Best of 2023 featuring Jenna Fisher, Mark Miller, Lily Zheng, and Jane Hanson | 541

My guest is Jenna Fisher. She just wrote a book called To the Top. So before we dive into the, the, the essence of the book, what expectations did you have upfront about either what the process would be or whatever versus the reality of actually writing a book and now doing the hard part? Not that writing's not hard, but actually getting it out and get eyeballs on the book and get, get it in the right hands of the right folk. What were the things that played out differently than you might have expected?

Yeah, it's a great question. You know, one of my friends who has been a bestselling author said to me, you know, while writing the book is hard, it's much like having a baby. And once the book has been birthed and into the— come into the world, that's really when the hard work begins. And I didn't really believe him, but now that it's 2 weeks from publication date and I'm spending a lot of time talking to people about the book, which is so wonderful. Just get the message out into the world. But I think there might be some truth to that. So that's a little bit of a surprise.

Well, we'll hope the book leaves the nest before it's 30 and becomes independent and all that.

I need to launch it.

Yeah, right, right, right. Exactly. Exactly. So the model that you use, you interviewed a bunch of women, right? So give it, give us the high-level overview of the gist of the book and then how you went about writing it?

Yeah, well, I guess I would just say by way of background, I've always had a passion for keeping women on a path to professional success. Starting when I was in college, I wrote my honors thesis on the differential in performance between boys and girls in math and science. And what I learned in that endeavor was that the only statistically significant discrepancy between boys and girls was around their levels of self-confidence, not achievement. And then fast forward a decade to a very different sort of milieu when I first started working at Russell Reynolds as an executive recruiter and leadership advisor. And I would hear from the women I interviewed, I'm the only one, only one, only one, all the time. And so I started convening groups of women board members and CFOs, the two groups of folks that I recruit here, and that followership grew. And then simultaneously, I had the experience countless times where I'd be introduced to an incredibly talented woman who had had stellar academic credentials and had worked in a super hot company, led an IPO, blah, blah, blah. But then she dropped out of the workforce after she'd had her, you know, second or third child. Then fast forward a decade, she wanted to get back in, and, and I was pretty much useless. And it was almost impossible for these women to rejoin the ranks of the working in a financially meaningful way. And this led me to I think there has to be a better way, a way to keeping women with a toe, if not entire foot or more, in the world of work so that women can ultimately be financially on par with men. And from there, I set out writing this book, interviewing dozens of incredible women, a very heterogeneous group. So different races, ethnicities, locations, functional expertise, industries, ages. And their stories were both incredibly inspirational, but also really pragmatic. That others, I think, can benefit from, and most importantly, that companies can benefit and learn from.

Yeah. So there are a lot of drivers and motivators and goals and such as to behind the scenes why people write books. Some of it's intrinsic, right? It forces you to get your thinking tight. It was sort of always in you to get out. Sort of speak a little bit about the bridging between the intrinsic, like this was just fun to do, because I could see as we're talking, you're lighting up. You probably learned a lot, right? There's something somewhat selfish in a good way, like, wow, I get to talk to a bunch of smart people and learn some— learn more about a subject that I'm passionate about. But also bridge that to the benefit to the business, because even though you had this free time with COVID you could have said, I'm going to double down and find more talent, find more clients, find more whatever, right? So how does it benefit both you personally, professionally, et cetera? And then where do you see it as a a tool on the business side of the house.

Yeah, well, it was funny because in 2021 I did that as well. It was such a busy time in recruiting, so it wasn't necessarily either-or. And I thought it could be pretty synergistic actually, because so many of these women were either clients or had been clients or candidates. And so there was a— there was some overlap, not 100% certainly. But, you know, I certainly have always been very reflective about what do I think it takes to be successful professionally. And I, of course, I went into this book writing process with my own hypotheses based on my experience.

Sure.

But I did learn a lot. And one of the things I've always loved about my job in executive search is that no two days are the same, and I'm always meeting amazing people and talking to incredible people and learning. And this was really just an extension of that. And there were a few surprises that came out of it. Like, for example, one of the things I didn't have as sort of a working hypothesis personally, but that I learned by interviewing these women is the importance of entrepreneurship and how critical that is as sort of a long-term wealth-creating, multi-generational wealth-creating mechanism. And I learned that only 2% of VC deals fund women-backed companies. And I've definitely seen this play out as a recruiter where women, when I call them about potential job opportunities, they say, "Well, I haven't checked this box or that box, so you know, you shouldn't consider me for that role." And it's the same thing with entrepreneurship. Some of the women I interviewed, like, One of the ones that comes to mind is Jennifer Goldfarb, who is the CEO and founder of ipsy, which is an online beauty company, very successful business. She said, you know, like, I could have always said like, oh yeah, there's another box to check, but at some point you just gotta jump in and do it. And, and, and so yeah, I, I learned a lot and there certainly were lots of surprises along the way.

