The Remarkable Leadership Podcast

Keith: I hope so. And the fear I have is that it won't. So at the peak of the pandemic, I asked that question. This was after we got beyond thinking that this was a two month blip. Remember when we thought it was a couple of weeks and then we thought it was two months?

Kevin: You and I were talking, I think the first time it was two or three months and something like that. But yes. So after that, you asked this question. After that.

Keith: I asked myself the question. Boy, this is an inflection point in the world. What will we be saying about it when we're done? Whenever that is. I mean, nobody ever expected this. And my biggest fear was that we would crawl out of the rubble, having clung by our fingertips. To the ledge and gotten through this garbage crawl out of the rubble and go back to old ways of working.

You and I, Kevin, have been advocating for, you know, for decades now that there are needs of shifts in the world of work. Leadership needs to shift. Teams need to shift. My area of specialty, of course, is teams. And what I recognized was that this could be a reboot now. So I started a research institute study within our research and said I started a study, raised $2 million from some amazing sponsors.

I mean, I'd love to mention them, but they're just great names. And you can see it all at go forward to work because I wanted to make sure we didn't go back to work. We went forward to work. So what we did, Kevin, was we we had 2000 executives over this two year period, and we would interview these individuals and extract the things that they were doing that were true best practices for reading, leading in this radically volatile world.

And we found some extraordinary best practices. We found those. And then we put these executives who had these best practices into small peer to peer groups of five individuals, and then they would meet and wrestle their cumulative best practices and come out with something that they think is even better. Then we took those best practices and reapplied them in different teams.

We were working 300 different companies during this period of time in the Research Institute and then we would see whether or not those practices move the needle on something. So we call those high return practices. This book is organized around the four critical attributes of leadership that need to be dialed up and the very distinct practices in order to do that.

And the second half of the book talks about how do you apply those leadership practices to reinvent your business model, reinvent your workforce, etc.. We if a leader watching this, wants to have a quick clip of why this research was important, you would just ask yourself, do you want to learn from 2000 of your peers? Their cumulative best practices during this volatile time to carry forward, to work, not back?

So that's that's the the reason for writing this book. That's the work we've been working on. And it's been great not to have to travel because I could have I did this that's where you and I were talking about beforehand. I would have never been able to do this in my old in my old world.

Kevin: So, OK. So and that gives us a bit of a preamble to all of the direction for a lot of our conversation. Keith. But so I asked you, has the pandemic changed the work forever? You said, I hope not. Now I'm going to ask you.

Keith: 15%. 15%.

Kevin: 15%. So in what specific ways do you think it's changed forever?

Keith: Well, that's actually a great question. And the ways it's changed forever is it's opened up individuals to the recognition that the traditional mindset of being tethered to a desk is needed to achieve collaborative success. We got it done on a remote basis. Now, there's only one chapter in the book specific to remote and hybrid, but it's a very important chapter.

And what I can say is that we still didn't learn enough. All we learned was that we could get by or do it. And it was very interesting. Kevin, there were studies that came out at the same time. We were doing our research that showed that remote work was less effective at certain things than physical work was. And it was a study done out of Cambridge and I think it was at Cambridge only the Cambridge study that I'm referring to.

Well, I looked into that and I and I recognized that they did not cultivate or curate that data set to determine which of the organizations that reported that work was less effective. They didn't look at which organizations were and were not using the tools. Right.

Kevin: Exactly. Or what cultures were supporting this change successfully. Right. Right.

Keith: So if you look at Dropbox, my friend Drew Halston, who's a part of our or my my faculty for this group, for this work, drew thousands organization thrives in a remote work environment. I'll tell you a funny story. We were coaching the Delta Airlines executive team going into the pandemic and the executive leading. That was a guy named Gil West, who's the chief operating officer.

Keith: Gil left and retired and moved over to cruise the unicorn self-driving car company. And he came back to me, says, Keith, I tell you, the one thing that I noticed, which was the biggest difference is over at Delta, if we had a problem to solve, the first thing we said was we got have a meeting. He said over a cruise.

