In the latest episode of Le Podcast on Emerging Leadership, that was a fantastic pleasure to have Russ Laraway, a distinguished leader with 30 years of operational experience, including roles at Google, Twitter, and as the co-founder of Candor Inc. Russ shares valuable insights from his book, “When They Win, You Win,” and discusses his innovative approach to leadership and career development.
Key Learnings:
- Leadership Behaviors for Success:
- Russ emphasizes the importance of focusing on a small number of measurable leadership behaviors that predict employee engagement and business performance.
- The Three Buckets: Direction, Coaching, and Career:
- Direction: Setting clear goals and expectations for teams.
- Coaching: Providing ongoing support and feedback to help employees grow.
- Career: Engaging in meaningful career conversations to align personal and professional growth.
- Career Conversations Framework:
- Life Story Conversation: Understanding an individual’s pivotal moments to identify their core values.
- Career Vision Statement: Helping employees articulate their dream job and long-term career goals.
- Career Action Plan: Creating a detailed plan with actionable steps to achieve their career vision.
- Building Trust and Retention:
- Investing in employees’ career development fosters loyalty and reduces turnover. Managers who genuinely support their team members’ growth are more likely to retain top talent.
- Prioritization and Work-Life Balance:
- Russ highlights the importance of prioritizing tasks by subtracting non-essential work to maintain a healthy work-life balance, ensuring long-term career success and personal well-being.
References:
Russ’s insights provide a fresh perspective on leadership, emphasizing the importance of measurable behaviors, meaningful career conversations, and prioritization. Tune in to the full episode of Le Podcast on Emerging Leadership to explore these concepts and learn how to implement them in your organization.
Here is the transcript:
Alexis: Welcome to Le Podcast on Emerging Leadership. I’m your host, Alexis Monville. In today’s episode, we are honored to have Russ Laraway, an accomplished leader with 30 years of operational experience. Russ has held significant roles, from being a company commander in the Marine Corps to managing positions at Google and Twitter. He co-founded Candor, Inc. with best-selling author Kim Scott, and has served as Chief People Officer at Qualtrics. Russ is also the author of the insightful book “When They Win, You Win: Being a Great Manager Is Simpler Than You Think.”
Welcome to “Le Podcast on Emerging Leadership,” Russ! How do you typically introduce yourself to someone you’ve just met?
Russ: Yeah, that’s a wild question. I just say my name at this point. I don’t really say anything else. And I, and I have some reasons for that. I [00:01:00] think, Alexis, what you’ll gather from me over the next several minutes together is I’m a very intentional human being in, Ways that I think are perhaps uncommon and might seem a little bit nutty to people.
This is one such example I realized that what’s common Is that we often introduce ourselves and we sort of lead with our really our professional identity our title and company or whatever And that’s not even probably in my top five identities. I’m a dad, I’m a husband, I’m a friend.
And so I started to just become really conscious about that. Additionally, I kind of have to say that as my career has transpired, I’ve had some really, really good jobs that are, I don’t know, I think you might say objectively one might say.
They’re kind of impressive. Then I get into this problem where, gosh, I don’t want to sound like I’m bragging ever either. And so I really started to sort of subordinate [00:02:00] the professional identity in introing myself and just kind of wait. And if someone wants to talk about what do you do, I’m happy to, happy to talk about that.
Alexis: And what happens when you do that?
Russ: We have this house here in Utah in the United States. And it’s a very unusual house. It’s really neat, but it’s unusual. And when we show people the house and take them through, because. You know, some of the features and because of the size, it’s very common.
People, people think they’re being slick, but this has happened now like a hundred times, somebody will say, so what do you do? Because they’re looking at this house and they’re like, how the heck, you know, that kind of thing. And it’s funny, the first couple of times I realized, well, I finally, it took me a minute.
I’m a little slow sometimes to realize what people were, they were trying to triangulate. Like some version of how can you afford this? Right. So then that makes me even want to sort of subordinate the professional identity even more. And then I just generally will say I’ve been, I’ve been an executive in tech. So that’s kind of what I’ll say. Because that [00:03:00] is really, I know what they’re really asking and that helps explain, you know, this house. So I don’t know. It’s a really wild question. I’ve been very intentional about it over the last several years where. I’ll just let someone else, if they want to peel that onion and they want to find out what I’ve really done and ask questions out of genuine curiosity, I’ll go there with them.
