Providing Value To Your Clients: How Francisco Rodriguez Built The Largest Speaking Bureau In Latin America
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Providing the best value for your business clients starts with knowing what they need. If you are like Francisco Rodriguez, who made it his mission to build the largest speaking bureau in Latin America, then it means being ready to communicate with your customer and fill their specific need. In this episode, John Livesay interviews Francisco on how he built one of the most successful businesses in South America. Learn how Francisco pivoted his old company to form Smart Speakers, and what he’s learned that helped him grow and scale his company. Tune in for more great business stories as John Livesay hears more success stories.
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Listen to the podcast here
Providing Value To Your Clients: How Francisco Rodriguez Built The Largest Speaking Bureau In Latin America
My guest is Francisco Rodriguez Aguirre who is the President of the largest speaking bureau in all of Latin America. He shares with us his secrets to his success starting the bureau Smart Speakers and says that when you provide expertise, you give your clients the best outcome. His whole focus is on being the best partner that he can be to his clients and finding innovative ways to bring in new content to events to make them a huge success. He said it’s not enough to have the right expertise as a speaker, you must also have the right attitude and be easy to work with. Enjoy the episode.
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I’m honored to have Francisco Rodriguez Aguirre who is the Founder of Smart Speakers, the largest and biggest speaking bureau in all of Latin America. They’re in countries like Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, the US and Mexico. We had the pleasure of meeting at an event that our mutual friend, Josh Linkner, produced. We instantly clicked. He is someone who leads from the heart and speaks like a poet. Francisco, welcome to the show.
Thank you very much, John. I’m honored to be here with you.
The honor is all ours. There are so many impressive things about your background from you winning an award at MPI to going to school at UCLA and getting your MBA. I’m going to let you take us back to your own story of origin. You can go back to childhood. You could start at UCLA, wherever you want to start your story on how you started to discover your passion for communication and how you got into the speaking bureau business.
I first started in a family business that was radio. We were such a big family so it was difficult over there to cover an important part. I took my MBA and when I finished the MBA, I love all training, knowledge and after reading such big names, I’m getting so much knowledge. I said, “I love this.” I started a company that used to make events for selling them. We used to do the Sales Summit or Marketing Summit, events where we used to bring great speakers from Mexico and Latin America with great minds from all over the world. Over there, we have Philip Kotler, who was the great Father of Marketing. We have Seth Godin and Al Ries. We have these big names.
When we’re doing these events, we used to produce everything. We used to hire the place where it was going to be. We used to do the marketing to know which best subjects that the business people would like to have and who are the biggest names that would be in these events. We were very successful but a lot of competition started to come when we did this in Mexico. The business started to be not as good and it started to be more risky. Some of our clients that come to our events because there were corporate events for business people started to tell us, “Are you able to make an event for my company like this? This speaker is great. Can you book this speaker for us?”
[bctt tweet=”Always try to get the most value for your clients. If the client is happy and sees that their objective was accomplished, you’re going to have a happy client.” username=”John_Livesay”]
In the beginning, we said, “No because we are doing this,” but afterward, when we started to see that the business was not going that good, we said, “Let’s try it.” We started two lines of business. One line as a speaker’s bureau but we weren’t speakers bureau yet. We started hiring speakers. Another is as a meeting planner. Being a meeting planner specializing in conferences doing like these kinds of events. We were growing but my passion was not in producing the whole event. I was always with my team.
We were great at getting good content and researching who has the newest option and curating that great content. With my team, I was like, “Let’s do this speaker’s bureau.” We saw it in other countries. We set our webpage and we started to create the speaker’s bureau a 100% professional one. We did this in 2010. We did our first event in 1999. We started selling speakers in 2006 and making private events as a meeting planner in 2006. We stopped in 2007 doing our events.
What I love about that story is you have incredible insight and empathy for the stresses and needs that an event planner has. You aren’t just trying to figure out what they need or what pressure they’re under. You were in their shoes, which allows you a competitive advantage for someone who doesn’t understand it from the inside out.
That ability to say, “I know what you need. If that speaker’s plane is delayed and they don’t notify you when they land, you’re worried about that. We make sure that we have our speakers tell you when they get into the country so you don’t have to worry about it.” You’re anticipating problems that other people wouldn’t even think would be a problem but you’ve done it so that makes you a great partner for the event planners.
I was in the shoes of the meeting planner but before, as an end client.
You know both sides.
Speaking Bureau: Big differences are not that big and something that is great is that we can bring the best speakers from one place to another place.
In the beginning, we used to be a client of speaker’s bureaus and buy it for us. We used to be meeting planners but my passion was with the speakers. I used to study so much about speakers and looking for new content. I started looking more for that so that our business grew so much bigger from speakers and as a meeting planner. What started to happen was something that I didn’t like. We used to go to events and we met some meeting planners that used to be our clients or speaker’s bureau. I said, “I don’t like this. I have to choose one of both. I’m not able to play in both.”
We stopped being a meeting planner. We have everything. Our speaker’s bureau business and the meeting planner. The two things are focus and being a partner because in their part when I was a meeting planner, we have that competitive advantage and understanding because we were one of them. Sometimes, I could compete with them. That’s why we stopped being meeting planner. When we did that is because we have a good business from being a meeting planner. That’s when we said, “Let’s go international.” We started in Mexico City, Columbia, Chile, the US and Costa Rica.
Are there differences between the audiences in those different countries? Do you find that maybe Costa Rica prefers a different audience than people in Chile?
There are some differences but something great is the same language and culture because many of these countries are Latin America. Those big differences are not that big and something that is great is that we can bring the best speakers from one place to the other place.
If one of your clients has multiple offices in these countries, they might hire you to find one great speaker to speak multiple times to their different countries.
We can bring the best of Chile to Mexico and Mexico to Virginia or the US to Mexico. Many clients tell you, “What new do you have? What innovations in the speakers do you have?”
[bctt tweet=”Focus on being the best partner to your clients and they are loyal to you.” username=”John_Livesay”]
When someone comes from the US to speak at Mexico or any of these other countries that you’re in and the speaker is not fluent in Spanish, people might be curious about how does that work? Do you use a translator there? Do they have to pause? Are people listening to something like at the United Nations? What is the typical setup for language translation?
We use simultaneous translation. We have some good translators. They almost do it at the same time. If you’re a speaker, you shouldn’t speak very fast.
You got to pause a little bit. You can still keep your pace going. If you’re telling a joke, you can still keep all of that going. The audience is listening to something while it’s being translated. They provided a device.
They have their headphones. In many events, half of the people have headphones and of all the people speaking.
The speaking business was heavily impacted by the pandemic shutting down live events. I’m imagining that many of your clients said, “We’re going to have a virtual event. We still need to meet. Can your speakers give us virtual presentations?” Tell me about that transition. Were you able to keep some live events and convert them to virtual? People are doing hybrid events. What are you seeing?
