The Case for Strengths-Based Leadership [feat. David Rendall]

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. Today we're discussing should we balance our strengths to be better leaders or amplify our flaws? And I am excited to introduce my guest, David Rendell. Over the last 20 years, David has spoken to audiences on every continent. His clients include Fortune 50 companies such as Microsoft, AT&T, Fannie Mae and State Farm. Prior to becoming a speaker, David was a leadership professor and a standup comedian. He has a doctorate in management and organizational leadership as well as a graduate degree in psychology. And he's the author of four books including the Freak Factor and the Freak Factor for Kids. So welcome David.

Hey, extra credit. I've been using that bio for years and people always say Fortune 500 companies, even though once I spoke to enough Fortune 50 ones, I just included the Fortune 50 ones. But nobody ever says Fortune 50. So you win already. Already at the beginning for actually being able to read correctly.

I can read your bio. I get a gold.

They just don't like, they just see it. They just go Fortune 500. Because that is the most common discussion of it. Right. So people just. Right, right.

You just fill in the.

On it. Right.

Well, I can't wait to dive in and hear all about the freak factor, your mission and your philosophy. So, and we're going to have probably a really good discussion because I have some other ideas as well as we talked about before. So there may be some divergent thought, but I think it's important to hear both perspectives and see what value we can provide for listeners. So let's dive in. Yeah, tell me a little bit about the freak factor. What is it?

Yeah, I mean the freak factor is really simple. It's, you know, I spent my whole life, especially most of my childhood, but well into adulthood getting in trouble because I couldn't sit still, be quiet and do what I was told. And well meaning people, my parents, teachers and employers told me that I'd never be successful if I couldn't learn to sit still, be quiet and do what I was told. And because I didn't know any different, I believed that I would never be successful if I couldn't learn to sit still, be quiet and do what I was told. And so I spent a lot of time trying to get better sitting still, being quiet, doing what was told. And eventually, and not purposefully because I didn't know to pursue this, but eventually I ended up becoming a professional speaker. And I get paid to stand up, not to sit down. I get paid to talk and not to be quiet. And I get paid to run my own business, not to do what other people tell me to do. And so in the end I succeeded not by fixing my weaknesses, but by actually embracing and amplifying those weaknesses because they were also strength. Good at sitting still because I'm very active. I'm not good at being quiet because I have a lot to say. I'm not good at doing what I'm told because I like to take charge and take the initiative in my own life. And so there are bad things about me and there's bad things about everybody. I'm not saying we don't have weaknesses or weaknesses aren't real. What I'm saying is that those qualities that look bad are also good. And that when we can understand that and see that, when we can see the other side and build on that instead of trying to fix the weakness, that's when we find success. So in my talks we end up applying that to marriage and long term partnerships, to parenting, to managing people and also the managing our own careers. That you could have more happiness, more fulfillment, more energy, more engagement, more productivity when you're not trying to fix your weaknesses and you're building on the related strength instead.

Yeah, what I like about what you're saying is it's related to that whole study of appreciative inquiry where we focus on what's working, not what's not working. They found organizationally, if you ask the questions of as opposed to what's broken here, what's working here, how do we double down on that? I see some real similarities between that and what you're talking about.

Yeah, and I'm a former college professor. In fact, I still teach some graduate school courses online. And yeah, every time I present that idea to people, they've never heard of it before. Have you ever heard of appreciation of inquiry? Because every company goes, what's wrong with us and how do we fix it? Very few of them say what's working and how do we build on it? And so that's what we talk about in Pink Goldfish as well. Which is just like the freak factor for marketing and strategy. It's that company weaknesses can be strengths and companies don't have to just try to fix their weaknesses. In fact, you can embrace, flaunt them, be unapologetic about them, you can be unashamed of them because you can't have this strength without Having that corresponding weakness. You can't be a brand new company and also have a 100 year reputation. You either, you can't have both at the same time. So you can either be excited about how new you are, or you can be ashamed that you don't have an established reputation, but that it's true about you and you can decide how you handle it.

So tell me, share some stories with me about where you've seen people double down here on their strengths and what happened as a result of that.

