Hi, welcome to another episode of Unlocked, where we talk about unlocking the potential of people. Today, I've got Larry Robertson on the call and he is going to talk to us a lot about his latest book, first of all, called Rebel Leadership, and what that means and the new way we need to think about leadership versus the old way. So Larry is an award-winning author and consultant and speaker. He has also written many columns in the Creativity Post, CEO World, Inc. magazine, Thrive Global, SmartBrief, and others. He is a Fulbright scholar as well as a graduate from both Stanford University and Northwestern's College School of Management. So you're going to get some awesome stuff out of this interview.
Larry has, you can tell, he's like a professional interviewee. This guy has his talking points. This guy has some direct actions that you can take to improve yourself as a leader. But we also bridge this out into talking about culture and what that really means in the grand scheme of things as we're managing uncertain times. Okay. And he is very clear about this is not just about COVID. It's about uncertain times in general. As we are managing those, what are the important things we need to think about? What are the important things we need to do as people and as leaders and as even team members inside of our organization? So let's get on with the interview. Here we go. Larry, welcome to the show.
Larry Robertson:
Thanks, Skot. It's a pleasure to be here. I appreciate the opportunity.
Skot Waldron:
So you are a veteran book writer. I'm just going to call you that. After three books, you become a veteran.
LARRY ROBERTSON:
I didn't know what the number was, but I'm glad that to hit the hurdle.
SKOT WALDRON:
That's it. I've just coined it. So that's what it is. Your third book, Rebel Leadership has just released in June. June 1st, the launch. There's the cover there in the background. Give us the premise of this book a little bit. Why this one now? How to thrive in uncertain times. We've just had this thing called COVID happened, which created a lot of uncertain times. Was that the spark? I mean, what was it that wanted you to write this book?
LARRY ROBERTSON:
I appreciate you asking that because it's a really important question. And the simple answer to the back end of it was no, it wasn't COVID at all. In fact, I'd been working on this book for, I don't know, somewhere between two and three years before the pandemic started. And one of the real incentives for it was that uncertainty is not COVID. COVID is an example of uncertainty. But if we look back at the last 20 years, the first 20 years of this century, this has been an increasingly uncertain century. And until COVID we often experienced that in pockets or we saw it at a distance. The uniqueness of COVID was that brought it to everybody's shore. But this uncertainty has been coined as a term, really going all the way back to the military use of this term, it's an acronym VUCA, which stands for volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous.
And when the term was coined, it was because the military was seeing instances where the world as they knew it, the world that they had trained to operate in, the world in which they had defined their formula for success was dramatically different. And their way of leading in that world, their way of executing in that world wasn't working. So you think about encountering Al-Qaeda on the streets of Iraq, a very, very different scenario than the theaters to battle that they were looking at. So VUCA became this very interesting term that was thrown out around there, but it was always considered situational, right? This situation is volatile, uncertain, complex, et cetera. But what's happened over the last 20 years and COVID really shows this is that the world is that all the time now. And this idea that if we get past this pandemic suddenly uncertainty is over, is really a very wistful thought, but a false narrative of where we really are.
This is what I call our new abnormal. And if we realize that the world is going to be abnormal all the time, it tells us a couple of things. One of which is, we can't lead the way we always have. And that's where rebel leadership comes in. Rebel leadership is this combination of two concepts, we love and sometimes loath. One is the rebellious innovator, the creative, the person who thinks about the better way or the new way to do things usually by looking at the world and saying, that could be better or that's problematic and I have a way to solve it. We love that part of the rebel. We hate the part where they're disruptive just for the sake of being disruptive. And we like the idea of leadership because it gives us the sense of comfort that we're going to go somewhere positive and someone is going to take us there.