But generally I just say my name and let other people kind of take the lead and see where our introductions take us. I don’t know. What do you, what do you think about that?
Alexis: That really resonates with me. For years, I introduced myself to anybody, regardless of the context, by stating what I was doing for a living. Sometimes, people were impressed, and sometimes not, but it always led the conversation to professional stuff.
While I would have loved to discuss something else. I am an avid book reader of fiction and non-fiction. I would love to hear about that or anything you are interested in, and necessarily what you are doing for a living.
In short, it really resonates with me!
Russ: Well, glad to hear that. It’s also it’s been frankly a mouthful the past few years. You know, I’m, I go from chief people officer at Qualtrics to chief people officer at Goodwater. By the way, wrote a book sort of in between those two. So I’m an author. Then switched over to operating partner at Goodwater.
So that’s kind of two titles in a little over two years and author and chief people officer of culture. And by the way, now I’m, I’m actually with some buddies. I’m writing a screenplay.
Alexis: Oh
Russ: and, and so, you know, you just, it’s just tough to, it’s tough to fit it all, you know, say, say my name and see where it goes.
I’m way more proud of, my sons and my marriage and my,, that I’m a good friend to people, I’m just way more proud of those things than anything else. So yeah, cool. Fun question. Great question. I’ve done a bunch of podcasts, I think, as you know, and that is the first time I’ve been asked that question and that’s really fun.
Alexis: I love it! My friend Michael Doyle, who is a great coach and a great communicator and also the co-author of my second book, wrote that question for me. I love that you liked it!
Your book, “When They Win, You Win,” proposes that being a great manager is simpler than one might think. Can you tell us more?
Russ: Yeah. Why I wrote the book, maybe I’ll start with why I wrote the book. It’s a really simple idea. I believe people deserve to be led well. You know, stop, you know, sort of that’s that idea itself is, can be unpacked for months, but the problem that I have seen and measured, by the way, is that actually people are not being led well and this is kind of hard to believe, in fact, measurably managers have not improved in 30 years.
This is like, you start to combine stuff from Gallup and some other like Qualtrics, other employee experience [00:06:00] companies, and you start to see a pattern that managers are really flailing in the world big time. I have a lot of rigor behind these statements, mathematical rigor behind these statements, as you know, in the intro and part one of the book. And then I thought, well, gee, how can that be? How can we be standing here? Employee engagement is a measurement that’s been around for 30 years. It comes from the field of IO psychology. And it is explained, by the tune of like 70 percent of employee engagement is explained by manager quality.
And employee engagement itself predicts business results. And so you’ve got this really interesting relationship, manager quality, employee engagement, business results, and engagement has not improved in 30 years. Managers have not improved in 30 years. How can that be when I can’t walk 10 steps outside without tripping over another book or podcast or article in HBR about how to be a better leader?
Like, How, how, could it possibly [00:07:00] be the case managers aren’t getting better when there’s a pile of content that’s taller than Mount Everest out there trying to help them be better. So I dug in on, on that and I had this realization. I learned this in my time at Radical Candor this probably my biggest insight I have from my time with Kim there, which I think might be on our agenda to talk about a little later.
So I can come back to that, but I had this realization that One of the reasons managers are failing is because all this content out there, including their training programs in their company, there’s too much stuff. That’s number number one problem is too much. We’re asking managers to pay attention to too many things.
It does not hang together, so there’s not a common system. Let’s say that is pervasive. There’s a lot of like, well, what worked for me, the problem with that is the person you’re learning from isn’t necessarily conscious of exactly why that worked. What was their business context? What was the team context?
What were their executive relationships? Like, what are the things that [00:08:00] contributed to you having success with that leadership advice you’re giving? By the way, worse, the manager who’s receiving the advice is extremely biased in what they choose to opt into or not. They grab for the things that sound familiar, the things there may be even already good at things that sound perhaps easier.
So there’s too much stuff. It doesn’t hang together. And worst of all, none of it is held to measurable account, like whatever leadership, you know, prescription you’re offering. What’s your proof that it’s worth paying attention to? There isn’t any out there. So I said, you know, there’s no wonder people aren’t being led well, systematically or the managers have not improved.
