Libby Gill, The Hope Driven Leader

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TSP 157 | Hope Driven LeaderEpisode Summary:

Hopes starts when we believe that change is possible. Being a hope-driven leader means believing that whatever you do makes a difference for the entire team. If hope is one of your foundations in leadership, you are leading by inspiring and informing; not by demanding and ordering. Libby Gill believes that when you become this kind of leader, you will be able to determine the outcome of your team’s performance. She shares that hope and happiness are key to keeping up with the velocity of technological changes as leader.

Are you someone who’s hopeful or are you someone who’s pessimistic? Our guest, Libby Gill, is the expert on hope. In fact, she’s written a book called The Hope-Driven Leader. She said, “Hope is what is connected to taking action. That’s the difference between hope and optimism even though they are both emotional cousins. It’s hard to be hopeless and happy at the same time.” She gives us specific ways that we can bring hope into our lives and into our careers. Enjoy the episode.

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Libby Gill, The Hope Driven Leader

I have Libby Gill as my guest. She is the former head of communications and public relations for big companies like Sony, Universal, and Turner Broadcasting. She’s now the CEO of LA-based Libby Gill & Company, which is an executive coaching and consulting firm. She guides emerging and established leaders and organizations like Acura, Capital One, Disney, Honda, the big boys and women. Libby shared her success strategies on everything from CNN to the Today Show, to Time, The New York Times and many more. She’s the author of four books. The latest one is The Hope-Driven Leader: Harness the Power of Positivity at Work. I’m very excited to have her on the show. Welcome, Libby.

Thank you, John. I’m happy to be here.

One of the things that we didn’t touch on in your little introduction is that you’re also a keynote speaker.

Yes, I am. I just did a keynote in Kansas City and it’s exciting. I know you do the same thing, John. It’s a lot of fun to be able to spread your message and get to connect with people whose paths you might not ever cross otherwise.

You had all these great jobs in corporate entertainment, which is very challenging to get let alone decide to make that leap to be an entrepreneur. What made you decide to do that?

I’d been in television. I headed communications at those three studios and after a long time launching television shows and promoting our studio and our celebrities and our executives, what I found I loved was turning my team, my kids, and in my world anybody under 30 is still a kid, into real leaders. That was a joy. The studio could be chaotic and crazy swirling around us and I typically had the youngest and greenest staff of any department because what we did was very time and labor‑intensive. You got to know people and learned what made them tick. I just found that such a joyful process to help people sort out their own career path and help boost them along the way.

What’s some of the things that you find most challenging with leaders since you’ve had a front row seat to them? The biggest thing that people are dealing with now is just the velocity of change. We’re all faced with technological changes. There are always sorts of advances and things. It’s very difficult to keep up, regulations, political atmosphere, all of these things. In the corporate world, it’s just compounded by the fact that the people are managing human beings that have to adapt to all these changes. If you think about it, the rapidity of change right now, the acceleration, this may be the slowest rate of change we ever deal with in our lives again. We’re not going to slow down. We’re going to continue to speed up.

TSP 157 | Hope Driven Leader

Hope Driven Leader: The biggest thing that people are dealing with now is just the velocity of change.

I’ve seen presentations on this. It’s the hockey stick. Everyone thinks, “I’ll eventually catch my breath again.” It’s not the case at all with artificial intelligence and all the other things coming.

Just think about driverless cars. We think, “Who would have shopped online?” but now everyone does and yet, Amazon’s only been around since 1994. To us, it feels like it’s been here forever. All of these things, Airbnb and Uber, that affect us in our personal lives, artificial intelligence and internet grocery shopping, all the things that have changed professionally. Dealing with people who are really hardwired, we are not very skillful as animals. We look at things negatively and that’s the way we’ve survived. We don’t have a lot of defensive skills. We’ve had to weigh out who’s in our path, what’s in our path, how are we going to respond to this? Our fight or flight response is kicked in to high gear when we’re dealing with all these changes in the workplace, even though we don’t always realize it’s just our primitive brain reacting as it’s supposed to.

It’s interesting you talked about Amazon because one of the things I work with people on is getting their pitch clear and concise. I tell people, “Remember when Amazon just sold books,” and people forget. I said, “They were known for one thing and everybody in business needs to be known for one thing first before you’re known for all the other things you could do.” I’m guessing that that becomes one of the challenges that you see in the corporate world and in the clients you coach, which is they’re trying to be known for a lot of things and then they end up not being known for any one thing.