When I said, I want to have a meeting, people thought I had just, you know, put a turd in the middle of the room. The reality is you do a meeting when asynchronous collaboration fails collaborating in the cloud, visibly arguing right on decision boards and and and slack rooms and getting things done in asynchronous fashion is is the first wave of collaboration, but not for fortune by hundreds, but for high tech startup and unicorns.

So he recognized that big gap. And I said, 15%. Because in our work we found that fewer than 15% of of reasonably sized organizations reinvented their work. They just did it in a remote basis.

Kevin: Yeah.

Keith: They didn't invent their work.

Kevin: And as we think about work moving forward, that's what that's the that's the banner that we're carrying is that organizations have to be thinking about the redesign of, of teams, the team. What does that look like? What does it need to look like? And, and getting to the idea and this is oversimplifying, but it's the point that you're making, the idea that, yes, we can collaborate without a physical whiteboard, right?

Like it's possible in fact, in many ways. Excuse me, as you said, it could actually be better.

Keith: I mean, I could share my script with you right now and show you how there's a product that I found called neural and you are able it's written up in the book. It's an extraordinary way of collaboration. In fact, it search reinventing innovation because what I have found is this. In the olden days, our our engagement with a number of people was limited to the size of a room flying in.

Right. People's schedules, you know, and now it's unbounded. It's totally limitless. So we know at the peak of the Black Lives Matter movement, I was looking at diversity and inclusion. And as a very strong proponent of it, I have blocks on myself. The the focus that I was on was not just that. I was like, thank God that's finally being addressed appropriately.

I'm not sure it retained its its significance as it should have. But but now what happens when we get a diverse population? How do we make sure that all voices are heard yeah. Right. And so with Federal Express, our research showed they co-created there. They had never done an annual leadership meeting in the past because they just they were frugal organization, et cetera.

They ended up having a 3000 person leadership offsite over a period of several days. With offsite co-creation offsite. Right Unilever reversed engineered business planning instead of top down, cascaded from the CFO and the CEO. And then the numbers get cascaded down. They started with the 300 top leaders and crowdsourced what were the growth opportunities and then built the plan up from there.

Again, we they would never been able to do that before. So, you know, the chapter that we have on the power of collaboration and inclusion in an increasingly hybrid world and how that should be reinventing the way you work, the way you collaborate and the realization that, you know, with what we talk about in the book is what we call the collaborative stack, the cloud it's not.

And these people are like, well, what's better, physical or remote? It's irrelevant what it's for, what purpose you use. You use asynchronous collaboration to get multiple inputs right in the fastest period of time without having to schedule a bunch of meetings. Then you use remote meetings for the broadest group of individuals to be able to participate. Then when it really comes to push to shove the crunch time, right?

And you've got difficult, challenging issues, that's when you could have a physical meeting that would have some distinct advantage.

Kevin: 100%.

Keith: So we work through and we give very distinct best practices and how to do each of those. Well.

Kevin: Yeah, it's so it's so true that ultimately this is the, the there is no answer except by starting with the questions of what are you really trying to accomplish? Where are you in the stack, where are you in that process and all of those things. So one of the things that you talk about in the book is a phrase, and I think it's worth us talking about a little bit.

It's the idea of active foresight. So what do you mean by that? And how can any leader take that idea and apply it?

Keith: So I think you're now in chapter four or something. The foresight is I'll give you a wonderful example. We found that there were literally fewer than ten companies in the Fortune 500 that fully reacted to the pandemic shut down prior to the government obligation. One of the companies we found was a company called Lockheed Space. And Rick, who's the president there that we interviewed, what he had is a process in place of entirely iteratively looking around corners for risk and opportunity.

And I'll give you a very short cut for this. How do you do foresight with your executive team once a month? Every executive team should assign to each member of the executive team a lens or vantage point to have foresight. So, Kevin, you're the CMO I want you to look at the the competition. Dave, you're the head of sales.
I want you to look at customer sentiment. Jane, you're the you know, the head of blah, blah, blah, CFO. I want you to look at macroeconomic issues. The center, everybody looks at something different once a month for 5 minutes on the on the executive team agenda, we ask the question what risks or opportunities are each of you or any of you seeing that deserves our attention?

Some people say none. None. Right now, we're good. You know, what I said last month is the word, but some might say, as one did at Lockheed, you know, I've been following this virus in China. I think that it's worth looking at. So it's only a five minute meeting. They don't go into it there. They say, great, let's schedule a meeting on that.

