Podcasts – Page 22

The Peer-to-Peer Paradox

Edelman recently released the 2017 edition of its Edelman Trust Barometer. It revealed a decline in trust among all four major institutions (business, government, media, and NGOs). The words “global implosion of trust” were used to described the current state of affairs.

The Findings

Among 10 insights from the study, “a person like yourself (peer) is as credible a source for information about a company as a technical or academic expert.” As a result, the guidance for today’s organizations is as follows: “The trust crisis demands a new operating model for organizations by which they listen to all stakeholders; provide context on the issues that challenge their lives; engage in dialogue with them; and tap peers, especially employees, to lead communications and advocacy efforts.” Why? Because fellow employees are regarded as a more reliable source of information than either the CEO or the senior leadership team.

Contrast that with this finding: “People are nearly four times more likely to ignore information that supports a position they don’t believe in and don’t regularly listen to those with whom they often disagree.”

The Peer-to-Peer Paradox?

While we may trust our peers more than our institutions or their leaders, it appears we don’t really want to hear from peers who don’t share our worldview. There are myriad reasons for this, not the least of which are 1) we like to be comfortable, 2) we like to be right, and 3) too many people believe there’s an empirical right or wrong and that life is a zero-sum game.

What we know

1) We learn best when we’re taken out of our comfort zone.

2) Being “right” is highly overrated. Our need to be right at the expense of considering other ideas, options or possibilities makes us tenacious fighters, but horrible problem solvers.

3) There are often multiple truths (I’m not talking about not alternative facts or fake news), but specific realities that are true for individuals and groups.

Our society’s inability to listen to one another was evident recently as we watched town meetings across the country, where people met to talk (scream at each other) about the Affordable Care Act/Obama Care (yes, they are the same thing), without much intent to even hear, let alone try to understand a different point of view. Good television, bad result.

What We Should Do

It’s time we stopped making good television and begin engaging in thoughtful and respectful dialogue, where rather than try to prove we’re right, we identify points of agreement, build from there, and focus on actually accomplishing something. Conflict is healthy, as long as it involves an open and honest exchange of ideas. It’s how we explore and discover new possibilities. Conflict is unhealthy when it consists of ad hominem attacks and the desire to be right at another’s expense. There’s nothing more divisive.

How We Get There

Expand your circle of peers. A peer is a “person like yourself” not necessarily a person who is exactly like yourself.” Engage more people who look different from you, have different backgrounds, and see the world differently from the way you do.

2. Practice conversational jiu jitsu. When someone says something you don’t agree with, don’t bang heads, ask questions. I’m suggesting you do so NOT to gain an advantage over an adversary, but to seek an advantage for yourself – the one that comes with being a learner rather than a judger – and opens doors for creating mutual understanding and problem solving.

3. Be open to the concept of multiple truths. A number of years ago, in a powerful demonstration at a Dealing With An Angry Public conference (MIT/Harvard) led by Lawrence Susskind, I learned unequivocally that truth is often in the eye of the beholder. Once we start seeing the world from another person’s point of view, it expands our own view, and creates a dynamic for achieving a win-win.

In the meantime, as our institutions work to regain the public trust, I hope Edelman keeps shining a bright light on trust and how we can engage our institutions and one another more effectively. Our very survival depends on it.

Millennials: Don’t Judge Them, Learn From Them

In an episode of Inside Quest from October 2016, Simon Sinek discusses millennials in the workplace. As of today, the 15-minute video been viewed more than 5.4 million times. In January, he recorded a 9-minute follow-up video called More on the Millennial Question based on the feedback (positive and negative) that he’s received about his comments back in October. To his credit, Sinek has also asked for more feedback, so here it is.

Full disclosure, I enjoy Simon Sinek’s work. I’ve watched his videos, read his book Start with Why, and heard him speak live, where he was terrific. That said, the more popular he becomes, the greater his reach and the more weight his words carry. In my opinion, he needs to be more mindful of that.

In both videos, he makes important points about relationships, empathy, and leadership, which is laudable. The reason the first video got so much traction, however, is not because of the points he made, but because he decided to throw millennials under the bus for a cheap laugh. Sinek hit on all the stereotypes people have (particularly boomers) about millennials, and he reinforced a narrative that does more harm than good. Anyone smart enough to come up with the golden circle could have made his points without doing it on the backs of a generation.

