There’s nothing like the speed, strategic alignment and employee engagement and vision that strong start-ups have. Each has a certain magic that simply vanishes in a large, multi-department environment. Many leaders know the feeling of struggling to bring that magic back, but how can they without the same intimate, one-on-one conversations and close knit environment a startup allows? Just how can leadership eliminate the sterile, remote and distributed communication of the enterprise and find that lost spark?

Contributor

• • Alan Berson, Learning Director Executive Education and founder of Leadership Conversation LLC, Wharton

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  Transcript
  Sanjog Aul [00:00:00]:
  Hello and welcome to CIO Talk Radio. To learn more about the show, please visit ciotalkradio.com always. We invite you to join the discussion on Twitter #Ctrlive and look for this show as #leadership. Today’s topic is Leading Startup Back To The Enterprise, and our guest for today’s show is Alan Burson. He’s the Learning Director at Wharton Executive Education, is the Founder Of Leadership Conversation llc, and he’s also the author of a great book, Leadership Conversations Challenging High Potential Managers to Become Great Leaders. Welcome, Alan, how are you doing?

  Alan Berson [00:00:35]:
  I’m doing great. Thank you very much for having me here, Sanjog.

  Sanjog Aul [00:00:38]:
  Great and a pleasure and honors all are so now, many CIOs and leaders who listen to our show have at one point been in a small work environment or at a startup, and they’ve always been first to tell us that there’s a certain magic and excitement that goes into every day on the job in terms of the intimacy and the ideas generated, the energy level and the conversations, the quality and the quantity of conversations happen in that environment, and of course, the speed at which things get done, and they may be wondering what the magic is now, given that they are in a larger setting or an enterprise setting and in a corporate structure. So the goal of this conversation is to see that where is it getting lost, how to bring it back and what else leaders can do to create such conversations. That said, Alan, the first question is we are trying to as an enterprise at all times, try to create value, make a difference, and that’s perhaps would have been the initial goal when this enterprise started. However, as part of what we started, the DNA that we created, that to some extent or for that matter, I’ll take that leap to say quite an extent that magic is lost and that’s why we in the first place doing this. So what could be the potential reasons why this is even happening?

  Alan Berson [00:01:57]:
  I think that the magic gets lost when the realities of the workplace and the requirements to produce hit a group of talented people who have come together where instead of doing what they love the most, which is the brainstorming, the thinking through possibilities, all of a sudden have to focus and get something done. Another time it goes away is when the organization gets larger. Because in theory, every time you double your sales, you have a whole new company and you start distributing the workforce, you start having to meet deadlines, you have more stress and the conversations stop, and the conversations are critical to the magic because magic is something that’s really, really felt by people. It’s not felt by an organization.

  Sanjog Aul [00:02:45]:
  And when we talk about startups, I’m going to go back there because it all started because there was a vision, there was a purpose, and that’s what attracted the founders in the first place, and that’s what attracted the initial set of people who said, I’m going to take the leap, I might leave a cushy job or I’ll start my career in this organization.

  Alan Berson [00:03:05]:
  Oh, go ahead. I’m sorry.

  Sanjog Aul [00:03:06]:
  So that purpose is where we started and that what gave us the energy and the reason we have lesser energy. Do you think the purpose is getting lost in most cases?

  Alan Berson [00:03:16]:
  Well, I actually think what happens is the person in charge and even those who are the followers start thinking about management instead of leadership and they work towards the project goals rather than the people goals. So to me, a great leader is one who keeps that magic going and oftimes in a new way. I mean, the excitement of a brand new group of highly dedicated and talented people coming together for an entrepreneurial venture is hard. That’s a candle that burns bright very quickly. It’s hard to sustain that. So the reality is you’ve got to start thinking of what are the ways in which we can still come together and have those personal needs met as well as the business needs, because otherwise the business needs overwhelm the personal needs.

  Sanjog Aul [00:04:05]:
  You mentioned that these things, what we used to accomplish when we were smaller, more nimble, they are now hard to sustain. Just because something is harder to sustain, should we forego or would you say that’s where an enterprise and its leader’s mettle is tested?

  Alan Berson [00:04:22]:
  I think that’s where the mettle is tested. That’s a great statement, and if you forego it, then you forego the magic. When you forego the magic, you forego the big potential. Because what you end up doing is you focus on all the management activities instead of focusing on the leadership, which is what creates the future. The management gets today’s work done, the leadership gets tomorrow’s possibilities teed up, and you can’t stop doing that. It’s almost like in a major corporation you’ve got new products and existing products, and new products are exciting, but they don’t add to the bottom line. So people who run an existing product area and end up being given responsibility for new products, they never have the time to do it the same way here.

