Unlocking the Bias Every Leader Has (And How to Fix It) with Mark Miller

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Timestamps:
00:00:00 – Cold Start & Intro
00:08:40 – Why Rewrite a Book That Already Sold 700K Copies
00:12:50 – Why “Servant Leadership” Got a Bad Name
00:15:26 – The Definition Problem Nobody Talks About
00:20:13 – The #1 Thing Blocking Your Boss
00:26:35 – When Learning Becomes a Hiding Place
00:31:34 – Why the Quarter Kills the Relationship
00:38:33 – Own Your Bias, Then Compensate
00:45:20 – Does Pressure Reveal Character or Build It?

Mark Miller (00:02.00)
We think that’s one of the heart habits is a hunger for wisdom.

We also say that to reinvent continuously, starting with yourself, is one of the marks of a great leader.

And I’ve not worked in a publicly traded company, so I want to be really clear on that. People asked me if I worked at a Fortune 500 company. I said, “no, I worked at a fortunate 500 company.” And Chick-fil-A is still privately held. So, I’ll give you my perception on this issue.

Skot Waldron (00:38.00)
When I’m not hosting Unlocked, I’m speaking at events all over the world. I’m helping leaders and I’m helping teams communicate better. I’m helping them build trust faster and actually enjoy working together. I’ve spoken for companies like The Home Depot. I’ve spoken at national architectural firms. I’ve spoken for pharmaceutical company offsites. I’ve spoken at associations, you name it.

With 99% of attendees of all those events, over 1800 people have reviewed me at this point. 99% of them saying they got some value. That’s pretty awesome. Even the caterers have thanked me. And if they are thanking me and they’ve heard a lot of talks and they’re busy doing their jobs, that’s saying something. If you’re an event planner looking for a speaker who’s really easy to work with, trust me, I want to be the last thing you’re worried about on event day. I’m going to take care of you. And who actually delivers value for your audience that they are going to use on Monday morning when they return to the office, then let’s talk.

We’re going to talk about leadership. Are you surprised? You shouldn’t be, because that’s what we do on this show. And I have a really special guest who is making not his first appearance, but his second appearance on my show. And that is Mark Miller. And Mark talked a couple years ago about his book Uncommon Greatness, which we’re going to reference in this interview. But he’s coming on now because he and Ken Blanchard have released or re-released The Secret. And I’m holding the book up right now. What Great Leaders Know and Do. And it is a parable. It’s written in a parable. And there’s a character named Debbie in this book that is struggling with her team, not performing well, and gets paired up with none other but the president of her company who is going to mentor her. And they go on this journey for a while about different aspects of what leaders are and what they do. It’s behavioral based.

And Mark talks a lot about that in this interview. And so, I want you to pay attention. There’s some really good tidbits. This isn’t a generic leadership conversation. We really talk about this whole idea of servant leadership. And I know some of you are rolling your eyes at the term, and rightly so. It’s very misunderstood. And Mark starts the whole interview by talking about what that is and what it means and why it’s a bit tainted right now, and what that is.

So, Mark Miller is co-founder of Lead Every Day and former vice president of high-performance leadership at Chick-fil-A. He’s the author of twelve books, including two coauthored with Ken Blanchard, his works have sold millions of copies, y’all. Millions means he’s got something to say and he says it, and he’s hung out with some great people that support him and what he does in his message

His real-world corporate leadership experience brings practical insights to leadership development. He’s full of this inspiration aspect, but he has a lot of applicable things he wants you to take away too. So here we come, Mark.

Mark Miller. What an honor to have you, man.

Mark Miller (03:53.00)
It’s great to be back.

Skot Waldron (03:55.00)
Yeah, it’s good. It’s been two years since you imparted your wisdom on my audience before. And now I have about 49 million followers since then. So, you know, get you a little more exposure, right? It’s not 49 million. It’s not 49 million, Mark. I’m just saying. Not yet. After this it will be but I’m excited because you and Mr. Ken Blanchard just released a new book, and that’s cool.

So, I’m excited to talk about that. But I’m first of all curious, so I’ve got my copy and a personal little note from you. And I don’t know if this is your handwriting, Mark.

Mark Miller (04:39.00)
It is.

Skot Waldron (04:40.00)
Is it? okay. It is. I love it, man. Well, thank you for the book. It was an easy read. But I want to know why you re-released this thing. You already released it once. It sold over 700,000 copies before. And now you and Ken re-release this thing. I want to know what’s different because I didn’t read the first one. I’m going to be honest. I’m a fan of yours, Mark, but I didn’t read the first one.

Mark Miller (05:07.00)
Well, you were just a child. The first one was out 20 years ago. I give you a full hall pass on that. Yeah. So let me give just a little context. I’m not sure everybody in your audience knows the name Ken Blanchard. That’s the reason they should read the book.