My guest is Mark Miller. He is the Vice President of High Performance leadership at Chick-fil-A. You're not a consultant, an advisor, an academic thinking theoretical great thoughts on culture. I mean, there's a lot of moving parts to your business, right? So this is usually the Chick-fil-A culture, but more importantly, it's sort of what can I learn from it, right?

Well, no, actually not. Okay. With most all of the projects, probably 90% of the projects, we try to start with what is universally true about a topic.

Okay.

So in the case of Culture Rules, we ended up surveying or interviewing over 6,000 people in 10 countries, leaders and frontline associates. And so we're saying, let's start with what's true. I never want to be the guy that just publishes my personal bias. I want something that I can tell a leader all over the world, this will work. I want something I can tell the church, the school, the hospital, the military, the chicken restaurants. I want to try to write about what is universally true. And so our process for many, many years has been, let's try to start there as, as much as we possibly can.

So in essence, you're, you're not— so let me put it this way, and I've seen several, whether it's culture books, leadership books, whatever, that are the codification of the way we do it here, wherever here might be, right? The GE way, whatever. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right? And that's a fine model. Hey, we're known for our leadership excellence, our management excellence, whatever, whatever. Let's share it with the world. You're almost a sort of an embedded research house in a fast food restaurant coming up with great things. Like, how does the business justify that? Right? Because at the end of the day, like, how does that all square? Because that's interesting.

I think it squares because we believe everything rises and falls on leadership.

Right.

And if we can help our leaders grow their capacity, grow their impact, grow their influence, everybody wins. If we can help them better with execution, better with engagement, better with teams, better building a high-performance culture, build better business culture. I agree. And so those are some of the projects we've done over the years. And I would argue there's a huge ROI on each and every one of them.

Well, that's where I was going to go. I would agree with all of those. But most companies, even those that are 5, 10, 20x your size, talk a good game, but they're not investing and really having that embedded thought leadership research and development arm inside. Because again, you didn't codify what we did here. You went out to the world. And I mean, this is classic research, classic, you know, sort of an academic model. So how does the business measure the impact and the ROI that you're having on it?

Well, let me back up. There is an academic component.

Yes.

But it is filtered extensively through a pragmatic lens and filter. I mean, you made the comment earlier, you know, I have functional responsibilities and have for over 40 years. We're running a business and then trying to help our operators run 3,000 businesses. And so somebody told me recently, and I'm not sure if this is good or bad, I probably shouldn't repeat this, they said that my personal brand is, you are painfully pragmatic. And I said, well, Thank you, I think, right? If leaders can't approach the truth, if leaders can't apply the truth, if it doesn't work, then everybody loses. And so—

I think painfully pragmatic is the highest level of a compliment. Well, I would say— I could say to you, Mark, you're painfully academic. I don't need the academic word. That just means you're painful, right?

Well, again, I'm thankful and I kind of wear that proudly because Yes, the stuff has to work. The stuff has to work. And that's on this project. I'll give you just a bit of a tangent here. Culture is big and culture is complicated and culture is hard. You go talk to 6,000 people around the world in 10 countries and you're going to have mountains of data. And then we did all of these interviews with probably 40 or 50 household brands. From around the world. I mean, one-on-one interview. I mean, it was crazy. And we were overwhelmed. And we said, this is not going to help people. And we actually took inspiration from the SEALs, the Navy SEALs. And you may know this, your listeners may know this. A few years back, they wanted to document in writing their mantra. And the first thing they wrote down was shoot, move, communicate. And the SEALs would tell you, that's not all you need to be a SEAL, but that's what you need to live to fight another day. And we then said, okay, let's take all this research and let's look for the equivalent of shoot, move, and communicate, because it's actionable.

It's—

it provides direction, it provides clarity, and it's not all you need to know, but it'll, it'll help you get through the day. And so that was actually what we tried to do. That's back to that pragmatism. Is this approachable? Is this applicable? And that's kind of been our charge and challenge for 25 years.

