#38. Unlocking Your Leadership Potential With 3x CEO And Speaker Tissa Richards

As a founder, CEO, or leader, it is your job to lead as your true self. Be authentic, resilient, and fearless with how you lead your team. Don’t just lead with “insert any adjective here.” You need to understand why you are leading that way. Why do you lead with empathy? Why do you lead with curiosity? You have to be an authentic leader.

Join George Randle as he talks to 3x CEO, authentic speaker, and the author of No Permission Needed: Unlock Your Leadership Potential and Eliminate Self-Doubt, Tissa Richards. Learn more about her book and how you can lead with authenticity. Discover your non-negotiables and values as a leader. Find out your catalyst statement, and know why you lead. Tune in and start unlocking your potential today!

—

Listen to the podcast here

Unlocking Your Leadership Potential With 3x CEO And Speaker Tissa Richards

I have a new colleague, a new friend that will be joining us. Her name is Tissa Richards. She released an amazing book called No Permission Needed: How to Unlock Your Leadership Potential And Eliminate Self-Doubt. She’s our Serial Software Founder and CEO, a $1 million raiser for multiple companies and patents. She’s now a leadership expert. As much as we talk about being able to articulate your value, you’re going to learn from the pro. Stand by and read the episode with Tissa Richards.

—

I am with one amazing person. I’m starting to think I got to go back and redo part of the book that says, “You can’t see talent,” because clearly when you meet Tissa Richards, you can see it right there in front of you. I wanted to jump in because I introed your book, No Permission Needed: How to Unlock Your Leadership Potential And Eliminate Self-Doubt. I love this. I know it was focused on women, but it spoke right to me. I’m like, “She must have known the self-doubt part in me and wrote this book.” I did your bio in the intro. That bio is a great bio. Tell us how you got to write a book and where did you start? This is a cool journey. Tell me about it.

Thank you. It’s exciting to be here. We met not that long ago and immediately decided we got to do some stuff together. I like to describe myself as a recovering Tech Founder and CEO. I say recover because you never know when you’re going to wake up and say, “I started another company but I promised myself I wouldn’t do that.” Now I’m not raising money for the first time in a long time, which is rather delightful.

Instead, I run a company where we help leaders create this unshakeable sense of self and develop high-performing values-based teams. I work with a lot of startups and large companies. I help diversify corporate boards and C-Suite. I write a book, do a lot of keynotes, and work with only remarkable people.

You started several companies and you have patents to your name, technology patents no less. You and I both know Lisa. You generally fall into that unicorn category.

I don’t think I ever would’ve written technology patents. Wine helped a lot in writing those. I went to UC Berkeley as a Marketing major. I never would’ve thought that I would’ve written these cybersecurity patents. Life takes a lot of weird turns.

I know because I’ve joked before, “You grow up as a skinny kid and poor. With the name George, you learn to talk, fight, and run.” I joined the military and got that part done. I’m a soccer player and got the running part done, then it transitioned into recruiting. Nobody grows up thinking you’re going to be into recruiting or talent, but you started several companies. How did you decide, “I need a period of recovery. I want to move on to impacting individuals and groups?” I don’t want to give away too much of what we’re going to talk about, but digging into their own DNA is what it amounts to. Was there a light bulb moment? How did that come to you?

I think about a villain origin story, but the light bulb moment for me was with my last company. I’ve had successes and failures like we’ve all had. In my last company, we had to wind it down. As any Founder or CEO knows, it’s very grueling and exhausting. You grieve for it. It’s hard. You’ve worked hard and you’ve sacrificed your life for many years. I lost my whole 30s to the company. I thought, “I’m exhausted. I need a little bit of time to go and then do it again.” This is all I know how to do.

Basically, I was in the fetal position under my desk thinking, “I’m going to take one year and recover.” As I was doing that, I thought I got some interesting opportunities to go, speak, and do some workshops for some private equity firms. I thought, “I like this. This is having an impact. I’m helping people find their story, tell who they are, and even more than that, figure out how to operate without fear, know what their values are, they are non-negotiables, and navigate the mind fields of leadership.”

