In This Episode

Dr. Marshall Goldsmith discusses the innovation and cultural shifts that Alan Mulally orchestrated as President and CEO of the Ford Motor Company from 2006 to 2014.

 

Episode Transcript

Introduction

Welcome to The Center for Leadership Studies podcast, an exploration of contemporary leadership issues with experts from a variety of fields and leadership backgrounds. In this episode, Dr. Marshall Goldsmith discusses the innovation and cultural shifts that Alan Mulali orchestrated as president and CEO of the Ford Motor Company from 2006 to 2014. From The Center for Leadership Studies, Here’s your host, Sam Shriver.

Sam Shriver

You were recently identified by Thinker 50 as the number one thinker in the world, correct? And you’re also the number one coach.

Dr. Marshall Goldsmith

Right.

Sam Shriver

So, as were talking before the interview started, you’ve got nowhere to go but down.

Dr. Marshall Goldsmith

I may be entered in an intergalactic contest.

Sam Shriver

First off, congratulations.

Dr. Marshall Goldsmith

Thank you for that.

Sam Shriver

But secondly, with that territory, just like anybody else that’s a big winner, how do you repeat it? How do you keep it going?  What are you seeing in organizations and sort of what’s on your horizon to kind of maintain that status, for lack of a better term, or that tremendous influence potential?

Dr. Marshall Goldsmith

One of the things that I’m working on is working with my friend Alan Malali, who I consider to be just a spectacularly great leader. My friend Alan was ranked the number three greatest leader in the world behind the Pope and Angela Merkel C of the Year in the United States. And I’ve had the privilege of observing the way he has led people. So he goes into Ford. The stock is valued at a dollar, and he leaves it’s $18.40. I mean, unbelievable turnaround. And he didn’t take any of the US. Government taxpayer money. So just an amazing guy and a 97% approval rating from all employees in a union company. Think about that. A CEO in a union company with a 97% approval rating from the employees. Unheard of, he’s the most respected leader of a big company in the world. Just an amazing man.

And Alan is a believer of Situational Leadership®. Let me tell you how he applies it in a different way because most of the people you’ve been training are first-line, second-line managers, and back to expertise. They have the expertise to do the job, and they are the provider of the leadership. Alan goes in at Ford. He really doesn’t have expertise. He has a lot of expertise as a leader, and he is an engineer. He’s a smart guy, but he had no experience in auto company at all. And he was basically told, you have no chance of success. Well, that was wrong. Everybody that bet on his chance of success made a whole lot of money. Right. He was a fantastic leader.

He could lead any organization, though let me tell you what he’s taught me that is so brilliant and how it connects to Situational Leadership®. Alan’s view is as you go higher and higher up the chain, you’re more of a facilitator, a person who helps people get the leadership they need, not the provider of the leadership. So what he does that’s brilliant is he really encourages people to be honest about their readiness level. Now, you’re an expert on Situational Leadership®. Readiness level is the key driver of leadership style. So he goes to Ford, and they’re top 16 people, five priorities each. Red, yellow, green. Green is I’m on plan. Now yellow is; well, I’m not on plan, but I have a strategy to get there. And red is, I’m not on plan. I have no strategy. So the first meeting, everyone’s green.

So the company is losing, like, 17 billion, and everyone’s on plan. So Alan goes, well, we’re losing $17 billion, and everyone’s on plan. I guess our plan must be to lose at least $17 billion, because we’re right there. We’re on plan.

Sam Shriver

Onward.

Dr. Marshall Goldsmith

Yeah. Let’s do it again. So finally, Mark Field stands up and says Red. So Alan starts applauding. He says, thank you for having the courage and the transparency to tell the truth. Good. He said you’re not on plan. You know how to get there. And then he said, this is something I’ve never heard a CEO say. It’s okay. You’re not on plan. You don’t know how to get there. It’s okay. Then he said, I’m the CEO of the Ford Motor Company. I know a lot less than you do. That’s okay, too. How many CEOs have you ever heard say that before? Not too many. Yeah, that’s not common CEO talk. Right. I haven’t heard a lot of them say, you don’t know anything, and it’s okay, and I know less than you, and that’s okay. Now, I’m not frequently hearing that one.

That doesn’t pop to mind very often. Right. Then he said, We’ve got hundreds of thousands of people that work here. We can hire outside people if we need to. Let’s just get the help we need. Then Alan said, within ten minutes, the problem is largely solved. Somebody said, Well, I know somebody, or I know somebody. Back to Situational Leadership®. See, Mark Fields was lost.

He needed help. Well, what happened is they found the help they needed, not from higher-ups, but from people at different levels in the company who actually had the expertise to help him. So, from a Situational Leadership® point of view, he wanted to learn. He needed to learn. Alan, as the CEO, couldn’t use a style to and teach him how to do it because he didn’t know himself. What he did, though, as a facilitator, is he facilitated a process so that Mark Fields got the leadership he needed, but it didn’t have to come from his boss.

