Success Authorities discuss with Guest, Howie Milstein, what is needed of leaders especially when what’s ahead is ambiguous and uncertain. Listen as they unravel what they’ve learned from clients and colleagues who have ventured into the unknown.
Listen to Podcast:
Questions to Ask Yourself:
To gain more insight, ask yourself the following questions. Then, submit your responses along with any additional comments or questions you may have.
Transcript:
Howie Milstein
I just think that CEOs, if they’re self-aware, then they’re uncertain all the time. With the pressure, by the way, to look like they’re certain
Peter Beaumont
Yeah, that’s exactly it. You know, the problem with uncertainty is that’s where we get fearful, right? Because uncertainty breeds fear and stress. But you’re right, they’re looking like ducks with their little feet going underneath the water, right? When on top they’re trying to pretend that everything’s all right.
Milstein
Yeah, like “I’ve got this, folks!” And then they don’t have a freakin’ clue. And you can’t blame them.
Beaumont
I was talking to a guy yesterday. He’s in charge of a pretty large company here, up in Eden Prairie. A couple of days ago, he connected some dots for me. It sounds simplistic, but he said, “You know, you just made me think of something. A lot of the supply chain issues are the same problems we’re experiencing in retention and hiring people. It’s all about people! We haven’t got people to drive the stuff to us. They haven’t got people to unload the stuff. Although there are parts. But if you look at the parts piece, it’s actually the people piece.
Milstein
We’re emerging from a year and a half of being sequestered in our basements. Hiding from a virus. People realized they were able to survive. They had a taste of not having to work in environments that they found to be distasteful for bosses who were unpleasant.
On LinkedIn somebody talked about he left his job because the boss was horrible. The boss convinced him to come back. He came back and it was even worse. I always say it all relates to leadership. First of all, we don’t select our leaders well. The things that we look for in our leaders aren’t the things that we really need in leaders if retention and collaboration is to happen.
Beaumont
It’s funny you should say that. We had a conversation yesterday, a few of us Success Authorities. We were saying, “So what is a leader? Not a job description because I think it’s shifting. I think there’s a misnomer about what we’re looking for in leaders. The obvious ones are to build revenue, build profits and all that, right? But what, really, are we looking for?
Milstein
It’s funny because I just gave a presentation on that last week. You know what a leader is. We make it so complicated. A leader is just somebody who’s able to get people to authentically follow them. That’s all that is. A leader isn’t smarter or more strategic or anything. They just have to engage the resources of humanity around them. That’s all that is.
Beaumont
I agree. I think that they’re facilitators, right? Everybody thinks the leaders are the ones who have to solve everything. Actually, they’re not. They’re normally the people who bring the resources together that can actually work together to solve it themselves. All they are is the glue that helps: A) Bring together, but B) help it stick—the stickability of retention.
Milstein
Yeah, and that’s kind of idealistic. But the leader in the business world also has to ultimately make some of the decisions that can be risky or unpopular. The leader takes some of the bigger risks. A good leader will take one for the team on occasion. But that gets people to follow them, too.
Jayne Sanders
You mentioned you did a presentation last week. Was it on leadership? What was the topic about, Howie?
Milstein
The title was, “If You Want to Lead, Be Less Human.”
Sanders
Be “less” human?
Milstein
Yep.
Sanders
I would like to hear some of the highlights.
Milstein
That was exactly the reaction that I wanted to hear from you. You just fell right into my trap, as if I paid you to say it.
Sanders
Well, you did pay me.
Milstein
Am I getting a bill?
Sanders
What were some of the highlights that you could outline?
Milstein
I talk about one of my old ancestors from caveman days. His name was Thag Milstein. Thag walks around carrying a big club. He’s carrying a big club because he’s afraid of a bunch of stuff. Things that can eat him, right? Or kill him. That’s a natural part of our human brain. We’re just afraid. I’d use that club on spiders. It’s not one of the four fatal fears, but I shared this with Ronn afterwards. I had this epiphany the four fatal fears—they’re common, but I think the real fear we have is of spiders.
Sanders
I agree. Not snakes.
Milstein
No, I don’t care about snakes. Milsteins don’t care about snakes. Milsteins don’t like spiders.
Beaumont
Howie, what are those four fears?
Milstein
Well, there’s the fear of being wrong. Fear of emotional discomfort. The fear of fear…what are the other ones?
Ronn Lehmann
Failure and rejection.