How are you going to make hard decisions? How are you going to stand up sometimes and say, “I appreciate this opportunity, but it’s not aligned with how I work. As a leader, it’s not aligned with whom I want to be. Thank you for the opportunity. I’m going to take it off the table,” walk away, and not fear that it’s going to be fatal to your career, future, and reputation? A lot of that came from the experience of winding down my last company.

I thought, “If I can do this, I can walk away and still be a success and still have much potential in front of me, other people can. How can I help scale that and help people, especially women, know that nothing is fatal? It’s not fatal to your self-esteem, well-being, and your career. There’s a bigger mission here for me.”

I wanted to pay you the first compliment. There are many books that you could read as a leader, an aspiring entrepreneur, and a board member. I had a book on Amazon. It took off, but we would look at where we were positioned and there was something like 2 million books out there. The number of books was astounding. One of the things that I love above and beyond the pure content and lessons in the book is when I teach people to interview, this is a bottom-line upfront book. It is s very how-to, short, quick, great, and impactful read. You don’t have to search for anything. How you wrote this was good.

Thank you. I appreciate that.

How many times did you have to go through that?

Enough that I’m tired of reading my own book. I had a remarkable developmental editor. There’s an interesting journey of the book too, which is that I was ready to publish it a year before I did and had a phenomenal instructional design team approach me. They work with Tom Peters, the bestselling author, and asked if I would wait and develop a couple of courses with them first, and update the book based on those courses.

I did, and I thought, “There’s no rush to get this out into the world. Let’s make it the best it could be. They’re remarkable.” The woman who wrote the foreword, Karen Mangia, who’s a bestselling author and an executive at Salesforce, is the one who did that intro. I’m grateful to her. The courses that came out of that help people on their board journey or on that self-discovery of, “Who am I as a leader, and what are the values that I lead by?” It was worth hitting the pause button, making it better and more actionable, and then releasing it.

There are many dog-eared pages, but I want to jump right into the framework of FARE, Fearlessness, Authenticity, Resilience, and Effectiveness. There are one million acronyms out there. Did that come to you right away or did you have to tailor it down and say, “These are the four things I need to land with people on this journey?”

Maybe a little bit of both. In some cases, it was people describing how they felt after working together or going through workshops and saying, “I feel like I’ve unlocked some of this.” It’s pragmatic and hard to measure. Some things are very quantitative. You can say, “My team’s NPS scores have gone up. Our productivity has gone up.

At an individual level, I’ve been able to jump up two levels in the organization. My comp has doubled.” Something like that is very quantitative. The qualitative side is very hard. I don’t have women or people that come to me and say, “My self-doubt has gone down 32% and my confidence has gone up 67%.” It would be fabulous.

I’m scared. I’m thinking because I’m in fitness and I look at the scale. It would be horrible to have those numbers at any given time. It’s good that we don’t.

I love getting these. I got texts every day from clients saying, “I kicked ass at that meeting. I went in with total confidence and I had no doubt.” Even though it’s not quantitative, the qualitative element of somebody saying, “I did not worry about this. I felt totally ready. I kicked butt. I knew exactly that this was not the company for me. I was interviewing two candidates and I knew that one was the right one.” Feeling those qualities of fearlessness and somebody saying to me, “I was able to be my absolute true self at this company, in this role, or with the people, I hired that authenticity,” and then seeing how resilient and energized people can be when they can be who they are is resilience.

When you put that all together and you see how effective whole teams can be when they’re like that, that acronym and framework fell into place when I realized how effective that approach was. I thought, “Should I move it around?” You don’t want to call it fear leadership. It made sense. They build on each other in a purposeful way.

It’s interesting because I’ve taught interviewing. I don’t even know the count. I know it’s certainly in 5 or approaching 6 digits of people that I’ve talked to or coached. One thing that I’ve seen with the exception of a few who that ego is completely out of control. You have to deflate that balloon, to begin with, and those generally are the harder candidates I’ve had to work with.

I don’t think a lot of employees out there and people realize that fearlessness doesn’t come naturally and it doesn’t lessen as you move up the career ladder or as the career climbing wall because we know it goes in different directions. You started with fearlessness. How do you get people over that hump, or at least recognize that it’s an inhibitor to what they’re doing?

Can I answer a different question first and then come back to that?

Sure.