Yeah, I mean, a hysterical example from sort of recently that I kind of bumped back into is I was, I do some coaching for a large mining company and this guy got sent to me for coaching because he, he wouldn't do what he was told. He would be argumentative in meetings. He asked difficult questions that made his superiors uncomfortable and they wished he would just do a better job of doing what he was told and, you know, being more socially and politically acceptable within the organization. And you know, in my job as a coach, when I'm hired by a company is to help them achieve their goals, you know, with that person. But at some point I have a responsibility to the person as well. And if it's not a right fit, maybe it's not a right fit. And so at some point I said, well, maybe your strength is that you have initiative and you can chart your own course and your own direction and that you're never going to be very good at doing what you're told and not asking difficult questions and pushing who you are down in order to make these people happy. And, you know, maybe you should go out and start your own company and do your own thing. If you believe strongly enough that you're right, put your money where your mouth is and do that. And you know, a couple weeks I didn't think anything of it and we talked about other things and I think we even had another meeting after that. But when I went to schedule the next meeting, like a month later, they're like, oh, that guy doesn't work here anymore. And I was like, well, what's he doing? They're like, I don't know, I guess he started his own company or something. And now just every Facebook post is him kite surfing in the Dominican Republic at the hot springs, just yesterday in Montana with his children. And he's just traveling around the world, absolutely crushing it, because he stopped trying to be what somebody thought he should be. And he started being who he was. But very specifically, he stopped trying to fix the weakness that his employer had identified in himself. And he put himself in a situation where that weakness was not only not a weakness, it was a massive strength. And he found happiness, fulfillment, and success in that. And the reason it's interesting is that I was just down in the Dominican Republic speaking, and we almost. We were just too far away, but we almost got to get together. But his journey, and he immediately just went from unsuccessful employee to very successful entrepreneur because that was the right fit for him. So that's just one of the personal examples. A lot of the examples I share aren't necessarily people I know or that I influence directly, but you can just see how their weaknesses are strengths. But that's one where I was like, hey, maybe you just need to find the right fit. Maybe there's nothing wrong with you. And it definitely worked for him. And it's just fun to watch his success and feel like I had some kind of part in that.

That's wonderful. I love it. I love that he found the right opportunity for him. And maybe that's where some of your perspective and my perspective are congruent. Because ultimately, it sounds like his best gift was to be. Be the bold, brash person that needed to go out on his own and in the environment he was in, it didn't suit him.

Right.

And so recognizing that, recognizing what would truly light him up and where he could use his gifts, absolutely makes total sense.

Those are the. Yeah, those are the two key pieces, is that, you know, one of the things I talk about in the book is alignment. So the crucial thing is that in the right situation, our weaknesses become strengths. Right. So the quality itself isn't good or bad. And that's the problem. We don't have a good way to talk about that. The quality is just what it is. But in certain situations, there's a spotlight on the bad part of it. Right. The bad part of the characteristic because it isn't a good fit. In other situations, there's a spotlight on all of the good parts of that characteristic. And so it's not about changing who we are or fixing that thing that seems broken. It's about putting ourselves in situations where the spotlight's on the best qualities that we have and the spotlight is taken off of the worst qualities that we have. That's where we find success and happiness and fulfillment.

Right, Right. Where I see some challenges with that, where it's, you know, just go for strengths or double down on strengths and don't look at what I need to potentially grow with. I mean, it sounds awesome, and to some degree, it Lets us off the hook. We don't have to do any work. Let's just.

Right.

And.

Well, let me stop for there. Let's stop there for just a second.

Okay.

It is a lot of work to build on your strengths. Right. I've always been a good speaker, but it's work to get better at it. I've been an athlete, but it was work to get myself to the point that I could run a hundred miles. So I do think working on our strengths is still work and it's still an activity. I just think it pays off faster and it's more enjoyable and it has a higher potential. But I do think you shouldn't just be on cruise control. I think we would agree there. You shouldn't just say, ah, I'm fine. It is building on those qualities. Right. And trying to find ways to improve either the fit or the strength of those qualities.

Yeah. I think when it comes to managing others is where I've seen some challenges in terms of what the organization needs. Right. And what somebody needs to work on to grow. I'll give you an example. The weakness was arrogant. Wouldn't listen to other people.

Right.

That had other issues with some of his directionally charge ahead and we need to move fast. Now. That is an awesome skill and great for leading a company. And so there is a wonderful gift. The arrogance part and the kind of shutting out the voices and the rest of the organization that really cost the company and they ended up having to lay off half their workforce. And a lot of that came out. The arrogance piece, the confidence came with the arrogance. Right. It's the light and the shadow and that arrogance, even in giving the feedback, he didn't want to hear it, he didn't want to see it.

Right?

No, no, no, no, no. I just know what I'm doing. They don't. You know, even being in that arrogant place when ultimately it caused him a lot of pain and it caused a lot of the employees a lot of pain. And I could go on. I mean, I've got dozens and dozens of stories like these where I think in a leadership position, when someone is managing others, is it about being aware of. Of your weakness and making sure that you are having someone in the organization that your counterbalance so that you're not sort of completely denying that and putting blinders on?

