Building World-Class Teams with Jay Rosenzweig

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Hi, I'm Susan Drumm and welcome to the Enlightened Executive where your personal evolution sparks your leadership evolution. Each episode we feature groundbreaking techniques and strategies to help you get the edge in personal and leadership effectiveness. This episode is brought to you by Meritage Leadership. At Meritage, we strengthen leaders and empower teams to achieve high performance. Go to meritageleadership.com to learn more. Are you curious about your own development path to enlightened leadership? Take our free 5 minute quiz@susandrum.com to discover your superpower and the roadblocks that could get in the way of effective leadership. Today we're focusing on building world class teams and I am happy to introduce my guest, Jay Rosensweg. Jay is a social impact entrepreneur, humanitarian, lawyer and leadership strategist. He founded his company focused on designing and building and attracting world class teams. And he's been immersed in global human rights for well over two decades. He's the chairman of the Raoul Wallenberg center for Human Rights and an outspoken advocate against antisemitism, racism and all forms of hate and discrimination. His work has been featured in publications such as Forbes, New York Times, Fast Company, the Guardian, Business Insider, Bloomberg, and Huffington Post. So welcome Jim Day.

Thank you, Susan. Pleased to be here. Thanks for having me.

Absolutely. So we're starting a bit with world class teams. How do you define a world class team? How do you know you have a world class team?

So there's very specific elements to understanding what a world class team is. First of all, in a business context, obviously results are important. So if you, if you're part of a business that continues to grow, continues to innovate, even in such a competitive landscape, has a brand that is unmatched, then, then you know you're doing something right. But it's not only about great sales results and, and great profitability. You also want to have a team that's cohesive and that has people who are very focused on a common goal and are motivated by the impact that they want to have in the world. More and more young people care about impact. So I'll say one last thing. On the notion of world class teams. People have been asking me of late about the notion of kind of the bad apple within, within the team oriented environment who actually has great results, who might be your best salesperson? What do you, how do you handle such a situation? And I always say, you know, you could, you could lose that first class status real quickly if one bad apple begins to rot others around them. So you need to take that out. Even if the results are good. So it's a nuanced thing, but I'd say generally speaking, that's how I would define, define first class, world class teams.

You know, you bring up such a good point because I've seen that as well, where it seems like there's always one really difficult person. Now here's the thing. Is that difficulty actually creating healthy conflict on the team, that where the team is pushing its boundaries or is it destructive? And that's the determination you need to make as a leader and really look at biases, look at perspectives, get some other feedback around that. But if you do determine there is, you know, gosh, this person, just as an individual contributor, produces so much, but there's so much shrapnel on the rest of the team. But I still don't know that I could fire. What I see happen is leaders are just not really getting a full picture of the cost of that shrapnel and what could potentially happen if you replace that with a person who could actually get a cohesive team and work more effectively. Is that your experience too?

I think that's absolutely right. Which brings me to kind of another point and that's the importance of perception. To be a successful person in life, I find people are very focused on expression and expression is very, very important. We all know how important communication is, but if we're over indexed on expression and not spending enough time on perception, there's a lot of blind spots that we may not be aware of. So leadership also requires a very healthy dose of perception, which means a level of humility to be able to really ask people's advice who are around them and, and really observe what's real. And being true to oneself is very, very important as well.

Yeah, and some deep listening skills as well.

Precisely.

I think leaders think that they need to be the person talking all the time. And actually some of the best leaders that I know spend far more time listening and then speaking.

That's right.

Think about where you fall in that category.

I spend a lot of time with, with founders of businesses, helping them scale their ventures to next levels. And one of the first things I recommend to young leaders, and I do this myself, is when you're in meetings, try to be the last one who speaks. Get everyone's opinion, welcome everyone's opinion, don't shoot anything down. Create an environment where people are not uncomfortable to sincerely speak the truth. And then once you gather all the data, then you can say, say a few words and, and perhaps point the team into the direction that you think would, would best fit. But that doesn't require a lot of words. I find that someone who talks too much sometimes actually loses the respect of others. Because, you know, people might wonder, like, why is there an insecurity here? Why does this person just chatter, chatter, chatter non stop? Like I think there's a certain almost mystery when you're in the room as a leader and you're actually quite calm and disciplined and you're not the one who's speaking the most. So I think those are some very interesting things that might appear as counterintuitive to younger people.

Yeah, I think so. Tell me what, is there a particular methodology that you use in building a high performance team or a framework?