The downside of leadership is that we expect that to come from some kind of hero. And we're really always then waiting for this hero that's never coming. There's no individual that ever leads in total, leads an organization, or comes up with all the ideas, or solves all the problems. So rebel leadership is saying, how do we get the best of both? How do we get that innovative, adaptable element and that leadership element? And the truth is it's inside all of us. So this is really about how do you bring that out in a group context and make organizations and teams more adaptable to this environment that we're in, this FUCA environment. That's what Rebel Leadership is all about.
SKOT WALDRON:
Holy moly. That was a great intro. Is that like the first intro of your book? I mean, that was just so well said. I love that.
LARRY ROBERTSON:
Oh, thanks. I appreciate that. I think it's more, I think about this a lot, including in the run-up to the book. And people are really talking about this now because uncertainty is real and it's frightening and we don't always know how to deal with it. So I think the more that you talk about it, maybe the crisper the message gets. What I'm trying to do as I talk about it though, is let people realize that this is an experience everybody's having and make it a conversation everybody should have.
SKOT WALDRON:
Okay. Do you think that there is hesitation to have that conversation? Do you think people are reserved, and if they are, then why?
LARRY ROBERTSON:
Yeah. Again, a wonderful place to take this. Let's break down people. Leaders are hesitant to have this conversation and let's take the simplest reason. If I, as a leader, open up a conversation about how uncertain the environment is, just even the environment in which we're going to do whatever we do, I am acknowledging that I don't have all the answers. And we've been taught regularly since the time we were children and there was a teacher in front of the classroom, and that teacher was going to tell us what we were going to learn, tell us when we learned it well enough by giving us a grade, show us how we got to advance to the next stage. From the time you're a kid to your first job where you're trained to do that job on and on and on, there's this message reinforced that the leader somehow equals leadership in total. And it's just not true.
So, leaders, many of them are hesitant to have this conversation because it's kind of this acknowledgment to themselves that they're not superheroes and it's this larger acknowledgment that maybe I'm shirking my responsibility by saying that I don't have all the answers when nothing could be further the truth. A leader's job is to create that environment where everybody can step up and be a leader in their own way. So in terms of the hesitancy, it's leaders who are hesitant.
Ironically, employees, team members, leaders down the ladder, if you will, are not hesitant about acknowledging this at all. In fact, they're really embracing this idea that I may not like it but this is our new abnormal. Let's operate within that scope. And when they see their leaders not doing that, guess what they're doing, they're leaving. So McKinsey did this study, McKinsey and Company, a management consulting firm, they survey leaders and employees all the time, and just over the last few months, they did a study to try to gauge this. They found that 26% of employees right now are in the process of preparing to leave their job.
And this is the shocking thing, Skot, another 40% expect to leave their current employment by the end of the year. So they not only feel the power that's there in this uncertainty, which I think we often tend to overlook, that there's power and opportunity in this. But the second and more important thing is, they're not waiting for leaders to figure it out or to tell them what to do. They're taking matters into their own hands. And frankly, in the short run, I think that's a very good thing.
SKOT WALDRON:
That's incredible. Those stats are crazy. When you think about ... So, I'm sure there's multiple reasons why that is happening. This job market right now is, I've heard something about it's causing people to feel more empowered, right?
LARRY ROBERTSON:
Yes.
SKOT WALDRON:
When they're like, there's a lot of people out there looking for people right now, and I could just leave. The power is on the employee's side now. And I think it's up to that leadership, up to that organization to figure out how are you going to help this person feel like if they leave, they're going to be losing something, or by staying, they're going to be gaining. So what are they gaining by staying? Making it hard for them to make that decision, right? How do we make it difficult for someone to want to leave us?
And I think that's going to come down to that aspect of a leader not pretending to have all the answers, but being open about, hey, maybe I don't have all the answers, and I'm going to be vulnerable, and I'm going to be open, and I'm going to ask for collaboration, and we're going to work on this as a team. I'm going to help you feel invested. I'm going to help you feel like you're part of the solution with me, right?
LARRY ROBERTSON:
Yeah.
SKOT WALDRON:
And I think that that kind of culture is really what's going to probably help. What do you think about that?
