Transcript for:
Executive Presence and Leadership Development

in this video I'm going to teach you how to join the top 1% of leaders and climb to the top of any organization this is a free preview of my course which you can download in a link in the description I was a vice president of marketing for Google accelerator startup I was a Global Marketing Manager for Sony PlayStation and I study leadership at America's top Business Schools including the Ivy Leagues Columbia business school and the Kellogg School of Management where I received my MBA let's get started one of the single most important Concepts in leadership development is executive presence this is what I like to call the missing link it is the missing link between being an individual contributor or a mediocre people manager to becoming a true leader a true executive and often it's the only thing that you really need to get beyond that threshold of $200,000 per year in this section we're going to rely heavily on the book EX executive presence if you want to learn more I suggest checking it out so there are three major things to consider when we're looking at executive presence the first is confidence are you conveying confidence regardless of whether you're actually confident internally do you have Poise and are you perceived as authentic in other words you're conveying the idea that you are in charge you're the captain of the ship or at the very least you deserve to be and an example of that would if you're in an interview you deserve to be the person to get that position that leadership position now there are three ways that you convey executive presence the first is how you act the second is how you speak and the third is how you look now not all of these are equally weighted the single most important factor in conveying executive presence is how you act are you conveying the idea of Gravitas and basically what gravitas means is that you you are taken seriously you don't seem like some fickle indecisive person that's going to immediately get angry get flustered if there's an emergency they're not going to remain cool no you are someone that is taken seriously people believe you and they're coughing enough in you to follow you as a leader that is gravitas now when we look at the data and we look at top leaders and we consider what are the things behind gravitas we can rank order them from 1 to six so the most important factor is confidence and Grace Under Fire so when things are getting turbulent are you still confident number two decisiveness and showing teeth number three integrity and speaking truth to Power number four emotional intelligence number five reputation and standing and your pedigree and number six vision and Charisma now if you look at a lot of conventional wisdom out there about what makes for a good leader often they'll say Charisma but that's not actually the most important thing really it's about confidence as being being the main driver of Gravitas now when we look at the animal kingdom and we see who the leaders are we can look for example at Alpha gorillas and one distinction between the alpha male and the other gorillas is that he remains calm and confident he's not jumping around he's not nervously shaking he's not sporadic he's calm he's cool he's collected even when things are turbulent even when there's a threat even when there's a loud noise even when people are fearful they can still turn to the alpha as a show of confidence and calm so one of the most important things is to never lose your cool as a leader another key thing is maintaining eye contact now it's fairly easy to maintain eye contact when you're listening I can look you in the eyes and receive what you're saying but it's much more difficult to maintain eye contact when you're speaking but if you can maintain eye contact when you're speaking as some authoritative people like Bill Clinton are capable of doing you're going to seem much more persuasive you're going to seem much more confident you're going to have more executive presence now another key thing is you need to be decisive and action oriented so for example let's say you're on a team and everybody's discussing different ways to go different solutions to an emergency perhaps they're complaining perhaps they're worried if you're the one who takes control makes a decision and says this is the action we need to take to move forward you will have stronger executive presence another key thing is not to complain lots of people in the business world and organizations are good at complaining the complain about process they complain that things aren't fair but the person with executive presence doesn't they're more pragmatic they're more concerned with getting results than they are with complaining about the status quo now another key thing to consider with executive presence is that you're going to have a reputation whether you like it or not people are going to talk about you there's going to be a lot of Gossip in fact being in large companies is very much like being in high school where people for clicks they talk about each other behind their backs so what you need to do as an executive is you need to shape how others per perceive you you need to develop your personal brand you need to take control of your reputation so other people are not shaping it for you when I was younger I was a good student and I felt that having Integrity had a lot to do with the content or the substance of what you're saying and making sure that you're being as precise as truthful and as accurate as possible but when we look at the research of leaders what we realize is that the people that follow leaders the audience that listens to leaders is much concerned with how they communicate than the content of what they communicate and a good example of this would be Simon senic very very popular author speaker but a lot of the stuff he says is just flat out wrong it contradicts the data that's out there and a lot of what he says is really just conveying what you want to hear or convenient simplified stories that go against conventional wisdom even in cases where conventional wisdom happens to be right so what are some examples of how you can communicate in ways that matters to people well one is lower your voice you lower your voice you seem more like an executive another thing that you can do is you can use stories so a lot of individual contributors are deep experts in their fields they know the data very well they know copyrighting really well they know HR really well whatever that technical subject competence is there may be a tendency to overcommunication Lex ideas with a lot of moving Parts but leaving a lot of those details outside of the stories so they don't even include that now one of the mistakes a lot of people make as they try to transition into highle leadership executive positions is they talk too quickly you talk too quickly there's not a lot of weight behind what you say the other problem with speaking too quickly is you might be perceived as anxious or indecisive sporadic unpredictable not calm people want a calm leader that means you need to speak more slowly and that means that the best speakers they use a lot of pauses