Ken Blanchard was the OG in our space. He had three books on the bestseller list at one time 20 years ago. Again, not as popular or as strong a brand today because he’s not doing as much as he did in decades past. But his most famous book, a lot of people have heard of, The One Minute Manager, which I think he probably sold 15 million copies of that one, and it’s still selling.

So, I was delighted when Ken found out about the work that we had been doing at Chick-fil-A and asked me, well, actually, a little bit of that backstory. We had done some work at Chick-fil-A. Again, for those that don’t know, I spent almost 45 years selling chicken and we had done some work on how we could accelerate leadership development and we weren’t quite sure we had it right because this was 30 years ago almost now, and we didn’t know anything about leadership development. Our process prior to that time was more what I would call immersion and osmosis. And we just felt like leaders would emerge. And I would add parenthetically that at a certain scope, scale, and volume, you know, if you’re a small group, that might actually work. That’s how I learned a lot of leadership. I sat around the table; I was the 16th corporate employee.

And so, I got to sit around the table with our founder and our CFO and our COO and have lunch with them every day. So yeah, you can learn a lot by paying attention. But we got to the point, again, almost 30 years ago, that that process had failed us. We needed more leaders. And so, I was asked to figure it out. We went to work. We worked diligently for longer than I’m going to admit, because this was sort of a side hustle. We all had day jobs, but we worked on this for a long, long time. We reached some conclusions and we weren’t convinced we had it right. Because we didn’t have, really, any experience. Now we’d done the due diligence, and we’d done the global benchmarking and read a couple hundred books on leadership and lots of interviews and all the stuff you would do, but we still felt like we needed some affirmation or maybe a disaster check.

And so, I told the team, I said, I’m going to be with Ken Blanchard the very next day. Again, coincidence or divine appointment, you can draw your own conclusions. And I shared with Ken the work that we had done on a simple one page, five bullet points. And I said, “hey, Ken, we’ve been trying to figure out how to accelerate leadership development. Take a look at this. Let me know if you think we got it right. Did we miss anything? Do you think this will stand the test of time? And he said, first words out of his mouth, “this has got to be a book.”

Well, I blew him off and I said, Ken, everything looks like a book to you. Because even then he had sold, I don’t know, 10, 12 million books at that point in his life. And he said, “you don’t understand.” He said, “you were trying to articulate what great leaders do at Chick-fil-A. What you’ve done is you’ve articulated what great leaders have done throughout history. And it’s got to be a book.”

So again, another little interesting tidbit in this story. I just told him we didn’t really want to do a book, but I took his words as affirmation that we’d gotten it right. But he kind of planted that seed in my mind. And so, I went to our executive committee and I said, “hey, Ken Blanchard has this crazy idea. He wants to write a book about the work that we’re now doing in leadership development.” And they debated it for months and months. And it’s fine. I mean, I had a day job, so it’s like, get back to me when you decide something. And they finally came back and they said, “we think you should do it. Maybe this will serve the world.” And I think that’s a perfect picture of an abundance mentality.

And so, Ken and I did that first book. Little did we know, again, we had no imagination that would entertain the thought that today that book I think is in 34 languages. It’s just been a global phenomenon. And I would even say it’s not that great a book, but the reason it’s gotten so much traction even 20 years later is it’s built on truth. Now, with that context, why would we do a new edition? Well, the publisher called, this was probably 18, 24 months ago, and said, “hey, the book is still selling. We’d like to do a new edition and kind of reintroduce it to a new generation.”

And I don’t know how all publishers handle that, but you know, some of them will just put a new cover on it and say new edition. They knew that I was not going to go for that. And so, their question was, have you got any new content that you would like to add to the book. And interestingly enough, we had made one change in 20 plus years on the model that Chick-fil-A challenged me to rethink one facet of the model. If you care, we can get into that. But so, I told the publisher, I said, “yeah, yeah, I actually do have new content.”

And so, for those who read the first one, you might realize or remember that we’ve now rewritten about a third of the book. So, this is a new book. And we’ve added a facilitator’s guide and some study questions and an online assessment. So, we’ve really tried to enhance it for the new generation. But that’s kind of a long answer to why there’s a new edition of The Secret.

Skot Waldron (11:19.00)
A third, man. That’s quite a bit and I will tell you, I love the stuff in the back. Like, that’s awesome. For those of us that really drive on the application aspect of things, I mean, you’ve got the fable kind of or the you know type story that you’ve written in this thing about this character Debbie and her boss and you go through this whole journey of her leadership and what that is, but then you give me some really applicable stuff at the end, some facilitator’s guide type information, that self-assessment and things like that to really apply the thing.