And by the way, like you’ve heard the cliches, people don’t leave bad jobs. They leave bad managers. Like I’m not exactly saying the most controversial idea in the planet. I just was, I was just like, how is it possible? They haven’t actually improved. That seems impossible. Well, that’s how too much stuff doesn’t hang together.
held a measurable account. And so I realized, Oh, you know, the world does not need another person’s opinion about what it [00:09:00] takes to be a great manager. What we need is to measure, measure a set of leadership behaviors, small in number, ideally, that measurably and predictably lead to more engaged employees and better business outcome.
And so my really talented team of quants at Qualtrics and I set about running that. Experiment, you know, we were lucky Qualtrics has an employee experience platform that, you know, it was very natural for us to measure a number of these aspects of the employee experience. And all it took was some cleverness from our people analytics team to mix these things together in a giant stats package with things like ratings and quota attainment and contract renewal rate and in engineering, like lines of code checked in, like any measurement you could find that would indicate business performance.
We could measure the frequency with which managers were showing these behaviors. And of course we could measure employee engagement. And by the way, several other aspects of the employee experience. And so we were able to tease out about a dozen or so. Leadership behaviors that predicted [00:10:00] engaged employees and better business outcomes.
That’s extraordinary. That’s never existed before. That’s the book I wrote and why I wrote it in the books organized by the way, direction, coaching, career. Those are the three buckets, let’s say. Of behaviors direction is a set of behaviors, set of behaviors, their coaching, set of behaviors, career, set of behaviors.
So that’s kind of why I wrote it. That’s the impact we’re hoping to have is let’s demystify this. Let’s take out a bunch of the bias. And let’s focus on a really small number of behaviors that actually work that matter. And, and by the way, in almost any context that these behaviors work.
Alexis: So you are telling us that the leadership behaviors you organized into the three buckets, direction, coaching, and career, are direct predictors of employee engagement and business performance. I have to admit, I’m a big fan of your career conversation approach, and I’ve used it more than a hundred times in coaching or mentoring session.
Could you explain this concept to our audience and share why it’s so [00:11:00] effective in managing and developing teams?
Russ: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So part four of the book career this is something very original in the book. A model that I’ve invented over, got to be coming up on 20 years now, invented and refined. It’s called career conversations. And it’s three distinct conversations.
The first conversation is called the life story conversation, which is really about having people tell you their life story and then really taking the time to understand their pivots. Even at young ages, by the way, the pivots they’ve made and why they’ve made them. And through that process you learn sort of what people deeply value in their work.
It’s fascinating. And it’s important, I think, to do it just that way, rather than just to ask them what they value, because I think people accidentally frequently lie. They don’t mean to but they’re not actually generally conscious of what they value. But when you start, when you have them tell you their life story, And you help them probe the pivots that they’ve made.
You learn actually sort of a show don’t tell [00:12:00] version of learning what they value. So that’s the first conversation. And that really helps me understand things that in the, that are subsequent in the subsequent two conversations, things we should do, things we shouldn’t do, because we know what this person values.
The second conversation, which is the most important by far, is helping to get to what I call a career vision statement, which is basically like, what’s your dream job? What do you want to be when you grow up? And a lot of people, by the way, have skepticism that this is feasible for our young Gen Z employees or whatever, you know, like, People our age will say things like, I don’t even know what I want to be when I grow up.
I’m just going to tell you like, and I give a really strong prescription in the book for how to do this well, because it’s, it’s not, most people are kind of come into the room convinced they’re not sure. But you can facilitate them into the vision, and I teach how to do that in the book. I won’t get into it here.
It takes a little, a minute. And I’ll say for myself, I’ve done, I’ve done this a thousand times [00:13:00] and I have successfully facilitated every single one of those people into a, into a working vision statement. The reason this is so important is because it puts someone’s development into the context of what they want to be.
And by the way, those vision statements will generally be, and should be outside the four walls of this company. And this is one of the first powerful ideas is I have just acknowledged that you are a human being with a life well beyond. What we’re doing here in this office right now. And I’m interested in that.
And I think it’s my job to participate in your growth and development toward that. But perhaps more important is, you know, you know, question I’ve been asked Alexis a million times is should I get an MBA?
I’m like, man, I don’t know. What do you want to be? What do you, like, if you want to be the CFO at Disney as your, one of your, your career visions, then yeah, you better get one and you better get it from like three places, you know, that kind of thing.