this is something that they train you in Toast Masters and speaking engagements and in leadership training you need to use pauses you need to slow down so that people can process information and so that you seem confident and calm some other tips be succinct you don't want to ramble people won't pay attention To A Rambler you want to be forceful and assertive when necessary to move things forward and you want to have good posture or SL in you don't seem very confident you don't seem very interested you don't seem very much in the moment now what we're going to do is we're going to look at communication blunders and once again we're referencing the book executive presence so here are the key communication blunders that people make one of them is checking your device too often so you're giving a presentation you're in a meeting and you're checking your phone you're on a zoom call and it's very obvious that you're looking to the side checking your phone for messages you are not in the moment you're not a leader people want to follow it doesn't seem like you care having too high a pitch will make people lose confidence in you over Reliance on notes suggests that you don't really know your stuff cold breathlessness trembling signs of anxiety signs that you're not a safe person to trust crying appearing bored one way that you appear bored is by fidgeting shaking caressing yourself shaking your leg signs of nervousness rambling in redundancy repeating yourself too often and unintentionally and having poor eye contact and as I mentioned before it is easier to maintain eye cont contct when you're listening than when you're speaking and don't be sensitive the corporate world can be a dangerous place it can be an offensive place people might throw you under the bus people might cheat you contracts are going to be written to somebody else's benefit and to your disadvantage you do not want to be a sensitive person you want to have a thick skin or at the very least you want to project the idea that you have a thick St thick skin so try not to be sensitive try to be confident and always be looking forward instead of regretting what happened in the past I'm going to share with you some miscellaneous tips for leadership development there are four key things that you can do to help project your competence so people believe that you're intelligent and capable enough of achieving outcomes the first is to be assertive you won't do not want to be perceived as a passive person the second thing that you can do is you can initiate contact and not just wait for people to contact you so for example if you need help you can go and approach someone you can go and invite someone out to lunch to help build rapport you can be the first person to shake someone's hand the first person to say hello this positions you as a leader rather than just a follower and a receiver second thing is maintaining eye contact once again not just eye contact when you're listening but also when you're speaking and the fourth thing is maintaining good posture another key thing that you want to do as a leader is get the timing and the location right when you're doing something like public speaking or when you're holding a meeting so for example if you find that energy levels are high in the morning and you have something that perhaps is a bit controversial well you probably want to do that meeting in the morning because people are going to be happier and happier people are less critical they don't scrutinize things as much however if there's something that you do want scrutinized you want people to be critical of it and to have a negative perception of it then you might want to hold that meeting later in the night or perhaps towards the end of the day when people are a little bit grumpy and antsy and ready to get out perhaps they're a bit tired one thing that you need to do as a leader is make strong arguments and arguments tend to be better when they're Vivid and tangible so there is a lot of emphasis when people are building arguments to rely on things such as data and to build a very logical argument however people often respond better to things that are more uh visual or artistic or emotional and I'm going to give you a couple examples from the political sphere so for example Trump will say we're going to build a wall he's not talking about policies he's not talking about the detailed implementation required what he's doing is he's talking about sort of this Vis visible symbol almost of what he's trying to achieve and that builds a stronger argument and on the other side of the political landscape we have Biden who once again uses the same kind of vivid tangible language and he says we will defend every inch of NATO territory he doesn't say we're going to defend every NATO country no he uses something much more tangible every inch of uh that land so there's another trick that you can do when you're trying to build an argument as a leader one thing that you can do is you can juxtapose the solution that you want against a poor alternative and this is what's great about being a leader is you can actually decide what's being discussed so what you can discuss is something that's a terrible Al alternative to what uh you're arguing for so what you're creating here is almost an illusion of choice or a false dichotomy and when people are presented with a bad option and a good option it makes your uh good option seem even better to learn more about this you can read the book The Catalyst by Jonah Burger who's A Wharton business school professor and what he presents in the book and using his red framework is that one of the best ways to change people's minds is to give them a a menu of options so that they have agency to choose one of those options even if ultimately you're the one who's decided what those menu of options are another trick that you can do is you can simply make yours the solution the uh default so there are a variety of options that prospects customers can choose from but you simply have yours as the default in other words if they do nothing if your followers do nothing if the people above you do nothing if the people beside you do nothing uh this is what you'll be moving ahead with the default option your option another key thing to recognize is that uh having a strong culture having a strong team uh means that it's not going to fit everyone not everyone belongs in the group and this is a trade-off that needs to be made you need to balance diversity and cohesion if you have too much diversity there's going to be too much infighting if you have too much cohesion there's going to be too much group think and you're not going to be uh very good at progressing so you have to find that delicate balance now one of the biggest challenges with being a leader particularly at the high executive levels is going to be leading change because there was so much inertia centered around just keeping the status quo keeping things at as they are that's why large companies often end up losing uh because they are too stuck in the ways of doing things the way they were done in the past and they get wrapped up in bureaucratic processes so here are the four steps reling change that