So, I mean, hello book club. Like this is amazing for you know, those people that just want a quick, easy read. They can use it inside the organizations. I mean, so good job for that

Mark Miller (12:09.00)
Well, and let me put in one plug for that assessment. This was a legit assessment. I got a very large research and design team. We spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on that assessment. It was one of the more rigorous projects that I’d ever been part of. And so, it is a very legit assessment, a free assessment. So, a lot of folks’ kind of miss that as one of the real additions to this new version.

Skot Waldron (12:46.00)
Well, let’s get into the book a little bit. So, The Secret is something that is interesting. I love the title, right? Like the secret to like what great leaders do and how they behave and what they should be acting like and whatnot. And the premise of this is on servant leadership. I mean, the whole acronym in there is serve. And you go through that model and Debbie, the character, goes through this model and her own leadership journey. And I like how you also framed it up in that it wasn’t a, you know, in the book, it’s like it didn’t take 5 weeks for her to get through this thing, right? Like it was a journey that she went through for a while. When you think about how often she’s meeting with her boss and whatnot.

But you talk about this servant leadership aspect of things. But here’s what I want to push back on a little bit for this. Servant leadership has been around for decades, this whole term servant leadership. And I mean, if you look at the headlines out there, many leaders, I think still believe that fear and ego and pressure and accountability outperform the service aspect. I think the service aspect is that nice to have. But if servant leadership works so well, why do you think it’s still uncommon out there?

Mark Miller (14:04.00)
Okay. What a wonderful question. So, I’m trying to decide where to go first. Servant leadership admittedly is a tarnished brand, is a tarnished term. I think it languishes because they’re so few really good role models, is one. I think there’s a huge misunderstanding on what it means. And I think it’s also been modeled poorly by many men and women who are just crappy leaders and say they’re servant leaders. I mean, you put all that together. It’s a perfect storm.

Somebody called me a couple of years ago and said, “do you want to buy the URL?” I think it was servant leader or servant leadership. And I said, “why is that available?” And they said, “because nobody wants it.” So, it is a tarnished brand. I got that. But there’s a misunderstanding. When people conflate service with servant leadership, you’re on a slippery slope because I can buy you donuts and walk your dog and wash your car and serve you and be the worst leader in the history of the world.

So, service and servant leadership are different. You want a leader who has a heart and a mind to serve. But they have to be a leader. It’s like a relief pitcher has to be a pitcher before they can be a relief pitcher. You actually have to learn what we call the fundamentals of leadership. And that’s what the book is about. They’re the strategic ways that the best leaders serve. Again, it’s okay if you walk somebody’s dog and bring them donuts, but do not confuse that with leadership. So, you have to master the fundamentals. And again, not only are they not role modeled and they’re in all this confusion, it’s not being taught, not pragmatically. And again, I think that’s another reason that this book has gotten traction is we sort of demystify it. We move it into the behavioral realm. And that was one of the best decisions that I think our team at Chick-fil-A made again, 20 plus years ago. We said if we were going to accelerate leadership development, the very first place to start is we had to have a common definition. Because what I saw then and I’ve seen in organizations all over the world, if you say leadership, everybody nods. And then if you say, write down your definition of leadership, unless they’ve done the hard work of forging a consensus, they’re all different. That’s where we were at the chicken.

And that was one reason you couldn’t accelerate leadership development because every department and every team was trying to create leaders in their own image. And many of them weren’t even creating leaders because they had set such a skewed view of what leadership was. And it was just a mess. And so, we decided we need a common working definition, but it needs to be behaviorally based.

There are so many theoretical, conceptual, and academic definitions of leadership. They said that we’re going to define leadership by the critical few behaviors that these leaders demonstrate, that they cultivate and apply in their day-to-day life. Again, we ended up calling them the fundamentals, but it’s behaviorally based, which makes it much, much easier to articulate, to understand, to illustrate, and to train. Again, I think that’s why this book is still out there and hopefully growing momentum. We just sold two more languages with this new edition. So yeah, it works. It just works. And so that’s why we’re excited about it.

Skot Waldron (18:11.00)
I mean you talk about the idea and let me ask you then what is your definition of leadership?

Mark Miller (18:18.00)
The men and women that master and display these five fundamentals, that’s when you’re a leader.

Skot Waldron (18:26.00)
Mm. Okay. So, you put this, the SERVE model is what defines leadership.

Mark Miller (18:32.00)
It’s the cornerstone. Now, I would quickly say we believe there are three disciplines. Let’s pull up a step. There are three disciplines that every leader should pursue their entire life. Now, we wrote a separate book about that. I’m not going there, but let me, I need to put this in context.

One is, every leader should be focused on how do I become a better leader? Well, the cornerstone for that is in this book. You’ve got to learn the fundamentals. It’s the blocking and tackling in football. You can say you’re a team, but if you can’t block and tackle, you’re going to be awful. If you can’t do these fundamentals, you’re always going to struggle to lead.