Most people have something awful. I guess that it happened the same to you because we were going great with a lot of bookings and suddenly, everything came down when it was declared that this was a pandemic. I remember they stopped the flights to Europe and the US. Everybody canceled everything. In the beginning, we were trying to negotiate some of them, we used to say, “For May or June.”
Speaking Bureau: We were blessed that our industry was able to transform this way.
It was very difficult because of lots of agreements and things. It was awful. We started doing a webinar once a week. We bring speakers to these webinars and we made alliances with MPI and the Human Resources Association of Mexico. We did four alliances so that we had our own clients as well as the clients or the members of the other associations. We were reaching that it was able to do it in a virtual way in the speaking business. We did with some meeting planners and some events inviting their clients and our clients to show a way to do it.
We even had a webinar where we discovered a speaker that was training in how to do a virtual event. We even teach the meeting planners with this speaker how you could make your live event and how you can convert it into a webinar. We did this event. We spread the word. The clients started coming to us and the meeting planners telling us, “Let’s have a webinar. What options do we have? I still have to connect with my clients, with my people.” We were blessed that our industry was able to transform this way. We were with the speakers and say, “You should watch our video on how you can make it entertaining.”
You can’t just speak. You need some special effects, some music and all kinds of other things to keep people engaged in breakout rooms and polls to take so that the audience is entertained and not just watching a Zoom call. If you have a lot of major clients on your website, what is your strategy on how you keep these big clients happy? Do you have something as a part of your culture when you train people and hire new people around customer service to let them know we have to do not the minimum but go beyond what’s expected?
In Latin America, in general, we are very customer-oriented. We always try to get the most value for our clients and speakers because we like long-term relationships. If the client gets happy and he sees that his objective was accomplished, we’re going to have a good client both the speaker and us. We are always trying to get more value in the pre-event. The first thing is how we are going to meet the goals of the client in the best way.
We always have these pre-event calls but sometimes, it could be 1 or 2 pre-events calls. In the event, depending on what is the objective of the client, we are going to get this value and after the event. That is not just something that good speech that was great but everyone can forget afterwards. We are looking for ways to engage more with the client.
Having some ongoing follow-up, I know when I get engaged for a speaking event many times, I’ll say, “Let’s package in a 30-day and 90-day follow-up.” A lot of clients love that because it reinforces what they heard. It’s a check-in to see if they are, in my case, starting to tell better stories, are winning more business so that the objectives are measurable of what it was like before the talk and workshop and what’s happening afterward. I’ve had a lot of clients say to me, “We picked you because of that ongoing connection beyond the talk. We know it’s going to be reinforced.”
[bctt tweet=”Having the right attitude is just as important as your expertise.” username=”John_Livesay”]
That’s the real result that they looking for that they are going to make difference.
Do you have a favorite story of a speaker that you like to use and it has gotten great results that made you and the client happy?
Following calls with videos that reinforce the main idea or topic is something that is not that difficult. It could be videos of 1 or 2 minutes. The best customer service is not but you want to reinforce. If you do it that once a month, you keep the idea coming in.
Short little videos that recap the message make the client feel like it’s customized to them.
Before, we were not used to seeing that many videos live. We were not used to Zoom and all of these things. This is a new era and these things are great.
What is one thing that you’re excited about coming up in 2022 in the speaking business?
Something great is the Harvard events and how we are having new tools and more benefits from the speaking industry. In the beginning, as we were talking about it was awful but at the end, it’s a barrier. For example, we hired twice Pep Guardiola who is the soccer trainer of Manchester City. He was in the champions in number two but he was the trainer of Barcelona. With Barcelona, they won so many titles. He is the best soccer trainer of all time.
Speaking Bureau: The first thing is how we are going to meet the goals of the client in the best way. So we always have these pre-event calls.
He is a trainer and the champion of England and being the second in Europe. With this virtual thing, we are able to get personalities like him while he is playing with other teams. Usually, if we wanted to bring him to the US, Chile or Mexico, he would have to spend at least three days coming from Europe. Now you have a mixture of virtual and personal. This is something great that you can take the best of both worlds.
Is there a favorite quote that you would like to leave us with, Francisco?
Always deal with the experts. That’s the best thing that you can do. We’re looking for the best speakers that our clients need according to their objectives. We are the experts in hiring speakers and matching the needs of the client with the right speaker. That’s why we are able to get the right speaker but all this great content and the speakers that are easy to work with. There are some great speakers. You have great lawyers and some doctors. It’s everywhere. We have some other speakers that sometimes could be a little bit difficult to work with. Some others that they like to get value to the client. We can get the right speaker with the right content and with the right attitude to get their objective.
It’s not just the right speaker at the time and content, the magic secret ingredient is your expertise in making sure that that speaker has the right attitude. I can’t thank you enough. If people want to find out more about your bureau, they can go to SmartSpeakersWeb.com. Thank you so much for giving us such a global perspective and congratulations on all of your success.
Thank you very much, John. It’s a pleasure to be with you.
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Own It With Robert Hunt
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
With the trials and problems you face every day, do you blame other people or specific circumstances? It’s time to own it. John Livesay sits down for a conversation with Robert Hunt about the importance of accountability. Robert is the business owner and forum leader of Renaissance Executive Forums Dallas. He has been a marketing and sales leader most of his career, but in 2013 he decided to transition his focus to leading business owners and CEOs in monthly peer-to-peer advisory groups. He helps leaders remove obstacles that keep them from being their best. He believes that it’s his purpose in life, and God has wired him to pursue this passion. In this episode, he shares valuable insights on handling stress and pressure as well as the importance of accountability in business and leadership.
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Listen to the podcast here
Own It With Robert Hunt
My guest on this show is Robert Hunt, who helps CEOs figure out how to remove things that keep them from being their best and more often than not, it has to do with head trash. He said the difference between pressure and success is knowledge because when you have the knowledge, you can make a plan. Enjoy the episode.
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My guest is Robert Hunt, who’s a business owner and forum leader of Renaissance Executive Forums Dallas. He’s been a marketing and sales leader most of his career, but in 2013, he transitioned his focus to leading business owners and CEOs in monthly peer-to-peer advisory groups. His first group started back in 2013 and it’s been working with small and medium-sized business owners and CEOs in Dallas, and helping them remove anything that’s keeping them from being their best. He also has a new book coming out on accountability. Robert, welcome to the show.
You make it sound so exciting when you say a book in accountability. I also have one on how to grow onions. I don’t think anyone’s going to get excited about it, but I’m super excited about the book.
Do you have a title that might be snazzier than the topic?
Peak Accountability – Navigating the Climb to a Victorious Life
We decided at one point we were going to call it Peak Accountability. As we started writing it, we thought, “If someone walked by a bookshelf at an airport or someplace and said, ‘A book on accountability, let me get that.’” I don’t think it’s going to be a grabber. We’re probably going to use the phrase that is the turning point of accountability, which is nobody cares. We’ll probably call the book with a big black cover, red light in red words, Nobody Cares.