come from the Kellogg School of Management first thing you need to do is gather information you need to see what people's attitudes are you need to see what the different departments are thinking where uh groups are going the more information you have the stronger position you're going to be in to lead change second thing is to generate awareness so awareness about uh the change that's coming you need to build a critical mass you need to get groups of people uh snowballing so that they're in support of this change that's coming which is going to be uh facing a lot of resistance and then you bandwagons so you can start giving presentations to groups to different departments uh to support the change that needs to happen and of the best arguments you can make for change is that if you don't act if you don't make change then you're going to lose what you already have okay another thing that's going to happen as a leader is you're inevitably going to run into emergencies or situations that could lead to disaster and one of the most important things to assess in these situations is L is risk so in most situations dire situations what people do is they turn to legal counsel and they say what do we do and legal is going to have a very uh tight specific legal response to what's happened and often what that is is it's basically evading responsibility and putting responsibility onto other organizations or other people however uh this assumes that legal risk is the only risk or is the most important risk and that's not always the case even with things like lawsuits you also have to consider Financial risks so so uh when you're getting input make sure you're getting input from these different people you're getting input from the lawyer the CFO and then lastly the CMO because in a lot of cases when you're uh facing some sort of legal challenge often the bigger factor is the reputational risk so if you simply come out and say uh we're not responsible the contract said X we're in compliance with the law uh that's not necessarily going to position your company or your organization or your team in a way that looks good to customers or to the public so reputational risk will often Trump legal risk I'm going to give you a number of pointers from Toastmasters International I was a division director in Toast Masters where I developed a lot of leadership skills now previously we talked about how being a sensitive leader is not good people don't have a lot of confidence in you so one of the most important things is that you respond well to criticism because when people criticize you this is when you're most likely to be sensitive so here are the typical responses that we see to criticism number one is withdrawing from the situation two is rationalizing the criticism three is counterattacking or attacking back to the person that's criticizing you and then there's four responding non-defensively now it should come as no surprise that number four is the best way to respond to criticism respond in a non defensive secure way but how do you do that how do you respond without being defensive well there are a number of steps that you follow the first thing is you actually listen so don't simply react immediately take in what they're saying try to process it acknowledge what they're saying ask questions you may need Clarity on what exactly it is that they're criticizing you might have a broad idea and be offended by it but really it's a very narrow precise criticism paraphrase what they're saying so that you understand it and then agree with the truth if it's truthful then you should agree with it if it's not truthful uh then that's not necessarily something you need to agree with but I would generally see criticism as an opportunity for growth because sometimes it's rare that people do actually give you honest feedback often what they'll do is they'll just quietly resent you and eventually exclude you from the organization exclude you from the social group or exclude you from the team without ever telling you truthfully why it happened now on the flip side there are going to be times when you need to give feedback and often that feedback is going to be very critical so here are the seven steps that you'll follow when doing so describe the behavior that needs correction for example somebody showing up late to meetings explain the Behavior's effects so the effects may be that they hold up the seven member team from moving forward listen so you need to listen to the reactions that the person gives you ask for change reaffirm the person's ability to make the change and the feedback positively and then follow up now some other skills you're going to need are going to set around time management it's going to become very important as a leader because your time is Amplified your impact is Amplified what you do is going to affect a lot of people so your time is very valuable your time is also very valuable because you tend to be paid more so how do we manage our time well the first thing is to identify short-term and long-term goals number two make a daily to-do list that's going to help you stay on track and not just get distracted and busy work three prioritize the list so that you're focusing on the most important most impactful things rather than simply elongate it checklist delegate where possible after making a schedule leave time for emergency so emergencies are going to happen unexpected things will happen you need to account for this if your schedule's too tight if your arrangement of tasks is too tight and you're trying to jam too much in it is not going to account for things that are unexpected and another thing that's unexpected besides emergencies is just general interruptions so you need to make sure that you keep those interruptions to a minimum uh especially in days where there is a lot to get done now we mentioned that delegation is one of the keys to time management so how do we delegate well first we have to choose the right person know what people's strengths are what their weaknesses are then you need to make expectations clear I would say that one of the most important learnings that I've had in life is managing expectations you might have an idea of what you're expecting the the other person may have a completely different idea you need to verbalize what your expectations are so that they know one of the biggest mistakes people make in life is believing that others can read their minds they cannot read your mind they don't know what you want they have very different ideas of what they should be doing and number three establish how and when you want progress reports an example in my personal life was I was working for a very successful Venture C uh back company I had a boss that I worked with very well and then I got a new boss very smart boss the problem was that this boss didn't do number two and three they didn't set expectations and they didn't give a timeline as to when this person wanted update reports so she had expectations about when I should be delivering things but those were communicated to me so as a direct report I I just didn't know what to do so a good leader sets expectations sets timelines and that could have preempted