The truth is you don’t have to be good. Amazon is its own unique category like Oprah Winfrey. You can’t compare anybody to either of those. For most organizations, they only have to be good at a few things, their core competency, and then they can branch from there. That first thing is figuring out, “How do I get everybody marching in the same direction?” We’ve been taught that there is a leadership style, but the fact is there are so many different styles. When leaders can figure out, “What’s my superpower? What am I great at and how do I develop that so I can lead people in the way that works for me?,” that’s up to you.

What’s your superpower?

My superpower is what I write about. I feel I’ve got a good handle on inspiring people to go through all these changes. I went through a lot of changes myself. I grew up on a couple of different continents. I went to six different high schools including two in my senior year. How do you go through all these changes? When I started in the corporate world, in corporate entertainment, I started this little company that was founded by a real legend in the business. Norman Lear was the guy who created All in The Family and all those great shows and I thought, “I’m in this mid-sized company founded by this legend. I’m going to learn so much.” About five minutes later, that company was bought by Columbia Pictures and then by Coca-cola and then by Sony. It was either raise your hand and go with it and figure it out as you go or stay in this little place. I thought, “I’m just going to keep raising my hand whether I know this or not.” In five years, I went from being an assistant in Norman Lear’s company to being head of the publicity, advertising, and promotion for Sony’s television business.

I’m a big fan of his as well. In fact, he has a podcast out so let’s give a shout-out to Norman Lear’s podcast because it’s fantastic. He’s in his 90s, talk about staying relevant, healthy and funny and still working. It’s just amazing. His podcast is called All of the Above with Norman Lear. Since we both are admirers of him, we might as well send people to that podcast as well. Let’s talk about your book, The Hope-Driven Leader. What made you write about hope?

Somebody pointed out to me that I had been talking and writing about hope for a long time and I had a book that came out years ago called Traveling Hopefully. It’s about getting over the negative stories of the past, letting go of that baggage whether it’s personal or professional or whatever it is. I kept talking about hope and I had to sneak it in especially at keynotes because people thought, “It was fuzzy or abstract.” The more I study about hope, I had the good fortune to learn about this body of science that comes out of the medical community and positive psychology called hope theory. It is the research about hope. I was able to turn my personal obsession into a professional one and study and learn about the benefits of being a hopeful leader. That’s what kicked it in to high gear.

Is there a big difference between being hopeful and optimistic?

There is. Obviously, they’re related. They’re emotional cousins. Here’s the difference. Optimism is a generalized sense of, “It’s all going to be fine. It’s all going to turn out okay,” which is great, but hope links that to actions. It makes it specific and situational and focused on the future. In other words, “If I believe this and I behave accordingly, I’m going to go in this direction.” When you see it with an open-eye sense of reality, “This may not be easy but I see the pitfalls. I see the obstacles. I know there are some out there that I may not even see yet, but this is so important. I’m going to keep going towards that vision.” That’s the difference between hope and optimism. It’s action-based.

[Tweet “Hope and optimism are emotional cousins.”]

If we distinguish hope versus happiness, would you say that everyone who is hopeful is therefore happier than those who aren’t?

It’s hard to be hopeless and happy. They are clearly linked. There’s so much research about it now which I love, but according to the data, it is about being having a positive outlook on life and absence of major stressors. We’re not all happy all the time, but many of us have that happiness set point that people talk about. Hope is very much directed towards the future and based on, “If I do this, then this will happen.” It starts with a fundamental belief that change is possible. We think about that and think, “Doesn’t everybody believe that?” Think about someone. We’ve all got someone in our own life that that doesn’t believe change is possible. It’s that, “It is what it is,” person. “No matter what I do, nothing will change.” We all know one or several of those people.

Hope starts with a belief that change is possible and then an expectation that what you do as an individual is what makes the difference. You determine the outcome. It’s not determined by your boss or your spouse or the world at large. It’s up to you. When you put those together and you have that future vision that is so visceral and so intense and so inspiring, and the trick is, and what you’re so good at, John, is then you have to be able to articulate that to others. You’re leading yourself, which is okay but when you’re a leader, you can lead by demanding and ordering and requiring or you can lead by inspiring and informing.

Let’s double click on what you said about not being dependent on outside events to determine whether you make the choice to be happy. A lot of people think, “My boss is my boss and the marketplace is what it is. It’s never going to get better for us. My boss is never suddenly going to be someone who gives acknowledgement or whatever.” What do you say to those people of how they can find hope even if they’re in a culture that doesn’t exude it?

