E107 - Unlocking Your Leadership Style featuring Robert Jordan

We all have a leadership ‘style’. You know what I’m talking about, it’s that way we act with our team members, our supervisors. As new leaders, it’s often challenging to know be the style and kind of leader we want to be.

Robert Jordan, an author and the co-founder and CEO of InterimExecs, will talk about the four distinct leadership styles found in business today. Robert will also explain what success looks like for each style, and what leaders can do RIGHT NOW to make sure they’re the leader their company needs.

Robert’s Episode Links:

1.     https://interimexecs.com/

2.     https://www.rightleader.com/

3.     https://www.linkedin.com/in/robertjjordan/

4.     https://www.youtube.com/user/interimexecs

5.     https://www.amazon.com/Right-Leader-Time-Discover-Leadership/dp/1722505672

Robert’s Recommended Book/Movie List:

Books:

1. Start With No by Jim Camp

2. Second Mountain by James Brooks

Chapters

• 0:00 Podcast Introduction and Visual Setup
• 1:30 Meeting Robert Jordan and His Journey
• 5:20 The Evolution of Leadership and AI Impact
• 11:15 Introducing the Four Leadership Styles
• 18:00 Fixer and Artist Leadership Styles
• 24:40 Builder and Strategist Leadership Styles
• 36:10 Leadership Tolerance for Failure
• 43:10 Highest and Best Use of Leadership

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:07

I would like to begin this episode by acknowledging that I am located in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, and I am privileged and honoured to live and learn on the unceded, unsurrendered territory of the Anishinaabe Algonquin Nation.

Speaker 2: 0:24

Hello, you're listening to Trench Leadership, a podcast from the front produced by iGlenn Studios, a show for emerging leaders from all professions To hear from other leaders who have led from the front, made the mistakes, had the triumphs and are still learning along the way. And now here's your host, simon Cardinal.

Speaker 1: 0:52

Hello and welcome to Trench Leadership, a podcast from the front, a show for emerging leaders. We all have a leadership style and you know what I'm talking about. We've seen it with our leaders and we've seen it in ourselves. It's the way we act with our team members, our supervisors, everyone. But as new leaders, it's often quite challenging to know the kind of style and the kind of leader we want to be, and if we go to the internet, there are so many different ways to look at being a leader and the styles that we want to go towards. How do we choose where we want to be? How do we choose the style of leader we want to be? In this episode, you'll hear from Robert Jordan, an author and the co-founder and CEO of Interim Execs, who will talk about the four distinct leadership styles found in business today. Robert will also explain what success looks like for each style and what leaders can do right now to make sure they're the leader that they want for themselves, their teams and their organizations.

Speaker 1: 1:51

So, as always, I'd like to start this with the visual introductions and, for myself, I'm actually changing things up a little bit. I normally have a trench leadership golf shirt on, but honestly, it's in the wash right now. So today everyone gets this purple t-shirt that I have. The microphone is still black. My glasses still have a black rim. There's still far too much gray hair, as far as I'm concerned, on the sides of my head. My back wall is a photo of a stone wall with the trench leadership logo hanging. The logo is white surrounded in a purple glow. The irony of that is the actual trench leadership logo is black, but that's what happens when you order something off amazon and you don't pay attention before you hit buy now. So here we go. Uh, bob, would you mind taking a second and offering your visual introduction?

Speaker 3: 2:39

hey, simon I I was gonna say I thought you were in the bat cave and if you panned your camera I was looking for for the Batmobile. But it's very cool, I like it.

Speaker 1: 2:48

A guy could dream, that'd be fantastic. My background.

Speaker 3: 2:50

I'm in Chicago and I've been in a WeWork office for about five years, and so you're looking and we had a book launch party. I know we're going to talk about the book and so I have this huge poster behind me that you can see part of the image of the poster for the book great that.

Speaker 1: 3:11

Thanks so much for that.

Speaker 3: 3:12

You know if I panned my camera around, you'd see the skyline of chicago buildings which, it's my understanding.

Speaker 1: 3:18

That's why I've seen it on movies and different things like that. It is quite an amazing skyline to have. I'm hoping someday to be able to go and actually go and meet the guests actually in their other other cities that they're at. I'm in the process, I'm trying to buy an airplane and, uh, my hope would be to be able to go and actually fly to meet people. But that's a down the road thing and and I've realized now that I've done a great job of yeah, that's, that's, that's the theory.

Speaker 3: 3:44

I think it's a great idea. I'm ready for you. You know you want to combine topics. Chicago is a great foodie city. You know we can go do the podcast over some amazing meal.