  Alan Berson [00:05:10]:
  People who are trying to make this new burgeoning enterprise work, that are also faced with making people enjoy what they’re doing more, will always go away from that. When the stress and the time pressures hit. There’s something I often do with groups which is I’ll have them identify the top 10 values that are important to them, and once they do that, I then give them a second sheet of paper and I ask them to identify the top 10 values that they think are necessary for an enterprise to succeed, and every single time those doing values, I’m sorry, the human being values, get dropped off and the doing values of accomplishment get added in. So we almost naturally go, okay, we have to be unfun. We have to be nose to the grindstone to produce something, and yet what that does is that saps the energy away from the system.

  Alan Berson [00:06:09]:
  So the best leaders know that they’ve got to find a way to maintain that, and that gets you to leverage people instead of drain them. It’s all energy.

  Sanjog Aul [00:06:16]:
  Let’s compare an enterprise with marriage, and if the couple don’t fight, that means they don’t have a good relationship. They’re not open to each other. What you just said, where you are going to pick up the doing values and those become prominent and the people, what they wanted to do, it takes a back seat and they almost kind of compromise. Then I think the marriage is in jeopardy.

  Alan Berson [00:06:41]:
  What happens there is that we start to either take certain things for granted and often it’s taking the other person for granted, and there’s parallels in the workplace and we everything. I mean, I don’t know if you’ve ever said, and most of the listeners have said I don’t have a choice. The reality is we always have a choice. We may just not like the consequences of that choice. So a great marriage is one where the choice is, hey, we’re going to have date night twice a week, even if it’s eating a pizza in the backyard and having a sitter inside, but you make the choices to keep the humanity in the relationship. The same thing in an organization.

  Alan Berson [00:07:22]:
  You can make the choice to create today’s budget numbers and to achieve them at the expense of the future of, but at that point you’re going to lose your best people in the same way that you’re going to lose your soulmate in a marriage if you don’t end up keeping that alive, passionate and exciting.

  Sanjog Aul [00:07:41]:
  This brings up an important point related to humanization of an enterprise. So we were more a bunch of people, humans who were running a startup company, but when it becomes an enterprise, we suddenly start make it more sterile, more machine like where we are one of the cogs in the wheel or pieces of the puzzle versus people who have their own. There are viewpoints which want to be heard, which want to be appreciated and who want to be heard. So that’s where people have got way too many other people to listen to or talk to or have conversations with, and they say we simply don’t have the energy at the top, and so we will do less of it or we will not do it at all, and do you think that’s where the downfall begins?

  Alan Berson [00:08:23]:
  I think as you look at a larger organization with more people, all of a sudden you add in groups like human resources, you add in a legal department, you add in a lot of groups whose sole responsibility is to sort of control and contain and make sure that the organization is going where it’s quote unquote supposed to. In the early days, there was no supposed to. There was what do we want to do? Where are we going to go? And I think that dehumanization is really where every department in their culture says that we are people first and producers second, and what’s lost is that the more you focus on the management mindset activities, the more that you are limiting the future growth. So it’s really a trade off. We work with passion, we work harder now, we leverage people so that more can be done in the future or we forget about people. We do more now and then we’re in trouble six months or a year or two down the line. So there’s one chapter in my book that says people are not machines.

  Alan Berson [00:09:28]:
  And my editor wanted that chapter title taken out, and it’s the only fight I won with her over a two year period, and it’s just that people do realize that they get put in as a cog in the wheel, and there’s that simple walking over and saying thank you for a job well done. Here’s what I saw you do. I mean, for instance, in feedback, there’s a 6 to 1 ratio of negative feedback to positive feedback in the workplace. Yet if you ask the people who give the feedback, they say it’s 50/50. So what people hear is the reality.

  Alan Berson [00:10:06]:
  What you think you’re saying is not, and what we end up doing is we dehumanize by correcting mistakes, by solving problems, when what we want to do is get people jazzed and excited by coming up with new opportunities. One tip that I give for the listeners is write down the biggest problem that you’re facing and then sit down and say, how can I convert this into an opportunity statement? So if the problem is we’re having lousy communication, the opportunity is something bigger that subsumes that which would be something like, how do we make sure that we create the future three to five years in advance by having the kind of sustained conversations we had when we were a young enterprise. Again, it gets back to choices. You’ve got to make the choice to do it.

