Trust and Inspire: How Great Leaders Unleash Greatness in Others
BY Judd Bagley July 27, 2023In the realm of old habits that die hard, there’s a management principle that has stuck through the 20th century and beyond, called “command and control.” It’s the top-down, military style approach to leadership. Stephen M. R. Covey, the best-selling author and leadership-development expert, compares command and control to stubborn ancient traditions like bloodletting, which remained in use well into the 19th century, despite being disproved scientifically and having hastened the death of George Washington, Scotland’s King Charles II, and countless others.“Old paradigms can live on indefinitely,” said Covey. “I think command and control today is like modern-day bloodletting, in that we’re just kind of persisting from an inaccurate, faulty paradigm that is no longer relevant.”Covey, speaking at a fireside chat that capped off From Day One’s conference in Salt Lake City, said that command and control served the world well enough when work was something that took place in factories, but it ceased being the right tool for the job with the emergence of knowledge work. He explores these ideas in his book Trust & Inspire: How Truly Great Leaders Unleash Greatness in Others.The title describes what Covey proposes should be the new model. “‘Trust and inspire is the better way to lead a new world of work,” he said. To the world’s credit, the evolution away from command and control has been underway for a while now, albeit very slowly. “Over time, people said, ‘You know, but we’re not valuing people enough. We need to look at this better.’ And so they began to add things like emotional intelligence, and strengths and mission, and even trustworthiness,” Covey said. “And they became more enlightened. The problem was, we didn’t shift the paradigm. It just became a more enlightened version of command and control. True, enlightened command and control is better than the authoritarian, but it’s still not the kind of sea-change shift of trust and inspire, where you view people differently.” Stephen M.R. Covey signed books and chatted with attendees at From Day One’s conference in Salt Lake City, where his company is based (Photos by Sean Ryan for From Day One)Students of organizational leadership know that Covey’s late father, Stephen R. Covey, catalyzed the very paradigm shift that facilitated this enlightenment, through his best-selling book The 7 Habits of Highly Influential People. Indeed, the elder Covey is even credited with popularizing the phrase “paradigm shift.” It’s compelling to see the younger Covey building upon and extending his father’s work. Covey says the pandemic cast a bright light on how starkly mismatched our day-to-day and workplace leadership realities are. “The pandemic accelerated this. Remote work, hybrid work, intentionally flexible work. Change and disruption and technology. People have choices and options they didn’t have before. The whole world has changed. And yet, our style of leadership has not kept pace,” he said.How does one become the kind of leader who trusts and inspires? To address this question, Covey distributed decks of cards summarizing the philosophy and steps to manifest it. Central to the process is incorporating the Five Fundamental Beliefs of a Trust and Inspire Leader. As he described them:No. 1: People have greatness inside them. “Leaders who incorporate this belief will unleash the potential of their employees, not control them,” Covey said. No. 2: People are whole people. “If I believe that, then my job is to inspire, not merely motivate,” Covey said. “If people were only economic beings, then motivation would be sufficient. Just carrot and stick–and that can work. But we’re leaving a lot of potential and value on the table.”No. 3: There is enough for everyone. “A leader needs to elevate caring above competing by instilling an abundance mentality,” Covey said.No. 4: Leadership is stewardship. “My job as a leader is to put service above self-interest,” Covey said. “It’s a stewardship, which is a job that comes with a trust, and that trust is to inspire.”No. 5: Enduring influence is created from the inside out. “My job as a leader is to go first. Someone has to. Inspiring leaders go first,” Covey added. A consistent impediment to becoming a trust-and-inspire leader is the mistaken belief that leadership requires certain personality traits. “Some people want to do more than motivate, they want to inspire, and they say, ‘But I’m not inspiring!’ You’ve got to be charismatic to inspire,” Covey said. “Don’t confuse the two, because they are not the same. I know many people whom no one would call charismatic but who are remarkably inspiring, because of who they are, how they lead, how they connect, how they care. Inspiring others is a learnable skill.” Covey took a final swipe at the status quo by challenging the widely held belief that organizations should be measuring their success by levels of employee engagement.“We’ve been focusing on engagement for 20-plus years, it's been the Holy Grail, and engagement still is vital. But there’s something beyond engagement. It’s inspiration,” Covey said. “Inspired employees are not only 125% more productive than merely satisfied employees–and you might expect that because that is not a high bar. But inspired employees are even 56% more productive than fully engaged employees. There’s another frontier of engagement, and it’s to be inspired.”Ultimately, Covey sees a lot riding on his effort to bring this next generation of organizational leadership change to the fore. Indeed, he quoted Gandhi when explaining what’s at stake. “Gandhi said, ‘The difference between what we are doing, and what we are capable of doing, would solve most of the world's problems.’ So we're trying to tap into that. I think most organizations have that kind of capacity as well.” Judd Bagley is a marketing communications professional and freelance journalist.