By doing this, Simon Sinek sent a bad message – one that makes it okay for leaders to point fingers and make excuses, because we all know how those “entitled” millennials are and how tough they are to “manage.” Instead, he should have challenged leaders to dig deeper. That they consider taking a pause to listen and learn for understanding – to be curious. The more that leaders try to learn and the less they judge, the more likely they will discover the very best attributes of this generation and the individuals who comprise it. Sinek always talks about how leaders eat last. That’s fine, but that doesn’t mean the leader should poke fun at the employees in the food line.

Over the past few months I’ve recorded a number of podcasts with young people, all of whom are incredibly impressive. They are wise beyond their years and doing well for themselves and good for others. Now, I read their books and listen to their podcasts. They inspire this baby boomer each and every day. Meeting them and becoming more familiar with who they are and why they do what they do has been a gift.

On my podcast, you’ll hear from Vitaly M. Golomb (Feb. 16), Rahfeal Gordon (Feb. 23), and Bri Seeley and Thais Sky (March 30). Vitaly Golomb is an entrepreneur, author, and global start-up evangelist for HP Tech Ventures, where in addition to his job, he is passionate about his work helping entrepreneurs create business models for their ideas. He started as an intern in Silicon Valley at 13 and just released his first book, Accelerated Startup.

Rahfeal Gordon, who spent part of his childhood homeless, has written 14 books (including Skyscraper) and inspires people of all ages across the world, reminding them that their location is NOT their destination. I met him last year in Portugal. We remain friends, and I can’t imagine having a more positive force in my life.

Bri Seeley and Thais Sky founded a company in Los Angeles called The Amplify Collective – each own their own company as well. Check out their Be Amplified podcast). The Amplify Collective is dedicated to helping women come together at their un-networking events so they see one another as more than a title on a business card. Bri and Thais help women engage on a level of who they are, not simply what they do. Don’t be surprised if one of their events comes to your city soon.

All of them, each in their own way, are helping people establish the kind of deep, meaningful relationships that Simon Sinek said are so lacking among our young people. (Deep and meaningful relationships are too few in all generations, by the way). So if you watch Simon’s videos (or watch them again), I ask you to extract the good messages he has to share, and engage everyone in your life from a place of curiosity rather than judgment.

Image: Mirus Restaurant Solutions

Jim Kouzes: Year Of The Peer Podcast – Learning Leaders

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 31:51 — 29.2MB)

Jim Kouzes is an experienced executive, bestselling author, respected educator, and award-winning speaker. Jim served as president, CEO, and chairman of the Tom Peters Company for more than a decade, and as an academic administrator for 17 years. He is the coauthor, with Barry Posner, of more than 30 publications, including The Leadership Challenge (with more than two million copies in print) and their most recent book, Learning Leadership. Jim also serves as Dean’s Executive Fellow of Leadership, Leavey School of Business, at Santa Clara University and delivers lectures on leadership around the world.

Next week’s guest will be Vitaly M. Golomb, Investor & Global Startup Evangelist, HP Tech Ventures.

Who Are Your Peeroes?

Like many people here in the U.S. and around the world who watched yesterday’s Super Bowl, I was blown away by New England’s comeback victory. Down 28-3 in the second half (28-16 with only 6-minutes left to play), the Patriots scored the next 31 points for a 34-28 overtime win. While the accolades being thrown at Tom Brady are well deserved, make no mistake, it was a team effort. Just look at all the players on offense and defense who made big plays down the stretch.

Despite the odds, the team continued to believe in each other. And without that collective belief, a comeback would have been impossible. Who you surround yourself with matters for sure. Now having grown up in the Boston area, I was most certainly rooting for the Pats, but I also know what experiencing a tough loss as a fan is all about. So I appreciate the class with which the Atlanta Falcons team handled such a devastating setback. It says just as much about their organization as it does New England’s.

I hope the players on both teams see each other as “peeroes” in the same way Teresa Eyet described the people in her life in a 2016 blog post. In her post, she wrote:

Over and over throughout my life, I heard the recommendation to surround yourself with people who challenge you, who lift you up, who are living the life you want to lead, and are making changes in the world you want to see. It wasn’t until recently that I realized I needed to pay some real attention to who I was spending my time with. I guess I was ready to finally see/feel how different I felt when I was around people with grateful hearts, with vision, and those who approached life with their glasses half full. These are people who build up my energy and my confidence, and I refer to them as my “Peeroes.”

I invite you to read about her peeroes. Then, reflect on the people in your life. I believe that if you enlist their support, they can help you accomplish anything and pretty much survive everything. I hope the Patriots, the Falcons, and all of us for that matter, recognize the special people we surround ourselves with for the super-peeroes they are. None of us does it alone. Not even Tom Brady.