It sounds harsh, but if you want to stop being a victim in your life, you have to have this mindset that nobody cares about the reasons why you can’t do this or that. At the end of the day, it’s all up to you and you either own it or you don’t. If you want to own it, you can fix it. As long as it’s someone else’s problem, you don’t have any control over your life. I don’t like being a victim. I want to have the freedom to do things and make a change, but that means you have to own it.
That’s a great tweet you gave us, “You own it or you don’t.” Let me ask you about your own story of origin. What was life like before you started helping CEOs? Give us more details about your background in sales and marketing.
I grew up in Southern California. My career was a marketing agent, coordinator, manager and sales guy. I had a lot of careers in the sales and marketing area. I moved to Texas in 2010 because California was imploding and I needed to get out. It felt like the right time. When we came here, I was doing marketing consulting. I met a guy who had bought the franchise rights for Renaissance Executive Forums. He was telling me what they do. I was listening to him and thought, “People pay you money to help them. That seems so foreign.”
As a marketing guy, you’re always trying to make everything look better than it was. You’re trying to address, “We’ve got all these problems, unhappy customers and the product doesn’t work. Why don’t you get out there and figure out how to tell our story?” I said, “Why don’t we just be a great company and then it’s easy for me to tell the story,” but nobody wanted to go down that road. That was too much work.
[bctt tweet=”Remove things that keep you from being your best.” username=”John_Livesay”]
What I was hearing when I tell that story is I thought, “That aligns with my personal purpose in life,” which became my company’s focus. My purpose in life is I help people remove things that keep them from being their best. That’s how God has wired me. It’s what I’ve done all my life, but I never got paid for it. It’s been this cool opportunity to take my purpose and my passion and have a job that does that. It’s been the greatest combination ever.
I can’t wait to hear a story of an example of one thing you’ve removed for somebody that allows them to be better.
I think the most successful leaders already know what to do, they’re just not getting it done for some reason. A lot of times it’s head trash. I found that you can know to do ABC, but when you’re stuck trying to do it, you can’t get that first step. Coaches don’t tell people what to do. You ask them, “What do they want to do?” They say, “What would you do? What’s the first step?” You said, “Let’s do it right now.” You don’t hold their hand, but you’ve helped them get over the thing that holds them back. Tiger Woods does not need his coach telling them how to hit a ball. He does need his coach to say, “I thought you were going to keep your elbow down. Your elbow is up in the air. Why are you doing that?”
When my clients tell me, “I want to spend more time with my family. I don’t think I’m having the life I want to have.” “What would that look like? What are you going to do? What’s the first step?” All I do is ask him more questions and more questions. They usually self-discover what the solution is. It’s rare that I have to bring up something as an idea to somebody because they’re smart, successful leaders. They run a business with lots of employees. They do it for years, but sometimes the head trash makes it where they can’t see clearly.
I’ve heard of the monkey mind and negative self-talk. I’ve never heard of head trash before, which I love because what a great concept that we can click on it and put it in the trash bin.
Own It: As long as it’s someone else’s problem, you don’t have any control over your life. Don’t be a victim. Have the freedom to do things and make a change, but that means you have to own it.
It sounds that easy, but it is because when it’s not your problem, you look at it objectively. I had a coaching session with a client. He was supposed to do a one-page business plan. It’s a really simple one-page business plan. I gave it to him three weeks ago and he says, “I’ve done the mission vision, core values and purpose but I can’t seem to get my first five strategies down.” I said, “You’re making this too hard. What would you do? If you’re going to drive to New York, what would you do? Get a car. What else? I need some gas. What else? I need a map. What else?”
You got three things, a car, gas and a map. You’re halfway there. I said, “What do you have to do?” He was focused on trying to have additional sales. What’s the first thing you have to do to get more sales? I have to find customers. What’s the first step in finding customers? We started talking, but for some reason, every time he opened up the document, it was giving him anxiety. It’s like this huge test that if he did it wrong, he’d have to wear big Baba glasses. I said, “You’re making this too hard.”
People at that level are worried about perfectionism. Is that part of the problem?
There’s a lot of beat down through COVID from 2020. I think people are a little shell-shocked. I have two sets of clients. One that said, “This was an amazing time of reset. I’ve changed my life, my business. I’ve done all these healthy things and we’ve had amazing growth.” I have another set of group members who have been beaten down. They have to lay off their favorite employees, lose their favorite customers, mortgage their house and all these things to stay alive. It’s been a beat down.
This guy’s been in the beat-down mode. He lost his office building. He had to go move in with someone else to keep going with their business. They lost a lot of great clients. It’s been a hard year. I think at some point you get frozen in stress or uncomfortableness. I think that you need someone who says, “It’s not that big deal. Get a piece of paper, write down the first word. What’s the next word?” That’s that role I play as a coach. He knows what to do. We just had to get some more head trash out.
[bctt tweet=”The difference between pressure and stress is knowledge.” username=”John_Livesay”]
You reminded me, Robert when you said that, of a former guest on the show, Rob Angel, who created Pictionary. When he was trying to start the idea for a game, he got overwhelmed like you were talking about. It was pre-COVID obviously, but “Who am I to do this? I don’t know anything about this,” so and so. He finally made it so simple as you were talking about a roadmap. He got a dictionary, a pad of paper and a pen. He said, “What would be the first word I would make for my game that someone would have to draw?”
He looked up and said, “Aardvark.” He wrote it down and goes, “That would be fun to draw and people would laugh. Now I’m a game-changer and a game creator.” That’s the name of his book Game Changer. You described that almost verbatim. Just start. His whole thing is about finding your aardvark. The fascination of interviewing multiple guests and getting to connect the dots of stories like that is my passion. Thank you for that. That was fascinating to hear you describe it like that of how people cannot make it too hard for themselves and take some next step as opposed to being a deer in headlights, if you will.
I heard this great phrase that says, “The longer you wait to take the first step towards your dream, the lower the chances you’ll ever achieve it.” When I met the guy, who had the franchise rights to this organization here in Dallas, I had no experience facilitating means. I’d never coached anybody for a living and I didn’t have any money saved but I knew that was what God had created me for. I’m wired for that guidance and that role. I knew I had to do it.
I went home and talked to my wife and I said, “I feel like this is the job, the place. This is where everything I am comes together with my passion and my journey.” We knew we had to do it. It was exciting and scary at the same time. Because we took that first step and I got my first group going in six months, which seems like a long time, but it’s fast to do this. You go to some businesses and you’re like, “You don’t know me, but do you want to be in a group with a bunch of your leaders.”