Who wants to be a part of that? You all assess the risk or the opportunity. If it's an opportunity, you assess it. And if it needs to come back to us after that meeting, then bring it back to us on an agenda item and we'll decide as a discussion whether where it goes, could it go into planning, et cetera.

So that was in December. That was in December. Lockheed Aerospace went full virtual in February. They had no problems getting PPE. They got all of their green laptops. The only ones out there then that they stockpiled so much that they ended up giving it away to clients after the fact because they everybody was scarce and they were trying to be generous to clients and other folks in the community.

So, you know, it's.

Kevin: Yeah, go ahead. Finish. Go ahead. No, I.

Keith: Was just going say that simple process, that simple little tip or tactic can transform your business.

Kevin: What I was going to say, Keith, is earlier today I recorded a conversation with a gentleman named Len. Herstein and it will have it will already be on the podcast for those of you who might hear it. And we were talking about stopping complacency and this idea of having active foresight as a way to make sure that we don't get resting on our laurels, thinking everything's good, you know, how do we deal with success?

Right. It was one of the things that he and I were talking about. So there's a really great connectivity.

Keith: Did he have a good best practice to carry into this because this and remember with the thing about our research that I want your your followers to know about us is we're not like Gartner Group where we're doing trends or, you know, systematic observations. All we we are a we are a high return practice research institute. That thing that I just shared with you, all that foresight, 5 minutes changing.

And it's such a simple and elegant practice right now. So what the book does is it gives you those very simple and elegant practices across all of the areas of our research and they were all gained from your peers, sharing information, iterating them, and then testing them.

Kevin: One of the other things I really like about the book is you have a metaphor. It's one of the chapters near the end. The metaphor is the Lego block. And you say it's the leg. We're moving into the Lego block workforce let's talk about that for a second. There's a lot of detail that we won't probably have time to get into, but talk about the idea of how do we start to think if the world of work is going to be different and it will be how do we benefit from that?

How do we leverage that? And you're saying think Lego blocks. What do you mean? Yeah.

Keith: So maybe I'll even look, I'm a small company, we're 50 people, but maybe I can share how it's impacted me.

I went out and bought a fractional chief marketing officer that I could not in my organization have afforded at the level of his sophistication. I bought a fractional chief marketing officer. I then decided that one of the critical elements of our business is very direct B2B marketing. So in the olden days, an administrative person helping me administer my network, then I would then market to content marketing, direct marketing, et cetera.

That individual would be about an 80 K to a 95 K person in Los Angeles and in and if you were to.

Kevin: Not in Peoria, but in New York.

Keith: Right, exactly, exactly. In Peoria they're 60, you know, but guess what? In the Philippines there are 20 and they're bright as heck driven and ambitious, willing to work on my time zone. Bro. So they get up, they start working at ten in the evening and get to like six or whatever and perfect English drive and ambition and by the way, incredibly grateful for 20 because it's at least 30% to 40% more than they've be making locally.

And they get to work with a cutting edge you know American company. And so I have built out a six person marketing team that has cost me probably less than two years and that's a Lego block workforce. That's an example of a Lego block workforce. You can begin to globally distribute put apart, put together, think about roles that you would have never in the past thought of anything other than a W-2 and have them be an agency like I have plenty of agencies, people who are moms and have two of their clients and me, you know, and they're a part of my organization and I don't treat them like a vendor.

They're my person who's running acts and it's working beautifully and I'm loving it. But that's a part of the Lego workforce, you know, you can and you can that kind of variability and allows you also to be more agile, which is another chapter in the book. But the agility that you need to be able to adapt. Right? So I know I at the peak of my research institute, I had this amazing resource who was the president of my research institute, but that we were you could imagine the size of this work.

We had 14 people. We raised $2 million. It was a big research project when as this is tailed off and I'm still doing the research on an ongoing basis, but not as heavily right I've named I moved her over into actually running my sales organization and because of the type of sales we have and the and the success we've had to date, she's only 10 hours a week, but she's kicking ass right and so it's, that's a Lego block workforce and that's the ability for that to bolt into agility.