that kind of misunderstanding about for example when a product should be launching when a marketing plan should be prepared when I should be getting alignment from the product team because one of the problems is that you're going to be managing multiple projects as a leader so if somebody does doesn't communicate whether it's to the people whether it's somebody above you communicating to you or you communicating to someone below you there's going to be a misalignment in terms of the timelines and priorities of those various projects next I'm going to give you some advice on Team Management which is going to rely heavily on the book on teams by Harvard Business reviews 10 must reads the best predictors of productivity Were A team's energy and engagement outside the foral meanings so one of the fundamental concepts in this course is the idea that humans are fundamentally social animals and what we see here is that the socialization that's happening outside of the foral meetings are the strongest predictor of how successful the team is going to be now this is also an indicator of why economic clusters physical economic clusters are so important for example Tech is very successful in Silicon Valley centered around the San Francisco San Jose areas Hollywood is very successful with movie production and why is that why don't we have more Geographic dispersion it has a lot to do with the socialization that happens when you have economic clusters centers around certain industries a lot of information of a lot of ideas a lot of brain forming happens through these physical socialization discussions that often happen outside of for example formal Zoom meetings now what are the characteristics of successful teams number one everyone on the team talks and listens roughly equally so we are not talking about a situation where the most skilled people the most competent people the most impactful people have highly disproportionate say in what happens in the meeting instead an effective team is more or less Democratic in how it behaves members face one another and they are energetic members connect with each other and not just the leader so it's not an overly hierarchical or pyramid like relationship that's happening with Team meetings number four there's lots of side conversation so you want that kind of brainstorming happening you want a lot of information going back and forth between team members another key thing is that you want to add breaks so that there's an opportunity to explore outside of the team and outside of formally scheduled team meetings that's how you build a successful team now nothing beats face tace meetings of course with zoom Google meet Microsoft teams sometimes it's inevitable that uh you have to have these virtual conversations and that's a good second best but particularly when somebody first joins a team or first joins an organization I would make a strong effort to try to meet face to face so for example I have a friend that recently moved to London England uh but he after being hired was quickly uh sent to New York to meet the team face to face because that's incredibly important for building rapport and the socialization that happens is incredibly important to the success of the team not just the emotional uh betterment of the employees other key factors are going to be energy and engagement so if you see the energy levels and engagement are low then that suggests that there's some part of the meeting that needs to change perhaps it's when the meeting is held uh perhaps it has to do with the Dynamics of the team maybe somebody's bringing down the energy of the team and me needs to be excluded one of the most important factors when you first form a team is you need to get agreement and alignment on what the purpose of the team is if the team members have different ideas of what they should be doing or where they're going then you're going to see a lot of bizarre contradictions and disagreements uh throughout the team meetings and discussions another key thing is you want to keep the team small so the general rule of thumb from Harvard is you want single digits fewer than 10 people there are going to cases perhaps where the team must be larger for political reasons uh but it's certainly not optimal in most cases another key thing is that you want a deviant so someone might call this a devil's advocate not everyone should be a deviant but we do see that the most successful teams will have at least one this helps avoid group think it helps keep the team on its toes prevents it from going down a path that doesn't make any sense another key thing is that when you are choosing team members you want to choose them not based on cultural fit not based on personality but first and foremost based on their skill what skills are they bringing to the table what experience do they bring to the table now there are three Essentials for group Effectiveness the first is trust and a lot of that can be forms through the socialization process that I was talking about earlier another is a group identity so are they identifying as a group or simply a collection of individuals and is their group efficacy and lastly humor is important so we do see in the business world that humor can be very effective we see that things like aons can be affected we can see that a lot of executive leaders will use humor to dispel tensions during very serious conversations and sometimes to avoid very tough questions for example Goldman sachs's uh BL blank uh Lloyd blank fiend can use humor as a way to uh get around certain hot topics now we're going to talk about team leadership by referencing Harvard Business Schools leading teams there are two incredibly important Concepts that you need to determine with your team leadership the first is the purpose of the team and the second is the scope of the team the purpose is very important because it is very easy to go on t that are irrelevant to getting to the end result that you want if you haven't aligned on what the desired outcome of the team is then what's going to happen is everyone's going to come up with their own ideas of where they should be going what they should be doing and there's really no centralization purpose the second is the scope of the team if the scope of the team is too broad you're going to end up doing things and not having enough forcefulness you're not going to be able to influence things that are outside the scope if it's too broad if the scope is too narrow you're not going to have a large enough impact in the organization it's just going to be a drop in the bucket you have to determine what the required roles are going to be on the team the first and most obvious position is going to be the team leader this is the person who guides the team they oversee the process and they're primarily responsible for the team achieving its goals then you have the team advisor this is the person who promotes the team outside the team so within the larger organization within external stakeholders then we have the facilitator this is the person that schedules things like the meetings encourages everyone to participate that's something that we want in team meetings then we have others these are