My mother read the book and it was cute because she said to me, “I think you should tell people that you’re not always fearless.” I said, “You’re right.” She said, “You should tell people that you’re afraid of roller coasters and that you were terrified when you went skydiving.” I said, “I agree.” This is fearlessness in a certain concept. I want to put it out there because she’s right. I have a video of myself going skydiving, and I look like I’m about to vomit the whole time, except that the G-forces won’t let me. There are times of fearlessness. Starting with that is important because there are situations where it’s okay to be terrified and skydiving is one of them. She’ll be happy I said that.

When do you become less afraid of things? One of them is when you know who you are, what you bring to the table, and your non-negotiables, then what is there to be afraid of? One of the things I like to say to people especially in interviewing is, “It’s hard to be rejected. It’s hard when someone says, ‘Thank you, but it’s not fun.’” Think about Cinderella. In that case, it’s not that your foot’s ugly. The shoe just didn’t fit. It’s reframing in that case. It’s very objective, “This is not the right role for you. We’re going to find the next one.”

It’s the same with objections. When you’re raising money as a startup Founder and CEO, all you hear is no. If you let that eat away at you, you’re not going to be able to do anything. Learning how to hear no or hear those things and reframing them not so that you become arrogant and just oblivious to feedback, but where you realize that you can’t overcome some objections and you move on so that you find the right fit.

Many times people will say to me, “I don’t know why I stayed in that place for long. This is such a better fit.” You won’t know that until you realize what are you bringing to the table, what are you good at, and where is it going to be appreciated. Those things help you become fearless because what do you have to be afraid of? There is a place where it’s a perfect match for you.

It’s interesting. I’ve made that mistake when I’ve stayed somewhere too long. This caused many self-reflections. For me, it was the unknown, and staying where I was, was the security of the known. This is my show so I can say what I want. The people around me are pricks. I don’t like them, but I know what I’m doing and I’m still exceeding expectations.

It was weird even when I wrote a book to go, “Why am I not betting on myself?” To me, it was always the unknown, but I’m going to steal that phrase from you about the shoe doesn’t fit because when I’ve interviewed, I’ve dodged several bullets. I got rejected once and I was like, “Why’d you reject me? You need me at your company. You don’t know how badly you need me. You are a dumpster fire. You need me,” and they turned me down.

Months to a year later, I’m like, “Was I arguing myself into a dumpster fire? What was I thinking?” I’m going to digress a little bit because Lisa Schreiber was on the show with Myrna Soto, and we talked about deleting the adjective. You’re not a female leader, you’re a leader. You either are or you aren’t. We did a whole episode. Do you find that you see it more in women clanging to security, not betting on themselves, and a little bit more worried about the unknown, or do you see a good mix? I’d love to get your perspective on the people that you meet and see.

I’m not sure if I see that difference more with women. I don’t know if it’s a redhead thing or a personality thing, but it’s not harder, in general, to be a woman. It’s hard to be a leader. I’ve had people say, “Was it harder to raise money?” I can’t AB test that for you. I would love to, but there’s no way. I can tell you, “It’s hard to raise money. It’s hard to be a first-time founder. It’s hard if you haven’t sold your company to Google. It’s hard to be a leader and be a good one.”

If you focus on the negatives and interrupted, for example, are we potentially not looking at whether you’re a good communicator? Some people are crap. They are equal opportunity interrupters and are more negative towards women. In that case, there’s a cause for going in and looking at that, but you could over-index on gender and then not focus on, “Are you developing the right skills, presence, confidence?”

Where I see the biggest difference is that men have impostor syndrome and self-doubt, but women are a little bit more hesitant to walk into a situation and say, “This is what I’m known for. This is what I’m good at. I’m here.” We put more qualifiers instead of saying, “I achieved this. I was part of the team. I lead a team.” There are many more words that go along that cause your brain to stutter when you’re trying to think, “What are you trying to say? You were part of a team. You were not the only person responsible for that deliverable and accomplishment, but you don’t have to say that.” Just say the accomplishment. We all know that it was not singlehandedly you at an organization.