LARRY ROBERTSON:
Oh, I think you're absolutely right. In fact, I would take everything you said, and I would encourage you, you meaning the audience, to put that on steroids, right? It's not just what are you going to gain by staying here? It's where am I going to give you voice in why any of us are here? So you wonderfully talk a lot about brand. And I think what individual employees are thinking about now is, hang on a second, I've been working for something called brand that somebody else mysteriously defines for me. All I'm doing is executing within that whatever they think is going to make that brand look good.
And I think every individual now given that their world has been so severely disrupted is saying, I have some agency in my own brand and if I'm going to come work for you, what I want to know is what does my brand benefit from by being part of this shared purpose, this shared brand. And if I really am part of that, I want to be part of how we define it. I want to be part of how we execute on it and prove it out. And what's interesting to me is this isn't theoretical. This isn't just employees saying, well, maybe that will happen, or certain organizations saying, well, maybe we should go that way. There are organizations across the spectrum, across sectors that for the last 20 years have been leaning into this idea of shared purpose of leadership, not just being at the top, but leadership moving across the organization based on what's the environment like now and who in our organization is best equipped to lead us to address that particular problem or take advantage of that particular opportunity.
When we all say shared purpose, how can we say that if we're not all contributing to the conversation? How can we say that we're well in pursuit and likely to achieve our shared purpose if we never challenge it? How can we say that it will ever be accomplished if it's not tied to every decision we make, everything we do every day with everyone. And that sounds kind of like a frightening concept to let everybody in. It sounds like you're releasing chaos, but it actually reduces it and it increases those things that rebel leadership is all about. It increases adaptability, innovation, resilience. All these things we want are not achieved by buckling down. They're actually achieved by opening up. And there's lots to prove out there.
SKOT WALDRON:
So smart. The reason this show is called Unlocked, right, it's about unlocking the potential of people and how do we do that? And I think you've hit on a couple of things here I wanted to elaborate on. I loved that you brought the brand thing into this. And I love what you said, it kind of spurred another layer of thoughts for me on top of the brand stuff I already talk about as far as having a leadership brand, or an organization brand, a team brand, what is that, and what does it mean? And in essence, a brand is your reputation. It's what people say about you when you're not around. It's not a logo, it's not a color palette. It's that, right? We have a personal brand, our teams have a brand, and our bosses have a brand, and our organization has a brand.
Now, if I'm associated, I've got a purpose in my own head of what I want to achieve in my life. And if I'm aligning myself to an organization that isn't aligned in my purpose and people understand my purpose, and they see the organization and they kind of see some things that organization is doing, they're like, "Hold on a second, Skot, you're part of that?" So now my brand seems either inauthentic or misaligned or contradictory to what I tell people because now I'm associating myself with this organization or even this team. And then people, maybe in the past, employees or people on my team will look at our boss and go, "You still work for that guy?"
LARRY ROBERTSON:
Yeah.
SKOT WALDRON:
And then I'll go, "Yeah, it's part of ... " They're going. And that's going to reflect on my brand as a team member and as a person about that's my ... There going to go, "Skot, he's kind of selling out or he's just looking for this." So I think that's really important as we put in this concept of how do we as leaders, how do we as individuals shape that perspective to go into uncertainty with an aligned purpose, an aligned goal, personal alignment with team alignment, and organizational alignment as we go forward?
LARRY ROBERTSON:
Yeah. And so that's a big statement that you just made. How do we do that? And so let me just, for example, to make it real, let me build within a story. About six, I think it's been almost seven years ago now, Doug McMillan took over at Walmart, and a few years into his run there he had already done some dramatically bold things, some very unexpected things for the leader of an organization that has been massively successful, has deep assets. Really doesn't have to cater to anybody. He doesn't really have to change their model and he was dramatically changing the model. And it all was driven by a statement he made in an interview one day, or I think this kind of encapsulates it. He said, "An organization of 1.3 million people, it used to be that we made big strategic decisions on an annual basis, maybe on a quarterly basis." He said, "Now, it's daily." And that he even jokes with some leaders that it's really more hourly.