  Sanjog Aul [00:10:57]:
  Looking at the organizational design comparing to the startup where people were hired and by design, they were not really pigeonholed. They were invited for their core talent and perhaps see where they would fit, and they would wear multiple hats, and because of their excitement, they would volunteer to say, okay, what can I do next? Or what can I do more? When we start bringing HR into the mix, which is nothing wrong with getting HR into the mix because they’ll bring some structure, we automatically start resorting to maybe building a job description and putting job categories and scales, et cetera, and then performance metrics is also based on the competencies that were laid out. Do you think that’s a trap? Because then you are literally containing somebody’s energy and ability to expand their wings just because now you’ve got way too many people.

  Alan Berson [00:11:50]:
  It’s a trap with a big huge door that you can spring the trap. Nobody is pigeonholed when you first start in an organization. What happens is that as the organization grows, you don’t know the people as well. You don’t know what really makes them tick. So you end up just throwing things at them that are the competencies that you’re aware of, instead of continually challenging them in a way that allows them to dig deep and do more things that are of interest to them, and one of the things I also espouse is that you’re either having a stay interview with your best people or you’re having an exit interview because you don’t have a stay interview. So what do you do in the stay interview every month or every quarter? Sit down with your best people and ask them about who they are, what is exciting them in terms of that they’re able to bring something to the business that sustains their energy. What are they learning? How is it working with their career path? We spend most of the time during the day making sure that they do what the organization wants.

  Alan Berson [00:12:58]:
  In these stay interviews, we talk about what it is that the individual needs to sustain their ability to move forward, and we also do it from a place of curiosity, where we’re learning the more. I mean, it’s amazing when I do work with corporations and I get people in a room where they find out that people do things that they were never aware that that individual did and that that requires or it involves talents that could be used in the organization. One example is there was a person in a company who was running an entire soccer league and this person had not been considered for management because his job in the company did not involve doing managerial activities, and when they realized he was running something that involved thousands of kids, hundreds of parents and doing tournaments and everything else, they were able to tap into that same excitement and he was able to transform things that he was great at and had energy around into the organization that without good conversations one would not have known existed.

  Sanjog Aul [00:14:06]:
  Let’s take a quick break listeners. We’ll be right back and I would like to pick on one of the terms that you used, Alan, just now where you said pick your best people and do the stay interview. Why only the best? But please hold your thoughts. We’ll be coming back and we’ll we’ll talk more about this. Thank you and the listeners. Please stay tuned.

  Sanjog Aul [00:15:47]:
  So Alan, you mentioned about instead of exit interviews, do stay interviews. Fantastic idea. Now you also mentioned that it should be done with the best people. Number one question, why only best? Number two, how do we determine who is the best? Because sometimes that could be a false positive.

  Alan Berson [00:16:04]:
  I’m glad you caught me up on that because it’s something that definitely requires some additional discussion. The reason I say this is we tend to work with the squeaky wheels. We tend to work quite often with the people in our organization who are not getting a job done, where we’re spending a lot of our time and effort getting them to do that. So we’re having those conversations where things aren’t working well. The other hand, you’ve got the go to people and all of us have either been a go to person or we have them, and that go to person day one says, wow, the boss is going to me. They’re handing me projects, I’m doing them with huge success. I get a quick thank you.

  Alan Berson [00:16:44]:
  But my real thank you is I get given four more projects or six more projects. So you keep your best people busy doing things when what you’ve got to be doing is talking to your best people and making sure that what you’re doing with them is working for them as well as for you. Second part is who are our best people? Our best people are two things. Number one, when I work with my clients, I get them. If somebody leaves the organization, you don’t replace that person. You think about what you need in that position two, three, four years from now and you put someone in who’s able to do what’s needed in the future. So the second part to that is I suggest that you look for attitude before aptitude. Somebody who is really psyched about doing a job, who has, I mean, yes, they have to have reasonable intelligence, ability to work in a corporate environment, et cetera.

  Alan Berson [00:17:42]:
  But someone with passion, with the ability to sustain passion internally will find a way to get a job done. While people who just work from a skill base will often use those skills to talk about why something can’t be done rather than to make things happen. So it just again, that we’re not tending to have those conversations with our best people. Instead we’re dumping a lot of projects on them and not realizing that they sort of start to struggle and resent that they’re being asked to do far more work than the other people.