There are people who say, “I’ve got a terrible boss and I’m not going anywhere.” Hope is not rose-colored glasses. You look at that with a sense of reality. That’s the difference between what the hope pioneers, the hope theorists coined true hope versus false hope. In false hope, it’s the person who says, “Maybe someday it will change. My boss will suddenly wake up and be a different human being.” That’s not going to happen. That’s false hope, but true hope is looking at it, “What can I do to influence the situation?” Honestly, if you’ve done everything you can and it’s not getting better and you’re going to work with your stomach in knots, then wake up and look around and say, “This is never going to change, but I can. I can look for another department in my company. I can look for a different job. I can look for another way to handle this.”

That’s where the risk-taking comes in and that’s where as human beings, we trigger those biological fears and we get scared. “What if it’s worse over here? What if I get a meaner boss?” Those things are possible but you don’t know and we never have 100% of the data. It’s up to you to either try it out or make peace with where you are with a less than positive or fulfilling environment. For me, that was never going to happen. That’s why I worked in my corporate career at three different studios and I wasn’t jumping ship constantly. That was over eighteen years. It was always this sense of, “I think there’s another adventure out there. Let me try that.”

Starting your own business in your 40s, I had never run my own business. I’d never even thought about it. That was a pretty daunting time to think, “Let me go be an entrepreneur.” It was just time for a change and frankly if the right corporate job had come along, I probably would have grabbed it. Being a speaker and teaching and writing and training, all of those things, it’s hard to find that job. Instead, I decided I just create it.

We both have done the corporate world and now work for ourselves. For you, was it a difficult transition?

It was difficult in the sense of, “I no longer had that nice universal title. I’m no longer senior vice president of something at a Fortune 500 company.” That disappeared. Then you have that moment of, “Will the phone ever ring or will I figure out what the heck I’m doing?” I had those same fears everybody else does, but I had some money in the bank and I had a plan. I’d never been a great person about soliciting help, but I was the sole support of my kids and myself. I’ve done favors for people for all these years and it’s time to ask and I started asking. At first, you suck it up and say, “Would you mentor me and guide me?” I went to a former boss at Sony who today is one of my real heroes of that corporate world and just asked him if we could have a quarterly breakfast. He said, “No.” “How about monthly? How about you pick up the phone anytime you hit a snag?” He later told me, “I had no clue what you were doing.” I said, “Neither did I, so that made two of us.”

TSP 157 | Hope Driven Leader

Hope Driven Leader: Raise your hand, be vulnerable and ask for the help you need and you might just get it.

He was a business guy and he shepherded me through this process. He never let me pick up a check. He always answered questions. He introduced me to other people who were so instrumental and that’s the first hurdle people have to get over. Raise your hand, be vulnerable and ask for the help you need and you might just get it. There are a lot of nice people out in the world as you discover when you start asking all of them for help. I discovered the art of the small favor, “Could you help me do this one thing?” It sends a signal that you need some help. You’re not going to suck up somebody’s time and energy without their consent, but that you need a little help and could they do it. You find out how gracious people can be and it’s pretty humbling.

The big takeaway for me is that you built a relationship already with someone who weren’t starting from scratch asking for the small favors or mentoring without having given something to some people in the past. That’s important for people to realize that there’s always something you can give other people who are helping you whether it’s advice themselves. Maybe you’re an expert in social media and they’re not or whatever it might be, to come up with ways to offer your help back because it is a two-way street.

For myself just launching a podcast, I realized the tech part of it, how to edit it and promote it, I didn’t know how to do any of that. I realized that if I was going to invest in my own career, I had to hire some people to help me as well. There’s not only the small favor and the mentoring that you can do, but sometimes you have to hire people to help you as well for skills you don’t have.

You have to do it before you think you can afford it. Entrepreneurs, whether it’s a college intern or a virtual assistant, whatever it is that you bring onboard or whomever, you find that you’ve got to focus on your highest level activity and if that’s marketing and providing the services to your clients, nobody can get out there and give a keynote for us. We’ve got to do that, but somebody can book our travel. You start looking at what can you shift to someone else so that you can focus your time.

Ideally, if you can spend 80% of your time and that’s arbitrary, maybe it’s 60%, maybe it’s 90%, on what you do best and let other people take care of whether it is the technical or the social media or the travel planning or the outreach, whatever that is, so that you can be giving back. Social media is such a good way to provide value to people. Through your podcast, through our platforms, through posting articles on LinkedIn or wherever you do what you do, you’ve got a great way to open doors and give something to people before you start asking. You got to give them some value and build those relationships.