Sam Shriver

Right.

Dr. Marshall Goldsmith

So the other thing Alan did, which is brilliant, is the huge majority of leaders in this will immediately start asking questions. Have you thought of this? Have you thought of that? One of the worst things you can do. One of my coaching clients who retired a few years ago was JP Garnier. He was CEO of Glaxel Smith Klein. I asked JP what’d you learn about leadership of CEO Glaxel Smith Klein? He said I learned a hard lesson. And he said, My suggestions become orders. Now, he said if they’re smart, they’re orders. And if they’re stupid, they’re orders. And if I want them to be orders, they’re orders. If I don’t want to be orders anyway, then my suggestions become orders. Well, I said, what did you learn from me when I was your coach that helped you the most?

He said, Before I speak, breathe and ask myself, is it worth it? Is it worth it? Now, let’s go back to Alan and Mark Fields. Mark Fields comes up and says, RIT, if Alan then would say, have you thought of this? There’s a very high probability you know, what would have happened? Aye-aye, sir.

Sam Shriver

Great idea.

Dr. Marshall Goldsmith

Great idea. The worst of all worlds. One, Alan knows a whole lot less than Mark Fields in this dialogue. So, the idea is probably a bad idea. Two, Mark has no ownership. It’s Alan’s idea. He’s the boss. The CEO told me to do this right. He’s got no ownership. Well, the incredible discipline that Alan has, which I find amazing, is and humility, is fight the urge to give people ideas. If you don’t know what you’re talking about. Don’t pretend to be an expert if you’re not.

And it’s perfectly okay to say, I don’t know. It’s okay. And in fact, it’s not only okay, it’s much better. Because if you start throwing out ideas, then what happens is people just run around and do these things, and oftentimes, they make no sense. And back to JP Garney’s comment. Suggestions become orders.

Sam Shriver

Yeah.

It’s interesting because we are at Center for Leadership Studies. We have a model, we built programs around that model worldwide. It’s a trademark copyrighted framework, and we protect that. It sounds to me, though, and I’ve heard many managers say this, executives, Situational Leadership®, it changed the way I manage people. Yes, I went through the program, and that altered as we talk about leadership is an attempt to influence. It helped me parent. It helped me know coaching. It helped me in all different kinds of things. But it almost sounds like what Alan did years later, after he had been through is he was still applying.

Dr. Marshall Goldsmith

Oh, yeah, definitely.

Sam Shriver

The principles of it’s just kind of like, where are we? What are we doing?

Dr. Marshall Goldsmith

What’s the readiness level?

Sam Shriver

Yeah, just putting that in context.

Dr. Marshall Goldsmith

Well, and creating an environment, which is something you’re doing in your influence program. Creating an environment where people can be honest about their readiness level.

And if you need help, it’s okay to say you need help. If you need direction. You need coaching, you need coaching. You need support, you need support. And you can do it on your own, you could do it on your own. It’s okay to do that, it’s okay for somebody to say, Red, I need help.

I don’t know how to do it. That’s okay. Well, that’s a real breakthrough. One of the worst things a leader can say I learned this from Alan is, I’m sure you’ve heard this. Don’t come to me with a problem. Don’t come to me unless you have a solution. Well, that’s nice. Let’s say you have a problem and you don’t have a solution. Now, I shout at you and say, don’t come to me. So you know what you learn.  Okay, I won’t come to you. I’ll hide it. You told me not to come to you.

Sam Shriver

I’m following directions. You’re giving me style one, and I’m compliant.

Dr. Marshall Goldsmith

I’m not coming to you at all. In fact, the next time you ask, do you have a problem?

No.

What was happening at Ford? No one had a problem. Although they were losing $17 billion, nobody had a problem?

Sam Shriver

Yeah.

Dr. Marshall Goldsmith

Why? Well, obviously, they’d been trained not to say they had problems. Well, you train people to say they have no problems. They all say green. The problem is, that’s not life. Life is never all green.

Sam Shriver

Far from it. And again, probably has something to do with the reason we’re here together today. But it’s like the portions of the organization that we interact with on a day-to-day basis are drastically different. Similar principles are at play. But when you’re talking to training departments, and you’re positioning Situational Leadership® as a program that can help new managers or second-level managers effectively influence, the single biggest obstacle you hear in many cases is top-level support. That’s what’s going to turn it from a program into a change initiative.

Dr. Marshall Goldsmith

Right.

Sam Shriver

So it hits me that what Alan did is really there was the language of Situational Leadership® that was permeated the C suite, and it just makes it that much easier to reinforce. You’re going through a program, you’re going to learn some skills. And these are life skills.

Dr. Marshall Goldsmith

Well, they are.