If you're enjoying this episode of Leveraging Thought Leadership, please make sure to subscribe. If you'd like to help spread the word about our podcast, please leave a 5-star review at ratethispodcast.com/LTL and share it with your friends. We're available on Apple Podcasts and on all major listening apps, as well as at thoughtleadershipleverage.com/podcast. Today, my guest is Lily Zhang. Lily is a sought-after diversity, equity, and inclusion speaker, strategist, and organizational consultant. In my work with authors, thought leaders, experts, et cetera, there's always an evergreen element to their work and what they do that is true regardless of what happened in the newspaper today, or the stock market went up, or it's the Great Recession or whatever. Mm-hmm. But then there's things that happen outside of their control that oftentimes will make their work more in demand, more intriguing, or less so in some cases.

Mm-hmm.

DE&I actually falls into that bucket where there's lots of things going on outside of your control that are making more and more people lean in going, I don't think we're doing this right here, or what you've been feeding us in the past is pretty, pretty terrible or non-effective. So give me— just maybe touch on that for a moment, if you would.

Absolutely. So, you know, the analogy that comes to mind is, you know how, you know how tsunamis work? Where right before the big giant wave hits, all the water recedes and goes away, right? So you see the seabed, and then of course the tourists walk in and go like, oh, that's a starfish. And then they get hit in the face with the 20-mile wave, right? Now it feels to me like DEI is that, but all the time, every week.

Really?

Okay.

I say that because, you know, we, we can go back through the last few years and there are so many examples. Talk about COVID When COVID happened, what was the first thing companies do? They slashed their DEI budgets, they ended their trainings, they closed their contracts, right? There was just like, "Oh, we're gonna focus on the real stuff now, right? Not the fancy, fun, nice-to-haves. We're gonna focus on the need-to-haves." And then what happened in 2020? The murder of George Floyd.

Exactly.

Tsunami wave, right? Suddenly everyone was saying, "Where are the DEI practitioners we laid off? Come back, please help, please help." Now, this happened so many times. It happened when the Trump administration banned DEI trainings and then the surge back, right? Every single time there's a race-motivated police killing, DEI surges. Every time there's a hate crime against Asians, DEI surges. Every time there's a new report, every time there's a new finding on discrimination against women, on disabled folks, for queer and trans folks, right? Like, our industry is defined almost by this sort of constant push and pull of corporations saying, well, we don't need that. That's just floofy, nice to have. And then the world reminding everyone, oh, oh, yes, absolutely, we need this stuff, right? We even just started seeing it in the last couple of weeks again. Companies saying, well, a recession's coming.

Yeah.

What are we going to do? We're going to cut our DEI budgets. And it doesn't—

isn't it? It's largely— not largely, but a lot of it is optics because there's a fear that a company can't say, oh, look at all the lovely things that we're doing, whether they're actually impactful or not. And I think— and maybe this is where you were going— we're now moving into this different level of DE&I where it's like, you know, and your interest book, it's about the outcomes.

Yes.

Right? Not about teaching people that look like X that they have to hire people that don't look like X. Like that was compliance training from the 1970s.

Yep.

That has stuck around because it's cheap, it's cost-effective, nobody cared, nobody was getting in trouble. But how do you make the connection to it being a strategic business driver? Because that's where you get attention, right? As opposed to compliance and regulatory and all that sort of fun stuff.

Right. So like I've been mentioning, DEI has been very trend-driven over the last few years. And I think that's, that's a major weakness of it because what we want to be doing is consistent long-term work that drives consistent long-term impact, right? And every piece of research we, we see says that the short-term flashy initiatives just fail. They're a waste of time. They're a waste of money. They're a waste of people's patience. And so what we need to be doing, and there's research that supports this from the business literature, there's research that supports this from the sort of critical theory literature, is we need to be engaged in these long-term efforts to shift workplaces towards greater equity, greater inclusion, and yes, greater diversity. And we haven't been doing that because, I mean, hard work is hard, right? Unfortunately, it's the biggest truism of the world. And all work worth doing is difficult. But companies don't want that, right? A lot of leaders I talk to are frustrated. They're just saying, we're getting bad press. We need to do something quick. We need to do something immediately. We need to bring in a practitioner tomorrow.

We literally need the hack, right? If you were to write an article, 5 things to do for every CEO to cure their DEI—

Oh, I could get it published tomorrow if I wanted to do that.