What do you think? So, so the freak factor is eight A's. It's thinking differently, and there's four ways to think differently and it's behaving differently. And there's four ways to do that, and you just hit on two of them, right? So you said, is it about awareness? Right. And that's one of them. You have to know that it's there, right? So if you don't know that, your confidence can also be arrogance, or at least seen as arrogance. Right. Because there's no blood test for overconfidence. Right. Somebody who doesn't have very much confidence can see somebody with a reasonable level of confidence as arrogant and overconfident and all these kinds of things. So I think that's part of the problem to begin with is we can say, even in retrospect, okay, he was arrogant and that's what led to these negative things. But let's take the invention of the light bulb, right? Oh, 10,000 tries. And then we got the light bulb persistence, you know, and there's even the billboard, you know, keep going, persist, right? But that same person tried to build concrete houses all in one giant pour, including some of the things like sinks and tables and stuff like that. Almost completely bankrupted themselves in the process. Fought for direct current instead of alternating current. So it's easy to say, okay, that person should have been more strategically persistent and not been stubborn. But stubbornness is what got them to 10,000 tries in the light bulb. And so they're going to be stubborn and fail sometimes, and they're going to be stubborn and succeed. And when they're stubborn and succeed, we call them persistent. When they're stubborn and failed, we go, see, I told you, you can't be like that. And you could also call it overconfidence. You're going to keep going after nine failures, you're a lunatic. Just, whale oil's not that bad. And let's just keep going with candles. Just shut up. You're an idiot. And so I think that's a hard judgment to make. But yes, I think part of it is awareness. And then the other part, like you said, the counterbalancing, I call that affiliation. We need to partner with people who are strong where we're weak, right? So can you see the value in that person who is humble and maybe to the point that someone tells them that they're insecure and timid because humility isn't just an upside as well. Every characteristic has strengths and weaknesses. And so, yes, what I encourage is partner with people who are strong where you're weak. If you're really creative and messy, connect with somebody who's very organized and systematic. If you're really big picture, connect with somebody who's detail oriented. And together you can accomplish great things. So you don't have to fix the weakness in yourself and you just have to be willing to relate to somebody who's different from you, which is part of the other part of the process, which is acceptance and appreciation, not just of your own strengths and weaknesses, but of other people's as well. Right.

And being open to their input. By its very nature, the arrogance didn't even allow them to see the weakness.

Sure. But I mean, that's another example where I could find you 50 examples of super arrogant people that people didn't like that did amazing things precisely because they refused to be influenced by what anybody else said. There's a lot of times when being influenced, I mean, Steve Jobs, for example, he just refused to listen to certain people say, you can't do this or this won't work, or it can't be that good, or it can't be that nice, or it can't be that cheap, or it can't be whatever. And he is like, eh. And he was not the kind of person I think you or I would want to be friends with and, or that we'd want to have a personal relationship with. And yet the products and the business that he created because of that unwillingness to sort of pay attention to what other people said and what other people believed. We have to build a life where we acknowledge that we have the weakness and we build supports in place. But the fix isn't that we have to necessarily change who it is that we are, because even then you say, don't be that way and you would have been better. We don't even have to go into an alternate world. If you ask the person, how did you become the CEO, it was probably an extreme level of confidence. I mean, look at people who become actors and actresses. Go work at olive garden for 20 years in LA and hope you hit it big on the Office. Well, that's what John Krasinski did, Right? That's what Jenna Fisher did. If we're a parent, we're telling that person, that's outrageous. How could you believe that you're going to be one of those people? You're going to end up sad, disappointed, devastated, wasting your life when you could have been getting a good education and working in a good career. So when the people make it, we're like, way to go with your dreams. And then the people who don't are just invisible. Right. But it is an extreme form of arrogance to think that you're going to be on the next big TV show. Or any of those kinds of things. But when it works, we're like, nice.

One, when it works. But a lot of times it doesn't work, right?

And then we say, oh, you shouldn't have been that way. But how does anybody end up the CEO, the President of the United States, the governor, or a famous musician or any of those things without having what has got to be seen? I mean, I always. My joke is because my first book was about leadership. You know, we love to talk about Gandhi now, but imagine you're Gandhi's parents, right? And they're like, what do you want to do, little Gandhi? He's like, well, I just want to free India from British oppression. They're like, well, why don't you get a job, right? Like, nobody at that point goes, okay, perfect. That's what we were hoping for. We wanted to raise the savior of the Indian people. They couldn't possibly believe that that was going to happen. In fact, a book I'm reading right now is called the First Rate Madness. And the guy argues, using political leaders as examples, that mental illness in a leader is more appropriate to crisis situations than mental health. And that mentally healthy leaders, whatever that means, do more poorly than mentally unhealthy leaders do, especially in crisis situations. So even our definitions of what good is, I think, are oftentimes unrealistic in the actual world we live in.

