The Rock of Trust: A Framework for Impactful Leadership | Karen & Aneil Mishra | 615

Today I want to talk about the marriage of thought leadership ideas and smart marketing. In today's episode, you'll hear from Anil Mishra, Dean of the College of Business and Economics at Towson University, and Karen Mishra, Professor of Business at Campbell University. You'll hear how Anil's dissertation framework around trust first led to case studies, then a self-published book, then a second book, an ongoing demand for consulting and hunger for their ideas. You'll also hear how Karen's marketing expertise reshaped Anil's ideas and helped them become more memorable and create greater impact. We'll also talk about their working relationship and thought leadership. And finally, we'll explore how they as academics purposefully cross the academic-practitioner-leader divide. Before we begin though, I want to note that Anil Mishra passed away shortly after the recording of this episode. We publish this episode with gratitude for him and our deep condolences to his family and friends. I'm Bill Sherman. This is Leveraging Thought Leadership. Let's begin. Karen and Neil, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you. Thank you.

So I want to explore the journey of taking what began as academic ideas out to scale and creating impact, because often there's the academic practitioner divide. Both of you are within academia, but you've also done work outside of it. So Anil, I wanna start with you and go back to your dissertation. You looked at and created some case studies in your research on organizations. Can you describe that research to us and begin the journey of how you went towards scale and thought leadership? So first off, what was your dissertation about and what idea sparked it?

Well, both Karen and I worked for General Motors after college, and so I went back to the US automotive industry or North American automotive industry to do my dissertation work. And at that time it was the late 1980s, early '90s, and they were going through one of their periodic economic downturns. But on top of that, was significant competition from the Japanese. So that was just making everything even more threatening, even to the point where it was really a study of crisis. I wasn't looking to study trust, I was looking to study how these organizations were dealing with this crisis. And the short answer is very few of them were doing a good job. Um, that means they weren't meeting their goals, they're having to continue to lay off people. —on this kind of negative cycle of, you know, poor performance, more layoffs, and so forth. There were a few organizations though that seemed to have escaped that cycle. They were doing something very different. They were meeting their goals to improve quality and costs. They were not having to lay off people. And so I simply asked these managers, plant managers for the most part, why are you so different? And whether it was luck, right? Or I think some enduring truths that I captured, they started to say, "Well, it's because our employees trust us. It's because the union trusts us." And because of that trust, we had a very different approach to leading and we could be much more flexible and dynamic, more collaborative. And all of that led to a very positive cycle of improving performance.

And that led to a framework, didn't it, in terms of, I believe, what you call the Rock of Trust? Right. So can you describe that?

Sure. So there are very different ways in which these organizations were building trust. They had different stakeholders. Some were unionized, some were not. But what appeared to be in common across all four of them— I'm sorry, all the organizations— was four types of Trust building, which I originally called competence, reliability, openness, and caring. And my marketing wife, she was a marketing executive at the time, said, Anil, that spells CROC. How about you reorder that and it can become the ROCK of trust? Well, she's a marketer, she knows what she's talking about. So it's being reliable, which means dependable and consistent, keeping your promises. Being open and honest, being transparent, being competent, getting the job done, and then caring about other parties' interests and not just being selfish.

So Karen, turning to you from the marketing perspective, addressing the name and making something catchy is one piece, but identifying an opportunity and saying, hey, there's a market for this. How did you process this work? As a marketer when you looked at it?

Yeah, well, I was working in sales and marketing at the time he was doing his dissertation, and one of my jobs was to build a partnership. I was selling soda bottles to Coke and Pepsi, and that was my job, was to build relationships with them. And so I could actually see how this was used in practice to build these partnerships. And so thinking of the going from the crock to the rock, it helped make sense and to be able to describe it because I was responsible for 19 plants. That's supplied Coke at Pepsi. So to be able to describe it in a way that they could remember it in a positive way too, because croc is not quite as positive as rock is.

Um, and so I see a crocodile in the Nile sort of thing, and that seems dangerous and threatening rather than something that I'm going to be drawn towards.