But if you want to be a you know, if you ultimately want to write a screenplay. No, don’t do not go get an MBA. It won’t help you at all. The people who finance movies, I think [00:14:00] oftentimes wouldn’t recognize. A good financial discipline if it fell out of the sky and hit him on the head. And then last is the last conversation is really about the career action plan, which is now that we know what you want to be when you grow up conversation to now that we know what you deeply value, let’s put together a short term plan that helps you take tangible steps toward the longterm vision right now.
Let’s take some steps right now. You want CFO at Disney. Clearly I cannot make that happen, but I can help you think about ways to that you can take small steps in that direction and that creation plans it’s four parts. There’s four discrete aspects will follow we’ll set up action items who will do what by when that’s how you know, you have a, a good action item.
And so and now this employee and I are both actively working on their long term career vision, what they want to be when they grow up together while they’re reporting to me, it doesn’t mean. We don’t focus on the day to day work that has to get done. It doesn’t mean any of that. And, you know, it’s funny, one of the most [00:15:00] common push, I get to two sources of pushback most often.
One is people don’t know what they want to be when they grow up. So why would I bother with this? That’s. I’m telling you, they do. You just have to make it safe and skillfully facilitate that conversation. And the second is, wait a minute. Why on this company’s dime, should I be helping a person think about their longterm?
Am I not just lose, am I just greasing the skids for them to leave? And what’s fascinating about this model, and I give retentive. People tend to stay with a manager who invests in them like this for longer for a number of reasons. One is they’re saying, well, this is unusual. I’ve never had a manager invest in me this way.
I think I’ll hang out here for a bit. The other is like a lot of people leave a current job because they have this grass is greener problem. They think the next job is better. And what you learn. Is that you can potentially make small [00:16:00] adjustments to your job right now in your career action plan. The first thing we do is evaluate what can we change in your current role, given your longterm vision.
So for example, if you want to be the CFO at Disney, I can have you run my team’s budget. Now that might seem a little silly or trite. But, you work with FP& A now, and you see, you start to see from the inside, what does the CFO’s organization look like, right? It’s, it’s actually powerful. So now you’re not necessarily as inclined to say the grass is greener because we make small adjustments that are in my, as your manager, within my power to make.
We can make small changes to your current role. We can chart a next job for you. That’s maybe on my team or maybe on another team inside this company that makes sense, given your long term vision. Right. We bring to bear and people in our networks that can help inform and influence these decisions you need to make.
That’s a part of the career action plan. So it’s robust and it really helps a person feel invested in, in a very unique way. And [00:17:00] so counter intuitively. Whereas it feels like you’re greasing the skids for somebody to go sliding out the door. The reality is they tend to stay longer when the manager goes through the full career action plan model with them.
At the end of the day, I think a person that you’re working with on this feels invested in uniquely and in a way that contemplates their humanity. Not just their sort of economic value to this company. And that’s, that just doesn’t happen. I don’t care. You know, it’s hard to pull off actually, as a manager, it’s hard to find those moments to invest in a person like that.
Given the core nature of our job is manager directs employee, Employer, you know, so I think that’s why it’s so powerful. I think that’s maybe, I mean, you could tell me you’re the one who says you love it. You could tell me why you think it’s powerful, but I, but I feel like maybe those are a couple of the reasons.
Would you, would you add or subtract anything
Alexis: That’s exactly what I believe. When we truly invest in people, and I’m truly that, like you say, I’m truly investing in you, we [00:18:00] take the time to make it work. And it’s a lot of effort. It sounds very simple. Yeah, there are three big conversations, but please don’t believe you will be done in half an hour.
It’s, it’s not true. That requires a lot more work, a little bit from you and a lot from the other person, by the way. That’s very powerful. And I had people targeted by recruiters outside of the companies. And sometimes you have people who are leaving or taking a new job in another company and you realize that, yeah, you basically were not there at the right time.
And when they are back in your company two years later, okay that means they should have stayed maybe, or probably they were not taken care of at that moment. That was a big mistake. And what I realized is once you have those conversations, they listen to the recruiter or even not listen to the recruiter, because those arguments don’t resonate with them because they have their development plan.
They have their action plan. Those things don’t fit their action plan. They don’t care. [00:19:00] They have a plan. They are working towards it. And that’s very cool.