So what about the argument that sometimes our blind spot can. Can also cause great harm to ourselves?

Right?

How do you. How do you handle blind spots? Because I know, I think we talked a little bit about this, but I do a lot of work with the Enneagram, and in the Enneagram, very much what you said. So I talk about, you know, I'm a type seven. I'm going to definitely have, you know, a type one on my team to find the errors and correct for them, because that's not my strength and I'm not going to be good at that. And having a more cognitively diverse team, hugely valuable. At the same time, there is. There are blind spots, Spots of this type which definitely have in my life come to not serve me well. So if I continue to just double down on those strengths of enthusiasm and being visionary, and I don't, again, what we talked about before, build the awareness of that blind spot, then just focusing on my strengths will not make me happy.

Okay, so first of all, like you said, so you're saying blind spots, but we talked about that, right? Awareness is crucial, right? So I encourage do the Enneagram, and I actually just did recently because I've, I have a master's degree in psychology and so I've taken a lot of them, but I never took that one. I did the Colby and had somebody do an hour long breakdown on it because I have a new assessment of my own and I'm trying to say, well, if, if you're like this on mine, but you've taken Enneagram, you know, let's, let's tie into what you've done. So, I mean, I don't even care if you're doing, you know, Facebook, what Star wars character are you? I think any kind of self awareness activity is valuable, right? The question is then what do you do with it? And so I loved your Enneagram example. If I'm a seven and I know that I'm not going to do the details, then I need to partner with somebody who's the details. And that goes back to affiliation. So again, you're not fixing it. You're not saying, I can't be this kind of person. You say, I just need to team up with somebody. You know, Example I give in the book is a guy named Paul Orfale who had ADHD and dyslexia, literally cannot read and write, got kicked out of four schools and he started Kinko's and sold it to FedEx for $2.4 billion. And the way he ran that company was by hiring people who could read and write and telling them, I can't read and write, so I need you. So if you can outsource literacy, right, you can outsource anything else. So that's, we're in 100% agreement there. So I don't think that we do have to change it. Another friend of mine calls it ringleaders and idea monkeys. So for you, it's not just having an assistant, it might be having a straight up partner where you're constantly bringing the energy and you're constantly bringing the enthusiasm and you're constantly bringing the vision and they're constantly bringing the execution. And you're sometimes going to be at odds as people, but you don't need to both move to the middle and end up being the same person. In a sense, you both need to continue moving to the edges and making the business better through diversity. But by not having to be all those things in yourself, right? So that's what I'm saying is you don't have to be all those things in yourself. So my happiness, and you said it earlier about sort of letting yourself off the hook, we say, you know, the magic happens outside your comfort zone. I think that's assuming that all the things we like and all the things we're good at or the things we enjoy are all like, worthless or don't have any opportunity in them. You know, I wrote a whole article about, I love to be active and now I run a hundred mile races and I'm getting better while being comfortable. I love public speaking and I'm building my business while being comfortable. I think you can stay inside your comfort zone. I think we've given the comfort zone a bad name. I think a question from an assessment standpoint is why am I comfortable there? What is it about me that makes me comfortable in those situations? And if I can find that alignment, how do I make my comfort, my unique comfort zone, productive? How do I make it valuable? And I think we can. And I think we too quickly devalue that and say, all the opportunity is in my weaknesses. All the opportunity is in the other things. Well, then why do you have these strengths? Why cultivate any new strength when the strengths you have aren't that relevant or aren't that important? So I am a big fan of hunker down, build on what you have and you don't need to be someone else and outsource those things that you just don't do. Well, because even when I try to be detail oriented, I just told this story the other day. I was helping a company with strategic planning and that requires a certain level of detail orientation. And I really thought, I dug deep and really just dropped down. I mean, we were subterranean. We went from 30,000 and we were mining. We were, and I was pretty much done. I was ready to write up the report. We'd had the meetings, we'd done the surveys. And the guy who hired me to speak or not to speak, to manage the process, he walked up to me after what I thought was the last meeting and I was ready to wrap it up. And he goes, when are we really going to like, you know, get started? So that's the thing too. Even when you're messy and you think you're being organized, you know, an organized person is like, well, that's cute, but you don't even, you didn't even know about color coding. You don't even own a label maker. Like, so all it does is make you mediocre and all that does is make you average and invisible and unnecessary. So I think it's that partnership with people who have corresponding strengths, complementary strengths, that really makes us valuable, especially as an organization and CEOs. Can do that. A COO who's realistic, who is execution oriented, who tells them the truth, those kinds of things, and that they trust. I mean, Bill Gates had that for years with Steve Ballmer. Bill Gates is never going to be Mr. Enthusiasm, Mr. Excitement, Mr. Personality. So he hired people like that so he could be the scientist who runs the company and does the things he's excited about.

