Leading with Humility: The Unseen Power in Today’s Business World

You got to be a leader. And then all the things to be a good leader might include humility. You have can definitely be a better leader if you're humble. You know, decisiveness. You know, I don't know about hunger and, and I honestly don't know about smart because, like, I think those are nice to haves. But, you know, are you thinking strategically? Can you adapt to changing circumstances? Because so many companies that go under go under because they couldn't adapt, they couldn't pivot, they're not able to be agile.

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Hey, everybody.

Back with another episode issue and print edition of the business launch podcast with Ryan Deiss on the other side not speaking right now. How you doing?

I'm doing excellently. How about you?

I'm doing fabulous. And I am Roland Frazier, your co host. Um, what we are going to talk about today is something that you have found that, that I think will have some, some interesting, interesting discussion about. You want to tee it up?

Yes. So what is the number one trait, number one character trait that CEOs need right now? That was the question that was proposed. It was this Inc. Magazine article that states that this is the number one trait that CEOs need right now. I want to state at the outset, I, I don't typically read a lot of Inc. Magazine articles. I feel like most of these publications, it's just kind of blah content. It's fluff.

It's like seven things you need to do this. And then you read it and it's like strive for more, think positive. There's Nothing useful in 95% of the articles that I see on there.

Yeah. And I feel like this one is kind of in that same area. And that's why I want to discuss it. Not because, you know, I think it's a particularly great article.

But this is the new issue of the Business Launch podcast. You will get absolutely from listening to this.

Exactly. Yeah. What we're doing is we're taking something that was worthless and we're going to really expound upon it. Yeah, we want you to totally regret subscribing this podcast, listening to it and. No, that's not it at all. I think there's a couple of things at play here that I want to get into. But I did just want to start. I mean, the basic premise of the article is that the single most important character trait today for a CEO is. Wait for a drum roll, please. Humility. Humility is the most important character trait that a CEO must have, particularly today, because a lot of things are changing and life is hard and all this other stuff. And so I just wanted to say, like, just kind of. I got thoughts and feelings about this. Apparently this came out of, you know, a study and some comments that some big muckety mucks at price WaterhouseCooper made. I'm just curious, like, how does that hit you? We're hiring for CEOs, like, humility being the most important trait. Go.

I guess it depends on. Important to whom? Because I have actual data that says somewhere around 85 to high 90s percent of CEOs of Fortune 500 companies are males who are above 6ft tall. And that apparently is the most important characteristic if you're trying to get a CEO job at one of those companies. I refer you to Tim Cook. But anyway, no, man, if we're looking at CEOs, I think that humility is a great quality to have and it certainly can help you make good decisions. But I think there's a lot of core skills that are far more important. You could be very, very humble and a terrible communicator. You could be very, very humble and terribly incompetent or short sighted or difficult to get along with or not listen to what other people have to say. I mean, like, like. And you know, God forbid, you also know how to run a company and have experience and history in the industry and taking a company of that size to whatever the next level is. So it's, I mean, very, very nice to have and helpful, certainly to be a better person and a better leader. But I don't think if, like, if I've got only one skill or three that I have to pick for our next CEO to have, I don't think that, that that's going to be one of them. What do you.

So the overall meta message that I, that I think is worth mentioning is stop turning to this type of content for any advice whatsoever. Now, I do think it's worth having a conversation about, you know, what, really, what are some of the traits that make up like a good CEO? I think that is something worth doing because I know a lot of the folks who are listening are either investors who are looking to hire CEOs for their companies and so they're out there doing it. And I also know a lot of folks who are listening or entrepreneurs who want to be, you know, amazing, amazing CEOs. So I do think that humility is important. Have you read the book the Ideal Team Player by Patrick Lencioni? I have not so Ideal team player. Patrick Lencioni, Great book. Love it. I think anybody, if you're doing a lot of hiring, it's a phenomenal book to read. And he basically says that an ideal team player, of which the CEO should be one of those two, possesses three overlapping traits. Humble, hungry, smart. Humble is one of them. Like we define that, that is important. Hungry, that you know, you got it, you have a general drive. And then smart. He said, yeah, I mean, there's an aspect of basic competency, but that's kind of permission to play. Really what you're looking at there is like people smarts, having some emotional intelligence, the ability to communicate with others. And then it is the combination of those three things that makes someone an ideal team player. And he talks about how, you know, if you're lacking one, like let's say you're humble and you're smart, but you're not hungry. You know, he calls that person the lovable slacker. Right. And that's where to your point, like you can have people who are humble, but if they're missing one of those areas, then they're not going to be ideal.