[Tweet “It’s hard to be hopeless and happy at the same time.”]

If someone is a leader at a company, even if it’s their own company or a big company, and they say, “I think my team could use some hope or motivation or just start to get them onboard with what my new vision is going to be, to adapt to all of this disruption happening,” what would be some tips you have for leaders?

I always tell clients, “Don’t overlook the obvious. What you know is in your head but it’s not in everybody else’s head.” The first thing obviously is to share your purpose. Make sure everybody understands, “This is what we do and this is what we care about.” That you’re all onboard together and that they have a vivid picture of the future. You’ve got to connect everybody from your brand new college recruit that just graduated and this is their first job. They’ve got to understand where the future is just like your high-level CFO or another high-level sophisticated employee. We’ve all got to understand and articulate where we’re going.

One of the amazing things that I see, I do a lot of work in healthcare, is when a medical device company that I worked with brought in people who had made the pacemaker for the patient. They connected the person who made that pacemaker by serial number to the patient that had that pacemaker inside them. Can you imagine if you’re a guy, you’re a manufacturer essentially, and suddenly you meet somebody whose device that you built is in their body? Talk about a powerful connection for people that don’t always see the end results. As a leader, you’ve got to connect the dots for people. They could be a file clerk but they’ve got to see, “This is the big picture of what we do. This is how we change lives by our product or services, the information we provide.” That’s your job as a leader, to get people fired up and excited about their role so they don’t feel like, “I’m just a corporate drone or a cog in the wheel.” “No. You’re a vital part of this organization and here’s why.”

That’s one thing and that requires that as leaders, we got to know our people. If you’ve got a company of 25 or 150, you can know every single person. If you’ve got a company of 30,000 or 300,000 people, you can’t know all those people personally, but you can know your top line people. Then they know the level below them. As long as that message is trickling down about, “Here’s what we stand for, here’s what we care about and here’s where we’re going, here’s how you connect to that vision,” then everybody is feeding that sense of hopefulness all the way through the organization.

What brands do you think exude hopefulness that are out there? Is it a Starbucks or is it anything like that that you can point to?

Starbucks is one of them certainly because they’re one of the good guys. We know what Howard Schultz is doing in terms of fair trade and all the things that they put back into the organization. I love those companies like TOMS shoes that has their One for One initiative where they buy a pair of shoes, they donate a pair of shoes. I’ve been over to TOMS’ headquarters which is here in LA. It’s in Venice. Seeing what they do and why it’s so cool and, and how they’ve got those organizations in countries around the world that are set up to provide those shoes. That’s so important to our Millennials. You look at the stats. Millennials are going to connect and look at now. To get just a touch political, but two of the big companies, both Walmart and DICK’S Sporting Goods have decided, “We’re going to do what we can and what we feel is appropriate to stem some of the gun violence that’s out there,” and at risk to their own bottom line.

DICK’S took some of those assault rifles off the shelf, but I think they’re going to get it back. It was the right thing to do. It was a smart thing to do because Millennials want those purpose-driven companies. When they think about, “Where am I going to spend my sporting good dollars? Whether it’s to buy a basketball or whether it’s to buy a hunting rifle, I’m going to go somewhere that gets it. In my worldview, they get it.” Understanding because by 2020, our workforce is going to be 60% of Millennials, so we better understand what they care about. Those are the kinds of purpose-driven companies. We don’t all have to have the same point of view, but we should have a point of view and be able to stand up and say, “This is what I believe and why.”

What I’m hearing is that companies that have a clear purpose and a mission for why they’re in business beyond making money are more likely to have a culture and a mindset of being hopeful than those who don’t have a purpose except to make money. Would that be fair?

Absolutely. I just saw a piece on a show about Beautycounter, which I know because I have friends and colleagues that are involved in it. That started because the founder didn’t want people wearing makeup with all sorts of ingredients that had been banned through much of the developed world but not here in the US. She started with, “I’m going to make these products,” and then found a way to market and sell them. That was a real mission. That started with somebody who had a real purpose.

Is there any little tidbit you can share with us that you haven’t already from what you’ve learned from all the research on hope theory?

One thing is about the way you connect with your teams. It didn’t necessarily come out of hope theory, but some of the research that I did about the engagement with your team. It flies in the face of conventional wisdom that in those big team meetings, which is one of the major complaints of my corporate clients and I’m a big fan of, “Start your meetings at a weird time like 9:21 AM.” It sends a message that, “This meeting is different and it’s important and you better show up on time because we’re starting at 9:21 AM.” Teams are engaged and don’t just sit there and listen and interact with the boss.