Mapping the Human Genome of Potential
BY Judd Bagley May 31, 2023“The resume is one of the worst business tools on the planet,” said Scott Dettman, CEO of entry level career matchmaking firm Avenica. “Employers are missing anywhere from about 75% to 83% of the available talent by relying on these antiquated tools.”Dettman’s attacks on the oft-maligned resume only grew more fierce as his talk at From Day One’s live event in Salt Lake City progressed.“This happens because recruiting is heavily based on skills and keywords listed in resumes. So if you don't have those right, you are going to be missed,” he added.Dettman’s passion for this topic is informed by his own experience entering the job market following his graduation from college in 2009, at a time when jobs were scarce as unemployment levels approached ten percent. 400 job applications later, he finally received an invitation to interview for an opening. While he expected to meet with a recruiter, Dettman was surprised to instead receive an audience with the CEO. “Oh, it’s him,” Dettman remembered the CEO saying while glancing over his resume. “You applied for an entry level marketing position. But you have a political science degree. So you have no business applying for this job.” Crushed, Dettman decided that as long as he was there, he’d make the case for hiring him based on his abundance of grit over lack of experience.“And so I shared my story with him, I kind of poured my guts out. I told him everything I've been through, that I grew up in the south side of Milwaukee in a bad neighborhood, that I was born with a neurological disorder and had a lot of health issues, and an unhealthy home environment. But I'd overcome all that and played Division One, college football, I had done all these different things.”The CEO responded, “I'm not going to hire you for this job. But come back tomorrow, I've got a better one for you.”That position ended up being a great fit for Dettman, catapulting his career in vital ways. Eventually Dettman would be the CEO of his own company at just 32, far ahead of the average age of 58. And yet it almost didn’t happen. Dettman points to that experience as proof of the inability of a piece of paper to capture the true essence of a newly minted college graduate’s suitability for any position.“The important thing to note here is that I only accidentally got a chance to pitch myself like that. Most people don't get the opportunity to spill their guts as I did, and tell their story. And that's a real problem.”During his talk, Dettman referred to the irony of leading the presentation at the facility located within Salt Lake City’s famous museum, The Leonardo, named for Leonardo DaVinci. “The first resume was used 541 years ago, created by DaVinci,” he quipped. “We've been doing this thing for 541 years, right? Maybe we can evolve it a little bit.”As bad as he feels the resume is, Dettman said it’s only part of the dysfunction plaguing the talent acquisition equation today.Scott Dettman, the CEO of Avenica, led the thought leadership spotlight (photo by Sean Ryan for From Day One)“Most job descriptions are not well-crafted. They’re vague. They say things like “self-starter” or “collaborative” or all sorts of meaningless things. But at the same time, they're also calling for an increasing number of skills to be present, and skills are important,” Dettman said. “But we should also acknowledge that skills by themselves, without the right fit, without the potential, without the right environment, are almost meaningless. And most job descriptions are written to be exclusive. As are a lot of job postings. And don't get me started on job titles. All these issues contribute to this massive translation problem.”And the dysfunction of the status quo extends to the talent side, Dettman said. “The other side of this is employees are only making themselves available to the companies they're aware of. But a political science major from a state school has no sense for the entire variety of employers that are out there. There's no college course about that. Plus, they don't really know the kinds of jobs they could succeed at, or where they could do them. So it's a recipe for disaster.”Recognizing all these flaws, Dettman determined that there must be a better way, and the outcome was Avenica.“Before we ever take a look at a resume or send a candidate to an interview, we take them through a process called leveling, like in a video game. We have these individuals perform micro tasks on our platform. We'll send them a link, and it'll be to watch a video, and at the end, there'll be an instruction to follow, such as sending an email with the video’s three most salient points. And we're tracking every little movement, every data point along the path,” Dettman said. “We send them proprietary assessments that reveal their workstyle and workplace preferences. So we're building this big data cloud around these individuals. So they're not only demonstrating what their preferences are, what they're capable of doing, their ability to communicate and problem solve, to be responsive and follow directions. They're also demonstrating commitment, grit and intent.”The outcome of this process is a very granular mapping of a candidate’s talent genome, which produces insights offering the same kind of explanatory power that comes from decoding one’s DNA.“And we're mapping that to a hiring partner and their needs. This is the reason why we're focused on early career—because there's no better time to avoid resumes and besides, these people don't have experience anyway,” Dettman explained. Dettman said the data back up his iconoclastic approach, pointing to a particular client company, where 67% of promotions during one mid-year cycle went to candidates found by Avenica. “It just goes to show you that when you free your mind of the constraints that we've created on talent and the way that we look at things and the bias that we use to evaluate candidates, you realize that you can unleash all that human potential, and really make a difference.”Editor's note: From Day One thanks our partner, Avenica, for sponsoring this thought leadership spotlight.Judd Bagley is a Utah-based marketing communications professional and freelance journalist.