It’s like when I started my show asking certain people to be on the show, “Robert, Kevin Harrington, would you like to be on the show?” It’s a little tricky at the beginning to get people to say yes. Once you’ve got some track record, like you do, it’s a lot easier for people to go, “Look at all these other people who’ve gotten so much out of it.” To launch something is a challenge mindset-wise and momentum-wise. You said something that I find interesting and hopefully helpful to everyone reading, which is, “I knew I was wired for this.”
Own It: There’s no reason you can’t do anything. When you keep blaming why you can’t, you’re a victim and everyone has power over you.
I’m guessing one of your offerings, one of your secret sauces, is you can help other people figure out what they’re wired for, which then leads to another level of confidence beyond, “I think I can do this. I want to do it. I hope I can do it.” I didn’t hear any of that from you. I heard, “I’m wired to do this.” From that grounded faith-based sense of awareness, what a difference that makes?
I think a CEO’s number one job is to cast a vision that everyone else can get excited about. Where there’s a lack of vision, people perish. It is what the Bible says. The reality is that the people who come to work for you don’t need step-by-step on how to do their job. They need a vision of what it looks like when it’s done. Even with my own self, if I don’t have an exciting vision of why I’m doing what I’m doing, it becomes mechanical and it’s frustrating and boring.
When I close my eyes and I see my group members all together in one room and I can see the load of the world they carry being lifted off their shoulders because they’re in a room with other people who know what they’re going through and they feel loved, encouraged, challenged, motivated and inspired. When I see that in my mind, it makes me want to make those awkward phone calls to people who don’t know me and go, “I know you don’t know me, but I know a lot of people. You probably hate cold calls as much as I do. I’m going to ask you three questions and I’ll get off the phone really quick.” If they respond, they do. If they don’t, there are 10,000 more CEOs that I can call here in DFW.
What I find fascinating about what you’re doing is that people come for one thing and then get multiple benefits beyond it. Reading your testimonials, it’s like, “I got so many different perspectives on one problem. The comradery and the relationships I’ve made.” It’s like one thing if you joined the Chamber of Commerce or something else, maybe to network, but that’s not why people are coming. Yet there’s all these additional bonuses of that and that ripple effect.
[bctt tweet=”Some things sound easy, but it really is because you look at it objectively when it’s not your problem. ” username=”John_Livesay”]
I know for myself, when I worked with a healthcare tech company, they hired me to train their team on how to tell better stories to win more sales, “If you help us increase our market share and tell better stories to beat the competition, we’re happy.” Not only did that happen, but then they took all the stories and put them on a repository map. It started breaking down silos, which is as you know, a big problem in every industry. The silos are being broken down because people never knew anybody else’s stories to even make an intro. They had a client in one division, but they never made intros because they never knew a case story.
It’s amazing the similar problems that everybody has no matter what industry they’re in, their journey and their experience. We have four things that we always see in common. People, cash, technology and time. Those four things are the same for every single company. My largest group map, my largest size company is the president of the Coca-Cola bottling company, Southwest here in Dallas with 8,000 employees under his responsibility. He’s a super cool guy. He’s down-to-earth and genuine.
The smallest companies probably did a couple million and yet we all have the same problem when we get together. How do I get more employees to show up for work? How do I get more employees to care? How do we manage cashflow when I can’t buy any chemicals to make stuff or to do jobs? I can’t get raw materials. I can’t get people to show up to do the work. Even the customers who are having problems have enough employees to let us do the work. We’re all dealing with the same stuff. Nothing’s different. It’s a just different color, shape or size.
When you put things into buckets like that, and then you say, “How are other people solving the problem of people,” for example. The other outcome of that repository map where all the stories were, I’d also ask the salespeople to tell their own personal story of origin. What got you into healthcare? “My mom was a nurse. I was a microbiologist. I didn’t want to spend my life behind a microscope,” and all that.
Now, it’s an onboarding tool for new people. The number one thing I hear of people managing salespeople is how do we attract and keep top talent? They’re responsible for it. During the pandemic, they weren’t seeing them in person at annual meetings and this repository map became a way for the team to feel seen and heard. I wanted your insights on that because when we’re kids, we jump in the pool and we say, “Watch me jump in the water, mom or dad.” We want to be seen and heard as kids and validated. That doesn’t go away when we’re in the business world.
Own It: When you feel stressed out, it’s because you don’t have a plan. A plan doesn’t have to be that complicated.
If anything, you need more because it’s such a beat down. What we’ve done is we’ve replaced the relationships we used to have where you would know what house to go to in the neighborhood because all the bikes were stacked out. We’ve got to where I don’t have any friends. I have contacts. I have 4,000 contacts on LinkedIn. People are constantly sending me notes, “Do you know this guy?” I’m like, “I don’t even know how I met that guy.” People send me a request and I stopped accepting requests on LinkedIn for a while.
I would say, “If you want to know me, my phone number or email is right there on my LinkedIn page.” I put it right there. Call me if you want to talk. I don’t need more people on my LinkedIn page. What it did is it gave you this false sense of friendship. There’s a cool song out right now called Pictures of Mountains. It’s beautiful. It talks about no one’s heart ever skipped a beat by looking at pictures of mountains. It says, “I sit outside this restaurant reading reviews of what’s going on inside.” It tells about how we’ve lost connection with the world. It’s poignant for now.
Getting back to being in the moment and not so overwhelmed that it paralyzes us is what I heard from that. Let’s talk about your book. Congratulations, first of all. I know how much work goes into it. You’re obviously already envisioning what it’s going to look like on a shelf and would you pick up a book like that? That’s a tip right there for everybody. Reverse engineer, whatever you’re working on, and then what would it look like? What section of the bookstore is it in? Can I visualize myself speaking at Barnes & Noble? Who would show up? What would I talk about? What’s the problem I’m solving?
We all know what happens when there’s a lack of personal accountability and then going back to managing people. Many people in sales are micromanaged a little bit with CRMs and they all hate filling them out. We need to know how many calls you’re making a day. You need to be accountable. We somehow focus more on the number of calls instead of the quality of the relationships and how close we are to getting a sale. I’d love to hear your thoughts on that.
[bctt tweet=”The longer you wait to take the first step towards your dream, the lower the chances you’ll ever achieve it. ” username=”John_Livesay”]
In that sentence right there, I see so many things that are in that book because the only people who get micromanaged are the people who aren’t doing their job. If I’m rocking it, if I’m a superstar, they don’t even care what I’m doing. They don’t care when I come to work or when I go. The only people who get, “How many calls did you make?” It’s because your numbers are bad. That’s why we’re asking that question. People are so unaware of accountability at the very beginning.
We think like, “Everything’s going on. I take care of my stuff. You take care of your stuff and everything’s fine.” They’re constantly complaining about how the world is not delivering on what they expected or they’re not getting this or that. When some level of accountability comes up into their picture, they’re so quick to dismiss it. If you and I are meeting for lunch and you show up late, you go, “Traffic was horrible. Isn’t traffic always horrible?”