So I do think I'm going to, I'm going to tell you, I don't think that's any more helpful. I think that's just more marketing stuff. And that's why I can't, that's why I don't read his books because I've tried, because I know that you and a lot of the guys over at Scalable like them and have gotten something and I've tried And it just strikes me like John Maxwell and so many other ones that I'm reading. And I'm like, you've come up with a thing to market, that's a framework and that's good. But how helpful is that? Because like, like when we talk about the five exits, we talk about moving from, from, from doing to delegating and delegating to leading, right? So you move from, you're working the line, then you become a manager. And then the big difference between a manager and a CEO is none of those things, right? You can be a stupid CEO that follows a great playbook. You cannot be hungry but dedicated and you cannot, you can be an arrogant, you know, son of a gun. Just look at most of the big CEOs of successful Fortune 500 companies. So it sounds good. And then you can do this, you know, well, if you have three, but you don't have to. A two legged stool can't stand, you know.

It'S, you've got to be, I.

Mean, I think you have to be a leader, right? And so to me, I know our, one of our business partners, Richard Lenders, very big on leadership culture. You got to be a leader. And then all the things to be a good leader might include humility. You have to, you can definitely be a better leader if you're humble, you know, decisiveness. You know, I don't know about hunger and, and I honestly don't know about smart because like I think it's, those are nice to haves. But you know, are you thinking strategically? Can, can you adapt to changing circumstances? Because so many companies that go under, go under because they couldn't adapt, they couldn't pivot, they're not able to be agile. You know, they're not able to make decisions even not certainly not the hard ones. I love Steve Jobs, kept getting hit with yeah, but if we release the iPhone and we put on the iPhone the ipod things, we're going to cannibalize the market for our ipod. So we should not release the iPhone. You know, he's like, screw that. We should always be cannibalizing ourselves. We should always be ever improving. And he made the hard decisions and he was an arrogant son of a gun. You know, ask anybody that worked with him. And not humble at all, right? And, and certainly very smart. So he was a one legged stool for, for, for the book you're mentioning. So I just feel like it's, you got to be able to adapt and communicate and lead and make decisions and, and, and hopefully be strategic. I think Those are, you know, like actual important things. Like, like you, you said it. If we were hiring for CEO, what would we ask for? Would we interview them and say, okay, I don't know if you're going to take the humble, smart and, you know, hungry boxes, but let's see, convince us and then you're hired. It's not going to ever happen. So I feel like if we're going to be delivering useful value for people, we ought to say, screw all that stuff. None of that's going to help you. It's all nice to have, it's great book selling stuff, but you really got to find somebody can actually lead and make stuff happen.

Yeah. And that's kind of where I was going with. I think that, I think it's a good book. I think it's helpful, especially when hiring. I don't know that it's necessarily helpful for hiring the top level execs. I think it's a decent enough framework. But I was going to say even there to, to pretend like you can sum up somebody's ability to do a job, like in three areas. Even if you're going to say they have to have experience and be generally competent. Right. This notion that these three things, if we can identify them, that even that is enough. It's just not that simple. Right. It just doesn't work that way because there are times when, yeah, you need to be humble and there are times when you kind of need to be a fricking jerk and you need to, you know, drag everybody kicking and screaming. So I just don't know. Especially when you're thinking about a CEO that trying to identify because. Because there are just so many examples of people who don't fit that mold. And yet it works.