And it was a statement to say the job is too big for any one person. So if we want to continue to be this very powerful brand, I'm going to circle back to the brand message now, what we have to realize, he told everybody who would listen to him, is that brand isn't just this thing we say we want to be or this thing we put out there when we're trying to sell a product. Brand is who we are. So brand really is the culture that we have here. One of the people I interviewed for the book was Doug's senior director of global culture, diversity, and inclusion. His name is Russell Shaffer. And I asked Russell, I said, okay, Doug is making culture and brand so important to what Walmart does. He says it applies to all 1.3 million employees across the globe. Really? Is that true? If that is true, what do you actually do as the person who leads up global culture here, what do you do to make sure that happens?
And I loved his definition of culture. He said culture is the things that we do and are doing right now. It's not what we did. It's not what we will do, but it's our words and our values in action in this moment. He called it a litmus test. And I think that's really what a powerful brand is. If a brand is used as a litmus test, is it what we say we are, what we're doing in this moment? Is this new project we're launching in alignment with that, right? If it's used in that way.
And if you take corrective action when it's not, either by adapting your brand as you go or adapting or expanding or eliminating some of those projects that are in conflict with it, suddenly you are really creating that powerful concept that we know as brand. I mean, when we think of brands that we admire or think of brands that we are attracted to, we're attracted because they speak to something inside us. When an organization is saying, yep, that's the way our culture is going to run, not just going to speak to the person at the top but speak to everybody here about their connection to this brand and show them that they are actually impacting it, that's something powerful.
SKOT WALDRON:
Love it. Thank you so much for saying that. So you talk about Doug McMillon. Would you consider him a rebel leader? Would you define it that way?
LARRY ROBERTSON:
I would, and part of the reason I do is what I just said. He has said multiple times, I can't do this job alone. I can tell you that as great as some of the CEOs of Walmart were before him, including Sam Walton, way back in the day, I've never heard a CEO of Walmart, let alone most major organizations, say it isn't about me. I can't do this alone. And it's nice window dressing if it only remains words. But he's really embedded at deeper. He's not the only one. And I think the thing that's important here is that while I would call him a rebel leader, this concept is about rebel leadership. And so the idea here is not to create this heroic image of leaders.
What's heroic if you want to put it that way about Doug McMillan is he's creating the environment. It is not heroic in the sense of he's coming up with every idea, solving every problem, and doing every job. That's never going to happen. He's allowing the behavior to be created.
One of the other organizations I talked to was Airbnb, and the person I talked to there was the head of global diversity and belonging. The theme of Airbnb is belong anywhere. So, Melissa Thomas Hunt is in this important role as the head of global diversity and belonging, to say, well, what the hell does that mean every day? And so when I asked her o define culture, she said, culture comes from the way people behave, how they engage, why they give currency to certain things, the markers of their language, what's sanctioned, what's taboo, all of the smallest parts in all of the smallest places. That's what adds up to a culture and ultimately, that's what adds up to a brand.
SKOT WALDRON:
You said one of the biggest mistakes that companies make when it comes to the company culture, is they treat it as an output or an afterthought, rather than the central tier-one priority it must be, especially in an uncertain world. Elaborate on that for me.
LARRY ROBERTSON:
Yeah. This is pretty interesting. There are lots of surveys about culture that are regularly done. One of the surveys that was done just a couple of years ago, actually just pre-COVID, it was done by Deloitte. And they surveyed thousands of C-suite leaders, CEOs, CMOs, and so on, middle managers, and employees. And when they asked all three groups, is culture important, every one of them off the charts said, yes. I mean, we're talking between 88 and 95% of those people in each of those groups said, oh, my God, culture is critical. And then they asked these really defining questions within to say, and so are you giving it that attention? And what they found overwhelmingly was this massive disconnect between action and statement around culture.