JJ Ramberg: Year of the Peer Podcast – The Intersection of Business and Journalism

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 34:58 — 32.1MB)

JJ Ramberg is the host of MSNBC’s “Your Business.” Now in its 11th year, it’s the only television show dedicated to issues affecting small business owners. She is coauthor of It’s Your Business: 183 Essential Tips that Will Transform Your Small Business, and a business owner in her own right, as a cofounder, with her brother Ken, of Goodshop.com. Before joining MSNBC, Ramberg was a reporter at CNN, where she covered a wide range of topics, ranging from breaking news to profiles of the country’s top business leaders. Ramberg is a graduate of Duke University and Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Next week’s guest will be Jim Kouzes, leadership expert, best-selling author, and former CEO!

Lead As Part of the Group, Not Apart From It!

This is Part III of a (somewhat accidental) series involving why peer groups work, how they work (the conditions necessary for their success), and at least one perspective about how they could be led – that would be this post!

In Part I, I offered an illustration of a reinforcing loop involving a process of learning, sharing, applying and achieving to show why peer groups work so well, not only when it comes to embedding what we learn, but also with giving us the courage to implement new strategies and actually benefit from them. Part II simply suggested that this process doesn’t happen unless you have the right people in the room, a safe/confidential environment, a process for interacting that brings value, a culture of peer-to-peer accountability, and good servant leadership.

In the book, The Power of Peers: How the Company You Keep Drives Leadership, Growth & Success, we don’t take a position on whether a group should be led by a professional facilitator, a member on a rotating basis, or anything that may fall in between. What we do suggest is that no matter who is in charge, the responsibilities are the same: to be sure the conditions or factors outlined in Part II are present, and that the group leader should maximize all the assets in the room to drive the reinforcing loop we described. The high performing groups we studied have this in common.

If you think of it visually, we didn’t see an all powerful leader who stands apart from the group, engaging in dyads with the members, each looking to the leader for guidance and support. Instead, we pictured a more participatory environment with the leader as a part of the group, using a triad model we picked up from a terrific book called Tribal Leadership and through conversations with one of its coauthors, Dave Logan.

With each entity accepting their role as “having the back” of the relationship and being accountable to one another, it allows everyone to extract the most value possible from the experience and ultimately serve everyone’s purpose for being there.

This “series” may have been a happy accident, but I hope it was an informative one. Please share your thoughts and experiences on any aspect of this in the comments section. Thank you!

Lewis Schiff: Year of the Peer Podcast – Good Givers Are Great Getters

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 38:43 — 35.5MB)

Lewis Schiff is the author of Business Brilliant: Surprising Lessons From the Greatest Self-Made Business Icons, the executive director of The Business Owners Council, and co-founder (with Norm Brodsky) of BEN Global Mentorship – an organization that helps business owners transform their companies into scalable enterprises and, eventually, enduring institutions with help from rock star entrepreneurs from around the world.

Next week’s guest will be JJ Ramberg, Business Owner and Host of MSNBC’s Your Business!

Time To Start Listening

Whether you attended the inauguration on Friday or the women’s marches on Saturday, millions of people in Washington, DC, and in cities across the world, understood that their voices are louder and have more impact when they ring together.

Now it’s time to start listening. It just may be tougher than it sounds.

According to the 2017 Edelman Trust Barometer, people are “four times more likely to ignore information that supports a position they don’t believe in.” Meaning, if you watch MSNBC, you don’t watch Fox News, and if you’re a Republican and you have a friend who’s a Democrat (unlikely as that may be today), you can’t even talk politics without it devolving into a screaming match.

I declared 2017 as the Year of the Peer prior to election day because, regardless of the outcome of the presidential contest/reality TV show, we were destined to be a more divided nation. It was also apparent that trust in our institutions was clearly suffering. Here’s how I described the situation in October, 2016:

“Regardless of whether you’re a Trump or Clinton supporter, the tenor of the campaign itself has sunk to new depths. Yet when it’s all over, we’ll be reading about the importance of healing and uniting the country. Ironically, the same media that fueled the fire and aggravated the wounds will start handing out medical supplies.

“The problem is this: The deeper the wound, the longer it takes to heal — the more likely it will leave a scar. The lower we go, the tougher it is to climb out of the hole. The harder is it to trust one another again. The tougher it is to make the transition from fighting against each other to fighting for one another. Regardless of who prevails in the election, we may be headed for one of the toughest recovery periods since the Civil War.”