Yeah.

And so I don't know that there is a classic quote unquote mold of like, this is the perfect CEO. I certainly don't believe you can distill it down to three traits. And I definitely don't think you can distill it down to one. That to me is the most absurd of all. So I would ignore that. And to their point, like they said, well, the whole reason you need to be humble is because you need to be able to be flexible and respond to change. But that doesn't necessarily require. You can have a humble person who still doesn't do that because they're just incompetent. Right.

And you can have someone, I am the best person in the world at change. I am the best person in the world.

Right.

You can that arrogant Person also can make that stuff happen.

Yeah. So I was, as I was reading this, I thought to myself, okay, let's get away from like personality traits and character traits and those kinds of things, because I think the biggest problem is they're tough to measure. And you know, again, somebody who I think is humble, somebody else might be like, that person's a fricking jerk. So it's so subjective. So I was trying to think about what I believe is the most important skill of a CEO. Like what is the thing that a CEO must be able to do on a. On a daily basis that kind of most overlapping, kind of defines the CEO role. And I think I've got it. I wanted to run it by you though, just to have you kind of check my logic. Feel free to tell me you think I'm a total idiot.

Okay.

But when I think about what must a CEO do, I think the primary job of a CEO, because like Paul Graham talked about how wrote an article, very famous, that CEO has three jobs and it was to set the company vision to hire, train and retain the best people and don't run out of money. Right. And I think that's, that's fun and there's, there's plenty enough there true to be helpful. But I think all that really can be distilled into the CEO's primary job is to figure out what is the next right thing for everybody to be doing, right? What is that next right thing? Because to today should be taken care of by the functional leaders, right? The here's what we're doing now. Then that should be taken care of by your systems and by the people who are executing it. The examples that you gave. You know, Steve Jobs. The next right thing is to disrupt ourselves and to roll out the iPhone. Damn the torpedoes, right? The next right thing is to go raise capital right now because of this. The next right thing is to do that. And when I think about the CEOs that I have seen perform incredibly well and, and even when I think about when I've been, when I've been sitting in that role, when I've succeeded versus the times when I've absolutely failed, the times when I've succeeded, it's when I could clearly identify the next right thing and then align the resources to move towards it. The times when I failed, it's when I just didn't know. I didn't have a clear picture and I wasn't able or willing to make a call and I just kind of sat there and allowed everything to languish. In ambiguity. So that to me, if you're going to say, what does a CEO need to do?

What's kind of their number one thing?

I think most of it could be distilled into that. Even going back to Paul Graham. Right. Hire, train, retain the best. Okay, is the next right thing to make this critical hire. Because at some point all of those things you should have other people doing. You should have functional leaders and managers who are hired, training and retaining the best people. You should have a finance department that is primarily tasked with ensuring you don't run out of money. The setting of the vision is going to. Should be done in coordination with other members of the team. But I think that is the one that that most kind of speaks to that. I don't know. That's kind of my thinking. What do you think?

I was going to look up the definition so I can see. I don't know how to spell it though.

CEO.

There we go.

You can look up the definition of CEO, but you don't have to spell CEO.

That's too hard. So let me, let me find something else. Now.

I would.

I think that it's really to proselytize because I think that those functional leaders are really executors of vision. A CEO should have vision that gets approved by the board. But really it goes beyond leadership. People need people to follow towards wherever the company's going to go. So I think that they do need to make that next decision. I agree with you. They need to make that right decision. But in the absence of everything else, really, what, what I believe a CEO needs to do is lead. And it's more than lead. It's convert almost to a religion of the company for whatever the vision is. If the vision is the religion of the company as to where we're going, the CEO's job is to sell it and to take the company in the direction of that vision. So that means they need to make the next right decision and they need to be good communicators and all of those other things. But like, if I'm thinking about if I can only have one thing and I'm hiring for that position as an owner or as a portfolio manager or as a. A director on a board of directors, I want somebody that can actually convert people to everything that we want to happen. So I like it. I think it's part of that maybe bigger thing.