You could have come here 20 minutes early and sat in the parking lot and read your emails. We have a computer on our phone. There’s no reason we can’t be somewhere and still be productive. We look at ways and go, “It’s seventeen minutes to that restaurant, no problem. I’ll do one more email.” All of a sudden, there’s a traffic jam and now you’re late. When the first time they become aware of accountability, whether this is you personally, or you at work or whatever environment you’re in, you blame, then you make excuses or you say, “I can’t,” or at the last part, you wait and hope.
All those four things, you’re a victim. You’re not in control. “I tried that, but this guy was a bad boss. I didn’t get that job. I didn’t get promoted.” If you are a rockstar and you had a bad boss, they’d fire him and keep you. The fact is we want to blame and make excuses and say, “I wasn’t growing my business at the clip that we’re supposed to grow for years.” I’d say, “I’m not good at sales,” but I wouldn’t do anything about it.
Own It: Pressure’s good pressure makes us push to be our best. It makes us creative. It makes us see things beyond where we are today.
I would say, “I’m never really good at sales.” Why don’t you get some sales training? I signed up and paid an awful lot of money to Frank Gustafson in the Fort Worth area. I met with him every week and learned the Sandler philosophies of sales to not only clean up a lot of my head trash, which was keeping me from making sales calls in the first place. My close rate went from 10% to over 90%. It’s because I got sales training and got my head around why I was doing it. Now, it’s amazing.
There’s no reason you can’t do anything. When you keep putting the blame as to why you’re a victim, everyone has power over you, the government, your spouse, your family and the world. When you go, “This is horrible. I hate it.” You acknowledge reality. You embrace the suck and go, “This is going to be a long road, but I’m going to do it.” You make a plan and get it done. Now, you’re the victor over it. It may still take a long time, but you can still control it. If the problem belongs to you, you have the ability to solve it. If the problem belongs to somebody else, you’re a victim. I don’t want to be a victim. I want to solve my problems.
It’s a great perspective on it. It’s that whole premise of, “Is this something I can control?” Live events are canceled. I can’t control that right now. It may be coming back a little bit, but then getting canceled again and all that back and forth. I wanted your opinion on this. The thing that helps me bounce back up, be resilient, which is a key that CEOs need. They need to inspire their team to be resilient is doing what you said. Is this something I can control or is it not?
The awareness that things are not always linear. When I realized that, it helped me. I’m like, “We’re all going to get vaccinated. Everything will go back to normal.” Then it goes, “There’s another variant.” This event got canceled and you thought it was going to be a comeback. It’s a setback. That could be a metaphor for anything. “I fixed this problem. Why isn’t this happening yet?” If you aren’t willing to roll with what’s coming and not realize everything is linear, I think that manages your expectations a little bit.
[bctt tweet=”It may still take a long time, but you can still control it. If the problem belongs to you, you can solve it. ” username=”John_Livesay”]
My mom told me when I was a kid that there are two things you shouldn’t worry about, things you can control and things you can’t control. The reality is a lot less is under control than you think there are. I say, “Business isn’t good, I’m going to go get sales training.” I get sales training. Now I’m a great salesperson. If also the market is tanking and nobody’s buying that stuff anymore, all your great sales training still doesn’t fix the problem if you’re in the same market, selling the same stuff that nobody wants to buy.
I control another aspect. I’ll go to another market or launch a new product. There’s a lot that’s out of your control. You need to be resilient. The CEOs that I have had the most respect for in watching how they have lived their lives and run their business, they’re resilient. They’re not all the best at what they do. They’re not the most brilliant or whatever, but they’re resilient and decisive. They are willing to make decisions, not always the right ones, but they make them and own them. They’re resilient. When something goes wrong, they bounce back and they don’t give up. That’s a huge part.
If someone wants to explore, I am guessing you have to be a CEO in the Dallas area to be part of your forum, correct?
Yes. There are other groups across the country that deal with Renaissance Executive Forums. I focus here in the DFW area.
Obviously, anybody can buy the book?
Yeah.
Any last thought or a quote you want to leave us with, Robert?
[bctt tweet=”There are things you can control and things you can’t control. And the reality is a lot less is under control than you think there are. ” username=”John_Livesay”]
I had a conversation with someone who was stressing out and I reminded him that the difference between pressure and stress is knowledge. When you feel stressed out, it’s because you don’t have a plan and a plan doesn’t have to be that complicated. Sometimes it’s the first step. When you are stressed, it’s like, “Everything’s out of control. What am I going to do? I don’t know what to do.” You then come up with a plan and then you have pressure. Pressure’s good. Pressure makes us push to be our best. It makes us creative. It makes us see things beyond where we are now.
When you feel stressed and overwhelmed, stop. Get some knowledge and let that motivate you to be your best. Sometimes that comes through research, learning and reading, but in our world, it comes through being a part of a group or of other business owners that we lead. I think that’s where great group learning occurs. You end up getting more questions about the things you hadn’t thought about before you make a bad decision.
It’s a great way to end. It’s great information and a distinction between pressure and stress. Thanks, Robert.
It’s my pleasure.
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Humbitious – The Power Of Low Ego, High Drive Leadership With Amer Kaissi
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
The best leaders often do not see themselves as above anyone. They recognize the things they don’t know thus, striving to become even better not only for themselves but for others. If we could name the qualities that this point, it would be humility and being ambitious. Award-winning Professor of Healthcare Administration at Trinity University, Amer Kaissi, Ph.D. put the two together and came up with what he called Humbitious —which is also the title of his new book. In this episode, he joins John Livesay to shed light on these qualities and why he thinks they are important for leaders. He talks about the power of low ego, high drive leadership and being both compassionate and decisive, breaking down misconceptions in seeing kindness as a weakness. When leaders behave with both compassion and action, humility and ambition, good things happen. Let this conversation show you.
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Listen to the podcast here
Humbitious – The Power Of Low Ego, High Drive Leadership With Amer Kaissi
Humbitious: The Power of Low-Ego, High-Drive Leadership
Our guest is Dr. Amer Kaissi, who is an award-winning Professor of Healthcare Administration at Trinity University, which is a top fifteen national program. He is the author of the book Intangibles, which has won the 2019 Healthcare Book of the Year award. At Trinity, Dr. Kaissi teaches courses in Leadership, Professional Development and Public Speaking and is the Director of the Executive Program. His research interests include leadership and strategy. He’s a national speaker with the Studer Group and a faculty member with the American College of Healthcare Executives.
He is also a certified Executive and Physician Coach. He works with MEDI as an Executive Coach, where he consults with hospitals and healthcare organizations in their strategic planning efforts. He lives in San Antonio, Texas, down the street from me as they say here in Austin. What is also very exciting is he has a new book coming out that I am looking forward to hearing more about. It’s called Humbitious instead of ambitious, combining humility with there, I’m guessing. Welcome to the show.