So it's interesting, something that's front of mind for me right now. You may have seen I've been advocating for women in leadership for many, many years. In fact, I do a report called the Rosenzweig Report on an annual basis, commenting on and doing a survey on top women in the corporate world and in Canada, just as an example. When I started doing this survey in 2006, I thought the percentage of women in top roles would be low, but I didn't realize how low it was. 4.6%. And I determined to keep working on this project year after year until hopefully one day I work my way out of a job. The good news is this year for my 20th anniversary edition, the number has tripled, but it's still way too low. That means that there's still 87% of the top jobs are still held by men. And it got me thinking, as someone who's in the executive recruitment space, you know, how can I ameliorate this situation? And the way to do that is to be very, very research based to ensure that the full potential candidate pool is open on any given search, which means a far more labor intensive process, rather than recycling the same old, same old that's already in the marketplace, which might mean even going one level below for up and comers who could bring diversity to the teams. And study after study has shown if you take that kind of approach and you uncover a greater pool of candidates, you will bring a greater diversity of candidates to the table. And McKinsey studies have shown this, Harvard studies have shown this, that the more diversity around the boardroom, the greater the business results. Because if you have, let's say twelve seventy year old white men determining the future of a major consumer business, you think that there's, you know, to use my earlier term, a little bit of a blind spot in terms of what the consumer really needs and consumer really wants. So a long winded way of me saying research, research, research. So we're not so much a search firm or a research firm. And we encourage corporations and others in our field to take that kind of approach because if you do, you'll uncover outstanding candidates who will bring incredible results to the table for you.

So let's take a typical leader, maybe a senior leader in an organization or an entrepreneur. What suggestions do you have for them to broaden their pool to create more opportunities to think about who could be best on the team? People take a shortcut sometimes.

Yeah, you need to be creative. I'll give you a story. One of the big banks came to me a number of years ago and they said, you know, we've been using a lot of recruiting firms, we're working internally and we're really struggling to find a senior marketing person who could do something different for us, who can really innovate within the banking sector. So I asked them, well, what have you been doing up until now? Where have these candidates been coming from? Well, they've been coming from other banks. So my response to them at the time was, well, if they're coming from other banks, you're recycling the same old, same old. Really. From a marketing standpoint, which area of the bank is most important? And it's retail. So what I suggested to them was, well, why not? If you're trying to do something more innovative, you should be looking at actual retailers, actual retail companies like the Gap and whoever else who are far ahead of you from a marketing standpoint. You already have thousands and thousands of people in your bank who understand banking and financial services. Bring in just a purely amazing marketing person who can really help you with retail strategy. So they, they took my advice, we did the search, we found them a marketing person from the pure retail sector. And, and they told me that this was the best hire they ever made. So it's just a matter of being a little bit more creative to understand really what are the business objectives underlying your decision to make this important hire and then marrying a research strategy designed to meet the business issues at play.

Yeah, for sure. And not just being locked into it feels like a safe, a safe hire to hire within your own industry, but then not getting the diversity and perspectives.

Yeah, if you want to do something different, you got to do something different.

Yeah, right, right. Otherwise you just keep getting what you're getting, hoping the next person will have some different perspective yet.

Correct.

Growing up in the same world, the chances are they're not going to have that different perspective.

Right.

And so in the, in the work that you've been doing with teams, it requires, as we talked about, this ability to build relationships. And you've got some unique ways and some stories about how leaders might take your way of doing things and consider it for the. For themselves. Can you share a bit about that?

