make this difficult decision. They wanted to be able to say, ah, we're forced by the government to do this. So that was sort of their out, and I think was certainly convenient for them. But I don't think we need to beat that one a little bit more. But I do want to have a quote here from your book that I think ties this in really nicely. And as I read it, I thought, yeah, this really is a good way for me anyway to think about it. Maybe others will find it helpful. You said, if morals are internally referenced, ethics are externally referenced, and role responsibilities are stakeholder-informed, then the decision-making triangle can prompt the leader to look inward, look outward, and look around. Looking inward enables us to understand what each of us brings to a dilemma. How our early influences, our psychology, our inner voices, our identities affect the way that we see and experience the inputs to a decision. Looking outward tells us what the world, or at least our broader operating context, has to say about them. And looking around tells us what our key stakeholders might think. So I thought that was a great way to describe inward, outward, and around. We got all these different constituencies. I love how you wrote that. I think that's a good way to think about it.

Thanks, Steve. I think the important thing to remember is that we're never going to have the answers to this stuff on our own.. And so getting clear about what we believe, but then also looking at what others believe and how that context affects our operating goes a long way towards helping us make a decision that we can live with and that our stakeholders can live with too.

So related to making these decisions, you also talk about the difference between ethics and judgment. And judgment, of course, is a key trait of effective leaders. So tell me a little bit about ethics and judgment and what we should be looking for there?

A lot of times when we talk about judgment, we try to engage with the idea that somehow we can be objective. I can gather all of the data and remove the emotion from it and be as objective as possible. But the reality is that we all have lenses through which we see the world. Those are made up of our lifetime of experiences, of the jobs that we think we're supposed to do, of the identities that we hold, and that stuff all comes together in how we assess situations. We can't really ever be fully objective, no matter how hard we try. And there's lots of research even about the way that coding happens in IT contexts that tells us that the biases of the programmers end up being replicated in the systems themselves. Human systems are even messier than technological systems. And so rather than trying to aspire to some kind of unachievable goal, the notion of objectivity, what we can instead do is try to build what I call skilled subjectivity. The idea that we make judgments from particular perspectives, but if we get really good at knowing where we're coming from and how that affects the way that we interpret information, then we can look at conflicting information, we can look at other points of view, we can make sense of a difficult situation By recognizing that our starting point affects the way that we interpret the information that we're gathering, that's really good for improving the quality of our decision-making, and it's really good for improving our ability to use that judgment to drive good outcomes in the long run.

So you're telling me that these algorithms that are pointing me to certain movies or showing certain tweets in my feed, that those are not unbiased?

Well, I think you know the answer to that. Yeah. And I think the truth is the people who own those algorithms know the answer to that too. That's right. They use that to make their businesses really successful. Knowing where they're coming from makes you an educated consumer too. But when you're the guy running the business, you can use it to think about what you want your customers to do and who you want to engage with at any point along the way. That's right.

Yep. They are generating outrage and manipulating us. So indeed, another thing I wanted to ask you here is a lot of companies have, I think, what you've called the brilliant jerk— someone who hits or exceeds all the sales numbers, for example, yet they don't follow company policy, they don't really fit in with the culture, they're just a rabble-rouser. Yet, man, they exceed numbers every month, every quarter. How do we deal with that in terms of your framework here? How should we think about those types of folks?