But identify and proselytize then, because proselytize, I mean, there's has a largely religious connotation to induce someone to convert to one's faith, but to recruit someone to join one's party, institution or cause. Yeah, and I think that. Yeah, and I agree with you because invariably as a CEO, if your job is to figure out what is the next right thing, if you're growing, very rarely the next right thing is to. And oftentimes it is. But, but typically if, if you want to scale, the next right thing can't always be just keep doing what we're doing. Sometimes it is. Yeah, sometimes it is.

Which can be a hard decision sometimes. Like it's as hard as it is to keep doing what you're doing when everybody says this is the next thing as it is to make a change from what you've been doing.

Right.

And the difference is knowing which is the right decision. For sure.

Yeah.

But when you make that decision, who's going to lead the army of the company into the battle to have the cause happen?

And I think the distinction is to make the non obvious call on what the next right thing is. Because if it's obvious, everybody's already doing it. And so the job of the CEO is to make the non obvious call of the next right decision and then proselytize, align the team and resources towards that decision, which sometimes because it's non obvious, is the hardest thing in the world to do. And if you ever as a CEO, find yourself, you know, go in a direction, nobody's behind you, you're by definition not a leader.

And so what we have, I believe, identified for everybody here and for ourselves is none of us is going to hire a one skill CEO. It's just. Yeah, like one skill.

They check, sign them up. I read an Inc. Magazine article.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, done.

Hired.

Hey, can you run this company and make things happen? I don't know if I, if I.

Can do it or not.

Hired?

No.

That's so humble.

Should it be on the box of.

Things you're going to tick? Yes. Should it be the most important? I think it's, you know, maybe in the top 10.

Yeah. So I think, I mean as I look at here, a couple of lessons, couple of takeaways, number one, please don't look at really large websites who have to publish a certain number of articles a day to maintain a certain number of impressions to hit their ad unit targets. Don't look to them for real actual business advice that can sound self serving. I do think places like these are far better to come to for like real life business advice. Also, if it seems overly simple, if somebody has distilled something down to its kind of like core essence, that either means that it's true genius or it's absolute, like worthless logical lie crap. And discerning between those two can be very difficult. But more times than not, it's the latter. Like more times than not, it's just overly distilled, watered down, and it's not helpful anymore. I think that's another takeaway. And I think, and I do think the, you know, the third thing is if you're a CEO or if you're an investor, if you're on a board, you know, know, if you're a CEO, like making that, making that call, that non obvious decision, that's your job. And then getting everybody else to follow, that's your job too. And if you're unwilling to make that decision, if you don't know how to make that decision, then it's possible that, that you're out of your depth and you need some additional insight and help, you know, from some peers. Because you probably don't want to go to your board and say, I, I have no idea what we're supposed to do next. Because if you're on a board and you're hearing that from a CEO, I would say they're failing at their core role, which is not to merely sit there and be humble, but to make the non obvious next right decision.

I agree.

Well, shall we call it a job done?

I think we shall. Thank you guys for listening today. I hope this was helpful. I hope that we, if you took the time to read that, and actually to me is an overarching thing, what Ryan said, I think is true, is, is when you're looking to move fast through the world and make decisions, you have to be careful about the information sources you have. We try to be one that provides you with practical, actionable, proven experience, lived and learned in the trenches stuff. When you've got writers who are hired to write pieces and have quotas of what to turn out and also get clickbait titles to attract people, they're very often selling you something that isn't going to actually be helpful. And so hopefully we've helped convert one such article into something that will be useful to you. And maybe even thinking when you're reading those things about, okay, well, this is an opportunity for me to think about what do I need. Even though I know that the subject matter of the, that the content of the article might not necessarily be helpful, it does give me food for thought. And now I can think about the specific things. So if you enjoyed this, we hope that you will share it if you did not. Please keep it to yourself and we will see you next time on Business Launch.

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