Kevin: Perfect. You know, one of the things and as you and I are talking here in January, I'm very confident that for unfortunately for the foreseeable future, the topic of mental health, mental fitness resilience is going to be at the top of the list. In fact, I believe perhaps ought to be at the very top of the list for us to think about as leaders.

What are you learning from your research or from just for the folks that you interact with about some some high level best practices in these areas? What I guess I'll ask let's ask in two ways. First of all, for us as individual leaders, what should we be doing and thinking about for us? We'll talk about our teams after that.

Keith: Yeah. Well, hmm. I'm not sure that those two things are are separate questions. And I'll explain what I mean by that because what we found so I wrote an article in Harvard Business Review during this period of time that showed that our research showed the thing that was the greatest strain on resilience was not the rioting in the streets, was not the political unrest in our own capital, was not the zoom fatigue to some extent.

Yes, it was actually the the the frustration and the difficulty with getting things done so the real drain or on resilience in organizations is our work. And when we found that when a team came together with a strong commitment to a relational commitment to each other, which is, you know, the guy wrote and every loan believes a lot of the relationships that with a strong relational commitment to the point where there's no passive aggressiveness, meaning we're so committed to each other that we speak truth in the room no conflict avoidance.

We wrestle and argue things transparently and openly, not in the back. Shadows are talking behind each other's backs. That's the stuff that breeds a drain in organizations. Now, the number one predictor of our ability to to attack this stress and fatigue that does I'm not saying that's the only thing that does happen because we're always on, et cetera, is actually the peer to peer relationship of your team.

So the best thing you can do, Kevin, the best thing I can do is to be able to share vulnerably and openly with my team about how I you know, there's a very simple high return practice. It's one of the simplest it's called an energy check in. And I would once again offer that at least once a month, maybe twice a month in a meeting, you stop and you ask the team on a scale of zero to five, please put at the beginning, the beginning of the meeting as you're coming into this meeting, on a scale of zero to five, what is your energy level?

Zero is in the dirt. Five is your you're sipping on rainbows with unicorns. And then you look and you and you and people know that if it's two or below, you're going to pause and ask if they're OK. So they're signaling right? So if somebody puts a two or below, we pause and, and we say, are you OK, Kevin?

And Kevin says, either, you know, new baby, I was up all late last night. Cool.

Kevin: I it's just today it's a temporary thing. Right, right.

Keith: Or or Susan says, well, my husband Dave just got diagnosed with needing a kidney transplant, which I was present at both of those. Right. And interestingly enough, Susan, not in the real name Susan, but Susan she said that after having that information for two weeks, but nobody knew it because your ability to create an esprit de corps in a shared commitment to each other's energy and mental well-being, that peer to peer that my second book that who's got your back?

We've got each other's backs. That idea of co elevation, that word I created for for a team coming together and not letting each other fail, but lifting each other up in pursuit of a mission but helping each other at the same time. That is in fact I believe in our research has shown is the leading thing we can do is to create that community around us.

Now, I know one of things you might be looking for some tips around routines now. We did study routines of executives that breed better mental health. One of the routines is to actually create up to 2 hours a day, but at least an hour a day of thinking, not just thinking, but contemplative review time. You know, if I showed you my calendar at the peak of the pandemic, it was half of an hour straight through.

And no wonder I was exhausted at the end of the day. But I just got up and did it again today. You look at my calendar and I've got 21 hour blocks of red on my on my calendar that have been given to me to think to actually read my emails, to review things so that it doesn't bleed into the evenings and weekends so that I can actually lead my life because I've I've given so much more time back to the company by not traveling, that the company doesn't deserve to have all of my time and evenings and weekends.

And so we've got to leave that that curated space. And we in my comp- my team treats those red blocks like they are my meetings and they are. They're my meetings with me.

Kevin: 100% and I often say to people, if you, if you had had, if you'd had a heart problem of some sort and you had a follow up with your cardiac cardiologist, would you cancel that? And of course you'll say, Heck no. I said, Have you ever canceled a meeting you scheduled for yourself? Yes. Why? Right. The whole point is why?

Well, you know, you wouldn't cancel the card-. It's cardiac. Red blocks are cardiologist time.