Stimulating a Culture of Healthy Feedback to Boost Innovation and Productivity
BY Judd Bagley May 15, 2023Achieving a culture of feedback demands first instilling a culture of safety. That was the consensus of a panel discussion at From Day One’s live conference in Salt Lake City, where five expert panelists offered advice backed by stories demonstrating both what to do and what not to do when helping employees feel safe while providing feedback. The conversation was moderated by Robert Gehrke, government and politics reporter at the Salt Lake Tribune.Connie Washington, VP of people at Progressive Leasing, made the case for a culture of safety by defining the manifold benefits of getting it right.“When somebody feels like they belong and they're safe, you get higher engagement, you get better performance, you get better retention,” Washington said. “And so that psychological safety is huge, that ‘I can make a mistake, I can do something wrong, and it's not the end of the world.’”Washington feels that a true culture of safety should be 360 degrees, in that employees should feel safe both giving and receiving challenging feedback.“One of my employees, when I would give her feedback, would go into a death spiral if it wasn't positive,” Washington recounted. “So I figured out a way to converse with her. During a one-on-one I said, ‘listen, here's my vision for you and where I see you being, but for you to get there, you're going to need feedback. And so I'm going to ask your permission to give you feedback. And that'll be the cue that we're going to talk about something.’ And it really changed the dynamic, because she wasn't blindsided by it. And she knew that my goal was for her to continue to grow and to get to the next level where she wanted to be.”The panel of speakers, from left, Carter Lee of Overstock, Whitney Harper of Extra Storage Space, Ivan Iordanov of Zions Bancorporation, Connie Washington of Progressive Leasing, and Steve Sonnenberg of Awardco (photo by Sean Ryan for From Day One)Washington adds that a culture of safety must begin at the top of the organization.“At a previous company, the CEO would host employee lunches and say, ‘tell me, whatever, this is open, let's talk.’ And so one person was like, ‘well, then let's talk. Do you have any idea what is happening and such and such?’ There were 50 people in the room and it made everybody uncomfortable and she walked out crying, and the CEO wanted her fired,” Washington recalled. “Creating that sense of safety, it’s important that people are comfortable and not crying when they walk out of an interaction with the CEO.”Whitney Harper, SVP of people at ExtraSpace Storage, finds that employees will open up in meaningful ways when they are encouraged to go deeper in their feedback sessions.“Sometimes, by asking ‘what else?’ you get to the next layer down, and you're kind of role modeling like, ‘this is safe, I want to hear everything that you have to tell me,” Harper said. “You have to role model it regularly. If you don’t receive feedback each week, it's been too long. Just ask your team members what you can do to help them make their jobs easier. Role modeling that behavior creates that culture of safety.”Acquiring measurable data is good, but quarterly or annual employee surveys are not the best way to get meaningful feedback, according to Ivan Iordanov, VP of enterprise learning and development at Zions Bancorp.“Surveys are the wrong questions at the wrong time for the wrong reason. You’re less likely to hear positive feedback. Or you may just hear generic feedback. Companies need to develop something more organic that’s able to capture the data but not just as part of a survey,” Iordanov said. “One-on-ones and coaching [sessions] are when employees tend to open up, especially when the person they talk to shows empathy and support and it's safe, and there's no fear of retaliation, particularly if the employees want to remain anonymous. If you want to collect survey data, do a survey afterwards. You will be more successful.”Helping employees feel both safe and valued can be as easy as adding a few minutes to company meetings, according to Head of People at Overstock, Carter Lee.“We have a culture document, listing our values and our leadership principles. We like to bring examples of employees living those leadership principles to the surface. And so we start most of our meetings with an example of it,” Lee said. “And I think that creates a safe zone, because you're not only saying these things, but you're highlighting people that do those things in your organization and when employees are saying good things about each other, when we challenge ideas and not people, they're more likely to give feedback all the time.”Steve Sonnenberg is the founder and CEO of the employee recognition firm, Awardco. Understandably, he feels that helping employees feel appreciated is key to building a culture of safety in an organization. “You need to develop a culture of appreciation, to then create that safe environment where people feel a sense of belonging,” Sonnenberg said. “When they feel they belong and are appreciated, they’re going to feel that their feedback is also valued.”Sonnenberg went on to effectively frame the value that feedback offers an organization. “It's extremely important to take feedback, process what you learned, and recognize that individual for giving it to you,” Sonnenberg added. “Feedback is a gift. And if it's not received or appreciated as a gift, you might not get it again.”Judd Bagley is a Utah-based marketing communications professional and freelance journalist.