And again, the key is that philosophy of you are who you are. It is what it is. Don’t hide from it. And it’s okay.

Sam Shriver

Yeah.

Dr. Marshall Goldsmith

The big breakthrough, it’s okay. It’s okay to need help. It’s okay not to be perfect. It is what it is. And his whole focus is not on looking good. See, so much in corporate life is people try to look good, so they end up with pretense. Pretending to be who they’re not to look good. Well, his theory is we’re here to make cars and sell cars, not to individually show off or look good ourselves. Who cares how we look if we’re going broke? This is not good. This is bad. And how do we turn this around? Well, the way you turn around is you focus on the mission. You focus on what are we really here for? And we’re not really here to show off and prove how smart we are. We’re here to do great work.

Let’s do whatever it takes to do great work. And who cares how somebody quote looks? And what he taught them is once you do great work, you don’t have to pretend to look good. Everybody thinks you are good. Nobody’s going to complain. The stock goes from $1 to 1840. Nobody’s doing a critique. Then it all’s good. It’s all good. Then you don’t have to show off.

Sam Shriver

Yeah.  Read his book and heard a lot about him. Read a lot about him. But was Alan always this good?

Dr. Marshall Goldsmith

No, he would tell you he got off to a very rocky start. He had a young man work for him and an excessive leadership style one. He said something like, I may have the number wrong. 14 drafts this guy sent him. He corrected them over and over again. Finally, the guy just said, I’ve got to quit. No mas.  Nice young man, but you’re driving me crazy here. Really? I’m not sure this is what you’re supposed to do. And he kind of explained what he’s supposed to do.

Okay, so naive. He was not always a great leader. He wasn’t born with this. The idea that leaders are born; somehow you hop out of the womb with all these leadership skills, that seems a little ridiculous. A little ridiculous. People can learn things.

Sam Shriver

It hits me that the process of becoming a situational leader it’s iterative; it really is. It’s about, okay, this didn’t go the way I wanted it to go. And in the parameters we always use in success is to get the job done, scale of one to ten. Effectiveness, more of the engagement piece of it, scale of one to ten. And those two dimensions are always in play. But it is. It’s like people that are serious about becoming good leaders really learn from set. But that didn’t go the way I wanted it to go. What did I learn? How do I adjust? How do I put it in the context, for lack of a better term, of a model, or just what I want to do differently moving forward?

Conclusion

Dr. Marshall Goldsmith is one of the world’s leading executive educators, coaches and authors. He’s a pioneer in helping successful leaders get even better. His books Triggers, Mojo, and What Got You Here Won’t Get You There. Are New York Times bestsellers. Marshall has been ranked by Thinkers 50 as the number one leadership thinker in the world and the number one executive coach in the world. Thank you for listening to The Center for Leadership Studies podcast. Through its innovative leadership development programs, The Center for Leadership Studies has helped millions of individuals across the globe become more effective leaders and has helped thousands of organizations build more productive and engaged workforces. For additional information on our services and products, please visit Situational.com or call 919-335-8763. The Center for Leadership Studies, the global home of Situational Leadership^®.

In This Episode

Dr. Marshall Goldsmith discusses how leaders can build and leverage their power bases to successfully influence up, down and across the organization.

 

Episode Transcript

Introduction

Welcome to The Center for Leadership Studies podcast, an exploration of contemporary leadership issues with experts from a variety of fields and leadership backgrounds. In this episode, Dr. Marshall Goldsmith discusses how leaders can build and leverage their power bases to successfully influence up, down, and across the organization. For The Center for Leadership Studies. Here’s your host, Sam Shriver. 

Sam Shriver

It was very rare that you could be in a room with Paul Hershey and not hear him talk about power. Leadership is an attempt to influence and power is influence potential. And really, it’s like Situational Leadership^®. To me at least. It tells you what to do and when to do it. And the whole idea of your power, dictates why you’re either going to be successful or unsuccessful, effective or ineffective. What observations have you had in organizations that kind of connect leadership and power?

Marshall Goldsmith

Let me connect a couple of dots. It’s one I learned from Paul and then one thing learned from Peter Drucker. Paul talked about power and your influence potential. And Peter Drucker taught me every decision in the world is made by the person who has the power to make the decision, make peace with that. Not the best person, the right person, the smartest person, or beautiful person. It’s made by that person. Make peace with it. Well, connecting the two dots, the first thing is one of the most common questions I’m asked, and I’m sure you’ve heard this a thousand times, sounds like this I’m working in a government organization, and I got this guy working for me. He’s about two years from retirement. He’s really a very mediocre performer. There’s absolutely nothing I can do to change his performance appraisal at all. 