That's one way, yes. And you know, there's lots of different definitions. Oh yeah, yo down for croc. But yeah, that's— we'll go with that one. And so rock is just, you know, it's a little bit more sturdy and, and it's easy for people then to remember when they're trying to go through. Now, what does that mean again? And so, so that's kind of how I was looking at it at the time. Like, let's think of a way that we can easily relate it to people and say, and even, you know, I'm talking to these 19 plants, like, are we being reliable with our customers? Like, are we doing what we say we're going to do? Are we sharing the information that they need? You know, are we hiding things? Are we being open and honest? And are we doing the work that we're supposed to be doing in the right way? Are we, you know, have the quality? And then the piece that we tried to differentiate with our customers was showing that we went above and beyond for them so that they would choose us over our competitors.

So, Karen, I like one of the things that you said In terms of you're watching Anil work on the research and dissertation, and you're like, hey, there's direct application for that, right? Something I can use in my work right now. Yeah. So often when you're working in academia and dissertation land, it becomes more of an abstract problem. Were you thinking from an applied perspective as you were working on this, or did Karen pull you into this perspective? Anil?

It was a combination of both. I had a fair amount of credibility having worked at General Motors, so they knew where I was coming from when I was asking these kinds of questions. I wasn't simply trying to do an exposé or get the dirt, but to truly understand how to help them improve their operations. And at the end of each of my research projects, including the dissertation, I need to provide them with a feedback report to show what I learned to encourage them to continue to work with me. So that's where I learned how to translate things into what I call human speak. And that is to use words and language and examples that made sense or in their vernacular and to take that academic lingo and make it understandable.

Let's stay there for a moment because you pointed out two things. One, you had credibility because of your work in the industry beforehand, which also allowed you to speak their language and understand what they saw as important, right? So it would have been a lot harder coming in as a grad student or PhD candidate who'd never worked in the work world and was trying to research business, right? Very true. Second, the piece that you said in terms of, hey, if I'm doing a report out, I've got to create value. How do I translate that? And recognizing that not everybody geeks out over p-values in the same way and effect sizes, right? So Karen, I want to ask you, how do you cross that language barrier and make things relevant? Because I think that's really in the land of marketing. It doesn't matter if you have a good idea, you have to be able to speak in your audience's language. Yeah.

And I think that's one of the things we started to do right away. Together. We started because I was actually his first research assistant. PhD students, you know, don't get research assistants, but he had me to help him because I was getting my MBA while he was getting his PhD. So I would, you know, help him with things. But we also then realized that there were opportunities to take all of this research and turn it into like mini case studies for our students. And so in doing that, you also need to translate it you know, the geeky parts into the parts that students can understand. Um, and so that's actually how we started writing books, is that we started with case studies and we compiled the case studies, put them into our first book, and were told we were not famous enough to publish a book.

And I want to ask about the first book. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So many dissertations wind up going on a shelf in the library of the university that sponsored them. Some of them actually get published in part or in whole in academic journals. A small fraction get either taught in B-schools or see the light of day in an applied sense. I want to ask about that journey. So let's circle back to, you think you've got something and you're like, we want to take it out to the world. Tell me And I'm going to start with you, Karen, about that journey of going to publishers and saying, we want to write this book.

Yeah. So we had all these mini case studies. We put them all into this first book. I don't even know how many publishers we went to. 6 or 7. And we had this great proposal, you know, all written out. And literally somebody said to us, I mean, thankfully they did, you know, you, it's a great idea, but you guys are just not famous enough. Nobody's heard of you. And we're like, well, yeah, we're actually. Like junior professors. Of course nobody's heard of us. And they said, sorry, but, you know, for that reason, no, we're going to pass. And so finally we're like, well, we spent all this time, we're just going to publish it on our own. And there's a great publishing arm in Raleigh called Lulu. And so we were like, okay, we'll figure that out. We hired somebody to do the COVID We— and we use that. We sold quite a few books on our own just doing that and using it in our courses.

It was actually great that they were honest with us and said we weren't famous enough. In fact, one of my mentors said, uh, I can't believe they were that honest because often they just reject you and no explanation. So I think that was a spur to us to say, oh, we're not famous enough? We'll prove you wrong. We'll sell a lot of copies.

And you were going down the thread of, you know, some people would go and respond to the statement of you're not famous enough of Okay, I'm not going to go down this, or let me find, you know, a better time. You said the time is now. What made you— and O'Neill, I'm going to ask you— what made you convinced that you could go out into the world and do this?