team members who's primarily responsible for simply achieving their tasks and then we have the recorder who keeps the meeting records another thing that you need to do is decide on a decision-making process so there are different decision-making methods you could use the first is that the leader ultimately decides on uh the desire path that you're going to take the second is there's a majority so you do a democratic vote to decide what happens third is you have a small group of experts who ultimately make the decision and the last is some type of consensus so if you you look at teams and you look at the meetings that they have often what they end up becoming is just checklists of information sharing or updates but the ideal use of getting everyone together in a room or in a zoom call for a meeting is primarily about solving problems that's the most efficient use of these meetings in this section I'm going to teach you leadership principles and Leadership miss one of the single most important principles in leadership is the recognition that humans are social animals humans are not like bears bears that live alone and wand around mountains and rivers bears are pretty content doing that humans are not humans are happiest when they have close connections with other people humans are more like leming than they are like Bears now sometimes we forget this particularly in countries like the United States the United States is the single most individualistic country in the world it's also the most powerful country in the world so often we're deluded into thinking that humans are individuals but this goes against the nature of humanity we are social animals we're very sensitive to social pressure we're sensitive to social cues there's tons of psychological research reaffirming this point anthropologists reaffirm this point denying it is to deny your capacity as a leader to influence groups now because humans are fundamentally social animals that means that coalitions and alliances are going to be very important to your success as a leader and the single easiest way to form a coalition is to Simply influence one person and then you approach person two and say person one is on board and then once one and two were on board you approach person three and say well person one and two already agree do you agree and that social Dynamic that social pressure is going to snowball to the point where suddenly you have a huge Alliance and that huge Alliance is going to be very difficult to resist because humans are social animals now because humans are social animals and tend to clust cluster together what happens is they inevitably form hierarchies hierarchies are necessary to maintain Integrity in large groups it's how you prevent chaos and humans tend to defer to authority authority figures carry a lot of weight with humans they conform to authority figures that tell them what to do even if those authority figures are simply pretending or seem as though they should be in positions of authority that's you that's the leader that's the person who has good posture the person that seems confident person that seems like the expert so other than simply acting as though you are in a position of hierarchy you can also align yourself with people that already have influence people that already have hierarchy people that are already leaders one way you can do that is you can find influencers using this tool called spark Toro you go to spark Toro you type in some details about who your target audience is and it will spit out a list of influencers influencers that you can reach out out to influencers potentially that you can align uh your photo with them so that by association you also become a leader now even though humans are social animals the larger and larger the organization gets or the group gets the more you need to recognize that humans care more about themselves than they do about the organization they care more about their families than they do about the company so you need to appeal to their self-interest not just the interest of the organization another key psychological principle of humans is loss aversion people care much more about losing than they do about gaining it is much more painful to lose an amount of money than it is rewarding to get an amount of money and often this is a bias that's detrimental that holds people back from success because they're so fearful of losing that they don't act in ways uh that could completely change their lives that could completely change the company the larger an organization is the more there is loss aversion as a general rule because there is more to lose small companies can be riskier because there's really not much to lose somebody sues you they're not going to get a lot of money as an example so people generally don't like change I found this a bit bizarre because I like change I like modularity most people they prefer security they prefer predictability they trust people that are more predictable they like companies that aren't going to randomly fire them or change their position especially in negative ways another thing is people don't like surprises I like surprises but as a general rule people don't so given these two things let's think about what the Solutions are well if people don't like change then let's not phrase things as changes or gains let's phrase them as things that are necessary to prevent loss so for example you could say what will you lose by not acting in other words just to maintain the status quo you need to act you could also say this will let us keep X whatever X is perhaps it's the lunchroom perhaps it's uh money that we have saved up in the bank another thing that you can do and I realized this when I was in Consulting is give frequent updates and if you're a leader or manager give frequent feedback so that there aren't suddenly s surprises people don't like being blindsided so let's say for example that you need to have a very serious conversation to give negative feedback to somebody don't suddenly jump into it and say uh I don't like the way you act in meetings for example give them a heads up and say hey Cindy uh I have some in important I want to talk to you about are you available after lunch then there's no surprise there's some anticipation of what's going to happen things don't seem abrupt when you're a consultant for example uh you might think let's surprise the client at the end of the project with the grand release of uh the new website we developed or or the recommendation that we came up with in management consulting that's the bad way to do it you want to involve them early in the process so that there is no Grand surprise at the end now one of the key things that you need to do as a leader is you need to influence people you need to persuade them of the right direction to take the direction you want them to take so next what we're going to talk about is the Five drivers of influence the Five drivers of influence number one The Source are you likable are you credible are you competent and are you cold or warm War the more cold you are the more competent you seem you seem more serious you seem more precise you seem more intelligent however people don't trust