Second, every leader should be concerned about and focus on the discipline of how do I improve team performance. There are some different strategies and tactics, not to compete with becoming a better leader, but there are some things you do to lead a team well.

And then third and finally, we think every leader should care about and be focused on how do we strengthen the organization. Again, there’s some things, strategies, and tactics that you should be concerned about. Again, the foundation is leadership, but you need alignment, which involves the culture. You need engagement. You need a focus on execution. So, there are some things that you need in each of those disciplines, but it all starts with individual men and women becoming a better leader.

Now, let me back up. You said something a minute ago, and I can’t, I said there was so much in your first question. I can’t not mention this. When you were rattling off the more traditional or conventional worldview of most leaders, you mentioned ego. Well, guess what? We have done several global surveys over the last few years, thousands of people, you know, countries all over the planet. We did it on culture, we did it on, we did most recently a leadership survey, 4,000 leaders in six countries, and we asked them what if anything was impeding their boss’s effectiveness. You know where this is going. Over 60% said the number one issue impeding their boss’s effectiveness was ego.

Skot Waldron (21:03.00)
And what did they mean by ego in that sense? What did they mean?

Mark Miller (21:06.00)
Well, we did lots of follow-up work, but basically where the boss felt like they had to have all the answers or they did have all the answers and their decisions were always right and they undervalued the input of others and they were not curious or inquisitive and didn’t ask questions. You just make your own list. Because again, you talk to thousands of people, over 60% of them said this is my boss’s number one problem.

So, I think a lot of men and women are living beneath their privilege. And by their privilege, I mean the privilege they’ve been given to lead. But most leaders are not nearly as effective as they could be or should be. Ego is certainly one of those traps. And a lot of leaders are just not self-aware.

Skot Waldron (21:58.00)
I agree. I think, you know, and everybody says, you know, in our space, in the coaching space and consulting that we start with self-awareness. And I think that’s for a reason. I think it’s such a foundational element and the easiest way to become others aware is to become self-aware. And given you know multiple times that you can only give what you possess. And, you know, if I don’t possess any awareness, I’m not going to be able to give a lot back.

Your book, it suggests that a lot of leadership change starts with heart, not necessarily new techniques. The thing that I think about though is leaders are just, they’re looking for another framework, they’re looking for another tactic, they’re looking for another system you know for their life to make them a better leader, but what do you say to that?

Mark Miller (22:51.00)
Well, I applaud leaders who have embraced lifelong learning. In fact, we think that’s one of the heart habits is a hunger for wisdom. And so, we also say that to reinvent continuously, starting with yourself, is one of the marks of a great leader. So, I’m not opposed to people looking for new and improved means and methods. I think what often trips people up, there are probably a couple things, is one is they get on, and I don’t even have language for this, maybe you can help me. They get on this, it’s almost like binging, right? But it goes on for sometimes months and years and decades. And they’re just consuming, but they’re not applying. They’re learning, but there’s no wisdom there because there’s no application.

And so, reading the next book and going to the next conference and that’s, again, I think that there’s really, there’s something really good there, but how much are you actually applying?

Skot Waldron (24:01.00)
Yeah, I agree with you. I’m sorry to interrupt, but I think that there’s an interesting point you’re making there that we’re very good at consuming. Like we are, like our society, our economy, we are a consumption economy. We consume like crazy. And it’s easy to consume. It’s at our fingertips. We just turn on a podcast, we put up an audio book, we watch a video, like we can watch 30 second reels and we consume, consume, consume.

And social media has taught us that we’re really good at this and I call that passive action instead of the massive action aspect. The massive action is what is the application of the thing. Right? We can walk around and dip our toe in the pool all we want to, but then it’s the are we ever going to jump in? Are we actually going to commit.

Mark Miller (24:46.00)
You don’t learn to swim by sticking your toe in.

Skot Waldron (24:50.00)
Amen, brother. Yes, exactly. And I think that’s what you’re talking about.

Mark Miller (24:56.00)
I think it is and I think if we’re not careful, any of us, any leader can kind of fall into this trap, particularly if you believe that learning is part of your role and responsibility, which I think it is. But you got to be careful.

I had a mentor years ago who challenged me. He said, if you’ve got an hour to read, he said you should only read for 30 minutes. And I looked at him kind of funny. He said, and the other 30 minutes, you need to try and figure out how you’re going to apply what you just read. Now, I can’t say that I hold to that standard, but I have that thought often. How am I going to apply what I’m learning? Whether it’s a podcast or an audio book or a traditional book or a conference or an event. I mean, I literally am trying to capture action items when I’m at an event. And I’m also trying to build in debrief time for myself when I come back because everybody knows what it’s like when you go back to work. I know conferences aren’t in vogue as much as they were 10 years, 15 years ago, but when you go back, it’s like, it’s really easy to kind of lose what you just experienced.