There’s no way I’m going to fire him. It’s just far too much effort. He’s not doing an awful job. He just shows up and does a mediocre job every day. How do I motivate him to be this enthusiastic and positive contributor and make a big difference? Well, my answer is prayer is one alternative. The person has described a situation where they have no power. Now, they might think they should have power, but they don’t. They have no power. So the question is, back in Paul’s terminology, how do I influence someone when I have absolutely no potential to influence someone? Well, the answer is you don’t. You work around it. You do the best you can do, but you can’t change what you can’t change. Well, learning that, Peter Drucker has taught me that lesson is such a great lesson in life. 

Every decision is made by the person who has the power to make the decision, make peace. The other thing Peter Drucker taught me is that a person is a customer and they don’t have to buy. You sell what you can sell. If you can sell it, you sell it. If you can’t sell it, you let it go. And something in my book Triggers I talk about this one question before you deal with any topic. Am I willing at this time to make the investment required to make a positive difference on this topic? If the answer is yes, go for it. The answer is no. Let it go. 

Sam Shriver

Move on. 

Marshall Goldsmith

Move on. As I’ve grown older, it my level of aspiration in life has gone down and down, but my level of impact has gone up and up. Why? Quit worrying about what I’m not going to change. 

Sam Shriver

Yeah. 

Marshall Goldsmith

Not going to change it. I’m not going to change it. Make peace. Make peace. Change what you can change. Can’t change it. Let it go. Let it go. Move on. Right. Well, we waste so much time in life when we have no power over things we’re not going to change. The thing I’ve learned is really put my focus on, whether am I going to have the power to make a difference. If you are, fantastic. If you’re not, why? I mean, you listen to those call-in sports shows where they’re carping about the football coach. 

Sam Shriver

Yeah. 

Marshall Goldsmith

Nobody cares what you think of the football coach. And by the way, the football players don’t care about you. 

Sam Shriver

Very true. 

Marshall Goldsmith

People get all excited about this stuff, right? They don’t care about you. So. Kelly. My daughter Kelly’s, a professor at Northwestern. We did some research and we looked at meaning and happiness. And what we found is you want to have a great life, live your own life. Don’t live vicariously other people’s lives. And back to Paul’s concept of power. Do I have influence potential? 

Do I have the potential to make a difference? If you do, go for it. Now, what I love about what you guys are teaching on power, though, is you give people a model, and you give them a model to look at various levels of power, and then they can use that model to focus on how can I get the best leverage that I can in a specific situation? For example, a common case study is two case studies of power. One person is a Senior Vice President two levels down from the CEO. One is the Administrative Assistant to the CEO. Who has the most power? Well, you think about it, in theory, this Senior Vice President has a whole lot more power than the Administrative Assistant. What is this Senior Vice President going to do to hurt the Administrative Assistant? Not much. 

What can this assistant do to hurt him? Plenty. Who really has the power here? 

Sam Shriver

Oh, yeah. 

Marshall Goldsmith

So sometimes when you look at the concept of power, what I like about the way you guys teach this is you get out of this simplistic view that just because your box is higher up on some chart than someone else’s, that means you definitely have more power than them. Not always. Sometimes somebody at the bottom has more power than somebody at the top. Another one of the power bases you’re talking about is connection power. 

Sam Shriver

Oh, yeah. 

Marshall Goldsmith

They may be connected with people that are important, all kinds of things. And I like the way you guys teach it because what you do is you really cause people to think and analyze power as opposed to making these naive assumptions. And when people make the naive assumptions, that’s where they get lost in, quote, what should be, yeah, well, I’m the boss. I should have the power to make this person go out and bust their butt. Well, that’s nice. Theoretically, you should, but practically you don’t. 

Sam Shriver

Yeah. 

Marshall Goldsmith

Make peace, move on, get going, do what you can do, but don’t sit there carping about what you’re not going to change anyway. 

Sam Shriver

Yeah.

We’ve recently done a couple of studies with Training Industry on kind of revaluating the seven power bases. And interestingly enough, across generations, all seven of those power bases are still highly valid. 

Marshall Goldsmith

Of course. 

Sam Shriver

Will people do things to avoid punishments, the coercive? Of course they will. And a lot of times misunderstood. I think style one really the purpose of that is to create movement. So if somebody is scared and they don’t know what they’re doing, and you, the boss, say, okay, I want you to follow my exact instruction, they may take that first step because they want to avoid punishment, but once they do, they’re into the developmental cycle and you move on. But the three big winners in terms of the power bases were people really said, yeah, of all seven, these three make the most sense. I would change my behavior if my boss asked me to do something differently on the basis of these three. And the first one was legitimate power. If you’re the boss, there’s that whole idea of oughtness. 

Marshall Goldsmith

Right. 