people that are cold they do trust people that are warm but the problem with being warm is that the more warm you are the more stupid you seem you seem less competent you seem less intelligent so there's a delicate balance in leadership between being perceived as cold and being perceived as warm number two the message key things that you want to consider in your message is to emphasize losses we talked earlier about the principle of loss aversion you also will want to appeal to Conformity we talked about how humans are social animals they conform to what other people are doing the other thing that you can do is anchoring so you can anchor Peg your conversation to things that you want people to associate with so for example you talk about something that cost $100,000 and you anchor the conversation around that then when you propose something that costs only $10,000 it seems a lot less number three is the audience do they have a bias towards what you're going to say or against what you're going to say so for example people are strongly opinionated and they don't want to change their mind then giving them more facts and figures likely will do not will not persuade them what will persuade them will be more things like anecdotes consensus pressure is uh also going to be a huge factor in the audience is do they need to conform to what their group has already uh been biased towards number four is the procedures so this is something a lot of leaders don't think about is you can control the procedure that leads to decisions and you can do that in a biased way that is going to favor the outcome that you want so for example it's not just about the meeting it's also about the pre free meetings so for example when I was working at a Fortune 100 company people uh would sometimes come to me very early with their ideas to kind of get me on board so that when they presented it in the meeting uh I was in their Coalition I was already warmed up to their idea so there's a lot of sort of behind the scenes politicking that's happening uh with really effective leaders you can also decide who attends the meetings so if there's a naysayer uh you could time meeting to when they're on vacation I had this happen to me once I was away on vacation and uh one of my subordinates tried to uh get around what I was doing uh while I was away by by going uh to my boss to the CEO uh which was a somewhat a smart political maneuver um uh but ultimately if that person is not not suited to what they're trying to achieve then they're going to fail another thing that you need to consider is uh the meeting timing so I mentioned how you could time meetings to when somebody is away on vacation you can also time meetings to when they're happiest to when they're at their highest energy levels or lowest energy levels and we we talked about that earlier now there are also interpersonal tactics so Dr Robert keini in his famous book on influence talks about uh what these influence tactics are so it's things like uh liking uh people tend to like people that are similar to them so if you could highlight ways in which you are similar and act in similar ways they're more likely to like you there's reciprocity if you give somebody a gift or you volunteer your time to them they're more likely to help you out in the future there's presenting social proof positions of authority are also influential or getting an authority figure to endorse what you want scarcity uh if something's running short and they need to act quickly if we don't do this now uh we're going to run out of the chance later that that could help compel people persuade people there's consistency if people already agreed to Something in the past they're more likely to agree to something similar in the future and you can remind them of this fact hey remember Cindy when uh you said that you liked X well uh I want to move with ahead with X point x point2 uh do you agree and if she agrees then you can move forward it's also uh commitment commitment is very important uh you can get people to voice commitment for example like do you agree that you can make this change and if they say yes especially when in writing or verbally uh they're more likely to commit to what you say another thing you can do with interpersonal tactics is simply make your option the default well uh if we don't decide on anything this is what we're going to move ahead with uh unless we want to change another key thing is uh sucking up so there's some research from Stanford Business School Dr Jeffrey feffer who talks about how one of the keys to your success is really just making your boss feel good but Susan heathfield takes this to another level and they say be everyone's pet not just the teacher's pet not just the boss's pet but basically you want everyone to like you if everyone likes you you're going to have more persuasion you're going to have more uh favor CED so one thing that you recognize as a leader is that it's not just the formal meetings that influence what happens when we talk about team leadership often the biggest indicator of success is actually the engagement and energy that's happening outside of the meetings and one way that you can leverage this is simply invite your colleagues out for lunch develop that personal connection beyond the office environment shared events are very good at building cohesion very good at building alliances coalitions another thing that you can do is you can delegate to your boss now a lot of people including me have forgotten this point so I remember when I was working at a large company I was struggling with pushing some particular agenda and then my boss turned to me and he said delegate up bring me in so when things get tough bring in your boss your boss is there your boss is there to help you and nowhere is he going to be he or she going to be more helpful than when you're really struggling so if you face too much resistance get people with higher positions of authority to support you and that begins with the person immediately above you another key thing to recognize is that gaining commitment is something that can grow gradually so if you can get people to commit to something small in the beginning they're more likely to commit to Something mediumsized in the middle and therefore more likely to agree to something large in the end asking for something big up front front is probably going to be met with a Flatout no but something small leading to something medium leading to something large can be extremely influential when you're leading teams you want to have shared goals and you also want to have individual goals people are more persuaded by things that are in their self-interest but also things that have social pressure tied to them you also need to balance the diversity and cohesion factors we talked about that with the team management and team leadership sections when you enter negotiations here are three things that you really need to consider and the single most important one is your BNA your best alternative to a negotiated agreement now nothing is going to give you more power in a negotiation than the fact that you can simply walk away if you have a job offer somewhere else that pays