Speaker 1: 3:55

Yeah, exactly, and you know, and actually get out and take the opportunities to meet people in their locations or something for that. Don't get me wrong. Zoom is great. It's great for what we need it to do, but there's nothing will replace those human interactions, especially in these types of conversations and especially considering what we're going to be talking about here, when we're talking about leadership styles and how new leaders can pick that out. But listen, I'm wondering, before we get into that, do you mind just taking a moment and telling us a little bit about yourself, your journey, that out? But listen, I'm wondering, before we get into that, do you mind just taking a moment and telling us a little bit about yourself, your journey and really how we got to this point?

Speaker 3: 4:31

I'm your classic entrepreneur, simon. I was in graduate school and thought up an idea and dropped out the idea was well, it became the first magazine in the world that covered online services and Internet. So this is going way back and it was a great idea, other than the fact we were just five years too early. So so the beginning of publishing the magazine was a bit of a disaster, making about every mistake you can make in business. But then, of course, you know, this thing called the World Wide Web came around, and when that happened, I could do no wrong. And the business got onto the Inc 500 list, the list of the fastest 500 growing businesses in the US. And so I did.

Speaker 3: 5:21

I was in publishing for a number of years and then I had met a guy who had the weirdest job title. He was an interim CEO, he probably was the first interim CEO in the US and and he handed me his business card after he said this weird title and it said CEO of Yahoo. Ceo of Yahoo. And because I was in the online world early, we all knew that these directories were going to go public on zero revenue, not zero earnings, zero revenue. So that impressed me greatly and basically, from that one conversation, I decided myself to become an interim CEO, and I did. And I did that for a number of years and then, when social networks came around think about MySpace and Facebook and LinkedIn I started wondering how many people around the world were like me and my mentor and formed an organization that became Interim Execs, and Interim Execs is a global matchmaker. We're a matchmaker around the world for organizations that need leadership in the C-suite CEOs, cfos, cios and that's what led to doing the book which I know we're going to talk about.

Speaker 1: 6:35

Yeah, it's interesting. How are those journeys and everything often in my experience has been. It's about being at the right place at the right time and recognizing I feel that we are at that right place for the right time or not quite there, and it's difficult to say what's going to take on and what's going to not take off in that type of thing. I remember back when the net was a new thing, I was talking to some friend with my of mine in the infantry and never forget the conversation. He's like you know, I know everyone's talking about this internet thing, but I just don't see it. I don't see that going anywhere, I mean, and I didn't know any better. So I'm like sure, okay, of course we all know how that worked out, so it's kind of interesting.

Speaker 3: 7:17

Yeah, look, I have that same feeling now in what we do. It's a very human thing. You're talking to board directors, you're talking to owners and managers, and you know their organization, their company. That's sacred. Well, here comes AI, here comes artificial intelligence, and I am sure it is going to have impact, you know, when it comes to what we do, but what that fully means I don't know yet. The thing it reminds me of actually is if you see these pictures of early television shows, when they hadn't figured it out, all that you would see on the screen was an announcer standing in front of a microphone reading. It was like, you know, they hadn't quite figured out that television is a different medium and it's going to get used in a different way. And I feel that way about AI that you know, as you and I are recording this ChatGPT has made leaps and bounds. It came out commercially about four months ago and it is remarkable but not fully exploited in any way well, I, I completely agree.

Speaker 1: 8:30

I, it's interesting. The other day I was thinking about it and the chat gpt system and and that program and I said, well, I'm just curious how this might work and stuff. So I went in, I, I got an account and did all the different stuff and I happened every fifth episode is on the fives and the zeros is one that I narrate. And so I was like I think I'm gonna, I'm gonna see what this says about this particular episode. So I, I just said write a 15 minute podcast episode about this thing. And, sure enough, it, within five minutes, it blasted, not even, not even less than five minutes. It blasted it out. Now, it wasn't 15 minutes and and and looking at it, I'm saying wow, like this is incredible.

Speaker 1: 9:11

And it, it took that episode and wrote it in such a way that I was able to take. What I did was ultimately did was I took some bits and pieces from it and I went and fact-checked it, maybe to make sure the information was accurate, and then I added my own bits and pieces to it. So it is a great tool to have because it helped me for that particular episode. It helped me add in the filler. It automatically did that for me and I was able to throw in the facts that I wanted to hit and it, honestly, it was a great help and I'm going to continue using that when I'm doing those particular episodes because it it saves me a lot of time now. Now I'm not using that as the sole thing. I'm not going to say create this episode and copy paste and that's the episode. It's about finding the balance, what works for each of us. I think Does that make any sense at all?

Speaker 3: 9:56

Perfectly, yeah. And I look there's I think some fear out there, you know, my God, is AI replacing humans and what happens to everybody's jobs? And I'm not concerned about that. I think it's going to make things easier.