Thank you, John. Thanks for having me. I’m excited about this.
Let’s hear your own story of origin. You’ve got such an impressive background. You’ve got your PhD, obviously and all of these things. You can go back to childhood or when you were getting your PhD. How did you get so interested in EQ and all of these issues?
I will go back into childhood a little bit. As the audience can tell from my accent, I wasn’t born in the US. I was born in Beirut, Lebanon. My childhood coincided with the Lebanese Civil War, which some audiences may be aware of. It was not a regular childhood per se but I would say it was a happy childhood. One of the main things that influenced me growing up was that my mom worked as a Director of an orphanage. A Civil War was happening so there were a lot of orphans. With the nature of her job, she had to be there 24/7. My mom worked long days. She worked weekends, holidays and summers. During those times, I would go with her to the orphanage.
[bctt tweet=”Humility is being open-minded.” username=”John_Livesay”]
As a child, you will go through the orphanage, what are you going to do? You are going to play with the kids. For years, I played with the kids every single day, I ate and spent time with them. I felt like I was one of them. I was the son of the director but kids don’t care about this stuff. These experiences started teaching me about the value of humility. The value of not seeing yourself as above anyone else because your parents have more money, you have more education or whatever it is.
At the time, I didn’t realize it was humility but now reflecting back at it, that experience influenced my personality and primed me to start becoming a little bit more interested in this topic of humility. The rest of my childhood was normal. The war in Lebanon ended. I ended up going to college. I did an undergrad in Public Health. I then started focusing on Healthcare Administration. I always knew that I loved teaching.
For some reason, teaching was my passion. I call it my first love. I knew that if I wanted to work in higher education in teaching, I needed to get a PhD. I started looking at PhD programs. We didn’t have 111 so I looked at programs in the US. When you are overseas and looking at a program in the US like Nebraska or in Oklahoma, it all sounds the same. I ended up going to Minnesota in the middle of the winter. That’s where I did my PhD.
I was young when I started my PhD. I was 23. I had no business doing a PhD at age 23. No one should do that. That’s my advice to the audience. Don’t do a PhD at that age but for a variety of reasons, I did that. Going into the PhD program, I was thinking to myself, “I’m a pretty smart guy. I’m book smart. How hard could it be?” I didn’t know what I didn’t know.
I went into this program and the people who were doing their PhD, at that time, were at least 15 or 20 years older than me and they have work experience. They had done stuff with my life and I was a 23-year-old kid. I knew nothing. That also taught me another aspect of humility, which is to recognize what you don’t know and to try to know what you don’t know.
In that situation, I did what everyone should do, which is I stayed quiet. I listened because I had not much to contribute to the conversations that were happening in the classroom. Here, I was sitting next to people who had worked and healthcare for years. They had experience and had stories. I had nothing. All I had was book-smart. I learned from them and I started to improve.
I would say these two major experiences primed me for studying humility later on in my life. I then finished my PhD. I’ve got the job here at Trinity in San Antonio. I started teaching graduate students in healthcare administration. For the audience that is not familiar with healthcare administration, this is preparing people to manage hospitals. It’s like an AI program but for healthcare administration. I started working with graduate students who wanted to work in hospitals.
One thing I started to realize is that both our educational system as well as our organizations do not value humility. If you are going to think about it, in the classroom, this is something that I admit that I used to do earlier on in my career, we reward the loud students. We reward the students that are raising their hands all the time and talking before they speak.
We reward that behavior but we don’t reward the students that are a little bit more humble in terms of, they want to take their time to think about things. They don’t want to open their mouth before thinking. That was happening in the classroom but I also noticed that organizations didn’t value humility that much. When they’re hiring for leadership positions, typically you tend to hire the person who is self-promoting, who is charming, maybe a little bit of narcissism in there. Whereas like the humble person, the humble people tend to get passed on for promotions for development in the organization. So all of this stuff together made me think more and more of what the value of humility in our lives and especially within the context of leadership.
All of this stuff together made me think more about the value of humility in our lives, especially within the context of leadership. One major study that I’ve looked at got me into starting to study that in a more formal way. In 2014, the Harvard Graduate School of Education published a report in which they interviewed middle school and high school students. They asked them, “What is the most important thing for you? What is your priority as a 12, 14 or 16-year-old? What do you want to achieve?” The middle schoolers and the high school about half of them said that their priority is an achievement, which is not surprising. They said, “I want to get good grades. I want to go into college. I want to get a good job.” That was not surprising. A little bit less said that their primary priority is happiness. “I want to chill. I want to have a good life. I want to have fun.” As my kids would say, “I want to vibe.”
Humbitious: Organizations don’t value humility that much when they’re hiring for leadership positions. They typically hire the person who is self-promoting, charming, and maybe a little bit narcissistic.
That wasn’t surprising either but what surprised me was about only 22% of the middle schoolers and high schoolers said that caring for others was a priority for them. Think about this, 1 in 5 younger Americans say that caring for others is a priority for them. That got me concerned, especially as an educator, because I started thinking about it. I’m like, “These kids are in middle school and high school now, which means that in a few years, they are going to be in my classroom. More importantly, a few years later, these are going to be the people leading our organizations.”
Only 1 of 5 of them said that, “Caring for others is important.” I dug a little bit more into the values of empathy, compassion at work and how that impacts individual outcomes but also team outcomes and organizational outcomes. I started doing more research on that. I ended up writing the book that you mentioned earlier Intangibles and that’s why I published my second book called Humbitious.
[bctt tweet=”Leaders should have agility, humility, and kindness.” username=”John_Livesay”]
One of the other guests I had on the show, Dr. Diana Hendel was talking about her 100th day as the CEO of the hospital all the tragedy happened with a former employee coming in and killing some people. If you are not prepared with some compassion, as a leader in that situation, if you are only good with spreadsheets, let’s say or leading from your ivory tower, that is not nearly enough in those situations.
That’s why leaders of countries and the president of our country, whoever it is at the time when there’s a tragedy like that, people need to see compassion for what people have gone through and empathy skills in those situations. You may not think that will ever happen to you or under your watch. If you haven’t done any work on developing that skill, you are going to be seen as coming up short in those situations.
In the story that you shared, every leader has one of these stories where there’s some crisis, a major negative event where you have to show up as a leader with humility, compassion and empathy. I agree with you 100%. This is important for leaders but I would say it’s not enough. In addition to compassion, what people want from you is action and decisiveness. That’s where I start talking about the importance of compassion but also courage.
You mentioned the title of my book. It’s not only humility. It’s humility and ambition. These traits, humility, compassion and empathy, I would say they are necessary but not sufficient. If you only have that, you are not going to be successful as a leader, whether during a crisis or during regular times. You need to add more to that. You need to add more tools in your toolbox if you will and have action, competence, courage, ambition.