Keith: I still violate it, right? I did it this morning. It was funny. I was I was with my administrative assistant and we were in a meeting with my team and that and I and it was an half an hour meeting and they ended up going an hour, half of an hour into my review time. Right. And I paused at that and I said, you know, I said, Michael, you have permission when I'm bleeding into review, time to remind me and the team that that's what we're doing.

And to make us make a conscious choice.

Kevin: That's the key making. We're going to sometimes do it, but let's make it totally conscious in this moment. That's the right.

Keith: And I have to say that that's the thing that we learned in our research, which is we did a lot of things during the pandemic. Well, and yet they weren't purposeful. They were out of reaction. So, for instance, the chapter in the book on agility and how you build an agile organization, we practice what I called crisis agile during the pandemic.

Kevin: I love that because we don't have a choice right. Right.

Keith: We woke up every day and said, OK, what did we get done yesterday? All right, what do we need to do today and what are we committing to and then we went for the next day. What's changed? All right, we're assessing. Let's get together. So that process of, you know, commit a sprint, assess, commit sprint says that is an agile process that is used in programing and using project management.

That's very effective but is not used in leadership teams. It's not used as a way to run your organization. I believe that we were running agile as the operating system during the pandemic, and I want us to solidify that. And that's what that chapter is about. How do you how do you turn your organization into an agile operating system?

That pivots and assesses and forecasts and pivots and assesses and forecasts? And that's so important for all of us to be able to stay ahead of the curve. As we were talking about that forecasting conversation. Absolutely.

Kevin: So and I agree with you that what we need so what we need to do as leaders individually is the same thing we need to be modeling for our teams, and we can't certainly be at our best for them if we're not at our best for ourselves and all that stuff. I'm going to add one more thing that we ought to be doing and that in the research that we've done, not the same type of research as you, but in the work that we've been doing is that most leaders need more sleep now.

Keith: And, you know, I have to say, don't you think that most of us got better sleep in some ways during the pandemic because we were home and I think get you what you may have the data and I haven't seen this data and I actually look at this data. Arianna Huffington is a friend of mine, and she's like all about sleep and she's been preaching sleep for me for a long time.

I don't maybe I'm not maybe I'm a data set of one. But I didn't I've never gone to bed at ten, nine, 930 or 10:00 back in the olden days when I was on the road out to dinner. And then, you know, and then I don't know if I have found myself during the pandemic having more restful sleep than I have.

Kevin: Which is awesome. Right. And so for those of you that are getting that great, but many aren't still. And if you're not, I just want to put that in your in your list of things to think about. So so Keith, as we start to move toward wrapping up here, a question, is there one thing that you would like leaders or you would encourage leaders to do today?

What's 11 sort of piece of. Yeah, one piece of advice that you would give us today.

Keith: If if you go to go forward to work dot com, you can see so many articles we wrote during this period of time, so many pieces for Forbes Inc, Fast Company, our business review, etc. There's a ton of stuff there about how do you begin to really revamp your staff meeting for the better leverage of the tools you have.

I only picked this one area because once you because I know right now and I don't know if it's going to change by the time we're airing this in the late spring or early summer, but I know right now we are meeting overloaded and it is the death knell of many organizations whereas we can reduce the meetings by 30%, give ourselves back time for that thinking time, that reflective time that we're talking about, that asynchronous time, if we stop having meetings, be the first line of defense for collaboration, learn asynchronous collaboration.

That's one of the biggest things I could say is the takeaway. The other thing that I would say is just more macro than that's something as specific as that is make sure that you and your executive team take a meeting and stop and say, what was it about our behavior during the pandemic? And you can read the book as a mechanism to spur this conversation.

But what was it is a part of our behavior during the pandemic that we don't want to stop as we, quote, go back to work, but we want to hold on to. So, for instance, you know, somebody might say, you know what, we were a team. We came together, we didn't give a shit about silos and org charts, and we just got it done.

And we didn't let egos in the way turf wasn't an issue. Can we hold on to that? Right. We were vulnerable. We we cried together when, you know, when our parents were were were ill. With COVID and we didn't know was going to happen. And and we cared about each other in a way, and we helped each other.