Speaker 3: 10:12

I was a little embarrassed about I'm supposed to be on a panel. I have a panel coming up where I'm talking to trustees. So you think of trustees and they handle estates. You know when people pass away and sometimes in those estates there are companies, real life companies and the trustee has to be in charge in some cases, and so we've seen the trustees sometimes rely on interim executives. So I thought, well, maybe for the outline for the panel, let's see what chat GPT can do with this. So I said I just put in there. You know, hey, chat, I need five, give me the five top reasons that trustees of estates should use interim executives.

Speaker 3: 11:02

And this thing banged it out, you know, within 15 seconds, and I went off to some trustees you know who are hosting me on this and I said, look, this is embarrassing, I'm going to do my own. You know editing and all of this. But I said I have to tell you this is what ChatGPT turned out in 15 seconds. What do you guys all think of this? And it was pretty funny because it was at least an 80% solution not perfect, but 80% and I'll tell you that. You know, because we work with a lot of CIOs, you know, chief information officers and CTOs, chief technology officers. They tell me that the code that can now be written by AI, like ChatGPT, is excellent.

Speaker 1: 11:48

I believe it. You know, I was just amazed at how quickly this thing blasted out this program blasted out these topics for me and it's going to save me a lot of time. I'm not against admitting that I'm going to use it. I'm not going to rely on it for my sole sourcing, of course and I will fact check things but for the most part, know it, I'll use it to fill in the, to add it for the filler, and I think that's okay. That's the whole point of these programs not to take over the world, but to supplement and to work with. So, and and I think that's an interesting, nice way to segue us into talking about how leaders need when they were in the process of trying to find their own styles it's about looking around and looking at all the different things that are out there and being open to new ideas, not just saying, okay, well, this is the type of leader I want to be and this is it.

Speaker 1: 12:32

Things will evolve, Things are going to change and we, as new leaders, especially in those new leadership roles, we have to be open to those ideas, because my experiences as a new leader were such that, okay, this is what I feel I need to be. This is how I think people should see me as a leader, and that just led to me making a whole bunch of mistakes because I wasn't being honest and genuine with myself. I will say that was back in 2007. And so the internet was, you know, on its way. It was certainly a very popular tool then, but a lot of the information that we're seeing then the information boom has since happened. So, finding different leadership styles and things to look for and ways that might more align with my personality maybe that the thinking wasn't quite there yet, so I wish I'd had these types of tools. Do you have any thoughts on that at all? Like, does that make sense to you?

Speaker 3: 13:21

You used a great word, simon, the word genuine, and you know part of so you know. To get into leadership style here, the reason that we wrote this book is that over the past decade we've been approached by about 7,000 executives from 50 countries and we noticed some patterns. One pattern which was not so good, which was that the majority of leaders showing up were having career journeys, leadership experiences that you would describe as okay, but not necessarily great. But then if you look at the top two, three, 4% of leaders I'm talking exceptional people, remarkable leaders. Their career journeys were incredible and within that we saw these four distinct styles of leadership. And we can go over the four styles, but one of the commonalities between the four was that there was more ability or attempt or recognition, that they were being authentic to themselves, that they were being more genuine.

Speaker 3: 14:32

And it's easy to say and not necessarily easy to do. You know you think about somebody young when you're starting out in work or career. You need the job, you need the money, you need the recognition. People are relying on you and it may not be perfect and you may be doing all kinds of things you're not great at or you don't love. That's just the way the world is. But you see the successful people over time as they're going through the career journey, but it becomes more and more intentional. Time as they're going through the career journey, but it becomes more and more intentional, somebody gets more and more confidence and they get more of a sense of their own internal compass and direction. And that's what we started getting at with leadership style.

Speaker 1: 15:17

Okay, and that's the big thing about it, it's understanding that those styles are going to be out there and and knowing, finding ways and places to check them out. So this seems like a great way to roll us into the four styles that you've had in that book. Do you mind talking about them at all?

Speaker 3: 15:34

sure. So the four styles, the labels we gave we give to them, are fixer, artist, builder and strategist fixer, artist, builder, strategist, and in a lot of cases we refer to it as fabs, f-a-b-s. Um. We also have launched a free um leadership assessment. It's about three minutes if any of your listeners want to take it, and it's called fabs leadership assessment. Uh, and that's atercom. So should we dive into each one of the four? Yeah, let's do that, let's get at it, ok.

Speaker 3: 16:10

So Fixer is the energy which you know when an organization needs some form of saving, of turnaround, fixer is the leader you want and need of turnaround. Fixer is the leader you want and need. So, as you and I are recording this, simon, you know, a few months ago there was a huge blow up in the world called crypto right. A lot of cryptocurrencies blew up and one of the biggest platforms in the world called FTX famously, you know went down and into bankruptcy. And it's not a surprise that the bankruptcy courts appointed a new leader whose background is all fixer. Prior to FTX that CEO, he had been at Enron.