Russ: That’s right. Yeah. A woman who worked for me at Twitter named Anne I had gone through the career conversations model with her and I knew what her vision was. And she had come to me one day with an external offer. This is exactly what you’re describing. And we sat down and we evaluated the offer together.
And we’ve reached the conclusion together that this wasn’t it. This isn’t the right move for you. I appreciate that. Maybe there’s a couple of things that might be missing here for you now. I get it. We’ll change. What would I change? We can, there’s things we can’t change. She was an all star, you know, she was going places and she has gone places, she’s the CEO now of Gretchen Rubin media.
Like she’s, she’s an all star. I’ve heard of Gretchen Rubin. And what’s, what’s interesting about that is given her. Long term vision , we were able to say objectively wrong step. Nine months later, she came in with another offer. And I was like, yo, you got to take this one.
And I, you know, so retention at [00:20:00] all costs is a bad practice. It’s not, it doesn’t put the human first. It puts the company first. And people feel that I had, I had a manager one time who. She talked me into staying at Google. I had a pretty good offer to leave my manager. She talked me into staying. I highly regarded this manager and the company that I was going to join ended up getting bought by Google would have been not only a huge payday.
I would ended up back at Google in a, in a good role, you know, and After it happened, I actually, when the announcement happened that we were buying this company, I happened to be in the air traveling to Asia Pacific, and I landed and I saw this news and it was, I dunno, it was a little bit of a gut punch, you know?
Because yeah, I was still trying to make a, a career here and I care about my financial outcomes like anybody. And when I got back to the states, she, our one-on-one, all she did was apologize because, she just tried to keep me on her team. She wasn’t really thinking about what was best for me.
I forgave [00:21:00] her, you know, in fact, that person’s Kim Scott, actually, who wrote Radical Candor, like, I forgave her so much, I’ve worked with her again, and this is what makes her amazing, she probably lost a lot of sleep that weekend, waiting for me to come in Monday, to put that one on one on the first calendar, first thing in the morning, so she could apologize, so I know what it feels like, when someone engages in retention at all costs and it feels bad, like don’t do it, you know, and it put our relationship in jeopardy for a minute.
I don’t have a better relationship maybe anywhere in my work life. And she’s a friend, but you know, retention, all costs of losing strategy. So with, with Ann, we hung on to her because things she was thinking about, like you said, it was the wrong thing when the right thing came, I was like, Hey, Like Sting says, you know, if you love someone, set them free.
And so we did, we set her free and she’s had this, she became a CMO. She became a COO after that. And now she’s a CEO she’s so good. And she’s earned all of this. But we were able to help make sure she took the right next step given her vision.
Alexis: I love the All Stars story, but I definitely love the story of [00:22:00] retention at All Costs. I was about to interrupt you to mention that the manager was very good at realizing that they made a mistake and needed to apologize. And then you mentioned Kim Scott, the author of Radical Candor.
I love that book and I did an episode about the four quadrants of Radical Candor. Co founding Candor Inc with Kim Scott must have been a remarkable experience. What key insights did you gain from that venture?
Russ: Yeah, I don’t mean to make everything about my book, but by a, by a mile, the theory for my book came from my time at Candor Inc. So let me explain that. So Kim and I co founded the company and, and basically I took on all of our go to market activities. We had a ton of demand for just what can you do for us with radical candor?
You know, like we had so much demand. The job was really about keeping out things that would waste our time. On the phone, I talked to like, I’m not even, this is not an exaggeration, a thousand [00:23:00] companies.
As the chief operating officer, and, you know, basically that meant I managed our marketing person, Elise, who was amazing. And I handled all of the, all of the market based calls. I was selling our stuff, you know, workshops or talks and stuff like that. And so I would get on the phone and I would always start with a simple discovery question.
It was either or both, what problem are you trying to solve? And, or how do you think we can be helpful? And honestly, I’m just trying to get off the phone as quickly as possible if we can’t be helpful. If they want something we don’t do, you know? And so what I heard though, from a thousand companies was.
An alarmingly similar answer that I’ll summarize almost nobody said these exact words, but everybody said this exact idea, which was, we have an engagement problem related to low manager skill. Now, one group did say that specifically. And I [00:24:00] said, that’s the headline that everyone’s been telling me anyway.