  Sanjog Aul [00:18:13]:
  So let’s look at the way a person is wired and or has the DNA to thrive in one environment versus another. Would you say the people who demonstrate the most energy and they have a ball being in a large enterprise and show the traits as if they were in a startup environment where they could be communicating well and have the right attitude, et cetera, et cetera, would you say that is a nature versus a nurture issue? Would you take any credit or give any credit to the leadership who was able to make this person the way they are today? Or would you say that would come as a package from that person, when we hired that person.

  Alan Berson [00:18:52]:
  A fantastic question, and I think that the easy way to answer that is it’s up to the leader to figure out a way to channel the best of each person in the organization. A lot of times someone thinks, wow, now I’m the leader, everyone has to reach out to me, everyone has to do what I want. The reality is that becoming a leader is an obligation to reach out to your people, to find out more about them, and again, these stay interviews can do that. Taking them to lunch, having a meeting with five, six people in a given week where you just talk about nothing in particular and you see what bubbles up. It’s up to you to unhinge possibility. So what I mean by that is you’ve got essentially introverts and extroverts, and that’s an energy concept. The extroverts are out there, they lose energy when you’ve got them in the office doing a project, they gain energy when they’re with people.

  Alan Berson [00:19:49]:
  The introverts end up losing energy when they’re in a big meeting and they gain energy when they’re in their own office, and what you’ve got to be doing is recognizing that you’ve got to somewhat restrain the extroverts and get them to work on projects as well as people, and you’ve got to reach out to those introverts and allow them to prosper. One way I do that is I think of myself sometimes as a farmer when I’m working with teams and that is that I plant seeds with a group of extroverts. I can plant a seed and harvest it immediately and keep doing that. Plant, harvest, plant, harvest. When I’m working with a group of introverts, which you’re going to have in the CIO community, you’ve got to plant seeds on day one and then harvest them in a separate meeting or conversation on day two, three, four or five, and a lot of times you’ll say to an introvert, that is the best idea of all the ones that were put forward.

  Alan Berson [00:20:45]:
  But it’s three days later. Why didn’t you tell me this three days ago? And I think you listeners, this will resonate with you, you’ll just say, well, I didn’t have that answer three days ago. So yes, there are people wired for immediate response and there are people who are wired to think, to process, to bring things together, and the good news for all of you who are introverts is normally you come up with a better solution than what the extroverts came up with on day one.

  Sanjog Aul [00:21:12]:
  See, all this knowledge that you just mentioned wouldn’t be fabulous if we could log it in some system. We build and spend millions of dollars in sophisticated HR systems, but the kind of knowledge we are talking about, the nuanced information about an individual when they are at their best, when they get ticked off or the energy goes low, et cetera, et cetera, if it doesn’t get logged or it is not common knowledge among at least the people who matter in terms of leadership, then we are making a person’s potential and the person’s ability to contribute in an organization be dependent on a leader who when leaves, would render these people ineffective or less than what they could be potentially contributing.

  Alan Berson [00:21:56]:
  And I think the answer to that is that, and this is where in my book I talked about connected, aligned and inspired leadership rather than either servant leadership or command and control. In today’s world, we often are aligned in a matrix organization where we don’t have people reporting to us. Or if we do, we ask people to lead a project, lead a team, lead an initiative so that the functional leader is not necessarily the leader of the moment, and if we can build systems where different people are leading, are showing up with a leadership mindset, they’re talking to lots of people, they’re building trusted relationships, they’re thinking about vision and strategy, not just objectives and tactics. They’re opportunity driven instead of problem oriented. By the way, all that’s on page 12 of Leadership Conversations. You end up being able to have a group where everyone says, I am going to not just be a follower at the appropriate time, but I’m going to be a leader at the appropriate time.

  Alan Berson [00:23:02]:
  And they define leadership as not only finding a vision, but then working with people to create thought leadership, and that’s what energizes people that they are talked to as human beings and they’re asked to create the future, not just replicate the past, which is what managers are asked to do. So it’s all how you deal with someone, and I think if you think of the whole theory of concentric circles, that if you have one team, Sanjog and I have another, and there’s six of us who also have other teams, the more that we can get our teams excited and motivated as people and that will overlap with any of our people working with cross functional teams, all of a sudden you get those conversations going and it’s the lack of conversations or the inability of people to have appropriate conversations that stops us all from coming together. So it’s not that leaders don’t want to do it, it’s that they don’t take the time to do it. You look at someone like Bill Marriott and I think even I don’t know how old he is now. I think he’s in his late 80s, early 90s. He still visits 100 hotels a year.