There was one MIT study that I cited in my book, The Hope-Driven Leader, where they put devices on people that monitored what their body language was, who they were talking to, who they were listening to, the volume of their voice, and what they found was the level of energy and interaction was as important as the substance of the meeting. The fact that people were talking to each other and they were engaging with people besides the leader, then the other part that was so critical was exploration.

Team members that go out and meet with other people outside of their immediate group or team and bring that information back to the team. The explorers provided a level of not only energy and information, but they brought in new ideas and new risk taking. Things that people could act upon that they might not have stumbled upon in their immediate world. It is that idea of energy and engagement and external exploration. Go to that conference. Listen to that speaker. When I get to go to an event and there are other speakers and the travel schedule allows, I’m first in the door. I want to hear what they have to say and also how they say it because that’s so important to how we engage.

Two things there. What you’re talking about being an explorer reminds me of Tim Sanders’ book Dealstorming, which is all about collaborative selling and having other departments interact with each other and all be part of the same vision. I love that. It’s so funny you brought up other keynote speakers because I’m giving a talk and there’s a speaker that’s speaking the night before on the topic of focus and then I’m giving my talk on Getting to Yes. I’m flying in early so that I can start mingling with the audience at dinner but also hear what that speaker has to say about focus so that I can then incorporate it into my talk the next morning. For the audience, there’s a through line of what they just heard the night before and what I’m saying so it’s all consistent. Doing things like that make you an explorer, make you more relevant, and ultimately then the audience gets more energized.

It connects it all to them. It makes it one overarching theme where you’ve got different information and different takeaways from the other speaker, but it all makes sense in that same world. Just as business people, people are paying a lot of money to go hear some of these people like you speak. Why would we not want to sit in and soak up that knowledge and that information? It’s the best way to learn about our own business.

TSP 157 | Hope Driven Leader

Hope Driven Leader: Hopeful people tend to be stewards of our own future.

I do have a question for you around the connection research, if there’s any, on hope and health, or optimism. Are people who are more hopeful healthier or when you get a diagnosis of something, does hope come into play?

It’s interesting that you asked that because where I started with the research of hope was having the good fortune to read a book called The Anatomy of Hope by a man named Dr. Jerome Groopman who’s a Harvard-trained oncologist. He was one of the early researchers in AIDS and then he himself had this major pain issue. He had a back problem that for twenty years plagued him and then he went in a completely different way. He went to sports medicine and was able to cure it about 90%, which was interesting. What he said was early in his career as an oncologist and a clinician, thinking he was doing the right thing, he would give so much information about their diagnosis to the patient and their families. Then he realized they were shutting down. They felt so hopeless. It’s like, “There’s nothing I can do.” They didn’t participate in their own healing process. Part of that is mental and part of it is the physical follow through. There is definitely a brain chemical factor. When you feel like, “I’m going to get through this,” your brain releases endorphins and enkephalins that suppress pain, that boost the immune system. He saw that these patients weren’t able to do that.

TSP 157 | Hope Driven Leader

The Hope-Driven Leader: Harness the Power of Positivity at Work

As we often do, he swung too far to the other side and started limiting the information and saw the people were getting that sense of false hope. They felt like, “I guess no news is good news. I’m going to be okay,” even when that wasn’t necessarily true. He had to find that spot in the center where he could give them the diagnosis and the information, but also leave them that sense of possibility even when the situation was dire, that there was always hope, that there was always a possibility. He didn’t rob them of that sense because he knew he was not playing God. He didn’t have all the answers. There’s definitely a connection. In my book, I cite this study that was done in San Antonio where people followed people who self-identified as hopeful and hopeless and the ones who said they were hopeless, no surprise tended to be smokers, they overate, they over drink, they didn’t exercise. They had a shorter lifespan than people who said they were hopeful. Hopeful people, we tend to be stewards of our own future, but people who did not feel hopeless did not. The morbidity rate, it came much younger than the group that identified themselves as hopeful. There is absolutely a correlation.

The book is again The Hope-Driven Leader: Harness the Power of Positivity at Work. Any last words of advice for the listeners?

Just for people to think about how can you feed hope? There’s no neutrality. You’re either feeding it or you’re starving it. In whatever way is meaningful to you, feed hope into your environment.

How can people follow you on social media, Libby?

Go to LibbyGill.com, my website. I’m active on Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter.

Thanks for sharing your hopeful insights and we’re all inspired to feed it going forward. Thank you so much.

Thank you.

 

 

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