Sam Shriver

It’s kind of like you should make this decision. And a lot of times with legitimate power, you think about the whole idea of holding people accountable for things and making those difficult decisions. And so often in organizations, from our perspective anyway, culturally, whatever, people shy away from that. They’re afraid to do that. And what that does is it really impacts their reference power because people see them as unwilling to exercise their authority when their authority should be exercised. 

Marshall Goldsmith

Right. 

Sam Shriver

And it really impacts the whole idea of my identification with you as a leader. And then the third thing was expert power, legitimate reference, and expert power. Two of those three. There’s almost no end to the creative approach that you can take to build your referent power or your expert power. It’s a lot like emotional intelligence, right? So if I want you, for whatever reason, to identify with me, I have to invest, I have to listen, I have to understand, I have to do things for you on a consistent basis over time. Where you’re going, Sam isn’t such a bad guy. Maybe when he asks me to do something I don’t want to do, I’ll just pitch in and do it. 

In terms of developing expertise, if I really want to become an expert, there are a ton of things I can do to sort of increase that ability. But with legitimate power, as the Doc used to say, position power, it’s given to you. If you don’t use it, you lose it. So those three things really drive the effectiveness of pretty much any style you’re going to employ. And so much of referent power, as you’ve talked a lot about, is just saying goodbye to ego. If you’re saying to somebody, do this because I’m in charge, you’re probably on shaky ground there. But as you go up in the organization, is that valid from your perspective? Like legitimate, referent, and expert as kind of really being the drivers of effective influence? 

Marshall Goldsmith

Yeah, I agree. That makes lots of sense to me. 

Sam Shriver

Yeah. 

Conclusion

Dr. Marshall Goldsmith is one of the world’s leading executive educators, coaches and authors. He’s a pioneer in helping successful leaders get even better. His books Triggers, Mojo, and What Got You Here Won’t Get You There. Are New York Times bestsellers. Marshall has been ranked by Thinkers 50 as the number one leadership thinker in the world and the number one executive coach in the world. Thank you for listening to The Center for Leadership Studies podcast. Through its innovative leadership development programs, The Center for Leadership Studies has helped millions of individuals across the globe become more effective leaders and has helped thousands of organizations build more productive and engaged workforces. For additional information on our services and products, please visit Situational.com or call 919-335-8763. The Center for Leadership Studies, the global home of Situational Leadership^®. 

In This Episode

Dr. Marshall Goldsmith discusses Situational Leadership^® and a variety of other topics based on his vast leadership experience.

 

Episode Transcript

Introduction

Welcome to The Center for Leadership Studies podcast, an exploration of contemporary leadership issues with experts from a variety of fields and leadership backgrounds. In this episode, Dr. Marshall Goldsmith discusses Situational Leadership® and a variety of other topics based on his vast leadership experience. For The Center for Leadership Studies, here’s your host, Sam Shriver. 
Sam Shriver

We have a program called Taking Charge. It really is a focused program for individual contributors. And the whole idea is that they can contract for a leadership style with their boss. They learn the language of Situational Leadership®. They can go to their supervisor and say, I don’t know what I’m doing here or get out of my way. A lot of stuff gets in the way of that, though, in organizations at the base of an organization. And clearly, the higher you go, what’s your experience? 

Dr. Marshall Goldsmith

I love what you guys are doing with that approach, because what happens, I’m going to share some new stuff that I’ve been doing and how it connects. If you look at the idea of employee engagement, so I listened to three of the top HR people in the world do a presentation on employee engagement, and they talked about everything they knew about employee engagement. It was all good. They talked about training programs and fair compensation. And these are smart people, so it’s all common sense. Then, they said global employee engagement was an all-time low. I’m sitting here thinking, well, if you all are so smart, this doesn’t seem to be working very well. Then I realized that 100% of the dialogue goes what can the company do to engage you, and 0% is what you can do to engage yourself. 

Well, I thought you’re missing half of an equation. I’m on a typical airline flight. There are two flight attendants, one’s positive, motivated, upbeat, and enthusiastic. One’s negative, bitter, angry, and cynical. Have you been on that flight?

Sam Shriver

Yeah.

Dr. Marshall Goldsmith

You’ve been on that flight. Same pay, same uniform, same everything. What’s the difference? Well, it’s not on the outside; it’s on the inside. And there’s been very little about getting people to take responsibility. What I love about what you’re doing is, and what I’m doing in our employee engagement, I get people to start being responsible for their own engagement. I have people every day testing themselves on did I do my best too? It’s in my book, Triggers. What I love about what you’re doing is the same philosophy, though. It’s rather than being a victim, my boss is not giving me what I need. Poor me, I’m a victim. 

It’s the antivictim serum that’s saying, take some responsibility for your life. Work with your boss, contract for style. You have what you need is what you need. You need to be able to communicate with your boss and take responsibility. So that way, your boss is not being left and blind either. Because a boss may be a boss, but they can’t read your mind. 

Sam Shriver

Yeah. 