So, so, and what they were looking for from us was some radical candor coaching stuff. That’s what they wanted, you know, cause radical candor. You know, direction, coaching, career, coaching is really, Radical Candor is really about improvement coaching more than anything else, right? Chapter 8, I think, of my book. And so, when people would say to me, we have an engagement problem related to low manager skill, I asked, To further clarify, if we were a fit for them, I asked, what’s the nature of your manager’s skill gap?
Alexis: Hmm.
Russ: And so they, they said a lot of things, but you know, you’ve seen a word cloud before.
So imagine a word cloud of all the words they said to me, but three jumped out in the center of the page, three words. Direction, coaching and career. And so that those are part two, part three and part four of my book. [00:25:00] Now that wasn’t sufficient. That was not real research. It was, you know, it was a back of the napkin research, but I took that research and I created a theory that we took, I took to Qualtrics and we measured.
Whether those were the right groupings or whether those were the most pervasive groupings. And I think that’s important because one of the questions I get asked a lot about this leadership prescription is, is that just for tech? Well, no, our customers at radical candor came from every industry, including by the way, government, including education, including finance, consulting, you name it.
I mean, I talked to every kind of company on the planet, big, small, it didn’t matter. And they all had the same exact problem with their managers. That’s a, that’s shocking to me. I mean, I couldn’t believe it. Like it didn’t, it’s almost when I tell the story, I bet listeners are like, boy, that sounds lucky.
But we, so then anyway, we took that theory and we tested it, tested it over four years, rigorously, measurably. And that’s how we just, we learned that these direction coaching and [00:26:00] career, they break down into about a dozen or so behaviors that when managers regularly practice them as measured. By their employees saying that they regularly demonstrate those behaviors, we saw that then employees became more engaged and delivered better business outcomes.
And so by a mile. The most important thing I learned is, Oh, everybody still has the same problems. Nobody who’s out there running their jib about or, you know, yapping about what leaders should be doing. No one’s listened to one customer on the planet because otherwise it’s the answer is so obvious.
And then I was able to kind of take that and study that very rigorously over four years. And learn that, Oh my gosh, these behaviors strongly, the marketplace was correct, these behaviors do strongly correlate with happier employees and better business results.
Alexis: Yeah, that’s very impressive. Reading about your experience, measuring precisely the impact of leadership behaviors in the book convinced me [00:27:00] to try the approach you outlined. By the way, thank you for the tools that are available online. That’s very convenient, very cool, and thank you for that. I should put a link to those.
I can see that And there were some things that I was doing and others that I was absolutely not doing. For example, I was not doing the live conversation. I was trying to get people to tell me about their values, but I was not doing that by listening to their stories.
And that suddenly changed everything because, first, I needed to pay a lot of attention and do a lot of work to really try to extract that.
And, uh, and the first time it was very difficult. I learned to discover people that I, thought I knew, and I did not.
Russ: I knew almost nothing about what they really care about. I thought, and I think the super human, I’m like a human leader. I, I try to know my people. I ask about what they do on weekends. I ask about their families. I ask about their health. You know, I, I do these activities that [00:28:00] we’ve been.
Incorrectly taught help us know someone and we don’t know him in a way that really is helps us to help, to help them grow in a, in a relevant way. It’s the big insight. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. You know, by the way, I just, I’ll say if I did, if I had to offer one criticism of the book, one thing I noticed is you’re probably an anomaly.
In that you’ve clearly read the book quite carefully. That’s just not common. And I’m not just for my book. I could tell I’d go do a radical candor talk back in the day. This is one of the most popular business books in the last decade. Right. And I would ask people who read the book and, you know, every hand would go up and then, then I’d get to Q and a, and based on the Q and a, I could tell.
That I’d been lied to because if you’d really read the book carefully, you wouldn’t have been asking the question you just asked me. Right. Same’s true of my book. And so the criticism that I have is I have noticed [00:29:00] that with a lot of people listening, not maybe carefully, let’s say you’re listening on two X speed and you’re, that’s during your commute or two X speed while you’re gardening, you know, let’s just say like that. What has happened is a lot of people have missed part one that talks about the rigor of the model. You know, it’s important to me to give the why, and part one gives the why. Most people that have the books, the book, it’s 4. 0, you know, it’s highly rated book. I’m not, but like people tend to be very appreciative of the how and what of parts two, three, and four, and they skip, they skip the the why.