There’s that tendency to want to wrap up and give everybody credit that we get it. Delete all the adjectives. I hate to see things like a nimble senior executive. Are you a CMO? Tell me. I don’t need to read nimble. I don’t need to see any table stake stuff. It is hard to absorb cognitively in the brain. When I read a resume and see all those extra words, I stop reading. Get to the point. We tend to put more qualifiers around it. When I see someone say senior leader, and then I look and they’re a COO or a CEO, why didn’t it say that? Own it.

I love how you say, “What is there to be afraid of when you think about it?” The comment I’ve made to so many talented people that I’ve worked with is, “Bet on yourself.” If you can bet on yourself, it makes much of the unknown and, “Whatever. I won’t know the when or the how, but I know what the result will be.” You hear the authenticity in the DEI&B space, and you’re hearing it more and more, but when I’ve interviewed senior leaders, that’s one of the things I’m looking for all the time, but I find the least. I’m glad that you emphasized it. What was it about that particular attribute that had to be in there for you?

For me, that’s wrapped up closely with your values. The ability to say, “This is how you get the best work from me.” How do you lead? Why do you lead that way? What are your non-negotiables? That’s authentic to you. Maybe I can give you an example. I work best when there’s no yelling and that’s how I live my life and my personal relationships. I explain that to people and I’ll tell them why, which is that a calm and very respectful environment is how you’re going to extract the most value from me as a CEO, as a leading expert, or as whatever I’m doing.

It’s not something that I have to defend because those are my leadership principles. When things get a little bit escalated, I will, as a CEO, say, “Remember one of the cultural linchpins of this organization is that we don’t yell, it’s calm and respectful. We’re going to take a break.” We’re going to come back when my investors would yell. If a customer would get agitated, I would say, “One of the ways I work, the principles I lead on is calm and respect. We’re going to come back when everybody’s calm.” That to me is authentically how I lead and work. I know some people are the opposite, and that’s totally fine.

I’ve taken deals off the table. I’m willing to sacrifice income, a deal, or even an investment for that. It was important for me to put that in that framework because it leads to resilience. If I had to work in a place where it was always yelling and bullying, I would absolutely lose my resilience. It’s exhausting being a leader or an executive, running a company, but if you’re trying to be someone else, it’s triply exhausting. Figure out how you work the best. Explain it, don’t defend it, and know why you do it that way. That was a key point for me.

It’s 2X, 3X, or sometimes 10X means something other than you are. It takes me back to that dumpster fire thing. I remember being in the final interview and sometimes I get off on a little tangent. I’m being interviewed for this major transportation company and there’s a former Marine there. I’m an ex-Army. I’m thinking, “This ought to flow well.” He gave me a scenario and I’ll abbreviate it real quick, “You are ten people in a room. The CEO wants an answer at the top of the hour. You have 45 minutes. You’re all peers. You can’t reach a decision. What do you do?”

I said, “ I would raise my hand. Take charge. I would go up and put the top five best ideas. Let’s weigh the out of pros and cons. Let’s rank order them. Let’s do a waiting system. At the top of the hour, we were going to deliver to the CEO. If it went bad, I’ll take the hit. If it goes great, it was the team.” He flushed me for not being part of their culture. They wanted you to keep over-delivering. I thought, “You’re a US Marine. Where is this coming from?” It didn’t make sense. This was one of the companies that turned me down. I was upset about it. To your point about authenticity, I’m like, “I was authentic, but my ego was getting in the way of saying, ‘You do need me,’” but no, they didn’t.

They were being their authentic selves back to me. I love that. You do have to have fearlessness first, then the strength of authenticity, and then resilience. In our book, The Talent War, resiliency is 1 of the absolute 9 attributes of talent. When I saw that in there, I was like, “I can’t wait to tell everybody on the team.” That’s got to come and go. That’s hard to develop over time. Given your career path, the world’s presented you with an awful lot of opportunities to strengthen that attribute, I imagine.

Let me tell you a story about that. I knew the wheels were falling off the bus when I was traveling all over the world from my last company and leaking exhaustion in the form of tears. I wasn’t crying, but people would come running up to me in airports, and hotels and they’d ask me, “What’s wrong?” I would flip my head around thinking they were pointing at something behind me and they were pointing at my face. I was a big old fat dude who is rolling down because I had worked 7 years without a salary, 7 days a week, and not a single holiday, except for 2 days when my best friend said, “I’m kidnapping you. This is not sustainable,” and utter exhaustion. That’s a good sign that you are not thriving.