Milstein
Failure and rejection, right! They’re all associated with needs that we have: to be accepted, to be emotionally comfortable…but we also are filled with bias. We’re imperfect, reacting to our emotional brain before we actually seize conscious control and do or say what we think is more productive than we had thought about earlier. The human part is needing to be the funniest person in the room, needing to be the center of attention, needing to have the last laugh, needing to have to be right in an argument, needing to support your image as being super cool or being a leader. All that stuff is really off-putting to other people, and you end up looking like a dick. The bad news is that you neither need to be intentional nor aware that you’re acting like a dick to be seen as one. That’s the human part. That’s why people don’t like working for other people because their subconscious brain has gotten the best of them. As opposed to saying, “Here’s who I want to be. Here’s how I want to react. Here’s where I want to pause. Here’s when I want to listen. And here’s how I let myself off from needing to be the smartest person in the room.”
I don’t like the word “human.” I don’t know if you know Rosie Ward. She’s part of the conscious capitalism movement. She’s got a couple books out there, and she talks in one of her posts about being more human. I was a guest on one of her podcasts a few weeks ago. I said, “Look, I think you’re wrong. I don’t think we need to be more human. I think we need to be less human because that’s the imperfect stuff that comes out so much. We need to be more humane, right? Obviously, there are certain parts of being human that are delightful and nice. But when I say “human,” I’m talking about those parts of humans who are reactive emotionally.
Sanders
Yeah, it’s all the survival stuff.
Milstein
Whether we know it or not. We’re just not aware of it. It’s not like I’m making this up. I’ve done my own empirical evidence. I’ve started the “Stop Taking Yourself So Seriously” enterprise based on my own personal experience, watching others, hearing stories. I just get incredulous when people treat others poorly.
Sanders
Makes total sense to me. One of my theories is what helps us be less human, in your words, is to be more self-aware.
Milstein
Yeah, so my book really is a primer on emotional intelligence. It’s all about self-awareness. It’s knowing how people feel based on what you’re saying or doing to them.
Sanders
What’s the name of that book?
Milstein
My book is called “Don’t Be a F*ng Dick.”
Ed Bogle
Subtle title.
Milstein
You know, Ed, I had one shot at the title. And if I didn’t use that title, I would have regretted it. By the way, one way of showing up in that way is being so easy to take offense at things. I think people take offense at things because they think they should. They really don’t, in fact. But they think they should, so they do. So, my book title is kind of a setup. I say, “One sign you might be taking yourself a little too seriously is if you might have taken the title of this book offensively. It’s kind of mean to the reader, I know. I don’t care.
Sanders
I bet they don’t put it down, though.
Milstein
Well, I don’t know. It’s short. You don’t have to put it down between readings, it’s 108 pages.
Rejection is huge, by the way. Rejection comes very easy to us. And it’s not hard to feel rejected. It happens with 80 percent of job applicants. If you’ve gone through one or two interviews with a company and it’s in their court to reach out to you, but you don’t hear from them for days and then weeks. It happens so much. Ghosting is really something that lights up your brain. It’s a very painful hurt emotionally.
Sanders
Well, it mixes in abandonment, rejection, all those icky feelings.
Milstein
Yep.
Lehmann
And, you know, Thag Milstein, back then, had really good reasons for all those fears. Because if you got rejected from your clan, you were screwed. You couldn’t live by yourself back then. Thag wouldn’t have lasted long. Same with the others. There were some inherent reasons. Yet, we still have them, and we don’t have the same actual dangers. But those things kick in. If you’re really good at it, like myself, I can get all four going at once. I don’t recommend this, but I can do all four in one scenario.
Milstein
They’re often very related, aren’t they?
Lehmann
Yeah. I think they’re all connected. You talked about that CEOs feel frustration and uncertainty. So, what are they doing other than sitting at their desks and quivering?
Milstein
Well, a lot of them are feeling isolation. There’s a lonely-at-the-top thing where you don’t know where to go. You can go to answers from your own people. You’re going to get their own biases. You’re often going to hear what people want you to hear because they’re struggling to climb that corporate ladder, claw their way on their peers’ back to the top. Peer advisory groups are really spectacular because you’ve got people that are all in the same boat, all struggling with similar things. Often times, there’s human conflict and you get to be vulnerable and open.
My book is all about healthy community. Ultimately, I do this because I want to improve the community that is the workplace, which happens to be most people’s access to a community these days. Zoom and virtual environments are not real communities. People aren’t going to churches and community centers like they used to, even before COVID. So, the workplace is where people actually work with others in the same space. It’s all about the strength of a community. I’ve always been a community advocate. Loneliness is another thing we have that we know is risky when it comes to physical and mental wellbeing. Loneliness is associated with risk of death. I think its incumbent on our workplaces to provide healthy communities for others. By enabling people to work remotely, you might be taking away a benefit that people don’t even realize is a benefit.
I’m not alone on that thinking, thank goodness. I know one other guy that agrees with me, but I’ll take that. Even he wrote a book about it. In fact, he talks about weight-loss plans. His primary example is how amazing Weight Watchers is; how old it is and successful it’s been. It’s not about what you eat or how much. It’s the fact that you meet with a bunch of people on a weekly basis, supporting each other in a community setting on this weight-loss goal. Community. So, these Vistage groups are community groups.