And what’s, what’s extraordinary about that is that’s what, that’s what I actually invented that in career conversations in part four is fully, but the rest of it is a little bit kind of just cobbled together behaviors that help to bring the wider life and the actual invention. Is leadership as an independent variable statistically in a regression model, like the math of this leadership’s an independent [00:30:00] variable with engagement.
And business results as dependent variables. Nobody has ever done that before. Like it’s not that I’d like even want credit or something for it. It’s just like the reason you should pay attention to this book is because it’s the only book that has bothered to try to measure how leadership behaviors produce what we want.
Happier employees that stick around when they should and better business outcomes, which is all point. We’re all in the job to do, you know? So anyway, just a little, little bit on that, that I’ve noticed now a couple of years out regularly gets missed. Even, even among very intellectual types who I, you know, I thought, boy, boy, the intellectual types I know from Silicon Valley are going to love this.
You know, a lot of people miss it. A lot of people miss it because they’re not really reading it carefully. So I wish I wrote it a little better. To make that idea more obvious or make it more accessible for people with contemplating that people don’t read books very carefully. Very often. Does that make [00:31:00] sense?
Alexis: Yeah, it is very funny. If you ask people what they need, they need results. And for a lot of them, they understood that people engagement, employee engagement is linked to results. I usually describe this with impact and satisfaction. You cannot have one without the other, at least sustainably. And they have some common sense or street wisdom about how the manager role is important and related to employee engagement.
But when asked what they are doing about that, they tell you about incentives, without any proof that it’s working.
Russ: Always. Yeah. Yeah. And then on top of that, you know, what leadership approach we follow suffers badly from like chief executive officer flavor of the month. I went to this thing with other CEOs and they were talking about, you know, I don’t know, situational leadership. And so now that’s what we’re doing.
And what ends up happening is then the people who do leadership development in some company. Now have [00:32:00] to pay attention. This is a new thing they teach their managers with, with, by the way, and I don’t mean, I’m not picking on situational leadership. It’s very popular for a reason, but I also can say it’s not been held to any rigor now we’re telling managers to focus on this thing and then the CMO, let’s say, or the CFO goes to some conference and they come back with some new leadership idea, framework, and they say to the, And then there’s the chief human research and nevermind what the leadership development person learned in their PhD and everybody wants that to get into the leadership model.
None of it has any rigor. It’s too much stuff. It doesn’t hang together and none of it has held a measurable count. Now our managers are confused about what they’re supposed to do. And, and, and on and on it goes over and over. And you mentioned like proof. The most important thing that that we did at Qualtrics to learn that this, to prove this was the model we used, I call STAC, select, teach, assess, [00:33:00] coach, all with that leadership standard.
The same leadership standard and the assessment was the key, a measurement for every manager in the company from their employees on whether they’re demonstrating these behaviors, not 360, not from the boss, the boss gets plenty of opportunity to assess that manager in other ways, you know, and so now managers even who thought they were demonstrating certain behaviors, their employees were saying, we didn’t see it, you know, and it had confidentiality, so they didn’t know who said what, you know, we had a very Because of who we were, people, the managers were inclined to look at these measurements and pay attention to them.
And so suddenly we could show a manager every quarter how their team was experiencing their leadership. We didn’t use a punitively. That’s the fastest way to get employees to stop telling the truth. You fire someone. We used it to coach, assess, coach, assess, coach, assess. Every quarter, a manager got an assessment from their employees [00:34:00] anonymously that was by the way.
Organized and prioritized around the things that were correlating very strongly with employee engagement on their team. So it was custom what they should focus on. And we gave them measurements of why they should focus on, you know, nobody’s doing that. And that’s why managers. They, they pick and choose what they’re going to focus on based on, I don’t know what way the wind’s blowing half the time.
There’s, you know, and, and the, what companies choose to teach, select, teach, assess, cause they’re teaching too many things and they’re confusing their managers. What should you focus on is not a question a manager can answer. Managers are, what I think I should focus on is they don’t know because they don’t have any sort of connection between the teaching and the assessment.
And there’s no connection between the selection for the job. The teaching, the assessment and the coaching, the coaching should, they should all be done around a coherent, concise leadership standard that we know works measurably predictably leads to more engagement and [00:35:00] better business outcomes.
Alexis: Yeah, I love it. I have one last question that I like to ask. Looking back at your career, what is the one piece of advice you would give to your younger self?