As for the decline in institutional trust, it’s now been documented. As we look again to the Edelman Trust Barometer, institutional trust — including government, media, business, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) — has plummeted.

Let’s look at government and media specifically. If you want to put government gridlock in historical perspective, consider that in 1948, Harry Truman campaigned against what he called the “Do Nothing (80th) Congress,” which passed 906 pieces of public legislation. The 112th, 113th and 114th Congress combined (our last three) passed 908 public laws. It’s no wonder the 2016 electorate looked outside the establishment to Trump and Sanders.”

Our political leaders, however, are not entirely to blame here. The media have turned politics into a blood sport. Attempts at collaboration and compromise breed serious casualties. It’s all about winners and losers, as someone is always vilified as having “sold out” or having “caved to the other side.” Conflict spikes ratings and readership, but it creates an impossible climate for our elected officials — it’s the kind of climate change we don’t talk about often enough.

I’m not knocking conflict. It can be a healthy byproduct of open, honest dialogue. I just think it may be time to get back to boxing and leave the bare-knuckle fights back in the steel cage. As long as everything remains a zero-sum game and those who collaborate to reach sensible compromise continue to be marginalized by the media (and the public), trust in institutions will continue to suffer.

The flash of good news from Edelman is that we trust one another (people like me) as much as we do academic and technical experts. Sounds to me a like a good place to start.

The Year of the Peer is directed at leaders who are challenged with preparing themselves and their many stakeholders for a future most of us can barely imagine. As citizens, I hope we channel all the energy and good intentions we saw over the past few days and aim it toward moving our society forward by listening for understanding, seeing the very best in each other, and finding areas of agreement to establish a foundation for doing good.

Together, we can accomplish anything. We just have to start listening.

*Image: Dreamstime.com

How Peer Groups For Business Leaders Work

Last week, I offered a framework, or a reinforcing loop if you will, that illustrated why peer groups for business leaders are so effective. This week, I’d like to share the five factors, or five conditions, that are necessary for a group to drive that reinforcing loop. Turns out, you can’t just throw a bunch of people in a room, cross your fingers, and trust that group members will spontaneously engage in the process of learning, sharing, applying and achieving. Because of this, we need to look at the five essential conditions that create the ideal environment for success. They involve:

Select the right peers/have all the right people in the room. Whether you want to lead a company or run a marathon, it’s essential that you involve people who want to do that (or have done that), and who are committed to helping each other achieve their individual goals within a particular domain, whether it’s business, running, etc.
Create a safe/confidential environment. Business leaders need to trust that they are in a safe place. This involves working with peers who treat each other respectfully and their being assured that what happens in the room stays in the room. It’s a place for learning rather than judging, and where confidentiality is sacrosanct. In this environment, group members can let their guards down and have real conversations. How many opportunities do you have to do that?
Foster valuable interaction. While creating emotional safety is necessary, it’s not enough. Intellectually, group members must believe they are engaging in a structured process that helps them solves problems and evaluate opportunities alike. They tend to get to the heart of the matter, instead of wasting time dealing with symptoms and other extraneous issues, and they do so in a way that produces actionable outcomes.
Be accountable. This involves creating a culture of accountability, where group members hold one another accountable for doing what they say they will do (DWTSTWD) to achieve their goals. This accountability doesn’t come from a place of calling people out; it comes from a place of members believing in each other and truly caring about their respective success.
Utilize a smart guide. Leadership, servant leadership specifically, drives higher group performance. Whether the group leader is a professional facilitator or a member leading the group on a rotating basis, the responsibilities are essentially the same. Smart guides need to be stewards of conditions 1-4, and like any great coach, maximize the assets in the room and help the group realize its full potential.

The conditions for group success described here are covered in detail in The Power of Peers: How the Company You Keep Drives Leadership, Growth & Success – Part II, The Five Factors for Peer Advantage. Turns out, each of these five conditions are evident (in a slightly different form) in high-performing organizational teams as well. As a CEO or business owner, one of the many ROIs you get when you join a group is that you can take what you learn from working with your peers and bring that peer-to-peer experience back into your organization. It’s what Kouzes and Posner call, “modeling the way!” The Year of the Peer is the perfect time to find a group that’s right for you and give it a try.

Next week, I’ll look at the role of the smart guide in greater detail and share what we learned about leading high performing peer groups and great teams.