You know, I think it was— and this helped us as we wrote these books to really reach a wide variety of audiences— so I had to be able to write up stuff that was compelling to an executive whose time is very busy, and at the same time that would be interesting to an undergraduate and/or an MBA student. And when we got positive feedback, when executives said, wow, you know what, I am so glad that you shared that with me, I'm going to go back and change the way in which I lead my workforce, or when an MBA student or undergraduate lit up and said, 'You know what, those are the kind of leaders I want to be when I finish my degree.' I think that positive feedback was what also encouraged us that we had something that we could keep pushing on to try to get it published.

So, Karen, continuing on the story, you've decided the self-publishing route, which means you're taking on the marketing responsibility. How did you think about marketing a self-published book?

Well, it's very hard because academics are not really encouraged to toot their own horn. I mean, it's a whole different world today than it was, you know, when we started. When we started, it was kind of frowned upon that, you know, you don't really do that kind of thing. Almost déclassé, right? And so we had to kind of be under the radar about the way that we did that. So we honestly, we gave away a lot of books. Probably gave away as many as we sold, um, just to kind of encourage people, hey, take a look and see if this would be right for your class, or, um, that kind of thing. Or with companies who were considering, they were like, you know, we need some leadership development, and we'd give one to them, say, look at this, see if, you know, we might be helpful to you. So some of it was that. But the one thing I will tell you that we obviously did it right, because when we finally got a publisher interested in us, they sent out our proposal for review, and one of the reviewers said, well, I'm not surprised, they're really good marketers. And we thought, we had no idea. Like we, you know, we were just trying to like stumble under the radar, but obviously somebody who reviewed our proposal knew that we were good or thought we were good marketers. So that was a surprise to us.

And lest you think that we, 'cause Karen's right in some literal sense, we gave away as many copies as we sold, but that's not really a great business proposition. But most of the books that we gave away, was in the form of giving them to our students. So often the universities would then pay for the, at least the cost of the publication of the book itself. We're not making any money, but at least we're getting, and, but they would share these books with others at the workplace too. Yeah.

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 thoughtleadershipleverage.com/podcast. And I like the evolution of momentum. Of how do you get an idea in the world, you started actively seeding it out there and putting the conversation out into the world, realizing that if you got enough momentum, then publishers might pay attention. So let's talk about what that momentum has looked like, not only in terms of getting the framework of the Rock Up Trust out there, but what that's meant to organizations as well as the two of you. So Anil, I will turn to you first and then Kara.

You know, I think, um, certainly with that self-published book, um, when we subtracted the cost of production and so forth, uh, copy editing, you know, we didn't make a lot of money off the book itself, But it's truly amazing how important it is to have a book for credibility in the outside world. Again, assuming it's a good enough book. And I was able to secure a lucrative multi-year contract with a Fortune 500 company. And the executive who hired me said, the reason I'm gonna hire you is two things. You're not giving me a cookie-cutter solution, Anil. And two, You've got that book of yours, which I read and found very informative. So, I think that's another way in which you can make this publication process or this journey more sustainable. And that is if you're getting it in the right hands, you probably will find it leads to consulting, keynote speaking, other kinds of activities that generate income as well.

And Karen?

Well, I think we do want to put one disclaimer out there. So, You know, our schools know every bit of royalties we get from our books, we give back to our schools. So I do want to make that comment just so they all know we write a check every year or two wherever we're teaching. And, um, because we do want— because sometimes we will use our books, um, with our students as well. And so we always want our students to know that, you know, whatever money we make, um, we, we give it all back to our schools.

And that's a very specific point to academia than if you were out in the world as consulting and using the book as a virtual business card.

Yeah, sometimes it is, but we also feel very strongly that we want to make sure that we support our schools as well.

Absolutely. I mean, you have an affiliation there and you are building the organization of the institution. Yeah, yeah. So So Anil, you and I were talking and you mentioned something about how the framework has evolved over time. Let's go there because I really find it interesting that the research data that you had from the time of dissertation, the way people look at trust has evolved. Over between then and now.