Russ: say, Hey, you had a good instinct. It was well executed. Do that again. And here’s what it was. I was in the U S Marines and I loved it. I really loved it. There’s a number of things in that culture that I miss. I’ve never seen again in corporate America, probably do another whole episode on that someday, but I loved it.
But I got out after four years because I realized that the tempo. Of the Marine Corps, the deployment schedule, for example, was not conducive to me being the kind of husband and father I would one day want to be. I wasn’t married yet. I had a couple other small complaints about the Marines too, but this was probably biggest for me.
We deployed a number of times. And I saw how it wreaked havoc on my, you [00:36:00] know, my Marines and other officers and things like that. So that’s the first time. Then when I was graduating business school, so, you know, let’s, I think I’m 33, 20 years ago. I was interviewing with like McKinsey and Bain and, you know, big, big consulting houses. And I came home one night and my wife said, and I had two sons already. I eventually had a third. I came home one night and my wife said, you know, She goes with like sarcastic air quotes. She goes, you know, now that you’re getting this fancy degree, does this mean you’re going to get a job where we’ll never see you anymore?
Alexis: Hmm
Russ: You know? And I, and so we sat down and talked that through and I made a promise and the promise was that I would never allow my career to get to a point where I was no longer being a good dad or a good husband and further agreed that she and the kids were the ones who got to evaluate that, not me, it was, you know, they’re the ones who are receiving.
My husband ship [00:37:00] receiving my fatherhood. It’s very similar to the assessment of the manager. I don’t really care what the manager’s manager thinks about how that manager’s leading. I care what the employees think people are fighting to attract, develop and retain my opinion of how good of a father I am or how good, you know, I got to look myself in the mirror, but I really want to know what my wife thinks about that and what my kids think.
Right. So we, we sort of stacked hands and said, Never let, never let the career get in the way of being a good dad. Good husband. What’s interesting about that, by the way, is I, as a result, I became a really good prioritizer. And, and I, you’ve heard, you know, I know you’ve read the book. I say the book prioritization is an exercise in subtraction, not addition, but it’s, it’s like, it’s like one of the most misused words in business.
I think only strategic is more misused than, than prioritization. People think it means a task list. It doesn’t. And so what I became very, very good at. Is subtracting work. It’s, it’s way easier to say than do by the way. And and [00:38:00] so when I subtracted work, that meant I tended to have usually a better work life balance, but you know, like I want people sometimes hear that and they think, oh, don’t work hard, you know, I won an award at Google for being a great manager.
You, the way you win that is one, you have to be. Not a dick, you know, so your employees are the ones who recommend you. And so if you’re a dick, you’ll never get recommended. And then you get chosen by the CEO’s team and they don’t pick people who don’t have like a reputation or track record of getting meaningful things done.
So I’m, I’m by far most proud of that award for that reason. So I say that just cause sometimes when I say I became good at managing my time, I became good at prioritization. I became good at subtracting work. Sometimes people hear the wrong thing. Sometimes when people hear work life balance, mine tended to be pretty good sometimes people hear doesn’t work hard.
And that’s just wrong. That’s a bad conclusion to reach. So anyway, what I would go back to my younger self and say is, this instinct that you had, [00:39:00] that you weren’t sure about, that by the way shows up again, In another 10 years in your early thirties when you’re graduating business school go with that What when you’re at the end of your career, which by the way, I pretty much am now.
I just i’m retired I do some speaking. I do some coaching when you’re at the end of the career All that will matter is you’re looking at your three sons you know, you’re looking at, you look at your wife, are we still happily married? Yes, we are. You’re looking at your three sons, how they doing? Do you know about them?
Do you know about their lives? Are you involved in their lives? And that I can’t, I can’t think of one other thing that gets anywhere near as important in my career as those things. So I would go back and encourage myself to follow that instinct that I, that I had. And, and maybe especially graduating Wharton wasn’t totally sure about it was, it was the right, it was the right instinct.
Alexis: I love it. And, , and thank you for sharing that. I hope it will inspire a lot of people to think and reflect on what they are currently doing. [00:40:00] Thank you very much for joining the podcast. I hope we will have another opportunity to discuss all the other things that we were not able to discuss today.
Russ: Anytime you want, anytime you want. Thank you so much for having me.