Bogle
Yeah. I was a TAB facilitator for a long time. Very similar to Vistage, but very different in some respects. It was that monthly Board Meeting, as we called it, where they got together and could speak without the kind of fears you were talking about. You know, I never called it a community, but it certainly had that aspect to it. Loaded question: How do you create that inside of an entrepreneurial firm?
Milstein
How do you create community?
Bogle
Yeah, inside of a firm. Is that possible?
Milstein
Oh, for sure! The creation of a community is simply finding a reason to get people in the same place at the same time. That’s all it is. What happens there is another thing. The leader wants to lead that community in such a way that they want to follow. It’s about building trust.
My book, a lot of it, is devoted to the building of trust, and a good chunk of it is devoted to how you destroy trust.
Linda Ruhland
To me, there’s an invisible wall a lot of times between the CEO and the rest of the company. It’s there for a whole bunch of reasons, some of them political, some of them just geographical. How is it that people are doing anything about it or breaking through that?
Milstein
I’ve spent the last seven years in career coaching, as well. But I’m now transitioning out. I worked with well over 300 people in job search. The rules, the way we do things that are so conventional, Linda, and it’s really wrong. That’s going to be my next book—how really screwed up, the world of resumes and recruiting and applicant tracking systems and interviewing is. It’s all looking for something that doesn’t really have a great correlation with success. It’s time to really break that down and just do things differently. The world is so stuck in the conventions around recruiting and hiring and retention that it’s really hard to move. It takes some courageous people. Smaller organizations can do it. For them to do something, they have to start thinking differently. But nobody’s provoking them to think differently in this regard. There’s no catalyst. I feel like that part of the world is really stuck and they’re getting what they want.
Smaller business owners in my group, I had a small enough organization where I had a hand in all the hiring. I just simply hired for courage and likeability, right? And a modicum of intelligence on a couple of things. But, other than that, I’d search from the exact sector in medicine that I worked in. The paradigms around that are really screwed up. If they’re complaining that there’s a lack of talent, well… No! Hire a copier salesperson. You can, it works. Train them a little bit. In fact, they work out better often. Dan Pink talks about this, too, in his book “Drive.” You think it’s all about compensation. It’s very about compensation. Money is extrinsically motivating. It might work for about a minute. But long term it doesn’t. We’ve created this world where we think that as long as we pay you enough that you’ll stay. How many of us here, in this room, I bet, had positions where we made decent money and then had another position where we made less money, yet were happier? And would never go back to that higher paying position for the crap that we had to put up with.
Ruhland
Yesterday, Peter shared an article from a client of his. The headline was “Meaningful Work Shortage Explains Worker Shortage.” How many of the problems could be solved, as you mentioned, if we started to provoke the issue a little bit and open up that Pandora’s Box.
Milstein
Yeah, lets redefine the job description.
Sanders
I have this vision of how the world literally would change if we hired on emotional intelligence and personality. I talked to somebody in the hospitality industry. Her criterion was “Were they breathing?” They needed help so bad. They’d hire somebody immediately and that person would stay until the first paycheck, then leave.
I spoke for the Society of Human Resource Management Chapter here in Denver a couple months ago. They were all complaining about how they’re getting resumes but nobody’s returning their calls and a lot of people will set up interviews and then not show up. So, the applicants are ghosting the companies. And they are doing only what they have to do to qualify for unemployment.
Apparently, a lot of people through COVID have learned how to deal with, live with less.
Milstein
We thought if we took away some of these unemployment benefits during COVID, when they were lifted there would be a resurgence of people back to the workforce. That didn’t happen.
Beaumont
No, it didn’t.
Milstein
So, now we are making up other reasons why people are not coming back.
Beaumont
You’re exactly right, Howie. That is a discussion I had with the same guy the other day. He said, “I used to think it was because of unemployment, then I used to think it was because of COVID relief, I was wrong. They may have contributed, but we still have the same issues.
Lehmann
How do you coach your clients on self-awareness?
Milstein
How do I coach them on self-awareness? There’s really not a singular conversation on self-awareness. At some point I might ask a client, “How do you think others are seeing you?” Or “How would you like to be seen?” How do you know that your authentic self is coming across the way you want it to come across? A lot of times I ask them how they know. Because it’s all about encouraging them to consider gathering some empirical evidence, in case they haven’t gotten it. A lot of times people don’t realize that they’re coming across as the jerk. To reiterate, you don’t have to know you’re coming across as a jerk to be seen as one. Sometimes you need to get some feedback from others. By the way, it’s hard to get honest feedback direct to your face.
Lehmann
This probably isn’t true of your Vistage group, or the people who have the honor of being coached by you… In your vast experience, are there leaders out there who don’t really want to know what people think about them?