Speaker 1: 16:53

Enron was a famous huge disaster over a decade ago.

Speaker 3: 16:59

And it was the same kind of thing. A court had to appoint someone new to come in to salvage the assets. Sometimes fixing means that you're trying to return an organization back to health. Sometimes it means you're just trying to do the best in terms of salvaging assets. In the case of FTX, there are over a million creditors, so it's a big deal and it's going to take a long time.

Speaker 3: 17:21

Fixer Energy this is the person who they need to run into the burning building and we distinguish it because you know, if you're a leader in any organization or you own a company, you're always putting out fires, You're always solving problems, but with this style, this is the person who needs to do that. This is how their career has success and meaning. This is the person who is really best at going into a troubled division, into troubled client accounts, into the country where a multinational may be having its biggest problems. That's fixer energy. Okay, so artist. Artist is the kind of energy that sees the world as a blank canvas or a piece of clay to be molded. So you want to think about a standout artist, leader in the world today.

Speaker 3: 18:18

Elon Musk, world today, Elon Musk you think of Tesla, SpaceX, the boring company. These are innovations of the first order. I mean, 20 years ago no one really took electric vehicles very seriously. I think a lot of people would have said you know, this is crazy and it's unnecessary and it's too expensive and blah, blah blah. But you really have Elon Musk as a force of nature, that around the world there really is a movement which is, you know, internal combustion engines for cars are going away. That's innovation. That's that kind of artist energy. Artist energy. This is the person on your team who is the renegade, the rogue. They're not necessarily the most liked, but they can't turn it off. They keep on coming up with these discontinuous leaps. And if you're an organization that has any sense of stagnation or it's been bested by competitors, of any kind of commoditization is going on. You need more earnest energy.

Speaker 1: 19:27

It sounds like almost like the the, the innovator Does that. Does that make sense at all?

Speaker 3: 19:32

Yes, and it can be. You know, the world thinks of entrepreneurs and that is. That can be that kind of energy. But a lot of innovative energy is within companies and shows itself, sometimes successfully, sometimes not in how massive R&D efforts that are. I'll give you an example Intel, the most famous CEO Intel ever, had a guy named Andy Grove and Andy had a guy on his leadership team he called the Wild Duck and that was not really meant as a compliment. He was surrounded by genius engineering talent. You know how do we print more transistors onto a chip right? Relentless increase in power and decrease in cost. And then he had this renegade and he needed the renegade, even though the renegade in a lot of cases for their kind of culture, was not always agreeable. But you need that energy, you have to have it Exactly.

Speaker 1: 20:38

Often in any type of team you can't surround yourself with all the same people. You get tunnel vision. That's been my experience with that.

Speaker 3: 20:47

We interviewed a lot of leaders for the book the book's called Right Leader, right Time and we also interviewed organizational psychologists to double check ourselves and make sure we weren't crazy. You know, is this model of fabs? Is it plausible? And one of the psychologists we interviewed he said you know, you just have to be spiky in certain ways. And we're like what do you mean spiky? And he said well, if you were looking at a piece of paper and you were graphing all of the capabilities and traits that a team or a company needs from all of the people on that team no one is all things to all people, but you seek these spikes, these superior abilities, these exceptional traits in just a few ways from each person on the team and then you can have an additive team, then it can be in a creative thing.

Speaker 1: 21:43

And that's the trick with that. It just opens everyone's eyes. They just someone else to say hey, listen, is this a good idea? One of the examples I like to use when I think about someone having a different way of looking at it is many, many years ago, somewhere in the united states, a truck was screaming down a highway or an inner, an interstate highway does that make sense? I't know. We just call them highways here and the truck happened to get wedged underneath an overpass and all the cops are standing around and the truck driver is like well, what are we going to do? This is going to take forever.

Speaker 1: 22:14

And of course it was rush hour traffic and everything's going on. And then they're like, oh're gonna panic, and they're talking about doing these crazy wild things like cutting off the overpass. And then, apparently, this little boy came up and said well, what if you just let the air out of the tires? You know? And of course it worked. Sometimes it's just a different perspective from a different way of thinking about it is all you need, and more often than not it's a simple solution. It's just being open to those ideas.