And they even looked at organizations that did training in onboarding new employees. They did training along the way where they would talk about culture. And then they went back and interviewed the trainers and the leaders of those organizations. The majority of them couldn't even say what their culture was. Here they're telling people in a training and yet they don't know themselves. An even smaller percentage said, oh yeah, I think about that in my daily decisions and daily actions. And the tiniest percent said, I actually connect it to that. I think about the connections every day. I'm looking for those connections.
So we all know that culture is important, but we kind of think it's going to come out the meat grinder at the end. It'll just be there. If we say our culture is X, that's enough. And instead, culture should be on the front end. Culture is really the chief competitive asset and can be the chief competitive advantage for any team in an uncertain world. Why? Because everything else that you need a plan, job descriptions, how we incentivize people, great products and services, and things like that, in this kind of world, those can go away in a heartbeat. So what do you have left? What you have left, hopefully, is a culture that figures out what you're going to do next, figures out how it's going to adapt. But if you're not investing in that and you're not treating it like your primary asset and your primary advantage, it isn't just going to happen.
SKOT WALDRON:
And that's called intentional leadership, right?
LARRY ROBERTSON:
Yep.
SKOT WALDRON:
Intentional versus accidental. When we're accidental, we just kind of hope it happens. Right. We're just like let's just do our thing and hope that our culture, people like it. We know it's important. And I'll even take a little of the pressure off them and say, maybe they just don't know how to shape it. Right. Maybe it's not in their day-to-day thought. And I just finished reading Simon Sinek's book about infinite game, super smart, right? And he took that principle from years ago, reading about somebody else that talked about that idea. But the finite game that we live day-to-day, even hour to hour, in a sense, like what you referenced earlier is almost in a sense of survival, right?
It's this game of, okay, especially in uncertain times, right? You could say in uncertain times, I just needed to survive. I don't need to be thinking about three years out. I don't need to be thinking about next year. I need to be thinking about right now. And so that finite mindset of got to win the day, or I'm going to lose the day, I either won or lost the game, keeps us from building maybe that mindset of culture. And I'm just spitballing here with you that idea of without thinking infinitely about the day's going to end, whether we won or lost is irrelevant because the game is going to keep going. The infinite game is going to keep going, and what are we doing purposefully to drive good intentions and good people to do good things for the long haul, right? So how do you balance that? This long-term mindset of culture, it doesn't happen in a day, but yet in uncertain times, we're just surviving. How do you balance that in your world?
LARRY ROBERTSON:
Yeah. I'm going to give you a quick three-part answer. Okay. The first part is that it's a very natural reaction to think that when things become more uncertain we should batten down the hatches, we should tighten up. Right? So that points to the first part of what you're saying. Why, wouldn't I focus on, I'll call them the day-to-day fires right now? That's the priority I've got to survive to get through. But the data is overwhelming and off the charts that says that actually doesn't work and doing the opposite of actually opening up, being a little more aggressive in the innovative way, involving more people in how you solve problems, loosening up the power so that they can actually do something about that, their productivity, the productivity of those organizations goes up enormously and so does their profitability. So if you just look at the data, it should at least be a quick check to say, that natural instinct of no, I'm not going to open up to start thinking about culture and things like this, I'm going to buckle down, it's a bad instinct, even though it feels like a natural one.
The second thing is, is to realize that what we're talking about here are not quick fixes. We're talking about changing habits. And I hate to say it, everybody would love to have a quick fix. And it's not that you shouldn't pay attention to those things that are pressing on you today. It's that as you do, you should also be proactively changing your habits, including how do we think about culture? How do we involve more people in defining it? How do we connect that more to what we do? So the first thing is the data would tell you you're wrong in your gut reaction. The second thing is, you've got to think of this not as a quick fix, but as a change in habits and that you should do it collectively.