Yeah. So building, building relationships is something I really take pride in. And, and it requires a lot of thought. You know, even, even the smallest text, and the timing of the smallest text requires really the precisely correct tone, or at least you need to do the best you can, even from the point of view of the smallest communications. So that's one piece of it. I'm very, very careful about how to nurture relationships and always trying to add value wherever I can. But in addition to that, I always say that even if it's inconvenient, if you really want to build a great network and great business friendships and impactful friendships, even on a personal level or in the humanitarian space, if you see a crack in the door, it's very important to walk through them. And I've always had the philosophy to explore opportunities when they're in front of me and recognize opportunities when they're in front of me. One of the stories I often like to tell is about my friend Dakimi Mutombo, the great hall of Fame basketball player and humanitarian who sadly passed away not too long ago. It was NBA All Star Weekend in Toronto, and the NBA really wanted to see if they could get one of the senior people from our Canadian government to participate in their weekend political dialogue that they typically have as part of their NBA weekend package. So they asked if I might be able to secure Prime Minister Trudeau at the time. So I called the Prime Minister's office and they indicated that he would have loved to. To do it, but he's not available. But they, they suggested Christia Freeland, who ultimately became the Deputy Prime Minister of Canada. She's now running for the Liberal leadership. And because of that little bit of help that I gave the NBA, they then invited me to the. The entire weekend, which was a wonderful experience. I brought my son to all kinds of festivities and went to that political panel that weekend, and who's sitting next to me, but to Kimby Mutombo, the great NBA hall of Famer. And we immediately hit it off and we realized that we had much more in common than our towering height, which we had a big laugh about. He's 7 foot 3, I'm 5 foot 9. And we agreed we'd stay in touch. Right. A few weeks later, I'm at my desk on a Wednesday night, and the phone rings, and Dakimbi, in his very distinct voice, is on the other end. Jay, it's Mutombo. I said, oh, hi. Hi, Dakimbi. So nice to hear from you. How are you doing? I'm going to be in New York tomorrow. That's not too far from Toronto. Meet me for dinner in Manhattan. So I had a decision to make. I had a full schedule that Thursday. It would mean booking a flight, canceling all my appointments, and going to meet him for dinner. What I've realized over the years with people of that stature who have so many requests and demands on their time, if you don't seize on that little opportunity, I'll probably lose the, the relationship. So I decided to clear my deck. I met him for dinner in Manhattan. We, we. We hit it off even further. We developed a beautiful relationship. He joined my advisory board. I involved him in some tech opportunities. I introduced him to some friends to help him with his foundation, and it became a beautiful, beautiful relationship. Most importantly, on a personal level, because I really love the men, but I have many, many other examples like that. That's just one example.

So I'm assuming you're in some ways, using your intuition to decide this is going to be worth it. I'm gonna.

Absolutely.

Right. I'm. I need to. I need to invest in there.

Yeah. I'll give you one more short example, and I won't. I won't drop names, but I was in Davos last year, and I had an opportunity to speak at one of the AI pavilions on. On the future of AI. It would have been very good content, and it would have been a really nice opportunity. But the night before, I get a text from a very, very prominent CEO of a tech company saying, jay, I'd love you to join me at my private lunch. Also, of course, in Davos. And it's a very, very special thing that we do every year. So I had a decision to make. That's an intuition one, right? Do I stick with my talk, or do I go to this lunch where I knew there'd be a bunch of other people around the table who would be great to connect with. So my intuition told me to just be honest, take the lunch call. The, the friend who asked me to talk that day on AI and just level with them and say so and so called me. He invited me to the private lunch. I just feel like I can't pass this up, you know, what would you do? And he's like, no, no, no, Jayman, you got to do it. Go for it. And it turned out to be absolutely the right decision. And I found ways to make sure that my relationship with the AI person who I turned down for my talk, you know, remained intact. And to this day, it is. I'm on. I'm on his advisory board, and it's all good. So, yeah, you do sometimes have to make difficult, intuitive, intuitive decisions, but the key is actually listening to your intuition.

Yes.

And that's what I always do.

Yes, yes. And. And handling everything with integrity is the other piece I heard with that where. How you handled the.

Yeah.

With the AI, you were. You were saying, oh, I just got sick.

Yeah. Yeah. And being. Being straightforward is always the. Because once you start with untruth or slight untruth, then you waste so much energy keeping up with that untruth that it's. It's not. It's not. It's not worth it, number one. And number two, you just want to live with integrity anyway, most importantly, and.

I was really impressed with all of your humanitarian causes and how you weaved that into the broader mission of what you're here to do. Can you share a little bit about your own personal evolution to becoming a more enlightened leader and how your work with these various humanitarian causes fits into that?

So I'm a lawyer by training. I studied at McGill University in Montreal, where I got a philosophy degree and two law degrees. And in the law school, I met a very important mentor, a professor there. His name is Erwin Kotler. He was just nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, actually. He's an international human rights champion, as I say, who represented Natan Sharansky in the former Soviet Union. He was an anti apartheid advocate, a very important one back in the day. And he went on to become Canada's Attorney General and Minister of justice, where he enacted all kinds of progressive laws. But we stayed in touch throughout, and I was inspired by a lot of his work. And when he left Parliament, he asked me to chair his newly formed Raoul Wallenberg center for Human Rights, which you mentioned at the beginning of the call. And it's really a continuation of his work, and it fits very well into the areas that I believe very dearly in as well, namely the combating of the global trend toward authoritarianism, women's rights, the combating of genocide and prevention thereof, and as you say, the. The combating of racism and hate wherever it might manifest itself. So my relationship with Professor Kotler really was perhaps the most important impetus to me getting deeply involved in these human rights causes.

And how do you see that fit in with what it takes to be an enlightened leader today?