Yeah, when you're trying to deliver something immediate, short-term, fast, the desire to continue to praise and reward people who deliver at all costs is pretty strong. But when you're trying to build something that's going to sustain itself over time, when you're building a business, when you're building a way of engaging with your customers, you have to make sure that you're not just thinking about what you're doing, but you're thinking about how you're doing it. Somebody who is a brilliant performer but leaves a trail of destruction in their wake might actually be undermining other people's ability to perform. And when you look at that collective performance, you may discover that in fact the damage done by that brilliant jerk actually outweighs the benefit of their brilliance. I didn't make up that phrase. It's one that Netflix popularized when they're very frequently retweeted, frequently sent around, deck about the importance of their culture was distributed a good 10 years ago. But I will say that in every context that I've operated in, consulted to, worked with everywhere in the world over the course of my career, this question always comes up. What do I do about somebody who's fantastic at their job, but it's just really difficult to work with? And there is something to be said for leaders about how do you hold people accountable, not only to what they do, the role responsibilities, but how they do it, what's helpful or harmful or good or bad or right or wrong, that ethical context and that moral code in the environment that you're operating in. Both matter. And at a moment when leaders everywhere are struggling to get and retain great talent, the how matters as much, if not more so, than the what.

Right. Yeah. And I think this all ties into self-awareness as a leader that, again, with your framework—morals, ethics, values—the more we can understand how we interpret those things, what's important to us, I think the easier it becomes for us to make those kinds of decisions about, well, where am I going to stand on this? Am I going to allow this person to operate in this way and create the destruction that they're creating in their wake? So again, great framework that you have here, and hopefully for everyone listening, it's going to help them make these difficult decisions a little bit easier. Well, Eric, I want to switch gears here just a little bit. I want to take advantage of you, if I can, here on, on all of your experience in addition to the book that you've done here. So I was reading a book called The Heart of Business by Hubert Joly, who was the former CEO of Best Buy, and whose name do I see in the book but Eric Pleiner. So one of the things that he talked about in his book as he was talking about you was you helped him and you helped his executive team at Best Buy clarify who's responsible for what at the executive leadership level. How does the executive team make decisions? How do we know who's in what swim lane, so to speak? So tell me a little bit, if you could, about maybe the work that you did with him or just in general how a leadership team should think about roles and responsibilities and who gets to make what decisions.

Thanks for that, Steve. I had the privilege of working with Hubert as his leadership coach for about the last 6 or 7 years and with his executive team along the way through the end of his tenure as CEO and then executive chairman of Best Buy. Like leaders everywhere, this question about how do we make decisions, who ultimately chooses, is one that they were grappling with. The fact is we could raise every decision to the level of the senior-most person. What does the leader think about this? I often say that in most contexts, everybody turns their head to the end of the table to see, is the CEO nodding or is she shaking her head? Is he supporting my idea or is he supporting something else. But the sheer number of decisions that every leader would have to make would make it impossible for them to do anything else during the day. They'd just be deciding for everyone all the time. So the first principle that we spent some time on with Hubert and with his team was how do you push down decisions as far as you can? Don't be the person deciding unless it is a decision that only you can make, that really, because of your vantage point or your set of role responsibilities, you are really the only person that can make this. That's pretty rare actually for most leaders. Most of the time, our job, rather than having our more junior people pushing up information to us to make decisions, our job is to push information down to them and to coach them to make great decisions in line with our total strategy. That was one principle. The second one, which I think is important for everybody everywhere when you're making decisions that affect a group, is to be really clear on whether each member of that group has a view, a perspective, a voice, a perspective that we'd like them to share to inform our thinking, a vote, something to say that can influence the outcome, or a veto, the right to say, I cannot live with this and therefore we're not doing it. Because unless you clarify the view, the voice, the vote, or the veto, people always assume that they get a veto. Otherwise, why would you ask me my opinion if you're not going to do what I say? But the leader may be assuming that I just want to know what you think. So the first thing is push decisions down. The second thing is get really clear on what role the person is playing in making that decision. One of the other pieces of work that was an important part of our partnership with Hubert and the team at Best Buy was helping them to think about the idea that a collection of A players, a group of great individual leaders, is not the same as an A team. Having a whole bunch of brilliant individual players doesn't mean that they can play well together. And so for anybody who's a leader anywhere with a team, thinking about the respective capabilities, drive, interests of the people on your team, and not just how they perform on their own, but the space between them as being a really important part of what makes them successful.