  Alan Berson [00:24:12]:
  And when he does that, he meets with the people, he talks to them, he answers their questions, he asks great questions of them to get them to think. So these are all techniques. I mean I always say that a manager answers the great questions that a leader asks. So the leader’s got to be there asking, just creating the ability for others to think in a more expansive way.

  Sanjog Aul [00:24:37]:
  Now when we look at the environment that we used to enjoy, which was maybe more in a startup mode again, is that we did not really know where we’re going to get, but every day we had a ball just going through that journey, dealing with uncertainties in or unknowns and learning about new things. Walk away an installer thinking that okay, I grew today. Now we either in larger enterprises, yes, we do take on projects which are going to help us learn some things more, but we do not have hand holding or people are not by our side for the most part and we are delivering things by results because there are way too many projects going on, way too many initiative and way too many people to manage. So when we get into this result oriented culture, do you think we are jeopardizing the quality of journey, which is where the energy lies or where that’s that that seems to be the secret sauce of how well the energy the daily journey is going for us to maintain our energy levels.

  Alan Berson [00:25:36]:
  All right, my answer to that, some of you may not like, it’s that we continue to grow, but we also have to grow up, and as we build a bigger company, as we take on a larger role, as we have more responsibilities, it’s important that we peer coach and mentor each other, that we take the professional classes, the skill building that allows us to do more than we did before. The job of an independent contributor. So in that initial company, everyone’s an individual contributor. You don’t have five layers, you don’t have the HR groups and the support groups. So everyone is contributing directly to what happens. What happens as you then grow up, as the entity starts to mature and grow is all of a sudden people have to start managing what others are doing, which is a whole different job, and by the way, you don’t want to pick the best individual contributor and reward them by making them manager.

  Alan Berson [00:26:38]:
  You want to find the people who show the competency and the attitude to be a manager. Then you go the second step of when you get promoted to the position of leadership, it is not just the manager being promoted to leader. It is actually someone looking at doing an entirely different job. A leader is not a manager on steroids. A leader is someone who looks to the future. The manager is someone who ensures the present. So what you’re doing is you’re tapping into different sets of competencies. So in that meeting where everyone is there saying, oh, why don’t we do this, why don’t we do that? I’ve got this great idea and you spin off these great ideas, the next challenge is that that person matures to say, how can I bring those ideas to market? And the next step is how can I lead an entire organization to create ideas and bring them to market?

  Sanjog Aul [00:27:33]:
  So who is struggling there? And let’s take a quick break right now, listeners, but when we come back, let’s talk about who’s struggling. Here are the people who actually want to share their energy and contribute towards organizations, or the leaders who are putting things out there and then not able to manage these people or harness the energy that’s available to them if they choose to, and make the full use of it. So let’s explore that more when we come back. Please stay tuned, listeners.

  Sanjog Aul [00:29:20]:
  Welcome back. So, based on your last response, Alan, it looks like for the most part, the people who have the energy are the ones who are there to give or they are willing to contribute. It’s something which is behooved on the leader to be able to get that out of them and are managed. So it seems like the leaders are the ones who have to grow up.

  Alan Berson [00:29:42]:
  Yes, I think the what happens is we have a process that puts people in a leadership position without either A telling them that leadership is different than management or B training them how to be leaders, and then what happens is they let down the people who are following them, the followers. One of the things that happens, especially in a high tech organization, is that you tend to have a few people people and then you’ve got a lot of process people. You have people who are technically oriented who truly want to just make decisions and take action, and a lot of those, when they become leaders, they forget about the people and they just try and drive the decision making and action taking, and yet those are only two of the four critical conversations that are in my book. The first two are actually building relationships and developing others and they are foundational. So a people person automatically gravitates to, hey, you’re new to my team, let’s sit down, let’s talk, let’s have a baseline conversation.

  Alan Berson [00:30:48]:
  I want to understand who you are. Forget the job for a moment. What gets you excited, what are the things you like to do? And the people person does that naturally, and then they’ll have a conversation where the person says, I’d like to do something different in my job than I’m doing. I’d like to be a manager someday. So they then through that go into developing other conversation and they make sure they bring resources to bear, because that’s a job of a leader, is to bring resources to their group. That person then becomes better at being able to make decisions and take action, which is kind of what that process person wanted. On the other hand, when a process person just does not do the developmental or the relationship building parts, then all they can do is push people.