I think it's very important as a leader to work in the broader context of humanity and impact. And I think, as I mentioned earlier, that young people want to have an impact as well. So I think that's where the world is really headed. So really working from a capitalist point of view, which I'm, I'm definitely a capitalist, but incentivizing through capitalism, doing good, I think is, is really the way of the future. So combining profit and purpose, if you will, Right on the board is an example of a tremendous investment firm called Full Cycle, based in la. I'm proud to be advising this business because it's absolutely an investment firm designed for profitability and designed to make its investors a lot of money. But what it does is it buys companies whose mission it is to reverse climate change. So for example, one of the businesses we bought turns waste into clean energy. There's another venture capital fund that I'm a venture partner in called Rebalance Capital out of New York. And the two areas we invest in are Fintech and the future of work tech, which are both very hot topics obviously, but we only invest in businesses within that context that uplift lower to middle income families. So I think being a leader that cares about the world around us and is capitalist by nature, but also impactful by nature is, is the future of where we're going.

Yeah. And particularly if you want to be a magnet for top talent, you're going to need to have some.

Exactly right.

Connection to a broader purpose.

To the point about where early. To the point about where younger people want to be. Exactly. Young people want to be inspired. I, I just love the next generation so much and the things that matter to them. I find that my generation is more oriented toward conquering and having lots of things, whereas my kids are really about experiences and how to find meaningful ways to live.

Yes, yes. It's almost as though there's a bit of higher up on the actualization pyramid in self actualization.

Right.

And hierarchy of needs. And. And they're moving up. And yet some people get frustrated and say they feel the younger generation is more entitled. I just wonder if it's a perception gap.

Well, this past year in Davos, I was actually on a panel on what employers should keep in mind given how intrinsically linked young people are to digital. And it is a problem because a lot of young People are so tied to digital and tied to their phone that it actually creates what one might call a pandemic of loneliness or sadness or depression or an inability to focus on for as long a period of time as we might have been able to. Even the way films are made now, there's such quick editing.

Yeah.

If you look at films from the 70s, for example, it's just a very different style which kids today might even find boring. So there's definitely an issue there. But the bottom line is my message is it's less about which you could do some of the shielding young people from digital because you can't stop technology. And it's more of nurturing kids to have the kind of self esteem such that they're not always worried about comparing themselves to others and they have the wherewithal to, to be able to be a, a leader of tomorrow with the proper grounding which, you know, I'm trying to condense a whole lot of ideas I have into one. But that translates into being outside being in nature, doing sports, doing music and, and exerting the energy that I once needed to break out of boredom. Because they're constantly stimulated. It's the opposite. Having the energy to break away from this constant stimulation to do something outside of the tech space and to have those kinds of experiences that young people long for.

Yes. Because at the end of the day as to be an employer of choice, you need to create, help create that bigger purpose and you'll be that draw. Because right now it's sort of like the floundering is on me. Am I getting the likes, like what's going on? But when you can reorient something to a mission outside of themselves, that's where you can get the best, the best of it. And that's where they'll find that self esteem again.

Exactly right. Yeah.

Yeah.

You can reach your self esteem as a parent, as an employer, as a, as a sports coach, whatever it might be, as a, as a music teacher. But yeah, every era is not without its challenges.

Yeah.

But you know, nurturing is the key.

So if we have leaders and entrepreneurs out there, they're interested in building a high performance team, maybe they're struggling with their current team. What's one piece of advice that you would give? An action that they could take tomorrow or this week to move them in that direction.

Pick out the four employees that you respect the most and ask each, each and every one of them to be brutally honest with you about areas that they may have been hesitant to mention, need improvement within your business and seek out that advice and act on it.

That's great. Yeah. That kind of what's going on in the business. And I would even broaden that also in terms of my leadership and how I'm leading.

It's all part of it.

Business and myself as a leader.

I would include that as part of the question.

Yeah. Yeah. I love it. I love it. That's excellent. Well, thank you so much for joining us today. Where can people learn more about the work you're doing in the world?

So you see my name, Jay Rosenzweig. Just do Jay Rosenzweig without any space between the Y and the r&then.com jrosensweig.com, and you'll see my personal website which includes all of my work.

Fantastic. I love it. Well, thank you. And if you like this episode, you're not going to want to miss my interview with Philip Wilson, whose story showcases how meaningful missions and heart led leadership can transform not only an organization, but also its leader. Let's lead the way. Hope you enjoyed today's episode and I'd like to point you to the next important step. Hit the subscribe button to get notified when we release new content. I'll see you on the next episode of the Enlightened Executive.