Absolutely. So one of the things that— I'll just pat myself on the back— but serious academics do is they say, does this set of findings, is your theory and results, uh, applied to other contexts than the one in which you did the study initially? So I went to, uh, aerospace industry Another, in other words, manufacturing, part of the manufacturing sector, but very different than the automotive industry. But after about 10 years of studying large Fortune 500 companies that were dealing with a lot of challenges, I joked I got tired of being Dr. Death and looking at downsizing. So I wanted to look at healthy organizations. So again, some of it's opportunistic in the best sense of the term, but we want to be compelling with our students. So we created a panel discussion one evening, 4 different women who were leaders, 2 of whom were— one was the founder and the other one was the president of this company called Two Men and a Truck. And so I asked them, this is a great story about how this company was founded, could we write a case study about your organization? And they were humble enough to say, really, you want to write a study about us? And I said, absolutely. So we interviewed a bunch of people as we always do for this case study and learned that that rock of trust absolutely mattered in ways that, you know, made a lot of sense given how it worked in large Fortune 500 companies, but in the same way with a small, rapidly growing company. But over time, what's become more important in terms of the rock of trust, the pieces of that rock, has shifted.

Yeah, so the reliability and the competence kind of, you know, are things that we just expect from organizations these days, that you kind of get weeded out if you are not reliable, if you don't perform, and if you're not competent and you don't have that quality. And so what's left that take a little bit longer to build is that level of honesty and transparency that you, you know, how much information do you share? And then how do you show that you actually care? A lot of times when we ask our students, who's the best boss you ever had, they don't talk about the other parts of the Rock of Trust. They always come to, well, it was the one who cared about me. And that, for them, that's really this distinguishing characteristic of the best boss is the one who took that time, who invested in them, who had their best interests at heart.

And in fact, we're not just doing this work in a vacuum. We're obviously keeping in touch with other scholars who are looking at trust. And many scholars have identified there's two types of trust: cognitive, you know, how you think about things, and emotional or affective basis of trust, or how you feel. And so what we would say is that the reliability and competence, the head of trust, has become less important because everybody is demonstrating that it's still around and in business, but the heart, the openness and caring are now increasing what differentiates truly excellent organizations and leaders from just really good ones.

And I wonder in some ways if that's almost a generational and management theory shift as well. So the difference between emotional intelligence and Theory X, Theory Y Or, you know, you go back to even earlier, you know, studies of, you know, moving iron across the yard, you know, in early business analysis. It was an entirely different perspective then than now. Okay. And I think what you touch on is expectations of employees, expectations of clients and customers. Has truly evolved and they're not used to being treated poorly, nor do they like it. And they have agency to go elsewhere.

Yeah, I think that's a really good point. When you just look at the surveys of what employees are expecting, like the engagement data from Gallup, you know, it's still not where it should be. When two-thirds of employees are not engaged at work, that's not good. But the things that you know, help employees be engaged or, you know, having a friend at work, but also having autonomy over their workplace and being respected by their bosses. And so those are not necessarily reliability and competence things. Those are more of the caring types of things.

Absolutely. So let me add one piece into the equation that I think is important. You described yourselves to me not only as academics who study trust, but also who practice trust. Karen, what does that mean to you? And then I'll turn to Anil.

When we— when Anil interviewed Bob Lintz during his dissertation, Bob was a plant manager at General Motors in Parma, which is right outside of Cleveland. And Bob's been in every one of our books. We wrote a case study and we call him the best boss we never had, because if we'd had him when we were at GM, we would probably still be working at GM because he was just amazing. And so he's really been for both of us, like a mentor and a guide for how to be that trustworthy leader. And so because of that and because of, you know, our interest in this topic, We both do try to live that out in our lives and the way that we deal with customers, that we deal with, you know, we both do coaching. So we try to do that with coaching executives and our students and just our colleagues that we work with. That's really important to us.

Anil, anything you would add? Sure. I like to call, you know, we study trust by building trust. So you've got to have that credibility that we had in the automotive industry, but As a project unfolds, or if we're using it in our consulting work, we certainly have to demonstrate that rock of trust. And often it can be hard to do if the people you're working with, which we're often called in to help, don't trust each other. So you have to be trustworthy to a bunch of different executives or to employees at, at the same time as top management. And they have very different interests, goals, ways of looking at the world and each other. So it requires, you know, a fair amount of, you know, I guess creativity or flexibility to be able to meet those expectations and be trustworthy to all those different parties.