Let me share with you a story that many people may be familiar with because it happens at the world stage. I don’t know if you are familiar with the Prime Minister of New Zealand. Her name is Jacinda Ardern. You have heard of her and I’m sure many of the audience have heard of her. Jacinda Ardern became the Prime Minister of New Zealand a few years ago. She was the youngest female leader in the world.
Typically, when that happens, people are a little bit skeptical and they were like, “What does she have to offer? Is she going to rise up to the challenges?” She had a challenge right away. Right after she became the Prime Minister, they had a shooting attack in the sound of Christchurch. It’s very similar to the story that you shared. There was an event, deaths involved, victims, mourning and all of that. The first thing that she did showed up as a compassionate leader and was there with the families of the victims mourning with them.
That wasn’t all she did because right away, she went into action. One of the first actions she took was to go to her parliament and force them to pass Gun Control Law. Now, I don’t want to get into the politics of Gun Control Law because I know people agree or disagree with that. I want to focus on the actions themselves, which was Gun Control Law in New Zealand worked fast two weeks after the attack.
That shows that leaders can do both. You can be compassionate, humble, empathetic, and be there with the victims and people who need you. You can also be courageous and take action. You need to have the competence to get things done in these situations. I realized that example because it shows how we can combine these two traits.
Fast forward to the COVID crisis. Again, when New Zealand, like any other country, was facing a global pandemic. What the first thing Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern did was action. They closed their borders. You can agree or disagree with her actions but she was decisive and at the same time, every single day, she was on LinkedIn, social media, talking to the people in her country and trying to understand what are the concerns of the small business owners. She’s trying to emphasize with them and tell them how the government is going to help them to stay above the surface while the lockdown was happening.
[bctt tweet=”Humility is in the value of not seeing yourself as above anyone else.” username=”John_Livesay”]
I have been following New Zealand on what’s happening there for a while now because that interests me. In June of 2020, they had zero active cases of COVID-19 in New Zealand. It’s a small country. It’s an island different than the US. The point remains that when leaders behave with both compassion and action when they behave with humility and ambition, good things happen.
The other thing that you talk about is kindness. That’s something that I resonate with as well. I interviewed the author of a book about deep kindness and the old way of selling, which is my background it’s Always Be Closing, ABC. I have changed it to a new acronym of ABK, which is Always Be Kind. I have people write it on Post-it notes, post it on their mirrors, phones and their computers.
If we can’t be kind to the way we talk to ourselves, how can we possibly give it out to others? I would love to hear how you incorporate kindness, compassion and humility into leaders. I also interviewed Tim Sanders and he goes, “Sometimes people confuse being nice with being weak and it’s not true at all that nice and smart people are successful.” It’s not being kind. Much like you were saying, humility is not something to be avoided but instead, embraced.
I agree with that. Many people have this misconception that being kind is being weak. “She’s sweet or He is so nice.” That’s not what we are talking about here within the context of leadership. We are talking about being kind in a way that you care about the other person, whether the other person is your employee, a client that you are trying to sell something or you care about them. You want good things to happen to them with that concept of kindness, compassion and humility. My background is in healthcare so I want to share with you this healthcare story.
This is a story that was told to me by a physician, a friend of mine who I was working with. Let’s call him Dr. Lee. That’s not his real name. Let’s call him Dr. Lee for the sake of the story. Dr. Lee told me about the time when his diabetic patients came to see him. The patient was there for a regular foot exam. Now that specific patient was severely obese. We are talking about someone very big. Now the patient came in for the foot exam. After the foot exam was over, the patient was sitting on the chair but was having a hard time putting on his socks and shoes back because of his size.
What Dr. Lee did, he noticed that the patient was struggling so very quietly and gently, he went towards that patient. He knelt on his knees and kindly helped that patient. He slipped his socks on, put his hand behind his foot and allowed him to put his shoes on. At the moment, that patient was at first embarrassed but then he started feeling an overwhelming sense of gratitude. He thought to himself, “Look at this prestigious doctor. He’s kneeling in the very humble way, in a compassionate way to help me put my socks on and my shoes on.”
Six months later, that patient came back to Dr. Lee having lost 60 pounds. He told him, “I have been trying to lose weight all of my life. I have never been able to lose more than 5 pounds at a time but because of the act of humility and compassion that you showed me that day, I lost 60 pounds. I have always been sabotaging myself when I tried to lose weight but because you showed me that compassion, I was able to show that compassion to myself.”
He said, “Mark my word, in six months, I’m going to come back having lost another 60 pounds.” That story shows the power of kindness, compassion and humility. When we talk about these traits, we are not only talking about the basic stuff like saying, “Please and thank you,” and all of that. We are going beyond that. We are talking about an act that transformed the life of the other person because you show them how much you care about them.
Humbitious: The real test is how do we behave when the world punches us in the mouth? When we’re in crisis, when someone on our team commits a mistake, when you, yourself, make a mistake. Are you still humble, kind, and compassionate?
When we are talking about leaders in organizations, they all can do similar stuff that showed their employees that you care about them as whole human beings. Same with entrepreneurs or salespeople. You can do similar acts of kindness towards the person that you are working with to show them that this is not only a transaction. “I don’t care about me selling you this product. I want to build a relationship with you because I want what is in your best interest.” That’s how I understand and I studied these concepts within the context of business.
The need to be seen, heard and acknowledged that we have as a child when you jump in a pool and I watch me swim or whatever it is to your parent it doesn’t go away in a job. When you can make employees or patients feel seen and heard, not only a cog in a wheel, then you get incredible results from them because they feel seen and heard.
The flip side of all this is we still get triggered. We hope that our best self shows up and we have acts of kindness and compassion. There can be situations where we get embarrassed. You wrote about this in a blog about this one-second gap that we can have between feeling angry, scared or whatever the issue is before we relax. Can you talk a little bit about that?
[bctt tweet=”Another aspect of humility is recognizing what you don’t know to try to know what you don’t know.” username=”John_Livesay”]
A great philosopher once said, “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” Do you know who that great philosopher is? Mike Tyson. How does this connect to your question? I believe that most of us want to be humble, kind and compassionate, especially when the world around us is behaving the way that we want it to behave.
When I wake up in the morning, the sun is shining, it’s a beautiful day, I have my morning coffee, my kids are listening and there’s no traffic on the road, I tend to be very humble, kind and compassionate but that is not the real test. The real test is how do we behave when the world punches us in the mouth? When they are in crisis, when someone on your team commits a mistake, when you, yourself, make a mistake. Are you still humble, kind and compassionate? That’s why it’s so important to remain calm under pressure. It’s important to delay the response.
Viktor Frankl once said, “Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our freedom. Freedom to choose how we are going to react.” We are all are getting stimuli from the environment. We are all getting stuff that’s happening to us that irritates us. It may be a colleague in a meeting that rolls their eyes on you, your boss that dismisses your idea, a client that you are going to see or you call who behaves rudely. All of these are happening around us.