And so, I encourage leaders, yeah, make action items during the event and then have some time to process when you get back so that you can apply the same principle that my mentor shared with me about a book for any learning experience. So, I just, I mean, I even begin my annual planning process every year with trying to figure out what were the big lessons from this year so that I don’t repeat the same mistakes again. So, I’m just trying to live my life in application mode, is basically the way to think about it, which again is one reason we built these fundamentals as behaviors. Because we can say to leaders, I’ve literally had leaders sit in my office and say, “What do I do? I want to lead. I don’t know what to do.” Well now you do. We can tell you here five things you need to do.

Skot Waldron (27:05.00)
And I think that this book is full of that. You have the, you know, Debbie and her mentor Jeff talking about this throughout the whole book of, you know, and then at the end it’s always the go and do. And she comes back and she reports about the thing that she did.

Mark Miller (27:23.00)
Thank you for saying that. That was one of the things that we really tried to work on in the new edition, but there were some guardrails, and they were actually established by the publisher. Now, I’m not blaming anybody, I’m just telling you. I’m just reporting the news here. They did not want a lot of tactics in the book. And we’ve dealt with this before because I’ve written several parables. I did this one with Ken, but I did several on my own. And they say the way you destroy a story is with too many tactics.

So, on this content, I wrote another entire book called Uncommon Greatness that is not a parable, and it is full of tactics. Because the publisher said, I said “How many tactics can I put in here?” He said, “as many as you want, because it’s a traditional book.” And so, for people who read The Secret and go, well, yeah, this guide at the back was an another half a step toward giving people things to do. And certainly, Debbie illustrates there’s some things that Jeff wanted her to do. But if you want a book full of tactics on this same model, it’s called Uncommon Greatness.

Skot Waldron (28:40.00)
And if people want to check out a little bit of an interview with you and I, we did, we talked about that book a couple of years ago on this podcast. And it was awesome. So yeah, that’s great. And I’m so dumbfounded at the application. When I’m out speaking now, I will often ask my event planners, do you want like inspiration, or do you want application? Like, where on the spectrum are we on this thing? I never hear, we just want all inspiration. Right. Nobody says that. Whether it’s a keynote, a workshop, or whatever. People are like, our people want to know the “now what?”

Mark Miller (29:21.00)
Right. So, a fun story about that. Part of my role when I was at the chicken is our team was responsible for our annual event. And you know, my last one, there were almost 10,000 folks in the room. So, it’s a pretty big deal, multi-day event. And we had invited Jim Collins, Good to Great, Jim Collins to come. And we finally talked him into that. He doesn’t do a lot of these type events. And in fact, he ended up coming twice. And we were challenging him on application. That we really need these men and women need and want application. And this is my interpretation, and I love Jim. But let me tell you, he didn’t know what to do with that.

So, here’s what he did. He gave his traditional talk, which was amazing. And then about 10 minutes before his allotted time was finished, he said, “get out your notebooks. I’m going to give you some things to do.” And he gave people a list of things to do. Now, I have not asked Jim if he’s still doing it, but he told me the response was so overwhelmingly positive that he was going to do that with all his talks. He’s going to do his talk and then say, now let me give you some stuff to do.

Yeah, the leaders, I’m not even sure it’s just leaders, but leaders is the pond you and I swim in so much. It’s like they really do want to know what works. What do I need to do? Not what might work, which I think is another reason our work has gotten traction over the last two decades, is we only share stuff that works. We share stuff that’s based on truth. We begin every project with the same question. What is universally true about this topic? And then once you share that, you can translate it to 30, 40, 50, 100 languages if you want. We got 152 countries listening to our podcast. Well, why is that? Because the stuff works everywhere. And it has this bias for action. And so, we’re unapologetically painfully pragmatic.

Skot Waldron (31:34.00)
Painfully pragmatic. Well said. I like that. So, let’s talk about this because you know a lot of people talk about leadership stuff and the soft skills term and some of the nice to have and what it means and business. I talk about this often with my guests because we do want to get into application. We do want business results; we do want to be profitable because then that means nobody has a job. And we don’t want to get the opportunity to serve anyone at that point, in that capacity.

But when Wall Street is watching the quarter slipping, right? Quarters are slipping. And we live and die by the quarter. And Simon Sinek wrote the book The Infinite Game, kind of talking about that concept of live and die by the quarter, win and lose the quarter, and what that does to our culture and our mentality within our organizations, that you know, it puts our it puts our culture at jeopardy, right? When we start thinking that way all the time. But when Wall Street’s watching the quarter slipping, isn’t it just human nature though to sacrifice the relationship stuff first? Because that takes a long time to develop. That takes a long time to nurture. We just got to get the quarter, get your stuff done, get the numbers in, etc. How do great leaders resist that temptation?