I thought, “If I’m not thriving, my company can’t thrive.” Knowing what other people pointed out to you, you’re not even self-aware about it. I’m happy to talk about that because I’m reaching a point now where every day I wake up and I say, “I’m excited to see what’s on the calendar. What am I doing?” I love every second and minute of what I do. It’s impactful and it gives me energy. When I see people and I help them into new roles that they love, or I help teams reduce this friction, and now they’re suddenly working and loving it, I think life is short.

We saw the pandemic, The Great Resignation, and people reevaluating, “Why am I doing what I’m doing?” If you are not thriving and not operating in a place where you can be yourself and be authentic, that you love what you do and you know you’re doing where you’re bringing the most value, you’re not going to be resilient. You can’t be there for your family. Work is not everything. I thought that was important to put in because we’re bleeding home and work life more and more. If you burn out, you’re not doing anyone any favor.

Somebody told me a great phrase and sometimes I have to repeat them in my head, “If you want to take better care of others, take better care of yourself first because if you burn out, you’ve got nothing to give.” That’s part of your value proposition. That’s part of who you are as a person, to give and to impact, and your burnout, everybody looks at you and is like, “What’s wrong?” You are leaking exhaustion. In effectiveness, we will get into the leadership thing. There were three big drills at the end, the catalyst statement, leadership style, and leadership values. I can go on and on because I’m such a fan of leadership styles.

You’ve had to have seen tens of thousands of leadership styles. You have put some amazing leadership vignettes in there. I was a little bit worried about the paper that I was starting to bleed through on some of my notes. They were very impactful. You chose them very well. Let’s talk first about a catalyst statement and tell me why that’s important to get across to the people who understand your value from your perspective.

When we talk about a catalyst statement in a book, it’s in lieu of an elevator pitch, which to me is a very generic and almost dangerous thing because they tend to be long, generic, and shoehorn everything about yourself. You aren’t going to be memorable and effective. People can’t anchor who you are in their heads. I love the word catalyst. Think about what it means. It’s something that causes a reaction and that’s what we want. When you talk about yourself in writing or verbally at a networking event or anywhere, we want to create a reaction. That’s how people remember you, how they understand you, and what are they going to do.

I work with people who are looking to accelerate their careers, maybe get into management for the first time, get into the C-Suite or maybe they’re thinking, “What’s next? I want to get onto a board. I want to be thought of as a thought leader.” It doesn’t matter what your goal is. You have to control the narrative about yourself and how people understand you. In 92nd or a 3-minute elevator pitch, people are coned out, “It’s boring.”

Having the courage and confidence to distill who you are in a very narrow way, there’s more. I get it, but the more specific you can be, the more compelling you can be, it’s easier for people to understand you and say, “I need to introduce you to these three people.” It’s not going to happen if I don’t have that a-ha moment of who you are and who’s going to be valuable to introduce you to or the opposite. When I’m telling you who I am, I want you to think, “She would be amazing to bring in for our sales kickoff for our annual event.” Having the courage to even be specific enough and say, “I am looking for my next role to be a chief marketing officer. I am looking to add two boards to my portfolio.” I don’t why we’re afraid to be specific about ourselves.

When I saw that, I was rethinking some of the emails that I’ve sent for introductions for myself thinking, “I thought I was briefing to the point.” I have some refinement. I wanted to thank you for that. You can’t count the number of people that are still teaching that 3 to 6 minutes elevator pitch. I remember telling somebody in an interview, “Do you know what the most dangerous question is?” They said, “No. What is it?”

I was doing the seminar. I said, “It’s the tell me about yourself question.” They said, “Why is it dangerous?” I said, “If you answer it dead on, your reward is question two. If you answer it wrong, you’ll get the rest of the questions, but you’ve lost them.” I love the way that you synthesize it. It’s got to be impactful and specific so you know what to do with it.