Speaker 3: 22:41

Yeah, you know, as you're saying that, it reminds me of a story you know at Google. Google's been dominant in search now for many years and still, you know, search is what makes the bulk of Google, Google. And one of the engineers had an idea and he said what if we made the search result boldface? So you put in some phrase and overnight he just thought, well, what if I just make the result boldface? So when you see your term and all of the results that caused a 400% increase in clicks. So you think about Google at the time. I don't know, might have been $3, $4 billion in clicks. So you think about Google at the time, I don't know, might've been three, 4 billion in earnings. That one engineer's move, that one simple thing, when they get bold faced. Well, now your earnings just went up four times that many billions of dollars from one idea.

Speaker 1: 23:37

And it's amazing If something's simple, a couple lines of code probably, and away they went. Often it's not the big giant thing that's going to change the world or change how we use something. It's quite often it's those small, simple ideas, and I think it seems to me often that emerging leaders have a tendency to want to look at the big ideas. Okay, I'm in, I need to do this thing. How am I going to change company culture? Well, that's a huge thing, especially if the company is Intel or or or you know, a giant conglomerate. How do we do that? Well, it doesn't, you know. It's one step at a time. How do you, how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time right, same thing.

Speaker 2: 24:16

Oh, hello, there, it's Glenn, the voiceover artist, and if you're hearing me, that means we're at the midpoint of this episode. Do you have an idea for an episode that you feel is vital for emerging leaders? Leave the idea in the comments section and, if your topic is chosen, you will have the opportunity to join us as a co-host during the recording session. So drop us a note and let's talk. This podcast is made possible by listeners like you, and if you feel we've earned it, please tell your friends and leave a review to help us grow our following. And now back to the show.

Speaker 3: 24:57

I had this experience myself. Prior to doing this book, I had done a book called how they Did it and it was a series of Q&A interviews with champion company founders, as we said, from the heartland it meant the middle of the US and really phenomenal people like the founder of Morningstar and the head of Twitter at the time, and I thought this was the greatest idea in the world and a way to give back to the entrepreneurial community For two years. All of the founders we wanted in and these people were amazing. It was 45 founders who had grown from scratch and to get interviewed in the book, they had to launch, grow, sell for $100 million or go public at $300 million, so they were rock stars Two years. They all said no.

Speaker 3: 25:55

Everyone I wanted in the book was like I can't understand this. I'm doing a good, I feel like I'm doing a good deed. And then I changed what I was saying by just a little bit and it wasn't like I. I knew what had planned. I was so frustrated I was. I was on a phone call with one of these amazing guys and I said something differently. I said you have a legacy and it can't die with you. Differently, I said you have a legacy and it can't die with you. And he instantly said okay, all right, I'll do the interview. It was like oh my god, I I missed this pitch by just. I thought I was appealing to ego and vanity. We're doing a book and you could be in the book. No, that didn't work at all. Not at all it's in.

Speaker 3: 26:41

Oh you go, I cut you off no, no, it's just so I think this applies for all of us that sometimes it's. It's just, you're just slightly off of what may be the, the, the magic for what you're trying to accomplish oh, I, yeah, I totally agree.

Speaker 1: 26:59

I think a lot of times people have an idea, a very loose idea, of what they want to do or what they want to accomplish, or whatever that may be. I like to say it's often sitting in the fog. You can just kind of see the outline of it and you're just waiting for it all to go away so you can see it's there. So should we move on to the third point, because it seems like this is a good segue Builders yes.

Speaker 3: 27:23

So, builder I know everybody in any organization is like we're all builders, got it Okay. We need something a little more specific, which is the energy that can take the small, the new, the nascent, product, team, service, client relationship and get it to scale. The mantra for builder is market domination. They have market fixation on the brain. Builder is the kind of energy that can take this product or service and really get it to the point where it is dominant.

Speaker 3: 27:58

What you tend to see with a lot of builders, though, is, once that has occurred, they're going to get bored, they're going to need to rotate off. You'll see a lot of cases with someone who creates a company and it goes public, and at that point, they're riding off in the sunset, not because they're going to just sit on the beach sipping a mai tai, but because they need to do it all over again. There's a very specific kind of energy. Um that and, by the way, I should say, simon, we're not trying to pigeonhole any leader to say you're only one of these four to be a successful leader. You're bringing all your capabilities, your resources, your genius to bear, and so we think all leaders are a combination of fixer, artist, builder, strategist. The thing is is that it is to infinite variation, and what we have noticed of exceptional leaders is they tend to have a dominant style approach system. They may have a dominant or a secondary, but I can guarantee you they're not all. They're not trying to be all things to all people.

Speaker 3: 29:07

You cannot be the greatest fixer leader on the planet and, at the same point, the greatest artist leader on the planet. It's not going to happen.

Speaker 1: 29:15

Yeah, and that makes sense. And I think one of the strengths of of leadership and recognizing our own leadership styles is understanding that okay, well, right now, like maybe I tend to lean towards artists as an example, but for this particular project, I need to lean towards, I need to tap into my strategy, strategist side or I need to be the builder today, whatever and understanding when that change has to happen and when to move in and out of those different roles. I think that makes a lot of sense to myself. Do you have any thoughts on that at all?