Dr. Marshall Goldsmith

So let’s say you’re my boss, and I need help. Well, maybe you don’t know I need help, but if I come to you and say, on this particular topic, I need help, I need leadership style, too, perhaps coaching, I want to learn. I just need to learn more. Well, there’s nothing wrong with that. Well, in fact, it’s a very healthy dialogue. What you guys are doing, which I really like, though, is you’re teaching people to take responsibility for their own lives, not to be victims, and also not to blame your boss. Poor me. Blame the boss. I’m a victim. I’ve never been very big on that. So I think I really love what you’re doing. 

Sam Shriver

Oh, I appreciate that. It’s not like I personally can take a lot of credit for it. Matter of fact, very little. But if you get back to the genius of the doc, right, and how he defined leadership. Leadership, very simply, is an attempt to influence. It’s a multidirectional thing. So it’s like you down, which is where most people think of it, but it’s you laterally, and it’s you up. And there really is an inherent responsibility that you have if you’re seeing something and you want to change it, and you want to influence it to take action. And that’s not dependent upon where you sit in a hierarchy. 

Dr. Marshall Goldsmith

Right. 

Sam Shriver

Matter of fact, the more you get really healthy cultures, where you’ve got individuals that feel comfortable going to someone in a position of power and saying, here’s what I need. That’s the speed of trust, as Stephen Covey would say. But you’re right. It’s a two-way street.

Dr. Marshall Goldsmith

And I love what you guys are doing because also, you’re giving the person some tools. If they don’t have the tools, they may be hesitant to do it. They don’t know how to do it. It seems awkward and uncomfortable. If you give them a tool, they can come back and use, and also they get over the shame. This feeling of I have to be ashamed to need help. And I think it’s very positive and very healthy what you’re doing. 

Sam Shriver

Yeah, it’s kind of like, you know, boy, I’m going to be at risk if my boss knows that I don’t know what I’m doing. It’s like, you’re going to be at risk if you don’t come clean with that information pretty soon. There’s only so long you can hide that. 

Conclusion

Dr. Marshall Goldsmith is one of the world’s leading executive educators, coaches, and authors. He’s a pioneer in helping successful leaders get even better. His books, Triggers Mojo and What Got You Here Won’t Get You There, are New York Times bestsellers. Marshall has been ranked by Thinkers 50 as the number one leadership thinker in the world and the number one executive coach in the world. Thank you for listening to The Center for Leadership Studies podcast. Through its innovative leadership development programs, The Center for Leadership Studies has helped millions of individuals across the globe become more effective leaders and has helped thousands of organizations build more productive and engaged workforces. For additional information on our services and products, please visit Situational.com or call 919-335-8763. The Center for Leadership Studies. The global home of Situational Leadership®.

In this episode

Dr. Marshall Goldsmith discusses Situational Leadership^® and the legacy of Dr. Paul Hersey, founder of The Center for Leadership Studies.

 

Episode Transcript

Introduction

Welcome to The Center for Leadership Studies podcast, an exploration of contemporary leadership issues with experts from a variety of fields and leadership backgrounds. In this episode, Dr. Marshall Goldsmith discusses Situational Leadership® and the legacy of Dr. Paul Hersey, founder of The Center for Leadership Studies. For The Center for Leadership Studies, here’s your host, Sam Shriver.

Sam Shriver
One person we both have in common that had a lot of influence on both of our careers was Dr. Paul Hersey.

Dr. Marshall Goldsmith
I would have to say there’s no way I would have achieved anything I achieved without him. He really was a key to my life. I met Paul when I was in my twenties, and he was kind enough to let me follow him around to go to his programs. And I just tried to learn what he did. Then, one day he became double booked. So he calls me and says, Marshall, can you do what I do? I said I don’t know. He said, well, I need help. Can you do this? I said I don’t know. He said I’ll pay $1,000 for one day. I was making $15,000 for one year. That was 39 years ago. I was 28 years old. You know what I said? Sign me up, Coach. So I go did a program for the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company.

They were very angry when I showed up because I wasn’t him. But I got ranked first place out of all the speakers. And then Paul called me up, and he called them up and just getting ready to get his butt handed to him. But they said, well, we were very angry. But Marshall got ranked first place of the speakers. Do you want to send him to do another one? So Paul says, do you want to do this again? I said, Paul, sign me up. Sign that’s how I got into executive education and then eventually went to work for him. And I have to say, the stuff he taught me, I use every day. So the essence of Situational Leadership® and the way you guys teach it, I use that all the time in my coaching. I use it when I explain it to people.

It’s just been something that’s very helpful for me that I’ve carried around throughout my life.

Sam Shriver
I can reflect on it myself, but I’m interested. The first time you saw the Situational Leadership® model?