And then I want to end with some practical tips and advice. Okay. And I want to circle back to something, Anil, that you talked about and dive deeper. The challenge of translating academic ideas into human speak. I think it's absolutely essential because it's part of that divide. It's, you know, people glaze over when you look at a journal article and it's a meta-analysis, or I don't understand even what, you know, methodology— I don't care about the methodology, just give me the top line. How do you do this? Aneel, you first. What do you do to reach that level of human speak?

This is actually the— what I say is the toughest part of our 39-year marriage, and that is, uh, it's not raising our children or maintaining a household. It's writing together. We have very different writing styles. I'm very detail-oriented. I parse every sentence word for word, and Karen has always rightfully so, focused on the big picture. So this going back and forth with these two different writing styles, I think has been absolutely important to make it more human speakable because we're trying to reach in our own way, two very different kinds of audiences.

Yeah, but I think we also, because we started, you know, we both started our careers at General Motors and we still think back to like, what was important to us then? What would we have liked to have known then? What, would have helped us in our careers then. And we do a lot of career coaching with our students and even people who aren't our students, honestly. We coach a lot of baristas at Starbucks. And so we always think about like, you know, how— what we've learned, how can we use what we've learned to help other people? Because, you know, if you've ever looked at Google Scholar, you know, you see, oh, your article has been read by one person. Okay, great. That's not very helpful. We want to use what we've learned to really help people.

Well, and that also helps again with that human speak. Karen is too humble. We also have coaching clients that pay us, that is executives. So again, if you're able to reach that client that you're coaching, whether that's an undergraduate student, as Karen said, a barista, or a 50-something executive with thousands of employees underneath him or her, That requires that continual translating to make it compelling to those very different audiences.

As we begin to wrap up, one last question for each of you. Karen, I want you to think back to your days of when you started the journey into fault leadership, and you said, this idea needs to reach an audience. Given the journey that you've been on, what advice would you give your younger self, knowing that there are many people who are just taking their first steps into thought leadership?

Probably be bolder, you know, not worry so much about what you think academia may or may not think about what you're doing. Because I think we were a little tepid because we're like, oh, you're not supposed to like sell your ideas in academia. But I think that's not really necessarily true because I think, you know, the business world and a lot of society looks at academia and they're like, are you people relevant at all? And I think we do have a lot of really relevant ideas and I think it's worth, you know, telling the world, hey, this is what we're working on, this is how I think we can be helpful to you. So I would just be more bold.

Fantastic. And Anil?

I think I would do more of what I did, which was to tackle big problems, big opportunities. That was something that Michigan encourages in its doctoral students. Don't just study something and try to move the dial a little bit, but go find something that's really important out there and then come up with the best possible lenses, the theory in which to look at it. And then, of course, the empirical research. But tackle big problems that, uh, I think that'll keep you motivated, um, in a way that smaller issues aren't going to do. And it does get tough from time to time when you're writing and trying to push it forward, but you remember, you know what, this is something that's really important. It's worth working at.

So you remind me of one of my professors in my undergraduate. So one of my undergraduate degrees was in theater, and he gave the advice of when you are on stage, no one comes to a performance to see the 7 parking tickets of, you know, bad. They want to see the 7 deadly sins. So you have to amplify and make the invisible visible. This is why, you know, we don't want a mumbling, mousy Hamlet that has no energy, no fire. If you're going to take an idea to scale, it's got to be a big idea and you've got to proclaim it boldly. Anil and Karen, I want to thank you today for joining us talking about the rock of trust and your journey in thought leadership.

Thank you so much. It's been so much fun.

Thank you, Bill. This has been wonderful.

Okay, you've made it to the end of the episode, and that means you're probably someone deeply interested in thought leadership. Want to learn even more? Here are 3 recommendations. First, check out the back catalog of our podcast episodes. There are a lot of great conversations with people at the top of their game in thought leadership, as well as just starting out. Second, Subscribe to our newsletter that talks about the business of thought leadership. And finally, feel free to reach out to me. My day job is helping people with big insights take them to scale through the practice of thought leadership. Maybe you're looking for strategy, or maybe you want to polish up your ideas or even create new products and offerings. I'd love to chat with you. Thanks for listening.