Speaker 3: 29:46

I think you're right. We tend to see that more over the course of career. For example, you and I had been talking about Federal Express before and Fred Smith, who was the founder chairman CEO, just retired about a year ago after 50 years at FedEx. And you look at a career that remarkable and you know in the beginning. You know he's famous for the fact that he wrote a paper while he was in school. This crazy idea deliver packages overnight on an airplane. That's a highly creative act. You know he's been interviewed many times that in the early years he ran out of money and at one point he went to Las Vegas and gambled to generate the payroll.

Speaker 3: 30:33

If that's not a fixer, what is you know?

Speaker 3: 30:37

And so he evolved where we would say clearly he became one of the greatest strategist leaders in the world to eventually be presiding over an organization with over 200,000 employees operating in over 150 countries Just a level of complexity and vastness which is part of the definition of strategist. But it is not the case that all leaders necessarily round the bases or go through all of that. I mean, I personally, for example, am strongly wired as an artist leader, and it's just who I am, and I know that, and I know that that has certain limitations within the organization. I help run a company with partners, and the way I acknowledge that is that my partners are far stronger than me, for example, in the actual operations of the business. And so this, we believe, is another key element to people who are exceptional leaders, which is they tend to collaborate better Because they're more confident in their own abilities, they can acknowledge others for their different genius and allow them to lead, and really lead, not just name only, and that's what it takes for an organization or a team to truly excel.

Speaker 1: 32:04

Oh yeah, absolutely. The collaboration is one of those things. You hear it in every type of leadership. What's the type of leader you want to be? Collaboration is inside of it, and quite often in a lot of formal performance evaluations, it talks about how well a leader is able to collaborate or not. Who knows? And there's a reason why that keeps coming up, because it's absolutely vital. Ultimately, that's the leader's main role is to help everyone work together to achieve the mission success. At the end of the day, that's what every leader has to do. Yeah, but we need to know how to get there. We need to know ourselves to be able to get to that point, and that's why we're here. We're talking about these different styles to get to that. So maybe we should talk about the strategist. What do you think?

Speaker 3: 32:48

Yes, strategist is the leader at scale. This is the person within the vast or very complex organization and the language you will hear from strategist is very different from fixer, artist or builder. Strategists talk about loyalty loyal to the organization. They talk about being mentored. They talk about mentoring other people. They talk about longevity, cross-training, tend to be cross-trained within various functions. You don't tend to primarily hear that language out of fixer artist and builder Stephen Covey.

Speaker 3: 33:27

You know the author of Seven Habits. He had a great phrase personal span of control. And for fixers, artists and builders, they tend to be on teams where it's five people, it's 10, it's 50, maybe it's 100 or more, but there tends to be this personal relationship between everybody on the team that is building trust and that's I can rely on you and you can rely on me. The strategist is that leader at scale. And, yes, there is a group around them where there is trust, but they're typically dealing with thousands or tens of thousands of people and so it is a different form of leadership. One of the leaders we interviewed for the book, dr Janine Davidson. She had been the undersecretary of the Department of Defense and, like you, simon, she was in an Air Force. She was in the US Air Force and she described, you know, helping run the Department of Defense, where you're talking about more than a million people as systems of systems and that you're having influence and deciding policy in a completely different way than most fixers, artists and builders think about.

Speaker 1: 34:47

Does that make sense? That makes perfect sense. I'm a big fan of the idea of systems thinking and helping people understand that even if we're inside our own little insular bubble, we are connected to something else. Guaranteed, there's a system inside of a system and we can get it down to the atomic level where things are always interconnected. Things and not even are they interconnected. They need to be interconnected and I think it's incumbent on leaders to be able to will be willing to step back and look and see where those connections happen, because quite often a decision we'll make will have a domino effect and if I'm a strategist and I'm making a decision and I'm thinking at it from solely a strategic position, that is going to affect how the artist and the builder and the fixer will perceive that information. How they're going to take it in, because they attack things in a different way will go differently and I think inside that there's something. That's why it's important as a leader to understand how we process information and have understand the styles, because if we can understand ourselves, then we're.

Speaker 1: 35:49

My experiences have been we tend to be a little more open-minded to understanding that we don't all think the same way and dot, dot, dot. That's okay, but it's about understanding that and then that's. Those are the ways that we'll start building the, the, that cohesion, and make them more effective. Does that make what? Do you think about that at all? Oh, you're right on the money.

Speaker 3: 36:09

Absolutely.