extremely well then you can actually say no to this job offer somebody doesn't sign your contract but you have another company ready to sign your contract then that is the greatest position you can be in in a negotiation but there are other factors too so one thing that people do in negotiations is they like to move linearly through Point BYO different discussion items things that you need to get alignment on but a more effective method is to have a non-linear linear discussion in a nonlinear discussion with negotiations instead of sequentially going through each point one by one you're willing to set one of those points aside so let's say for example that someone is hung up on point number two and you really can't come to an agreement on it well you can move along to point number three and then come back to point number two you're more likely to get a negotiated agreement by doing this another key mistake that people make with negotiations is they don't actually know what they want they simply think that they want more and going into a negotiation just trying to get as much money as possible is really not a good position to be in instead what you want to know is how much money you want what are the terms that you're willing to accept what are the terms you're not willing to to accept and moving ahead from there so when you're in negotiations or you're in any sort of social environment there's something that you need to recognize you don't know what people's motives are you can watch their behaviors and you can have guesses as to what their motivation is but a lot of the times you're going to be wrong you cannot read people's minds a lot of people think that they can read people's minds and they think other people can read their minds and this gets us into all kinds of problems instead it's better to verbalize what your intentions are and to Simply act based on what people's behaviors are or ask them what their motivations are do not assume that you know a funny example of this was yesterday I was eating a small amount of chowder that my mother had made and I guess I was making a lot of noise she thought I was making a lot of noise because I was trying to pretend that I was eating a lot of the Chowder I don't particularly like chowder so she thought I was acting as though I was eating a lot I wasn't at all that wasn't why I was eating that way but in her mind that's what was happening so there are a lot of silly uh sometimes ridiculous assumptions people make when they try to imply people's motives if somebody drives aggressively on the road you might think oh they're just impatient and not realize that they're trying to rush somebody to the hospital you don't know what their motives are but you can observe their behavior and you can respond to that behavior another common mistake people make is they complain don't be a complainer you want things to move forward and moving forward is not very um effective when you're just complaining about the status quo so we talked about how people don't read intentions very well and motivations so one thing that you need to do is you need to let people know that you're ambitious you want to get promoted you want to move forward you want to take on projects if you tell people you're more likely to get it another key thing is that as much as you want to be everyone's pet you want your boss to like you you want your boss's boss to like you you want your colleagues to like you you need to learn how to say no you need to know how to set boundaries if you don't you're going to resent people and you're going to be drowning in work that you don't need to be doing another key thing is you need to get to know people before you need them get to know them take them out for lunch help them on their projects do it before you need them because otherwise it's going to seem like you're only trying to get to know them to get something out of them to use them people don't like being used always remember the warmth versus concept competence principle you need need to find that balance we talked about that earlier it's going to be better in negotiations it's going to be better in influence it's going to be better as a leader when you're not perceived as stupid and warm or cold and competent but somewhere in between another key thing is when you're praising people you should do so publicly because that again ties into the principle of uh humans being social animals if they feel praised in public then they get this warm glowing feeling and you want to criticize privately I had an awkward situation one time when I moved down to the United States to a different state and uh I watched my boss verbally chastise somebody uh right in front of us uh for some interpersonal inabilities of his and I was quite embarrassed for him and I'm sure he was embarrassed too that's not something you should do if you have to criticize somebody do it in private book a room go out to lunch to discuss it you do not want to embarrass them publicly now when you're criticizing somebody or you're trying to change their behavior this comes from the hbr guide to office politics you want to name the specific behavior or actions that you disagree with once again you're not making assumptions about what their motivations were or their intentions You're simply specifying the behavior that you saw for example somebody showing up late to a meeting in the next video what we're going to talk about is Jeffrey feffer leadership BS book and how a lot of leadership advice is wrong a lot of leadership advice out there is just completely wrong if you want to learn more about this I highly recommend checking out Jeffrey feffer content you can look at his research you can look at this book leadership BS you can look at his videos from Stanford Business School on YouTube so what's the problem with leadership advice well a lot of the problem has to do with evaluation so when we have something like a motivational talk at a company or a school or wherever students audiences will evaluate it and the way they evaluate it is often based on whether they found it entertaining the problem is that entertainment is not very strongly correlated with actually learning so there is a strong incentive for the leadership industry to promote things that are entertaining interesting stories and anecdotes even if they go against what the data actually say about successful leadership so one of the problems is that what's successful in real the real world of leadership is things that maybe don't sound so good they don't sound as feel good so what are some of those things well one is do whatever your bosses want and latter them endlessly very proven way of getting ah hid in companies being forceful advocating for yourself there's a lot of social pressure against self-promotion but we do see in the business world that that is how people get ahead and showing anger can also be very effective people don't like conflict but leaders are often very okay with conflict Laden situations another key thing that doesn't sound so good but is the reality is that there are very politically charged environments even in companies that are supposedly very uh revolutionary or flat in hierarchy