And then the third answer I'll give you is this, there are three keys to why organizations that are adaptable, that are rebel leadership organizations actually do this effectively. And I'm going to list them. I'm not going to talk about each one. But one of them is co-creation. It isn't just one leader at the top with all the answers. It's a co-creation to figure out how to adapt and innovate. Two is diversity. That there's a range of people that are engaged in whatever the problem or the opportunity is, which means ultimately, you've got to have that range in diversity in your organization. This is also experiential diversity, it's intellectual diversity, it's idea diversity. It's not what we often think of as the top layers of diversity. It can overlap with that, but I'm really talking about something different. And the third thing behind co-creation and diversity is inquiry, thinking in terms of questions.
There's a woman I interviewed for my second book, her name is Deb Meier, and she's an education reformer, develops brand new school models, helps trouble schools, things like that. She uses this technique she calls the five habits of the mind, and this gets right to the heart of your question. Well, what can people do, right? How can they get going? How can they feel like they don't have to just put out day-to-day fires? She says ask these five questions in everything you do. These are the five habits. The first one is, how do we know what we know? It's like a daily check-in with your assumptions. Sometimes when you check-in, they're perfectly fine. But if they're getting irrelevant, if new things are coming in, how do we know what we know is a perfect way to open up to that.
The second question or habit of the mind is, is there a pattern? Because sometimes when things change, it's an anomaly. We don't care about those. We don't have time to chase those. But when we see enough anomalies forming a line or going in a certain direction, we better pay attention. So after we've said, how do we know what we know, is there a pattern, she says there always come some question, some version of what if. What if we took what we're seeing and we fixed the problem this way? What if we took overseeing and went a different direction?
The fourth habit of the mind is, is there another way of thinking about it? And it's a way of saying repeat the first three. There's always another way of thinking about it, form this into a habit. And the fifth and final question, this comes back to brand. The final habit of the mind is who cares because if you're just fighting fires for your own sake, if it doesn't impact your employees or your customers or your partners, maybe that's really not the fire you should be fighting. If we're focused on who cares, all of a sudden, we're talking about what matters in the long run, what is going to have the most lasting impact and the most valuable impact. So really just adopting those habits, playing with them as an individual, playing with them in small project teams across a company, it starts to shift how you think about everything, including culture. It doesn't take you away from fighting day-to-day fires, but it helps you make that long-term powerful shift. And that's really what this is about.
SKOT WALDRON:
So how would you say that wraps into, I guess, the new way we need to think about leadership and why is that so important right now as opposed to, by saying we need to think about that, that's the new way to think about leadership, there's an old way to think about leadership.
LARRY ROBERTSON:
Yes.
SKOT WALDRON:
How does that play into those two ideas?
LARRY ROBERTSON:
There's no hero coming to save the day. That's our old view of leadership. Even when it's subconscious, we default to believing that whoever is in that corner office or the top of the organization chart or has had the most ideas up to date, or has the most power that they're going to come up with the answers. And in a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous world, it's just not true. On certain days, they will. On other days, they won't. Think of this simple image. Ancient human tribes often had a chief, but on any particular day, the leader might be the medicine woman, or the warriors, or the gatherers, or the people who moved camp from one season to another, one place to another. The idea in those ancient societies, the reason they were able to survive, the reason they were able to evolve and thrive was they allowed leadership to move across the tribe. Wherever it was found that it was the best solution for that moment in time, that's where they went. And that's really what we're cultivating when we talk about rebel leadership.
SKOT WALDRON:
This quote that you have behind you, the language of man learning to speak creativity.
LARRY ROBERTSON:
Yes.
SKOT WALDRON:
I'm curious about that. This is totally off the wall, but, right?
LARRY ROBERTSON:
Sure.
SKOT WALDRON:
I want to see how that-
LARRY ROBERTSON:
Literally off the wall.
SKOT WALDRON:
Yeah, literally off the wall. I want to hear how that plays into what you talking about.