Speaker 1: 36:11

So I'm interested though. So, as we've been talking about these four styles, I'm curious while you were doing the research for the book and creating these specific four, did you notice if there were any type of maybe a physical cue or a personality trait that each of the different styles demonstrated? And the reason I'm asking that is if, if I'm a new leader and I'm trying to be introspective and look at myself, how might I identify that and how might I be able to identify the styles of the other team members that I'm responsible for able?

Speaker 3: 36:45

to identify the styles of the other team members that I'm responsible for. You know it's so great you're bringing this up because and part of this is you know we've done this research over the years. You know, based on yes, it was thousands of executives, but it's still anecdotal, and part of the reason we launched this assessment tool, fab's Leadership Assessment is to put science behind it Right, and so I'll tell you some things we believe that we're going to see if they prove out OK. So one of those things, simon, is that artist energy appears to us as a very, very parallel kind of thing, meaning people like Elon Musk, when you hear that he's simultaneously doing SpaceX as we're recording this. Yesterday, the largest rocket ever launched. It blew up, but it will be successful in the future.

Speaker 3: 37:42

But between SpaceX and Tesla and the Boren Company, artist leaders need this diffusion of energy between projects to be successful, as opposed to, for example, fixer. Energy tends to be what we call linear. You will, if you hear about a fixer and they're trying to fix, turn around, save more than one organization at a time. You're looking at a failed fixer, because we really believe fixer is a kind of energy that it needs to focus, and the mindset of fixer is it's one company at a time, it is one fire at a time, it's one crisis at a time, but the opposite is artist, which is there has to be this diffusion. Every time we asked an artist later this question to say, do you work on one thing at a time or more than one thing, we would have people jumping up and down saying I need to do three or four projects, companies, efforts at a time. So that's one of the things we are testing, that we believe and we're going to see if it plays out. We'd love to hear from your listeners on this as well.

Speaker 1: 38:51

Yeah, I'd love to see that too. I'd be interested. When you get closer to some more firm data on that, I'd definitely love to have you back and we could talk about that some more. I'd be interested to see how that works out.

Speaker 3: 39:01

Thank you yeah.

Speaker 1: 39:02

What about the builders and the strategist? What did you find with them?

Speaker 3: 39:07

Builder, to us, appears again to be a linear strategy and strategist appears to be more of a parallel. Strategist is parallel. There's a little different sense than artist. It is that strategist because they're a leader at scale and complexity. There's always five things going on. There are always things in various forms and when you think of someone in a large organization, a leadership role boy, they need to be able to react quickly to all kinds of different things going on. Builder, we think, is more linear that it tends to be that great builders are working on one overriding project at the same time and you know we're going to see how it plays out. But it's interesting that we've seen successful builders and sometimes a little later on in career they were so good at one thing that they'll try three or four things at the same time and it doesn't always work well if your wiring is more builder than artist interesting.

Speaker 1: 40:18

I have a question, but I'm gonna ask you. I'm gonna wait to find out. So we talked about strategists first a little bit. They tend to be a little more linear. So what I'm seeing in this is that the fixers and the builders are tend to be, uh, more of a connection there, and artists and the strategists there. There's a bit of a connection there and I'm curious to know what the long-term data will show, if, if you see that as well, um, that'll be fun for me, which I guess I have.

Speaker 3: 40:43

I'll give you another one if you want. Yeah, of course is we're gaining insights on tolerance for failure. Tolerance for failure so, for example, artist oh my god the world loves, uh, artists who blow up, literally elon musk no one is saying oh my God, the Starship rocket blew up. That's the end of SpaceX. No, it's not. If anything, you know, nasa is more cheering him on. No one was hurt. And so tolerance for failure for artists is incredibly high. Tolerance for failure for fixers not so much. You can't really be a successful fixer if you can't. Very interesting how the world views failure and it responds very differently to these roles. Strategists not so high tolerance for failure, because you tend to be in a very public role. And when you think about this, for example, the CEOs of large organizations generally, if they make one screw up, they're done. Of large organizations generally, if they make one screw up, they're done. Builders not so much.

Speaker 1: 42:11

Builders. Builder is a kind of energy, that where more failure can be tolerated. That makes sense.

Speaker 1: 42:13

In Canada right now, throughout everywhere, food prices are skyrocketing and inside Canada we just recently had a very large, very public parliamentary debate with the, the heads, the ceos of the, the three main food companies in canada, and the one guy in charge of loblaws is called, uh, the owner, or sorry, the ceo was a guy named galen weston and he went in. He was, you know, doing his speech to the Parliament, parliamentary Committee, and didn't go so well, didn't represent himself so well. Lo and behold, three weeks later he has now stepped down. He's staying on his chair of the board, but his role as CEO and having any type of activity in the day-to-day operations has completely ceased. Now there's a whole bunch of other stuff, but it's interesting. No, no, no, no patience for any type of misstep and I guess at that level you know that's also part to part and parcel with the role, but still I guess I mean and look, we don't want to draw a lot of parallels to politics.