A lot of great wisdom there that you just shared. And I want to dig a little deeper here in the second part, which is we hear so often, everyone says we got to get the absolute best people on the team. And I don't think anybody's going to argue with that, but you make such a great point there that the best individual performers don't necessarily make the best team. We've seen that with like the US Olympic team. I think in the early days of the US men's basketball, team superstars, and they lost to, you know, some unheralded country because they weren't operating as a team. Tell me a little bit more about how do we take these people who get to the C-suite of a Fortune 500 company— obviously they've got to be great individual performers to get to that level— how do we get them to all of a sudden share the glory, so to speak, and start working for the benefit of the company or the benefit of the team, as opposed to, I'm going to try and continue to look like an individual superstar so that I can become the CEO.

Yeah, sure. It is really hard to shake because the stuff that helps us to be able to achieve that level of success often gets in our way once we get to that level. So like I said, we're talking about the difference between how I perform individually and the space between us. How do we perform together? How do we interact? What are the messages that that sends to other people? And what is it that we're exactly trying to do together? The very first notion is that we— none of us can be successful individually unless we are all successful together. If the company is underperforming, saying, yeah, but I did great in my function or my department blew it out of the water, doesn't really go very far. We still have to make sure that we're performing together. And so that means Making sure that the entire team is bought into the strategy, understands what their role is in the strategy, and accepts responsibility for the shared delivery of that strategy. How do I make sure that if you're struggling, that I remember that part of my job is to help you? And so we look at the dynamics, the interactions between people across two dimensions. How do you operate together? What do you actually do? And how do you relate to each other? How do you do it? It's not that different from the principle of addressing the brilliant jerk. It's not just about what you do, but the way that you do it. Are you clear on your purpose as a team? What is it that we are trying to do together? And how do we achieve that when we are interacting? And are you clear on what our priorities are and who's accountable for what? Those dimensions cover this idea of how we operate, what we do, On the other side, how we relate. The first is, are we cohesive? Are we unified in what we're driving towards? Do we have each other's backs when we're not in the room? And do we genuinely believe together that this group of people, this configuration, can achieve more in combination than we can on our own or even as a collection of individuals? And finally, if we've got that clarity of purpose and accountability and priority, We've got that cohesion, that shared unity and belief. Do we have a strong exchange and interaction between us that allows us, in fact requires us, to challenge each other and shows that we have genuine respect for each other? Can we challenge each other respectfully, and can we demonstrate challenge in our respect of each other?

Now, I know your company, YSC Consulting, you guys are world experts when it comes to working with leadership teams at some of the largest companies in the world. So in this example, as we're talking about here, trying to turn top individual achievers into a great team, how much of your time is spent working individually with each of those leaders and trying to understand through assessments maybe what their style is, a little bit more about their background and why they're behaving the way that they behave, versus let's work with the whole team together, let's do exercises together as a team to get us working together. Is there some, mixed? Does it vary by company? Or no, it's all about let's work with the team as a group. How do you think about individual work and then work as a team, or just work as a team, period?

Yeah, all of the above. So I know you are someone, Steve, who is a systems thinker, that you value thinking about how systems work together. And I think our orientation is very similar. You cannot address the system if you're not addressing its component parts, the individuals. But addressing the component parts on its own doesn't fix the system. You can have all the pieces of the engine in tip-top shape, but that doesn't mean they actually work together to move the car. And so we think about both. We think about actually three dimensions. One, the individual— what's the awareness that I need to build of my own leadership, my impact on others, how I achieve what I believe I'm here to do? Second, the dynamics or interactions— so what's that space between us? And then third, the total organizational culture. What's the aggregation of all of those spaces between all of us, and how do we come together in service of delivering the greater good? We cover that on everything from individual assessment to individual executive coaching, team coaching, workshops, culture development, and on and on. We look at all three of those parts as having an effect on each other.