We don't want to let go of that. Right. It's like, you know, those, you know, talk to the team. And I think the book will be a great tool, not only the book, by the way, but we created a a free resource guide, which is a video series. And I think it'll probably still by the time this is aired, be free.

But because we're giving it away right now and for presales before the outcome for its last books. Yeah, there's a free video series we're giving away with the book that will help you implement this book and change your team. This eight chapters in the book, we have eight video packets and then you send it around to your team.

There's a workbook and you can work through how to really take advantage of all these these innovations and high return practices.

Kevin: One of the things that I know, because we've had several interactions, is I've always enjoyed.

Format format as a way that I know, and I'm guessing anyone who's listening or watching would won't be surprised is that you like me, love your work. So work is fun. But I want to know, Keith, what you do for fun. That's not work. What do you do for fun?

Keith: Well, probably my my greatest a lot of people don't think this is fun. But for me, it is. I work out. And, you know, I have been deeply committed with my friend Peter Diamandis to longevity. I want to continue to make a footprint on this planet for as long as I possibly can. And I know that the body that I'm in got to keep tuned.

So I love to work out, but I also love to drink and eat. So I think part of the world where you got it right, you got to.

Kevin: Work, too. You better.

Keith: Do. You number one. You better do number one. So I'm starting that my dinner parties again. Starting at my dinner parties again. And that's been that's been something I've missed during this two year period. But what we did do interesting enough, Kevin, is we started hosting dinner parties on Zoom so we we would send friends out a bottle of wine and we'd everybody bring their meal together and we'd all have a dinner party and we'd commune but now it was global and we were able to have people there that were, you know, eating lunch somewhere while we were eating dinner.

Exactly.

Kevin: Exactly. Another thing that we share in common is a love of reading and of learning. And so I'm curious, what are you reading these days, Keith, that people might want to know?

Keith: Well, I'll give you a sneak peek. I'm reading something that nobody else has their hands on right now. But by the time this airs, you will. I think you will. You absolutely will. I mentioned earlier, my friend Peter Diamandis, but he's coming out with a new book with Tony Robbins about longevity, democratizing longevity, and that is a book that I highly recommend you go out and get your hands on.

And, you know, it'll be it'll been out for a while, and I suspect many of you will already have it. But in one compendium, if you really want to live beyond a hundred and be thriving like like you and I are right now, Kevin, wouldn't you mind if he could be like you are right now at a hundred? I'm not saying you're in a bed.

Right? Could you what? I mean, you and I love life. But so how do we how do you go about doing that? And that's a great book. I would that's what I would advise.

Kevin: As is always. Thanks for that. As is always. Everybody, you can go to remarkable podcast dot com and look and look at this episode or the show notes wherever you are to see the links. We'll have all those there by the time that that comes. Where else. Keith, we've already talked a little bit about go forward to work WSJ.com.

Anything else you want people to know in terms of connecting with you, finding the book, anything else you want people to know?

Keith: You know, that's it. I mean, that's I'm really excited about this book. I've already started working on the next one. I promise you, I won't be out in in any year. So like this, this process was so fast that we were able to get it out as we did. But looking forward to our continued engagement. Follow me on Instagram, all those wonderful places, but go forward working, forget books, and we'll stay in communication with you.

Kevin, you are always such. First of all, I just your audience needs to know if they don't already, they probably what's why they're here. You're one of the most prepared, thoughtful and caring interviewers that I've ever had you I know you've read the book. I feel the energy, the understanding of it and really appreciate that it means a lot.

Kevin: Well, it's my pleasure and thank you for that. And so now I've got to after that lovely thought, I've got to say to all of you, the most important thing of this all show, which is what are you going to do with this? My two word question for you, as always, is now what what action are you going to take?

Are you going to apply one of the several principles, one of the high return practices that we talked about today, whether it's active foresight or whether it's the energy check or whatever it is, what are you going to do as a result of the time that you've spent with Keith and I? That's my challenge to you. That's our challenge to you.

And so, Keith, thanks for being here. It is a pleasure to have you. I knew it would be it's a pleasure, as always. And to all of you, if you enjoyed this, tell someone to come join us next week. Invite them to come back and listen to this one, whether they find it at remarkable podcast. Dot com or wherever you listen to your podcast, because next week I'll be back with another episode.

We'll see you then.