Speaker 3: 43:14

It's easier people become iconic once history is weighed in. So winston churchill, one of the greatest fixers the world has known. We don't want to do too many parallels to politics, but I'll tell you. For example, last year in Britain, former Prime Minister Theresa May oh my God, what did she? Last Two weeks or so. It took only one mistake which, granted it, tanked the market for guilt. You know the reserve currency in Britain and she was out.

Speaker 3: 43:50

That was it, you know. So you can kind of see, there are these patterns here, to these different leadership styles.

Speaker 1: 44:01

Yeah, most definitely. I know for myself, as you've been describing these styles, I've been questioning myself where might I fall into this? And I find that when you talked about fixers, you know have a very linear focus. As I mentioned earlier, I have laser focus. So me, I think, without having read the book although I'm getting there, I promise you I will do that I think I feel compelled to get towards the fixer style of things and then have definitely have a bit of an artist in there as well, because I'm kind of looking around, saying, okay, well, how can I fix that? How can I do that? I'll be looking, scanning different things all the time, saying, well, how might that get better? How might? How can we fix that? Do I even need to fix that? So so I think I blend the two of those, and then there's some builder in there as well, because I like getting involved in the actual process of doing it.

Speaker 1: 44:49

The challenge I experienced quite often is my leadership positions are such where I'm not supposed to be in physically doing the work anymore. I'm supposed to be leading the team, and that's tough. It's tough for fixers. I have a question for you, though. I've shared with you where I think I fall out in all of this. What's your dominant style?

Speaker 3: 45:09

Oh, I'm artist for sure, In every sense. I tend to be the person on the team. I can rapidly generate ideas and it's funny because many years ago, in my spare time, I literally became an artist and started painting canvases and that is becoming more and more dominant in my life. But, as I said, it's somewhat well maybe it's too strong to say to my detriment, but it is something that I recognize, which is I better surround myself with better operational leaders if I'm really going to get anywhere, Because simply having that energy, you know, if you're within a team, you have to have complimentary people around you and luckily I'm blessed and I do.

Speaker 1: 46:04

Yeah, oh, I completely agree with you in in that a successful team has a bunch of different perspectives and different ways of being the leader and they have to compliment each other, and sometimes that means things aren't going to go smoothly. Sometimes there's going to be conflict. That's okay. It's all about figuring all of that out. So, yeah, I completely agree with all of that. I feel like this might be a good time for us to move into the lightning round, but before we do that, do you have any final thoughts on the topic?

Speaker 3: 46:33

Well, I would. I'd want to leave your, your listeners, with with one of our findings, which the sounds easy. It's hard to do, but exceptional leaders tend to reject more of what is not for their highest and best use. That's one of our favorite phrases in the book highest and best use, and that is the thing we hope, or, you know, we would just hope for leaders, which is that's what we're all heading for. Thank you so much for that.

Speaker 1: 47:00

Well, listen, bob, before we move off. I'm just curious if people want to reach out to you, they want to hear more about the book, they want to have a conversation with you, to do the assessment, whatever, how might they be able to do that?

Speaker 3: 47:11

Thanks, simon. We welcome everyone taking the FAB's leadership assessment and they just go to rightleadercom and if they want to get in touch with me, that would be great. I can be reached at instrumentexecscom.

Speaker 1: 47:26

Perfect, and, of course, the way to reach you will be available inside all the show notes with a whole bunch of links. Bob, this has been fantastic. Thanks so much for your time. Today We've had a great conversation talking about different leadership styles, and I'm confident that listeners will have a better idea of their style and how they might be able to move forward. Thanks so much for your time.

Speaker 3: 47:47

Thanks, simon, I'm honored.

Speaker 1: 47:49

Well, that's a wrap from the front. In this episode, we explored some more leadership styles and helping all the leaders out there maybe have an idea of where they might fall under one of these four or any other leadership style, because, as Bob said, exceptional leaders tend to reject more for what is not so much for their highest and best use. Keeping in mind that we're figuring it out and you're very likely new in your leadership journey, and that's okay, we'll figure it out together. Thanks for tuning in and remember leadership without passion limits the depth of your vision.

Speaker 2: 48:26

Never miss an episode by following us on all of your favorite feeds. While you're there, please consider leaving an episode review and let us know what topics you would like to hear about. Be sure to join us next week with your host, simon Cardinal, for another episode of Trench Leadership, a podcast from the front Produced by iGland Studios. Music provided by Ashimel of Music. You.