Milstein
I don’t know that it’s they don’t want to know. I think they don’t care. Some people are unaware that they’re coming across harshly and hurtfully. I think they don’t want to be. They just don’t know it. But not caring means, “I don’t care how other people feel!” which is a real problem. A lot of this goes back the selection process for leaders. Look at the type of organization and how leaders are chosen. We need someone with executive presence.
Lehmann
And confident.
Milstein
And confident, right.
Lehmann
There’s also a piece of it that, as employees, we want to believe there’s a wizard who understands, somebody sees all the crap that I see and they’re doing something about it. We want to believe that despite having evidence to the contrary.
Milstein
In other words, you want to be able to hire a lemming who just is going to go along with whatever somebody says because they provide the appearance of knowledge, right?
Lehmann
Well, that’s definitely what you want if you’re that kind of a leader. You want lemmings and compliance and people who just do what they’re told.
Milstein
Yes, but I think, though, we’re getting tired of that. Years ago, I think people would say, “That’s just work. Why do you think they call it work? Of course, you’re unhappy.” I think we’ve wised up over the last couple of decades. Some of us are aware there are some better alternative ways of leading. If we work in an environment where we love the leader, it’s because the leader is vulnerable and the leader is compassionate and empathic, in addition to being smart. But the leader listens and people, when they’ve had a taste of that, they don’t like the other way.
Beaumont
I think that’s a good point, Howie. There’s some nonempirical data to substantiate it. But there is a lot of proof coming out that it looks like there’s a lot of people not at work anymore. But, in fact, people have opted to do their own thing. We’re not catching that in terms of all the self-employment that’s going on while people are looking into reinvent what they do themselves and go out on their own and do it. I think there’s a lot of that going on. It’s not being captured as being one of the reasons we’ve got this problem with getting people, to be honest.
Milstein
Hey, listen. All else being equal, working for yourself, people are very happy doing that because they hate being in the hierarchical environment of the office.
Beaumont
Yeah, that’s what Daniel Pink said in his “Nation” book back in 2001, that there was going to be this trend. That’s one of the questions I’d ask him. “Of those things that you said would come true, how much of it has come true? And how much had COVID kickstarted it?”
Milstein
Right, I think we learned a lot about ourselves during COVID. The other thing is those hierarchies of people that found themselves in certain levels of authority. I hate titles. Ronn knows my favorite title. I changed my title to the Gangster of Love. I had business cards printed with it and a placard outside my office. We were a publicly traded company in Norway, but I had my own division. On the legal documents I was still the president, but Gangster of Love worked out really well. And by that point, people knew who I was. I was always myself. I thought I was. I tried to be. Nothing changed. I didn’t lose the respect of people. I got more hugs at cardiac surgery conventions.
Sanders
I saw a segment on a news show recently how one of the restaurants in Denver, restaurants have been so hard hit. The owner decided to pay everybody the exact same. The manager the same as the dish washer, etc. They are not hurting at all for employees.
Milstein
Someone had the courage to just level the playing field.
Beaumont
One of the things I wanted to ask you, apart from the obvious, which is supply chain and labor. What are some of the other things that are on CEOs minds at your Vistage groups? Anything strike you?
Milstein
Yes, gender equity, women leaders. A bunch of guys sit around and are open to hear what it’s like being a woman in the workplace, hearing what they hear and the struggles. It’s super enlightening and really aggravating. There are still a lot of men in the workplace, right? These are all power issues. There’s the gender stuff. A lot of it, additionally, is more human conflict, working with people on the board, politics on the board, having to make certain decisions that are not really in the best interest of the organization, but in the best interest of maybe one other person, one other powerful person. And there’s a real conflict of values.
In fact, that’s what I’m going to do, I haven’t done this with my executive coaching clients yet. Next month I’m going to do values assessments on all of them, just to get it down on paper what their core values are so they don’t make decisions that aren’t consistent with their own personal values. Conflict of values causes pain.
Beaumont
It’s funny you should say that. It goes into personal life, too, as we all know. A very good friend of mine has just split up, after eight years she’s been with her partner. It manifested itself over politics because they were at opposite ends of the spectrum. But it really wasn’t about the politics. Their values were fundamentally different. I think values are so important and so underrated in terms of where we sit with people, and in terms of relating to and chemistry.
Milstein
It’s really good to get a handle on them and know what they are. Know what your values are. And know whenever you make a decision that’s antithetical to your values you’re going to have some internal issues, struggles, unhappiness.
Beaumont
Yeah, and unless you’re willing to move on those, there is no future there.
Milstein
Values pretty much don’t change that much.
Beaumont
They don’t. That’s right.
Milstein I’ve done that hundreds of times with my career clients. I would say 95 percent had in their top 10 values helping others. If that’s the issue, and you want to help others, how does that inform the decisions that you make about equity and equality and inclusion and all that. It helps you make better decisions when you know what your values are.