Excellent. Well, it sounds like maybe you visited my website. I did visit your website, which is where I got the idea that you— Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah. Done some homework on me just as I did my homework on you. So I appreciate that. Well, Eric, I know we're getting close to time here. I do want to touch on one other area. And as I did my homework on you, I'm thinking this is a real Renaissance man. So in addition to being the CEO, you're a coach, you're also very active in the arts. And you're a playwright, you're a director, and you had a show that you produced off-Broadway. So I'd love to hear about your experience in the arts, in creativity, and maybe a lesson or two that you learned in the artistic endeavors that you've engaged in and how you apply or translate those to your role, either as the CEO of YSC Consulting or in the consulting work that you do with some of the top leaders out there.

I probably don't get to spend quite as much time in the arts in my day-to-day now, maybe as a consumer as I once did, and certainly my writing has been more focused on the book more recently than on writing new plays, but I will say that the lessons that I've learned over the course of a career in and around the arts are lessons that I carry with me every day as a CEO. You know, when I worked with artists in the theater, the idea of being a director was always really appealing to me because it was about seeing the big picture and bringing all of the pieces together to enable an outcome that would be satisfying for everybody and that would allow people to shine in all of their respective areas of talent. But one of the things about being a director is you never set foot on the stage. The minute the show opens, the director's job is done. And so unless you inspire people, unless you help them to share in the vision that you're holding, unless you help to coach them to be wildly successful doing their parts, you cannot influence the thing that the audience ultimately consumes. Leadership is no different. I can't really influence what's going to happen when our employees work with their clients every single day. I'm not in the room there. I love consulting. I love getting a chance to sit alongside other leaders and their teams and organizations. But our ability to have impact is magnified by having a team of consultants in 10 countries around the world. I can't sit in the room for everyone. So, what's my job? My job is to make sure that I've set a vision, a strategy to achieve that vision, and inspired people along the way to be able to deliver something meaningful, aligned, and inspiring to their audience, their customer whether I'm in the room or not. That's a daunting task for anybody who started a career as a great individual contributor, as most leaders have. We've all wanted to be the ones doing the job at some point along the way. But the job of being the leader is to create the conditions for other people's brilliance to shine, even if it means you're not in the room when that brilliance is coming to life.

Happens every day, and one of my favorite lessons from working in the Yeah, and just like being the director of a play on Broadway or being the CEO of a big company, as you mentioned, you're basically going from being a doer, the person who's doing the work, to what I would like to say is a do-througher, where you're getting things done through other people, setting that vision and alignment and all those good things. So appreciate that. Well, Eric, this has been fantastic. I appreciate it. It's a great book. I encourage everyone to get a copy of it, Difficult Decisions with Eric Piner. So Eric, Tell us how people can connect with your firm. What's the best way to stay in touch with you?

Are you on social media? And indeed, you can find me on LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, you name it, under Eric Pleiner or Eric A. Pleiner. You can find our firm, YSC Consulting, at www.ysc.com or follow YSC Consulting on LinkedIn and Twitter as well.

Excellent. Fantastic. All right, thanks, Eric.

Appreciate you being on the show.

Thanks for having me, Steve. My key takeaway from my conversation with Eric Piner is you can no longer be neutral. One key aspect of senior leadership is you will be faced with difficult decisions, and you're not going to please everybody. Eric shared a key framework with us that involves morals, ethics, and role responsibilities. And you can use this as a lens to delve into the issues that you face and help you make an informed decision. And I think the framework is fantastic. All right, that's all for today. Make sure you like and share this podcast through your favorite social platforms. And for more great podcasts, visit us at barons.com/podcast. Take care and be safe. This podcast was brought to you by Wells Fargo Advisors. Looking for a firm your clients can't outgrow? Wells Fargo Advisors offers financial advisors full balance sheet solutions with wealth planning, investment products, banking, and lending that meet the needs of affluent to ultra-high net worth clients. Build your practice your way and on your schedule with independent and employee model options designed to meet your needs today and tomorrow. Learn more at joinwfadvisors.com.