Mark Miller (32:59.00)
Well, a couple of things. And I’ve not worked in a publicly traded company, so I want to be really clear on that. People asked me if I worked at a Fortune 500 company. I said, “no, I worked at a fortunate 500 company.” And Chick-fil-A is still privately held. So, I’ll give you my perception on this issue. I still believe, regardless of who owns the company, that the best decisions are always made with a long-term perspective.

Now, that doesn’t mean you won’t have to make some hard decisions along the way. Chick-fil-A made hard decisions along the way, but we always tried to keep the long view. And I just think it’s a, I mean this is an understatement, I’m looking for some stronger language here. It is a huge challenge if you get caught in that 90-day cycle. I mean I understand that. The temptation to sacrifice relationships will undermine results over time. See, that’s what’s, so it’s almost paradoxical that the way to maximize results is not to focus on results, nor is it to focus on relationships. It’s to focus on results and relationships.

We talked about Jim Collins. It’s an example of what he talked about, and I think it was in Good to Great. Don’t quote me on that, one of his books, where he talked about the Genius of the AND, where he studied organizations that had outpaced the stock market by 17 times over a hundred year period. And he found that one of the things they did is they took two things that on the surface appeared in conflict and in some cases actually were, and they embraced both. And the concept, as most of your listeners would know, is there’s real power in that tension. You don’t eliminate the tension; you manage the tension.

An example to kind of bring that to life is Toyota when however, many years ago, 50 years ago, they said we’re going to have high quality and low cost. And people said, “well, you can’t do that.” Like, no, those are, no, you can have high quality at high cost, or you can have low quality at low cost, but you can’t have low cost and high quality. And they said, watch us. And last time I checked, I think they’ve sold more cars than anybody, right?

Skot Waldron (35:26.00)
They last for three hundred thousand miles too.

Mark Miller (35:28.00)
They have pretty inexpensive cars that last a really, really long time. Well, results and relationships is a perfect example of the Genius of the AND. We do care about results and we care about relationships. And I’m going to have expectations for people and they’re going to have to meet those expectations. But that doesn’t mean that I can’t or shouldn’t or won’t have a relationship.

Let me give you one story about that. Back at the chicken, this was years ago. We used to reorg the field staff every 5 to 7 years. And these are men and women. We call them business consultants who worked with about 30 restaurants. And we felt like every 5 to 7 years, the consultant needed a new set of operators to serve, and the operators needed a new voice and a fresh set of eyes to help them with their business. And so, we had done one of those re-orgs. We were about six months in and somebody raised their hand and they asked the question, we’re six months in. All I’ve been talking about is the relationship. When should I start talking about results? And the answer was, you messed up six months ago. You should have started talking about results and relationships from the jump. And it’s like, yes, it’s both “and”, and I think if the relationships are strong and the expectations are clear, it makes the hard decisions easier.

But I think they’re still hard. I’m not trying to minimize that. But it’s a trap to think jettison the relationship so we can get the results. Because at the end of the day, again, this is a bit oversimplified, but all the good stuff is discretionary. And if you kill the relationship, people aren’t going to have initiative. They’re not going to demonstrate creativity. They’re not going to ask the hard and thoughtful questions. They’re just, they’re not going to do the things that will help you maximize your potential over time if you destroy the relationship.

Skot Waldron (37:46.00)
Agree. And I see, I work with some leaders that really put a lot of emphasis on the relationship, just naturally, just they tend to be that way. It’s just their nature and they sometimes criticize themselves or think that they aren’t enough because they don’t push a lot of the other stuff that they see other leaders doing. Right. Like pushing people in accountability, having those hard conversations and right and really prioritizing the numbers and whatnot. And they’re just like, I wish I could be more like them.

Mark Miller (38:29.00)
All right. So let me say a word about this. In the spirit of being painfully pragmatic, I’m going to suggest that what we’ve ended up talking about here is for most leaders the hardest of the five fundamentals. In my experience, I actually don’t have data to support it, but we’ve been sharing this content around the world for over twenty years. This is the one that most leaders struggle with. And I think you referenced the answer as to why.

It’s most leaders have a natural bias. They either show up more results oriented or they show up more relationships oriented. Now I say most leaders, again, this is an estimate. I think there are about 5% of the leaders who value both of those things equally. And I always say I don’t like those leaders because leadership is easier for them. For the rest of us, we have a bias. And again, it doesn’t mean it’s bad, it doesn’t mean it’s wrong. It is our innate hardwired psychology and personality and temperament. And I’m just going to assume that all that is what it’s supposed to be. But we also know the best leaders value both.