  Alan Berson [00:31:38]:
  They can’t pull them along and they don’t have the skill base to even know how to do it. So it’s one of the things on my website, which is my Leadership Conversations doc, is you can take a free assessment both on the leadership mindsets and on the four conversations to be able to see, and by the way, you can do this without buying the book. So you can see the extent to which you engage in the various types of conversations. It’s critical that you do all four if you want to be In a leadership position, and yes, it’s the having. One of the reasons, I mean, my passion for doing all this and having as an executive for 25 years and an executive coach and now I’ve sort of dedicated my life to teaching people, is that I’ve just experienced too much really bad leadership in my life, and I’m not so sure that we can teach some of the old dogs new tricks.

  Alan Berson [00:32:34]:
  But all of you who are out there are going to be the cadre of the future, and don’t repeat the mistakes of your elders. Learn from them, but learn also what not to do. So learn how to, even as a technical specialist, build good relationships with people, ask great questions, be curious, find out everything that the person next to you has to offer, and then a critical component is you have to cooperate with them, not compete. So many of us look to the left and right of us in our office, and we compete. Leaders aren’t about competition. They’re about breaking down silos, breaking down barriers, about bringing people together to compete with the outside, not to compete with each other internally.

  Sanjog Aul [00:33:22]:
  Now, one is to talk about conversations among the folks who are leaders, and then they talking to people who have the energy, the people who are workers or staff. There are conversations which happen, in fact, more often among peers, which is one worker talking to another. Then it could be between a manager and the staff, and then leader and the staff and all the whole matrix, if you will, and all of those conversations matter in the way a person whose energy is to be harnessed is going to feel and how much they would volunteer that energy to the environment, to the enterprise. How do we control? Or I would again not want to use the control. How would want to foster that culture where each conversation that happens within an enterprise is essentially cumulatively adding to the highest energy level. A person can volunteer on a given day or in a given period.

  Alan Berson [00:34:20]:
  Well, the key to creating excitement is to ask questions versus tell people what to do. I think all of us like to feel that we’re important. All of us like to feel that we’re contributing something larger than we are, and yet we also, at the same time, most of us feel that the people above us don’t see all the contributions that we’re making. I hear that all the time in my practice that my boss, if only my boss knew what I could do, and my response is, you can’t control what others do. You can only control what you do. Invite your boss to lunch, sit down with your boss and say, boss, here’s what you’re asking me to do, and here’s all the other things I could be doing and still do what I’m currently doing if you gave me the opportunity.

  Alan Berson [00:35:06]:
  So the other thing is that most of us end up through those conversations, being good at leading up and leading down. In other words, engaging with people and having the conversations. Where I find it’s a little bit, I think the opposite of what you were just mentioning is our peer conversations tend to be gripe sessions. They tend to be rallying around problems in an organization, and what the peer conversations are not doing is how can we as a peer group spur the people above us and spur the people below us to do something more powerful, to be better leaders, to be better followers, and we’re wasting that peer to peer interaction again on competing with each other rather than cooperating. Imagine if instead of you going to your boss and saying, I had this great idea, which you probably just stole from your peers, instead having all of your peers ask for a meeting with your boss and saying, as a group, here’s an idea that we want to rally behind. We want to do more learning for our people.

  Alan Berson [00:36:10]:
  We want to provide additional resources, we want to provide learning for ourselves so that we can be qualified to take your job and kick you up a level, whatever it may be. You’ve got to cooperate and you’ve got to have these conversations and we just don’t tend to have them now.

  Sanjog Aul [00:36:26]:
  Like quality and governance. We definitely in many cases have seen people feel that relationship building, a deliberate attempt to building relationship, is kind of little fuzzy for it to be justified, the investment in terms of time and energy, and of course, both you and us, I, and of course the listeners are thinking that that’s not true. So why is that a mindset that is prevailing? I’d like to share an example where talking to an executive, they say, we have a great culture. We have a ping pong table and we have a foosball table. When we ask them about how well do people understand what their jobs are on a given day, how are they going to grow within an organization? They say, perhaps we don’t have the greatest idea about that.

  Alan Berson [00:37:12]:
  They’re not asking questions. I think I was chuckling a little bit as you talked about foosball and ping pong. I mean that’s. Someone of my generation would think that’s a great game to have out there. The real question is to say to your workforce, when you take a 15 minute break, when you get together as a group to brainstorm, what is the activity that you would like to be doing, and in each generation there’s a different answer to that. So what we do is we make assumptions that others are like us and we put out opportunities or breaks or games that are like us, not like them, and getting back to your whole thing of fuzziness and whether it’s a soft skill or a hard skill, great relationship builders call relationship building a hard skill.