companies in Silicon Valley for example might promote that attitude but in reality uh political Dynamics are inevitable why because humans are social animals and humans tend to Cluster together in groups and politics are ways that you uh negotiate hierarchy in those groups and what we find based on research of Bill Gentry is that 50% of leaders are actually failures doesn't sound so good but that's the reality that we're working in so continuing now with some learnings from Jeffrey feffer there's a strong difference between what is good for leaders and what is good for organizations leaders often go ahead with what is in their best interest sometimes to the detriment of the organizations we see CEOs who leave companies with huge Severance packages even when the companies go bankrupt now one thing that good leaders do is they'll uh get commitment from their subordinates by getting them to sign sign for example an honor code that's one way that we can mitigate this problem here uh where people are acting in their self-interest and not in the interest of other people another key to success as a leader is to set goals and track performance so using things like Diaries so basically some sort of record of accountability uh will help help build actual successful leaders now another thing to consider is that one of the reasons we have so much issues in in leadership and in the leadership industry is that the roles are ambiguous so when you're an individual contributor let's say you're an engineer or some sort of uh technical position it's very clear what your role is it's very clear what you need to do the problem with leadership is that it becomes much much more vague and cloudier uh so people that are good actors or good salespeople often outperform in leadership positions even when we don't have objective measures of whether they're actually doing a good job another key thing when you Aspire for leadership positions is you really want to stand out and get noticed that means having some quirks perhaps a little bit of a different style perhaps using your native accent because people that don't get noticed don't get considered it's the same thing in the marketing world people aren't going to buy your product if they haven't first even heard of it now one thing that we see is that company size accounts for only about 40% of the variation in CEO pay while performance explains a trivial 5% so this reiterates the point that leadership positions are often ambiguous they're vague they're unclear so a lot of your success as a leader has to do with indicators cues things that sort of indicate that you are in a position to be a strong leader uh regardless of whether the performance is objectively measured or not so success as a leader has a lot to do with self-promotion talking about your successes not talking about your failures talking about Grand achievements talking about big achievements having overconfidence is actually a good thing to have as a leader people want people that seem confident and certain uh when they're leading the ship you want to put on a show you want to display energy you want to pay attention to other people people like Bill Clinton are very good at this and you want to do this regardless of how you feel authenticity is an overrated attribute of a leader if you're not feeling so well but people need you in times of emergency that means you need to play the part you need to do what's required of you regardless of what you're feeling on the inside and often it means that you need to maintain your cool even when you're actually very angry at the company that you're negotiating with or with the subordinate who needs to change his behavior so you have to have a lot of self-control and that doesn't necessarily mean uh being true to yourself uh in some senses another thing is that we tend to prefer things that remind us of ourselves and that's why uh often the people that get promoted look very very similar to uh the leaders that hire them and that's a bias you need to consider when you are a leader is that you have this propensity uh not to hire to for diversity but to hire for cohesion uh but do you really need somebody similar to yourself or do you need somebody that brings something else to the table so overall often what we see is that there's a very strong disconnect between what leaders say and what they do they might talk for example about authenticity but in reality that that's not uh what they're doing As Leaders or how they climb to leadership positions next we're going to talk about trust trust requires constancy and predictability what we know in human psychology is that people tend to like people that are predictable predictable people seem more reliable they seem more trustable this is one of the problems you may run into as a leader is you you might change your mind and people are going to look at that and they're going to say well can I really trust somebody that just constantly uh changes and flipflops so you need to G navigate that space very clearly so for example if you do change your mind and decide to go in a different direction perhaps what you want to do is you want to highlight changes that make it internally consistent why something needs to change so when we look at research leadership what we find is that there are two activities that are significantly related to managerial success one is interaction with Outsiders and the other is socializing and politicking both of which are very closely tied so a lot of people actually end up getting fired from their jobs even when they graduate from very top IV League programs one of the reasons that this happens is they don't actually fully appreciate the political reality of what it's like being in an organization you need to navigate the politics it's not just about coming up with the best solution or looking at the Hard data often it's about navigating very very murky political Landscapes and power structures that's the key to success as a leader so when we look at the experts what do they tell us well they tell us that people respond particularly well to leaders who make them feel special part of an elite group a distinguished group an unusual group so let's say that you're formulating a team and you're trying to get some expert on board they have a very strong skill set and you say this skill set would be great for the team well you want to approach them and tell them that they're great you want to flatter them and that's true they have a stellar skill and you want them to feel as though though they're being invited to some exclusive team maybe it's an Advisory board for Amazon for example and that you really respect their opinions because when people feel special uh it plays into that idea of humans being social animals they want to feel like they're connected to a close group part of a special Elite group and that can be highly influential you want to make people feel special and when you do things like that you want to signal strength confidence and skill you want to make it sound as though you're leading a team or a group that's going to be very very successful and that you have the ability to navigate whatever shaky waters are in the future