So, what we’ve been teaching leaders for more than two decades is there’s a two-step process so that you can embrace results and relationships. Two steps. It’s really simple. Number one, own your bias. Now, most leaders know. If they don’t, I’d say you only need to ask three people who know you well and love you enough to tell you the truth. I have encountered leaders, including recently, I encountered a leader who was deceived, self-deceived, and their team called them out on it because they wanted to be results oriented and they weren’t. And so, it was a mess and the team had to work through it. But number one, you have to own your bias. Don’t hide, don’t deflect, don’t defer, don’t deny. Here’s the way I am wired naturally. Okay. I’m not even going to get into why you’re that way. Again, beyond my pay grade, but 95% of leaders have a bias.

Step two, this is the magic. You have to compensate. I often describe it like a leader who wears glasses. You would never say a leader who wears glasses is a lesser leader. If you thought about it long, you might say they’re pretty smart because they identified something they didn’t do naturally well, and they got somebody to help them with the proper prescription to offer the correction that they needed. So, I say all you got to do if you’re results oriented is figure out how do you compensate on the relationship side and vice versa. And you can make a long, long list and just like with the eyeglasses, how much compensation depends on how strong your bias is. You might get by with some readers that you buy for $12 at the Kroger, you know, at the grocery store, if you’re not way out of whack.

Well, what’s that mean as it relates to compensation? What it means is if I’m results oriented, I just may need to be sure that I’ve got somebody in my inner circle that’s relationship oriented. To offer perspective and counsel and challenge and pushback, right? Because a lot of leaders look around the table and everybody’s just like them. So again, that might be all you need, but you might need more than that. Again, I don’t know how many of these examples you want, but as a results-oriented leader, from time to time, and I should probably do this more often, I’ll go ahead and confess that. In my annual plan, I’ll put a goal of how many notes of encouragement, thanks, and appreciation I’m going to write over the coming year.

Now, the relationship people think that’s pretty slimy. But for results-oriented people, it’s like, okay, I’ve taken up a critical and important behavior that I really do want to do. They still got to be genuine, they still got to be authentic, they still got to be from the heart. But because I’ve now created a metric, I’m going to write a whole lot more notes of thanks, encouragement, and appreciation.

So, identify your bias and figure out how strong a prescription do you need so that you can value both. It’s not going to change who you are, but it will change how you show up and it will improve your results.

Skot Waldron (43:06.00)
Amen. I think that there’s something interesting because what I find with some leaders too that are more of the results driven. I’m like, well, I want you in the morning to go around and say hi to five people in the morning. Just like go around, talk about the weekend, who generally think it was a waste of time to do that. But, you know, go and do it. And a lot of them will push back for a minute and they’ll say, people just think I’m being fake because I don’t do that. You know, they’ll just see that I’m ingenuine. And I’ll go, well, what if they just see you making an effort? What if they just see you trying? Like they know that you don’t normally do that. Isn’t that the point? Right.

So, I think there’s something interesting that they can turn that thing into, you know, I don’t think it’s being ingenuine. I just think that you’re trying.

Mark Miller (43:59.00)
Yeah. You’re trying to develop a very critical fundamental and competency that will raise your level of leadership. Oh, by the way, it’ll raise their level of fellowship. It’ll raise their level of engagement. It will raise their level of performance. So yeah, I think every leader has to find their own prescription though. And for some it may be something entirely different. But we’ve been telling leaders for decades, you need to find a way to value both. We’re not saying the way you are is bad or wrong, but we do know what drives maximum performance over time. And it’s a leader that values both.

Skot Waldron (44:46.00)
We’re going to start wrapping this thing up. But there is, I was looking in the book. Well looking at your SERVE model, right? So, I’m going to go through the model itself. So, S stand for See the Future. E is Engage and Develop Others. R is Reinvent Continuously. V is Value Results and Relationships, as you spoke about here. And E is Embody a leader’s heart. And a lot of this goes into what you kind of frame up at the beginning of the book of talking about the iceberg, and the idea of the metaphor of the iceberg 90% of what you see is the character piece of that. 10% of what you see above the surface is actually the skills that you see. Talking about the character piece. I’m interested in your thoughts on this. Do you think character is revealed under pressure or is it developed really before the pressure comes? Like where do you think that flies?

Mark Miller (45:54.00)
I think it’s revealed and fortified under pressure. I think you’ll grow in your confidence, you’ll grow in your competence as you lead. I mean, specifically, one of the heart habits we talk about is to respond with courage. Well, courage is a muscle, like a muscle, I should say. And the more you use it, the stronger it’s going to become. And challenges and issues and problems and decisions that might have rocked your world as a 25-year-old leader, they’re no less important, but you perceive them differently when you’ve been responding with courage for 5 years or 10 years or 15 years. So, I think it’s revealed and strengthened as you lead.