  Alan Berson [00:38:00]:
  They know that they could not survive and prosper without doing that. People who are not good at something call it a soft skill, and that’s a way of denigrating it and saying, what soft skill? I don’t have to learn it, but folks, anyone out there who can’t build relationships, who can’t develop other people who can’t make decisions and can’t take action, if you’re not doing all four of those, then you’re going to hit your own glass ceiling, and that’s one of the reasons I wrote the book, is it gets people to think about, as a first level manager, what is it I need to be doing as a manager of managers? What do I need to be doing as an executive leader? How does my job change? How do the conversations change? And as a cxo, how do things change again? And these are things we’re not taught even at, I mean, I’ve got a Wharton MBA and nobody taught that at the time I went to school. They’re starting to teach it now, but the top leadership didn’t have that training. So I really push back on the fuzzy skills, the soft skills, because we call that things that we’re not good at.

  Alan Berson [00:39:09]:
  And yet it’s our job to be a learner even. I mean, at the age of almost 50, I went back to school to become an executive coach. Why? Because I realized that I’d stopped learning and therefore I’d stopped growing, and the minute you stop growing, you become a drag on your organization. Rather than that helium balloon helping everyone rise up, those of you who are in leadership position, figure out something you can learn every day or something you can do differently every day, and my suggestion is ask your people because they know what you’re not doing well, and unless you’re good at accepting and receiving feedback, they’re not telling you. So increase the conversation level, ask questions, and do it in a very safe space.

  Sanjog Aul [00:40:00]:
  I’m sure the listeners in their own right are trying to be the leader that you are recommending. They should be in terms of doing the right things, building energy among people, et cetera, but this becomes an art form more than a science, and that then we cannot move towards improvement because we don’t know enough about and we are not able to measure. So is there an accurate or maybe near accurate way of measuring if the effort that we are making and or helping others make those efforts within our team as leaders is actually moving us in the right direction? Because otherwise we may be preaching and learning the wrong game of golf. Please stay tuned listeners. We’ll be right back and explore

  Sanjog Aul [00:42:05]:
  Welcome back. So Alan, leading and developing leaders is essentially an ongoing journey and whatever we do, if you don’t measure it, we don’t stop and measure and think about it. Then we would not know where this is going and we could keep compounding the mistakes versus taking in the right direction. So what’s the secret sauce to making that happen? Where are there any checks and balances that you could put in place as you go about getting this rather art form incorporated in an organization?

  Alan Berson [00:42:37]:
  I mean the measurement of building relationships, the measurement of developing others. It’s tricky to say what works and what doesn’t work because you never have a true control. I think a great leader takes it as de facto that they must do those things with their people. One of the things that’s important is that this audience, and correct me if I’m wrong, is very much process oriented and great at following processes, and again, there’s a science to processes, there’s an art to something that doesn’t easily fit into a process and that’s the way effectively we wrote Leadership Conversations was to give you a process for doing the artful types, the leadership types of work, and I’ll give an example of a CIO of one of the very top government agencies, and he sits down with every new person and he says to them, here’s my style, here’s what I expect from you, here’s the joint responsibility, here’s when to contact me, and by the way, his style says things like I’m blunt and transparent, I ask a lot of questions, don’t take them personally.

  Alan Berson [00:43:53]:
  I like structured processes and procedures and I insist on a family friendly team. So he starts putting out there that the art and the science are intertwined and can’t be pulled apart. He also then goes to his vision, which is success is when one, every employee is excited about what he does. Number two, every government employee wants to work for us and number three, every federal agency wants to use us as their trusted ip. Now what he’s done is he said we have to be the kind of people and do the kind of work that we are head and shoulders above everyone else. When we do that, we’ll have better people wanting to come into our organization. So one measure is are you losing your best people or are you stealing someone else’s best people when you get the job done, to what extent is it within the right people? There are the agreed upon time parameters with the agreed upon success levels. These are things that if you have a dysfunctional group, you’re not going to get things done on time because people will stonewall each other, they’re not listening to each other.

  Alan Berson [00:44:59]:
  And it’s not whether profit goes up 3% or 8%, you can’t tie it into that. What you can tie is that the efforts coming out, the humanity, the cooperation, the way in which our team tackles something as a team is superior to what is happening elsewhere, and again, those are hard to quantify until you look at the end result, which is whether you’ve built an organization that’s better than the one you found, if you’re the leader and or your people are better than you are and that’s the legacy that you leave behind you.