I like to say to people, “Don’t answer the first question,” because that’s always the first question, “Turn it around and say, ‘I’d love to answer that. Why don’t you tell me about the company, what you’re looking to do with this role, and what the challenges are?’” You are forcing them to give you more context you can answer it in a specific way. I keynoted at the New York Stock Exchange, followed by this series of interviews between board candidates and companies. I stayed for that. It was funny because everybody was refusing to answer.

There was this, “Why don’t you tell us?” I thought, “I’ve created this nightmare like Schrödinger’s cat because now nobody was willing to ask or answer the first question.” It’s a useful thing because you’re forcing somebody to tell you what they want to hear. You can target your answer much more specifically with more context. It’s a useful interview technique.

I remember one of my pet peeves about where I started teaching people to interview and doing seminars were veterans who didn’t know how to articulate their leadership style. Veterans are the worst at telling you about their leadership style. They would answer everything in the STAR format, Situation, Task, Action, Result. I’ve told people, “If you’re ever speaking to an executive, some kind of senior leader, do you answer that way? If you have, what has happened to you?”

I don’t know. Do you?

I’ve watched people. At the time I was, “Here’s what I was given. Here are the resources.” I’m like, “Please.” I would teach him to look at his bottom line up front. That’s what I love about that catalyst statement. It’s a bottom line upfront specific. I want to rewrite my book. There are many great tips in there. The big one for me was the leadership style. There are many vignettes in there, and it’s been my experience. I’m happy to know yours.

Even when I’m talking with senior leaders, junior executives, and senior executives, It’s been my experience that they’ve never had to articulate it to a degree that it’s almost when they get into a situation, their leadership style is muscle memory. They react or handle a situation based on their previous experiences, or they think it through or they have a methodology.

Let me back up and tell you my funny story. I was on this panel at the Service Academy Career Conference. You get all these employers in Washington DC and the only people that can attend are graduates of the US Military Academy. They have a bunch of panelists up there. None of them are in recruiting. I’m the only one, and I’m listening to all these crazy answers that they’re giving to these people to interview. I’m having a minor quiet stroke as I listen to them. Somebody asked me, “What is the hardest question to answer?”

I said, “It’s, ‘Tell me how you lead,’ because you’ve never ever been asked to articulate it.” In the military, it becomes muscle memory. You’re watching other people, you’re adopting, and putting it in the back of your head. You’re bringing it forward when you need it. Here you’re forcing people to do that drill, “How do you lead?” It would be fascinating to watch how you help people do that. I don’t want you to give away the secret sauce, but do tell me some tips about how you do that.

There’s also another question there, not just, “How do you lead?” A lot of people have taken all sorts of tests throughout their careers, whether it’s DISC, Gallup, or whatever it is. For me, the most important thing is not just, “How do you lead?” but, “Why?” Especially once you start reaching a certain level of management, I don’t want you to throw a bunch of adjectives at me, “I lead with empathy, curiosity, or collaborativeness.”

That’s great. I’m not a good poker player even when my botox is working because my inside face comes to the outside very rapidly. It can be a little bit of a problem because you can choose great adjectives and think that’ll help me get the job. I want to know, “How does that create value?” If you lead with empathy, why? How is that going to make you an effective leader? If I’m the CEO, the head of HR, the board chair, and I’m interviewing you to come onto the board, whatever it is, I want to know why I care.

I don’t want you just to choose the adjectives that are the most apropos of the moment, “I lead with empathy for all diversity.” That’s fabulous. That sounds like a bunch of keywords, but I want you to tell me how that creates value. As an example, I lead with curiosity. As a startup Founder and CEO, you cannot create value, scale, and growth unless everybody feels safe to experiment and do what they need to do and then come to you and know that no one’s going to get in trouble. No one is going to be punished for going coloring outside the lines. I want to know what’s possible. My team came to me and said, “We got to port our whole product to a whole other operating system.”

That took us months out of the cycle, cost a lot of money, and delayed customer implementation, but in the end, it made our product way more robust. We could go to way bigger network speeds, and much bigger customers. It was the right decision. Everybody knew that they could come to me and say, “We think this is the right thing to do.”

It’s being able to articulate to that level, “I lead this way. It creates value.” “Tell me how it manifests. This might be my extreme pragmatism, but tell me why. Tell me how.” Get to the level of detail that’s not just up here. When you can do that, you can also say, “I don’t lead this way.” You can also figure out your values. You know when to stand up and say, “This is not a good match.” That’s also how you know when a situation isn’t good for you anymore.