LARRY ROBERTSON:
That's the cover of my second book. And my first book, which is in the middle, A Deliberate Pause was focused on entrepreneurship. The second book, Language of Man, on creativity, and this third book on leadership. I'm a big believer in two things. Those three things need one another. To be the best entrepreneur or entrepreneurial thinker, you've got to tap into your creative capacity and you have to evolve beyond that to be a leader and not just the person who kicked off the idea or started it. So these three things come together. The second thing that I'm a big believer in is that these are not what we tend to think of them as being. So for example, in creativity, if you think of a pie chart and a pie chart with a tiny little slice in the middle, the tiny little slice is those people, that's a small percentage of people that know they're creative and practice using that capacity. And the rest of the pie is every one of us who've been wrongly told we're not.
So it's an example to say these things, this ability to think entrepreneurially, this creative capacity, this leadership capacity, these are human capacities, right? They are not the images or the output or the product that we often associate with it. A fine work of art, a beautiful painting, a symphony, or whatever, that's not creativity. That's a product of creativity. So the way these fit together is that really to survive and thrive in any environment, we need all of these, entrepreneurship, creativity, leadership, and we need to allow everybody to tap it if we really want to maximize human potential.
SKOT WALDRON:
Well said. I loved how you brought all those together. As a brand guy, consistency, alignment is key. And it looks like you've been very intentional about thinking just about that progress and the process of which you've laid out your thinking and your book, so very smart.
LARRY ROBERTSON:
Thanks, Skot.
SKOT WALDRON:
Where can people get a hold of you? Where can they get ahold of the book?
LARRY ROBERTSON:
Sure. So the book is available on Amazon. The full title is Rebel Leadership: How to Thrive in Uncertain Times. But the easiest place to find me is my main website. It's my initials, L R and the word speaks, lrspeaks.com. There, you can find out more about the books. If you're not a book reader, which I encourage you to become, you can read my articles. I write for a series of publications on these topics, and you can learn more about me in general.
SKOT WALDRON:
Very cool. Larry, you're a rock star. Thank you so much for enlightening me and having this great conversation and bringing the word brand into this. I love it. Thank you. I did not pay you to say that, so very well done. Thank you for being on the show.
LARRY ROBERTSON:
Thanks for creating the space and giving me the opportunity, Skot. I loved it.
SKOT WALDRON:
So what is a rebellious leader? It is somebody who thinks about new and creative and better ways to solve problems, right? And uncertain times, which are going to happen for forever, we are going to have to think about new and better ways to solve problems. And that is the mentality that we need to have, the new mentality we need to have. Also this idea of, it's not just going to be the hero, right? The one person that sits in that corner office on the top level is not going to be there to save us all the time. We've got to have collaboration. We've got to have a voice at the table that is different from ours. As leaders, we need to have voices at the table that can bring different things to make sure that we're getting the best solution at the right time to deliver on something that's going to help us all achieve what we're trying to do.
And that's what bridges into culture. And we talked a lot about that in this interview. So the idea of culture and how does that shape what we're doing right now? And that was kind of what he talked about, what culture was. It's what we're doing right now. And are we accidental in that or are we intentional in that? The biggest mistake he mentions is as being accidental in how we build our culture. And I also want to bring out the point that he made about actually taking action and actually driving action to not just have a statement that's made, but how can we build something that's more than just a statement. So as we go about that, and I feel like I've made a new friend here, Larry, thank you for being on the call. This has been awesome.
I'm really looking forward to reading your book and its fullness here. This is going to be really, really cool. Thank you for sharing that with us. If you all want to find out more about me, you can go to skotwaldron.com. You can go to YouTube and like, subscribe, comment, share, all that stuff. I would love. I've got some free tools on there that you can get access to. And you go to my website, find out more, and link up with me on LinkedIn because I love to connect there as well. So thanks for being today. And I hope you enjoyed it and we'll see you next time on another episode of Unlocked,
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