Dr. Marshall Goldsmith
Yeah, no, I can remember it very well. I was at a program with Paul. And I remember because I had some very good teachers at UCLA, but I had no teachers that were like him. So I thought, this guy as a teacher is just a different level. And it was so interesting and so much fun. And the thing I love about Situational Leadership®, and especially the way you guys teach it, is to me, Paul always said it’s organized common sense. It’s impossible to argue with to me. It just makes so much sense. Yet there’s a difference between common sense and common practice. So it’s common sense. It’s far from common practice. So I love the way that it’s designed. I think it’s the most practical model you’d ever get for leadership. It’s something that you can use for the rest of your life.

So when you guys train people on how to use this, it’s something they can take with them, not just in a program; it’s something they can use the rest of their lives.

Sam Shriver
It’s really easy to understand, which is the benefit of it. And as you’re saying, it’s far more difficult when you get into it, and you really start to practice it and to use it. But I, too reflect on the first time I saw the doc teaching Situational Leadership®. And I’d just come out of an MBA program and had a series of professors, and there really was magic that he could do in front of the room with, at the time, five blank flip charts. It was almost like you wanted to go up, which many people did. Can you autograph this for me? And I think, at least from my perspective, I’d be interested in your opinion on this. He was really a smart guy, but what he had the ability to do was to integrate things that, up to that point in time, had never been integrated.

I mean, the first 55 years of organizational behavior in general, leadership development in particular, right? It was like there were studies on leaders, and then there were studies on motivation. And he was one of the original contingency leadership gurus that kind of put apples together with oranges and came up with a very simple, practical language.

Dr. Marshall Goldsmith

That is still imminently useful today. That is still imminently useful today. And it’s amazing how Situational Leadership® has withstood the test of time. And to me, so practical and so much common sense. And it’s good for leaders at all levels, too. It’s good for first-line supervisors. It’s good for a CEO. It’s good for everyone to know and understand. So I think it’s just a great idea. I think what you guys are doing is great because you’re out there trying to help a lot of people get better.

Sam Shriver
What he did in the early 1970s, I mean, The Center for Leadership Studies was a global organization long before everybody had a focus there. But he actually went out and taught around the world with all of the focus today on globalization and generational differences. It really is a model that has transcended that since the early 1970s. It’s a small, medium, large, for-profit nonprofit, wherever you happen to be, and again, multiple generations.

Dr. Marshall Goldsmith
Well, let me give you an example, a couple of examples of leaders I’ve worked with. My friend Alan Malali is a great believer in Situational Leadership®. Well, he was ranked the number one CEO in America number three greatest leader in the world behind Pope and Angela Merkel, and he’s a believer. And Frances Hesselbine, Peter Drucker said, the greatest leader he’d ever met in his life. She loved situational leadership, a great believer in the model, and used it in the Girl Scouts to really try to help the Girl Scouts get better. And so these are some of the greatest leaders who’ve ever lived. And so I’d say they’re wonderful proponents of situational leadership and great believers in the idea.

The idea of just analyzing a person’s readiness level and then picking the style that fits the readiness level makes so much sense, yet again, is often not done.

Sam Shriver
Yeah. From your experience and again, speaking right now about folks at the base of an organization, is it better for them to have managed people for a while, made some mistakes, and had some victories before they go through Situational Leadership®?

Dr. Marshall Goldsmith
I think it’d be great to train Situational Leadership® to kids. I’m just a believer. I don’t think you can be too young to learn this. And I think even learning it before management could be good. Here’s why I think it’d be good to learn it before you become a manager. Then, after you become a manager, you start trying it out, then go back and say, now talk about the application of what’s it like to apply. So, to me, it’s a great thing for high-potential leaders, too. They’re not even in a leadership role yet because it’s a great way to look at getting started. And it just makes so much sense. And it’s something that they probably haven’t thought of because the sort of more naive mindset might be, well, delegation is good. Well, I should just delegate things. Well, no, delegation is not always good.

Sam Shriver

It can be.

Dr. Marshall Goldsmith

But you delegate to somebody who has no idea what they’re doing and how to do it right. Well, that’s not good. It does more harm than good. So delegation is not a uniform good in and of itself. It could be good. If you delegate to the right person, it could be a disaster. So, a lot of people have some very naive views about leadership that kind of sound good on paper but don’t work well. The nice thing about Situational Leadership®, it works.

Conclusion

Dr. Marshall Goldsmith is one of the world’s leading executive educators, coaches, and authors. He’s a pioneer in helping successful leaders get even better. His books Triggers Mojo. And what got you here won’t get you there. Are New York Times bestsellers. Marshall has been ranked by Thinkers 50 as the number one leadership thinker in the world and the number one executive coach in the world. Thank you for listening to The Center for Leadership Studies podcast. Through its innovative leadership development programs, The Center for Leadership Studies has helped millions of individuals across the globe become more effective leaders and has helped thousands of organizations build more productive and engaged workforces. For additional information on our services and products, please visit Situational.com or call 919-335-8763. The Center for Leadership Studies, the global home of Situational Leadership®.