  Sanjog Aul [00:45:42]:
  With respect to risk, we have not much to lose when we are a startup. So we give it all we have and we create a somewhat higher tolerance for taking chances or making new mistakes every day, but then when we start morphing to an enterprise or we are in an enterprise environment, we become risk averse or the tolerance goes low or we just simply try to take idea become the second or third mover versus taking that quantum leap by being the first mover now that saps or that confines or stifles energy levels in people.

  Alan Berson [00:46:24]:
  My MBA is in entrepreneurial management from Wharton, and I think that most successful entrepreneurs are not truly risk takers. What they’re doing is they understand the marketplace better, and while it appears that they’re taking risk, number one, they have nothing to lose because they have no established business at that time, but number two, they’ve actually lowered the risk by knowing the stakeholders, knowing the customers, knowing that what they’re going to bring forward is something the market needs. When you get into a larger organization, the risks are actually substantially higher in dollar terms, in reputation terms, and in the potential of being fired for something going wrong. So career risk gets higher at the same time that you tend to start having children and houses and country club memberships or whatever you end up going for. So I really think that it’s not risk that changes things.

  Alan Berson [00:47:24]:
  It’s people getting so involved in the present and that they forget that they’re dealing with people. I mean, for instance, organizations don’t change. People change. So organizations don’t grow. People grow, and it’s keeping simple concepts like that in mind that make sure that you grow the potential for the future, and you keep the excitement. I mean, the passion.

  Alan Berson [00:47:48]:
  When you look in page 12 of the book and you think about management mindset versus leadership mindset. Is your passion in solving problems or is it in creating huge opportunities? The latter is normally more passionate. When you work with your tightly knit team, well, that’s a small group. That’s nice. When you get to move out in the community and talk to all the stakeholders. That’s more exciting when you do a transactional relationship. In other words, you get to know someone just well enough to get today’s job done. There’s a certain amount of excitement.

  Alan Berson [00:48:21]:
  There’s, but when you create trusted relationships, ones where the other person will keep your best interest in mind in the conversation, those are great relationships. You start thinking global vision instead of just tactics. So it’s not really a question of risk. I think it’s the mindset to propel the future with great vision and thought leadership, and also that if you don’t grow your people that you’re not going to succeed. It’s companies that say my people are my biggest asset, but then they think of them as an expense and they’ll invest in property, plant and equipment, but they won’t send a leader who’s got 200 people underneath that person to do a little bit of leadership training or coaching when that’s all they need to do to take a really good leader and make them great. So you’ve got to invest in your people even more than you invest in your equipment and that’s how you mitigate risk.

  Sanjog Aul [00:49:21]:
  One last question. 45 seconds. We have leaders who will give them credit. They are taking on the responsibility and of course they don’t come to work every day that we are going to mess up today. They have the right intent. We could perhaps give them that benefit of doubt. What’s your advice? In few words where they could bring the spark back in an organization even though it’s an enterprise, but let the people have a ball and bring their best energy every day as if it was a startup.

  Alan Berson [00:49:51]:
  Okay, first of all, stop making assumptions and ask the question. Secondly, make sure that there’s clarity that what you mean to say is what people hear. Third, don’t bring a bad mood in the organization that sucks the life out of it. Number four, I believe in the power of positive intentions. That if you believe, I mean everything everyone does is for a positive intention, it may not be ours. So how do we align with someone so that our positive intention as a leader is the same as our people’s? I mean these are simple things that galvanize, connect and align rather than push people apart.

  Sanjog Aul [00:50:28]:
  On behalf of the show and our listeners, I’d really like to thank you Alan for sharing your thoughts about how we could lead and bring startup magic into an enterprise.

  Alan Berson [00:50:37]:
  It’s my pleasure to be here and everyone feel free. The information about me is on the website. Feel free to contact me if you have additional questions.

  Sanjog Aul [00:50:44]:
  Thank you so much and thank you again. It seems like you were a wealth of knowledge in the book that you’ve written, Leadership Conversations, so I recommend that listeners at least check it out and see how they can harness all the value that is there and use that in their respective lives and also share with others and listeners. Please like us on Facebook, search for CIO Talk Radio and be sure to follow us on Twitter. Thank you again for listening to CIO Talk Radio. This is Sanjog all your talk show host till next week. Take care and God bless.