Skot Waldron (46:58.00)
I agree. I think that there’s a lot of you know, it’s easy when there’s not a lot of pressure or a lot of stress to just kind of show up and do your thing and to be the good leader, the good parent, the good friend, the good whoever. But that pressure is what’s going to start refining it and causing you to exercise that muscle a little bit, a little bit more in those times. And I always tell people too, I did a lot of brand strategy in my previous couple of decades before getting into a lot of the leadership work. But really, it’s the same thing. I talk about your leadership brand, and your leadership brand is all the work that you do leading up to the hard moment is the work that should define the hard moment, right? I mean, people shouldn’t be surprised in the hard moment when you show up a certain way because you’ve already shown them in the years before that how you’re going to show up.

And so, I think defining your brand early, making sure you show up in a way that reveals that character, being intentional about it, cause it didn’t happen by accident, right. I think you talked a lot about those.

Mark Miller (48:11.00)
Right. And, to kind of put an exclamation point on that, we believe that if your heart’s not right, nobody cares about your skills. And I think I can prove it to your listeners. Most leaders I’ve encountered can think of someone, a leader in their past who had the skills that nobody wanted to follow. In fact, there may be some people listening who feel like they’ve got the skills, but they’re having trouble with the followship part, if people don’t trust your heart, they’re not going to follow your leadership.

Skot Waldron (48:50.00)
Thank you. I think that that is brilliant. And that supports Amy Cuddy’s research, Harvard professor, about warmth and competence. And if you don’t show up with the warmth first, people are not going to follow you. I always, you know, relate it back to the caveman analogy of I’m not following you into the cave if I just think you’re going to kill me once we get in there. You know, I think that I don’t care how good you are at killing stuff and making fires, because you know, I care about that warmth piece, first and foremost.

And that’s why I think it’s so important that we talk about this. And I think it’s so important that we re-emphasize the relationship part of who we are and what we do in leadership, which is why I’m so glad that you and Ken have re-released this to get that message out there. So, The Secret: What Great Leaders Know and Do, you can buy it anywhere. You buy books. If people want to hang out with you, Mark, if they want to, you know, talk to you, ask you questions, find you, where do they go?

Mark Miller (49:49.00)
Yeah, let’s start with my cell number, 678-612-8441. And if you would please put that in the show notes because somebody’s driving or on a treadmill and they can’t write that down. 678-612-8441 and then you can learn more about what we’re doing at leadeveryday.com.

I’m trying to figure out how to serve a hundred million leaders in the next few years. And so, love to start with anybody who wants to reach out.

Skot Waldron (50:21.00)
Well, you’re off to a good start, man. I have been following you for years and I love the work that you did at Chick-fil-A. And I love the work that you and Randy are doing at Lead Every Day. And I think that there’s enough to go around for everybody and enough to inspire each other in this journey. So, I appreciate you blazing the path for people like me to follow in your footsteps and continue the good work. Thanks, man.

Mark Miller (50:45.00)
Thank you. Bye bye.

Skot Waldron (50:49.00)
Did you hear the wisdom? Did you hear it just being imparted through the waves of this medium? Yes, you did, because Mark has a lot to say. He has a lot to give. He has a lot of experience, a lot of research, and a lot of people he’s spoken to about these topics of leadership and what it means to be a leader. And when I think back, it’s hard for me to go, Mark, you just don’t know how it is these days. On to the contrary, he knows exactly what it’s like. He has been there since the kind of you know the early stages of this whole leadership reformation kind of thing, that the Covey’s and the Ken Blanchard’s and all that stuff. The godfathers of the leadership movement, and he is still doing it today at Lead Everyday with his partner Randy, and what they do there is fantastic.

And so, he has a lot to give, a lot of knowledge and the things that he labels in this book are consistent principles. I mean, he said this came out 20 years ago. And they didn’t adjust the model necessarily. He said there was one thing in there they adjusted. But the way it applies to today is the same as it was 20 years ago. And that’s because leadership is universal. Whatever language you speak, whatever culture you live in, leadership is universal. And we want to find people that we want to follow. Those are fun people to follow, to be around. We want that relationship. So be that for somebody else. Be that person that people want to follow. Because I’m sure, I’m sure that you will be remembered later on in life for that thing that you did and that person you were.

If you want to find out more information about me or check out the show notes where there’s going to be more information and links to the things referenced in this episode, visit skotwaldron.com. And lastly, I’m asking for a little bit of love, just a little bit. So please take a moment, follow, rate the show. The algorithm is like that; it helps me get the word out. I really appreciate it.

Thank you. And until next time, stay Unlocked.