You’re working with the executives and people prepping for boards. I’m curious about how you do this because it’s brilliant how you break it out in the book. Do you ever ask them to start with what they value before getting to the leadership style? Is that how you do it? When you said the why, I remember asking somebody, “Why are you a leader?”

I don’t know why the question was out of sequence with what I had planned to do in the interview. There was something that sparked it. I said, “Why are you a leader?” It was the true deer-in-the-headlights moment. I was like, “This interview is no longer conversational. I’m in a reclamation project. I need to figure out how to make this person comfortable.” They were stumped and didn’t know why they lead. I love that part of it. You usually start with values and help people break that down.

It’s important to know your values whether you lead people or not. Roberta Lang is the former GC at Whole Foods. She’s here in Austin too. We were chatting about this concept, and I’m glad she put it like this. She said, “If you don’t know your non-negotiables, what’s going to happen when you need them? It’s going to be like trying to exit the freeway at 90 miles an hour. You’re going to hit the guard rails and concrete wall and crash. If you don’t know them and you don’t have them when you need them, It’s going to be an emergency.”

In the book, it’s interesting because our leadership style will mature and change as we grow, but I think your values are very constant. Your values should be accompanying you through life as well. My values are very stable even in how I interact with family or in non-professional situations because they’re very much my principles about fairness and how I interact with people. I ask people, “What is important to you? What guides you in just who you are as a person?” I don’t know if we take a lot of time. We’re busy doing.

Somebody had given me that hint. I kick myself when I get brilliant advice, and I’m not disciplined to follow it all the time, but they said, “You should spend the first 5 to 10 minutes in quiet or meditation time in the morning, contemplating your intentions what you’d like to do and what you value.” It would be nice for me to reflect on those values. When you see or qualify successful leaders, what do you see as commonalities in some of the absolute best leaders that you’ve seen? I would love your take.

Obviously, resiliency, and integrity are black-and-white. You’re not a leader if you don’t have integrity. With the best leaders that you’ve worked for, with, and coached, what are some of the things that stand out to you? Let me give you the reason that I ask the question. Number 1) I’m always interested in learning, but Number 2) The readers, many times are senior managing directors and they’re aspiring even greater. Knowing from people that have exposure to that senior level and seen great leaders, a lot of people have to read about it and I love when they get to read about it.

I’m glad you told me what’s behind the question. The most effective leaders I’ve seen are people who listen more than they talk. They are people who give opportunities for their team to shine and have exposure versus taking the spotlight themselves. They’re people who are not putting their own egos ahead of the growth and opportunities of their teams. I don’t think I talked about this in the book, but I know I’ve written a couple of articles and things about it. As a leader, you frequently have to fall on your sword.

There are times when you have to take responsibility for things that maybe your team did or didn’t do or maybe they didn’t come through on time. You’re the one that has to take your humble pie, go to your investors, go to whoever and say, “We didn’t meet the deadline. I’m sorry,” but you don’t say, “I’m sorry. My team was crap.” You’ve got to fall on the sword and say, “We will do better next to them. I’m dealing with it,” then you go and make your team better. A good leader is not somebody who throws their team under the bus. They go fall on the sword and make their team better.

It’s that ability to subsume the ego a little bit and develop a team and not take credit. It’s the willingness to take the blame but not take the credit. That’s hard because sometimes you think, “I’d love to take credit for that, but the ego doesn’t have a lot of place in good leadership.” A lot of that is also empathy and listening. A good leader is not somebody who’s always in the spotlight.

I’m sure you have met your fair share. I almost wanted to write it on a performance evaluation one time, which is, “This leader gets dizzy running in circles, chasing the spotlight.” I submitted that to the CHRO and she didn’t see the dripping sarcasm font that I had typed it in and said, “You can’t say this.” I said, “Yes, thank you. I know. This was for your mild entertainment in the middle of HR.” You’ve launched this book. I’m going to be championing it to everybody I know that this has got to be a best-seller fast. It is good and useful.