I think what I'm keying in on is what about the person, again, that I say is sort of suffering with something that isn't their strength? And let me give you an example of what I mean by that. Senior leader who's really good, is more of a peacemaker. Really good, bringing people in, supporting them, Kind of the person behind the scenes, but at the same time has to deal with a very strong individual that's extremely controlling and is super unhappy with how she's being controlled by this person and can't find her voice to stand up for what really matters for the organization and for herself. And she's like, I want to work on this. Right. I want to be able to engage with this person who I'm now avoiding. I'm going around, I'm doing all these things that are sort of passive aggressive. I want to get better at this, but this isn't my strength.

Yeah. So fit isn't just the organization, it's not just the company, it's not just the mission, it's also the people. Right. They say people leave managers more than they lead companies. So again, the person can see this as a challenge. I need to learn how to fight this person when I'm not a fighter or they say I'm going to find situations where I don't have to fight with people. And so I think that's one of them. I think another thing, and you mentioned this earlier, so I want to use this as a caveat. I do think there's a difference between what I would say are our fundamental strengths and weaknesses, who we are, and trauma or damage from things that we've experienced. Right. So if someone just says, I'm just naturally a peacemaker. I've always just liked to help people get along. I'm not a fighter. I don't like conflict and I never will. That's a perfectly awesome way to be. But if someone says, when I would argue with my parents when I was a child, they would punch me in the face and hit me with things and abuse me. And so I learned that you can't stand up for yourself. And I'd like to Learn to stand up for myself. That's something different because I think that person isn't expressing who they are when they're a peacemaker. They're continuing to live out that trauma when they're a peacemaker. Does that make sense?

Yeah.

So who they really were, which is that awareness and assessment piece, got buried under an avalanche of garbage. Now, even that being said, to some extent, I'm describing my wife in that scenario. And she grew up in an abusive family, Right. And she grew up in a physically and verbally abusive family. And she, her strategy was to withdraw from that. So you go, okay, my wife withdraws from conflict because she was involved in an abusive situation. The reason that that's potentially inaccurate is because she has a sister who's only 18 months younger than her who experienced the same physical and verbal abuse. And her response was to attack. And I would argue that's because my wife's personality, who she fundamentally is, is to withdraw and who her sister naturally is, I believe our personality show up very early in life, is to attack and to fight back. And so even to say, you're like that because of trauma, and we have, maybe she did more withdrawing because of trauma or whatever, but her, who she is, is to withdraw. Right. And so I would, even with that person, be careful that we don't say, well, you'd be better if. Because here's the other thing that, here's the crucial piece of all this in the Fix it. Right? So let me give an organizational example. Walmart's strength. They only have one slow prices, right? What are Walmart's weaknesses? There are too many to list. So there's poor service, poor quality, poor design. As a summary, right now we're going to fix them because wouldn't it be better if. Right. And they get in trouble for. And on and on. So let's fix service, let's hire more people, let's train them better, let's treat them better, let's give them better benefits. What happens when they do that? Well, their costs go up, so their prices have to go up if they want to stay profitable. And so their biggest strength is destroyed in the process of fixing their weakness, because it's two sides of the same coin.

This has been a fascinating conversation, but.

Your job is to change them, and I respect that. And you, well, they come to you.

Asking for it, right?

They come to you asking for it. And there are things we can do. Yeah, but it's, it's. I think we have a set of beliefs around change that isn't isn't real and it isn't based in how most people actually live.

How can people learn more?

D as in D as in David R E N d a l l.com d rendall.com There's a video of the talk. There's the books. There's the kids book. There's assessments so people can understand themselves better and see how their weaknesses might be strengths and what they can do with that.

If you like this episode, you're not going to want to miss my interview with Kaihan Krippendorf, whose book Driving Innovation from A Guide for Internal Entrepreneurs has helped leaders create strategies to maximize their bottom line. 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 and the bell to get notified when we release new content. I'll see you on the next episode of the Enlightened Executive.