Oh, it'll hurt you, right? But to actually do the work and change the way we think and the way we behave and the way we believe and the— systems, processes, et cetera, is much harder. Today my guest is Jane Hanson, and Jane is an Emmy Award-winning television journalist and a coach, and she has spent over 30 years helping people learn to communicate. So a lot of people think thought leadership and they get a little bit overwhelmed. Oh my God, I've gotta write an article. Oh my God, I've gotta write a book. You know, like it's a heavy lift, right? It's almost like You know, if you started to work out and the first thing that you did was a marathon, it's gonna be exhausting and overwhelming. But I think that there's lots of opportunity to use thought leadership in terms of talking points, bullet points, conversations, et cetera. So maybe connect the thread of your work and mine of sort of how do you use thought leadership and, and communicate that effectively in, in a natural way.

Well, thought leadership, leadership doesn't magically happen because one day you say, I think I'm going to be one. Thought leadership is— it's building upon who and what you are. And I believe at the heart and soul of it is good communication, because I, I've talked to a lot of people that are called thought leaders in whatever expertise they're in, and we discuss how did you get to that place where you're considered the woman, the man, the expert, and To a person, they say it has nothing to do with me aiming to become something. It's just that I got really good at telling this story and doing it in a way that has confidence and yet knowledge and all of that put into a place. We might call it wisdom. Perhaps that's correct. Sure.

But stay there a minute because I think there are some folks that are really awesome, amazing, wise thought leaders, but because for whatever reason, they're researchers, they're academics, they're introvert, whatever the reason is, and it doesn't matter, that they communicate best via words on a page, right? They write really well, they research really well, but then you ask them to bring it to life either conversationally, something like this on a podcast or keynote, and they're awful, right? It's just not— who they are or what they're about, or they— those muscles aren't developed.

It's interesting. You know who Simon Sinek is?

Yes.

Yep.

So Simon has got billions of viewers of his YouTube videos. He's considered to be one of the best communicators in the world, but he has been known to say that he's a total introvert, and if he's at a party, he'll be the guy sitting over the— in the corner waiting for somebody to come to talk to him.

Sure.

So Here's the thing is that in our world today, people don't take a long time to read a white paper or to read a book or to read anything. I can't tell you the number of authors I've interviewed who I'll ask them and say something like, you know, I don't understand what you meant on page 64 when you said this. And they'll go, you actually read the book? And they're on a speaking tour all over the country. And I'm like the first person they've encountered that's actually read the book. So, and that has to do with attention spans, which on average in the United States today are 8 seconds. And we've got this, this overstimulated world with the social media and with everything being so immediate and so quick. So if, you know, first of all, you gotta think what's the purpose behind becoming a thought leader? And if your purpose is really true, it's about taking the information that you have and getting it out into the world because there's an importance to it. There's a significance, there's a need for it.

Yeah.

If you're a researcher and you've got something that's got amazing information about a, a medical process or a technique, right? Then you gotta get it out there. But if you can't communicate it, then it's gonna sit where it is and nobody will ever know. And we're missing out on an opportunity to cure a disease or something.

What, what are some of the tips, suggestions, advice, whatever you might have for someone that is really good at communicating, for example, in the written word, but when they bring it to life conversationally or, you know, uh, public speaking or, or, or whatever, it's just not their thing.

I recently worked with a woman who wrote a book and she was about to go on a tour and scared to death. And she said, I've never spoken in public before. I've never done a video. I've never been in front of a microphone. I've never been in front of lights. I've never talked to a reporter. And she goes, I am absolutely scared to death. What do I do? And I said, we're going to start really simply. And the first thing we're going to do is you have a lot of information in your book, which was a book about, you know, medicine and women and that sort of thing. I said, so first we need to think about who you want to reach. And she said, my book is really about helping women manage their health. I said, bingo, that's where we start. So the first thing we did is help her create really good messages that she could repeat over and over and over again, that she got truly comfortable with saying.

Is it that repetition gives them the comfort to then build on it? And, and so it's kind of baby steps.

Yeah.

And by the way, 87% of the people in this country suffer from something called glossophobia at one point in their life, which is the fear of public speaking.

Right, right.

So a, a person like this woman I worked with thinks that she's alone in this feeling, but the truth—

she's the only one. Right, right.

But she is not at all. Most of us have it at some point in our life, and if we don't, maybe we're dead. Because, you know, because there's going to be a situation. There's always something happening. Maybe you get up to give a speech and the mic doesn't work, or you blank out, or you get really nervous, or you're in a video situation and the tech goes down.

Are you doing—

right, right.

I mean, all kinds of crap can happen. And so there's a lot of things that you can be afraid of, but if you stick to your purpose— so my work with her was A, really creating some solid messages that she could then repeat over and over with, because this isn't— it's not brain surgery. You're good if you're out there talking about a book. The message is consistently going to be the same. It's the audience that changes.

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