We can’t control that but what we can control is our reaction to it. What we can control is how to fall. That’s the One-Second Rule. It could be more than one second. It’s about giving yourself space to react intentionally, rather than to react on autopilot, to lose your cool, yell and scream or get upset, irritated and all of that.
You can still do that later on if it’s appropriate but at least you are doing it intentionally. You are driving the emotion rather than the emotion is driving you. There’s a concept in psychology that people refer to is called the Amygdala hijack. Very briefly, this region in our brain says the emotional region. When we don’t take time to pause, when we are reacting emotionally, the amygdala literally takes over the whole brain and the rational parts of the brain stopped.
There’s no rationality and no logic anymore. An example of that is when you get an email that annoys you and you reply right away in all caps. Five seconds later, you are like, “What have I done? Why did I act in this way?” The One-Second Rule may be the One Night’s Rule, which is sleep on it. Don’t reply to this email right away but allow yourself to be calm, controlled and think about it before you react with it. This is not a call to be submissive or accept everything that people tell you. Not at all.
You can still send an angry email in the morning but at least, now the anger is controlled. You are intentional about you being angry may be appropriate to go and confront that colleague that dismissed your idea but when you do it, you are doing it in a way that you are driving the emotion, rather than the emotion is driving you.
That’s key because where the thinker is thinking our thoughts and not the other way around. I remember Dr. Wayne Dyer, when he was alive said, “When you squeeze an orange, you’ve always got an orange juice. Doesn’t matter what time of day. You squeeze it in the corner, it’s still orange juice,” but what happens when someone squeezes us, we are pressured and in the corner? Do we still get kindness and love or do we get a little anger?
[bctt tweet=”In addition to compassion, what people want from leaders is action. ” username=”John_Livesay”]
I was parked in a parking lot. I wasn’t driving and someone bumped me with their car. I was like, “For God’s sakes, I’m not even driving.” He bumped into my car and I was like, “Take a breath.” When I looked and he didn’t damage the car. It was this big truck and I had said to the driver, “Back up,” and they dinged it again, then my amygdala got hijacked because I was like, “What? You made the same mistake twice?”
You realized that person probably got their amygdala hijacked. They were so nervous. They went the wrong way and didn’t do it intentionally. Once I calmed down I thought, “You have made the same mistake more than once sometimes yourself,” but you don’t have a lot of compassion for somebody when your brain has been hijacked like that.
Let’s get back to reminding everybody if they want more of this insight, skills and takeaways, the book again is called Humbitious: The Power of Low Ego, High Drive Leadership that allows people to realize that they are not mutually exclusive, you can have a low ego and still be a high drive high-performance leader.
To dig a little bit deeper into this concept of humility, what does this concept mean and how do we combine it with ambition, sometimes when you look at the word, it helps you go back to the origin of the word. Sometimes I do that. I’m a professor. I went through the Latin origin of the word humility. Now the Latin origin is humus. What humus mean is close to the ground or close to the Earth. Think of that definition and its application to leadership, and business situations. For someone humble and close to the ground or the Earth, how does that look like in a real-life leadership position?
Let me share with you the story of a leader that not a lot of people are familiar with. Although, he was the CEO and Founder of one of the biggest companies that we all know. This is a story of a guy called Jim Sinegal, the Cofounder and CEO of Costco. We all know Costco. I don’t think anyone is not aware of Costco. We all love Costco.
Jim Sinegal, when he was CEO of Costco and when he cofounded it, if you want us to go and talk to him on any given day, you couldn’t find him in his office. The company headquarters is in Washington State but he was never there. The reason he was never there, it’s because every single day, he still kept playing and visited a different Costco store. Think of that.
Some days he would visit more than one store. Why did he do that? He would show up like that with a name tag that said, “Jim.” He would go into the store with no entourage, no fanfare and he would start talking to the employees working at that specific store. In a very informal conversation, he would ask them, “What do you like about working at Costco? What are some things that you need so you can do your job better? How can we help you? How can we support you?”
[bctt tweet=”When leaders behave with both compassion and action, when they behave with humility and ambition, good things happen. ” username=”John_Livesay”]
In the same way, he would walk up to customers and say, “Why do you like shopping at Costco? There’s a stem club down the road. Why don’t you shop there?” Every single week he would do that, then on Friday, he would fly back to the offices, meet with his executive team and make decisions based on what he learned.
When we think about, what does humility mean? What does this abstract concept mean? That’s what it means. It’s close to the ground or the Earth. Being close to the people that you are leading. He didn’t stay in his ivory tower, in his corner office, closes the door and makes decisions based on what he thought was the right way to do it. He listened to the people and that’s how he made the decision.
Humbitious: One of the main aspects of humility is to be open-minded to realize that you do not have a monopoly over the truth.
One of the main aspects of humility is to be open-minded to realize that you do not have a monopoly over the truth. You are confident in your abilities, experience, qualification. You have done this before but still, you don’t know everything. That’s why you need to be open-minded. In humility research, we call it teachability, that you are willing to be teachable, whether you are talking to a fellow executive or the janitor in your organization. You go into that conversation with curiosity. You go into it with the open-mindedness that, “I’m going to learn something new from this conversation. I don’t know everything.”
I have been reading a lot of autobiographies of movie Directors like Mike Nichols. They obviously have their own ideas, they were also open to other people, the actor’s ideas. If somebody else had an idea of how an ending should come that they were struggling with, they were open to anybody’s input. I love the Costco story. It wasn’t only talking to customers but talking to the employees and getting feedback from both.
I think that shows the willingness to hear both sides of how you can improve and not like, “I don’t care what the employees think. I care what the customers think,” and vice versa. You need both, which is it’s great. Any last thought or do you want to send someone to a particular website to learn more about you as a speaker or a coach?
[bctt tweet=”One of the main aspects of humility is to be open-minded to realize that you do not have a monopoly over the truth.” username=”John_Livesay”]
They can go to my website AmerKaissi.com as well as to anywhere where books are sold. They can get themselves a copy of Humbitious. My hope is we change the way with humility. Let’s stopped doing it as a weakness but we recognize that it’s a strength. It takes courage to be humble, especially when we are combining it with ambition and with competence.
You remind me of the research that Brené Brown does on shame. You are doing it on humility, which obviously the world needs both. Thank you so much for your work and for sharing your insights with us.
I appreciate that. That’s the ultimate form of flattery to be in the same sentence as Brené Brown.
Thanks again.
Thank you. I appreciate it.
Important Links
- AmerKaissi.com
- Trinity University
- Intangibles
- Humbitious
- Studer Group
- American College of Healthcare Executives
- MEDI
- Diana Hendel – Past Episode
- Tim Sanders – Past Episode
- Better Selling Through Storytelling Method Online Course
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