Let me describe how useful it is, not to get your ego big. If you come to where I live, there are probably 500 books on the bookshelf. They said, “Did you read all of those?” I said, “No.” They said, “Why did you buy them?” I said, “If I spend $19 for hardback and I can get one good idea out of it, it’s worth 1 million or 100,000 times more than the $19 that I spent. I’m not getting one thing out of your book. I’m getting a ton. I’m going to push it because it’s informative for leaders at every level. I know you’ll probably be doing tours and speeches, but is there any insight as to what the next mountain you’re going to be climbing is?

I should put this out in the world. I would love to do a TEDx Talk. I already know what the topic is. If anybody out there can help me do that would be fantastic. My goal was to double the number of keynotes that I’ve done, and I’ve more than exceeded that. I’m going to put an audacious goal and do double that. Scaling the number of people to more corporate workshops, more large groups/I already know the next two books I want to write. I have big audacious goals on reaching the world.

I’m not letting that slip by. Do we get any hint as to what the general topic may be of the two books?

There’s that idea of swagger and being very unshakeable. It’s probably adjacent, but it’s this idea of optimal, not being a pessimist or an optimist, but optimizing any situation, and the cognitive science behind that. Now I’ve committed to it publicly. I’ve carved out time to write it.

You may not have understood what else you did, but that means you promised me the draft. I get to see some of the drafts and do that as well. I do have to thank you. It was great that Lisa introduced us. I got engrossed fast in the book. You did something marvelous here that’s wildly impactful. Here’s a crazy bad story. I had orders to be an Army officer, and I went to my Math teacher. I just had to pass the class to graduate and get a commission. I told him, “I promise I will never do Math without adult supervision. Just pass me in this class and get me out of here.”

If I would tell myself something, it would’ve been the study harder in Math. If you were going back to your 21 or 22-year-old self and you’ve had this wonderful career, ups and downs, building resiliency skills, all kinds of experiences, what would you tell yourself to make your career more productive, easier, more joy-filled, or filled with an abundance of more of the things that you wanted in life?

I heard a quote once that says, “Man plans and God laughs.” I’m a planner. I don’t sometimes love surprises. I was a Marketing major. I did not ever anticipate writing and being granted multiple, very technical cyber security patents and having companies succeed and fail wildly, and being where I am now. I would go back and say, “Don’t worry. It works out. You can lose a boatload of money. You can make money.”

“Sometimes the path is not clear, but the path is taking you somewhere. Don’t stress about it. Just follow it. Adjacent to that, don’t work quite hard because you’ll blink and twenty years will go by. You got to have a little bit more time to enjoy it. Don’t work 7 days a week for 7 years because 7 years will go by. Take a little more time to just enjoy the ride. You can’t plan every minute of it.” Now I take more weekends off and I enjoy it.

I love that advice. I wish I got that. My parents passed on an anxiety worry gene that had morphed from generation to generation. That’s what I would tell people as well. I had a funny story. My baby girl turned 30. My son, the sarcasm gene morphed as well in the next generation. He says, “You have a 30-year-old daughter. Don’t you feel old now?”

I said, “We passed that point when she pushed out a kid. I have a grandson now.” We’re in that category. I remember that and I don’t want to walk over your point, but it goes by fast. It drove forward for me that when I see her, I see my Tigger. She’s 30, and much has occurred. You were spot on. Don’t blink. Experience. Enjoy it. Love it for all that it is. No Permission Needed: How to Unlock Your Leadership Potential And Eliminate Self-Doubt. The only thing I don’t have is to signed copy. I’m going to use this for my note-taking copy and carry this around.

I will get you a signed copy. I’m going to put it in the mail.

I can’t thank you enough for coming on. I will close it with this. You’re right. You don’t know the how and the path. I got introduced to you and it’s been one of the most fascinating, wonderful learning experiences. I can’t plan that and I’m grateful for it. I’m grateful that you made time in your busy schedule to come on and talk with me. Thank you much.

I appreciate the great review of the book and the great things you have to say. Thank you very much. This was such a great interview.

Thank you so much and we’ll be talking soon.

Important Links

• No Permission Needed: How to Unlock Your Leadership Potential And Eliminate Self-Doubt
• Lisa Schreiber – Past Episode