In This Episode

Dr. Tim McCartney, professor at Nova Southeastern University’s Huizenga College of Business and Entrepreneurship discusses his career in psychology and organizational behavior.

 

Episode Transcript

Introduction

Welcome to the Center for Leadership Studies podcast, an exploration of contemporary leadership issues with experts from a variety of fields and leadership backgrounds. In this episode, Dr. Tim McCartney, professor at Nova Southeastern University’s, Huizenga College of Business and Entrepreneurship, discusses his career in psychology and organizational behavior. For the Center for Leadership Studies, here’s your host, Sam Shriver.

Sam Shriver

I have heard a lot about you from mostly Susie, but Doc as well, a man who has accomplished as much as you’ve accomplished. I would just be interested in your– kind of looking back at all of these years and all of these accomplishments.

Dr. Tim McCartney

Well, I was born in the Bahamas and graduated from high school there. And my father always wanted to be a doctor and couldn’t be a doctor. And I was the oldest of eight children. And from the time I was very young, I knew that I was going to go into college somewhere and become a doctor. And so I graduated, and then I became what they call in the British system, an apprentice pharmacist for two years and a half. And I got a scholarship to go to the Harriet Watt College in Scotland to do pharmacy because they had no member of pharmacy degree in the Bahamas at that time. Talk about 1949. But my father met Benedict in the east. They had a monastery in the Bahamas, the Augustine’s, and he and Father Frey were very good friends.  And Father Frederick Frey told him that I should not go to England or to Europe to do an undergraduate work. I should go to the United States where I can really have that comrade and everything else. And if I wanted to go and do graduate work in Europe, I could do it after I got my honor’s degree. And there were already two or three Bahamians of Wenderson John’s University in Minnesota that I knew very well. And so, cut long story short, 1953, I went to Minnesota at St. John’s University, spent four years there, did a bachelor’s degree in natural sciences, which is really pre-med. And at that time I was trying to, with some other friends in my class, get into medical school.

They had quotas. They had quotas for native Indians, they had quotas for Caribbean people, they had quotas for African Americans, et cetera. Very, very difficult. You have sometimes almost 1000 people vying for about 26 positions in medical schools. I got a probationary acceptance from McGill University in Canada. But at the same time I had another friend who was at Putin College in New York and who said, I’m having the same problem. I’m now in Switzerland. There’s no problem at all. Come to Switzerland. In the meantime, while I was in college, it was the Calypso era with Harry Belafonte, because I played piano, congo, drums, bongos, this type of thing, and I formed a group called the Drunken Rules. I had a guy who was sent to be a priest from Trinidad, another fellow from Venezuela and another Bahamian who was a music manager out of Florida, agriculture family. And he came up and we took the whole area, our lives with Calypsos. They never saw the Limbo, they never saw people like us. And we signed Calypso and this kind of thing. And we got a job with the OK Club in St. Cloud where every night we put on a show and it was standing room only, I mean, to the point where we’re offered a contract to go to Las Vegas. And I was wondering whether I shouldn’t go into music, but then I was fairly grounded. Look, you know, this is a crazy life and I really can’t see myself doing this. So I made enough money, I had enough money to go to Switzerland on my own for two years and I was accepted to medical school there. And also I had to get engineered a certain time to get a laboratory place.

My first transatlantic crossing on the Liberty. I met one of the top models and he convinced me to spend two weeks in Paris, Atlanta, and this was in 1958. And this is when I really got a feel because I not only spent two weeks and I spent three weeks in Paris with her. She was a top model. She knew everybody. I met a lot of people in the movie industry there. I used to go, as I said last night, to capital Saint German de Three. I got a chance to meet and spend some time talking to Jean Paul Sartre and his Simon de Beauvoir. I used to sit down and listen to Juliet Greco Singh and her fados. Of course, he was from Portugal. Francois again.  It was the beginning of the existentialist movement there. Make love, not war. And a lot of Americans as the modern jazz quartet from the United States. Bud Powell, the musicians, all these fantastic musicians and writers. Baldwin, the guy who wrote The Fire Next Time, all these guys would hang up there and being in a Roman Catholic college, very staged and being chaste and pure. I find myself in this incredible atmosphere of Paris, going up to Amiens and meeting the artists there. And just an incredible thing.

Anyhow, I got to Switzerland, all the lab searches were taken and I met a friend who was there were some Trinidadians, two Trinidadians in St. Lucia. They were doing medicine there. One was doing international law, and I was staying with him before I found my own apartment. I had made enough money with the Drunken Rules to take care of me for about three years. I made a lot of money and he said, rather than being around for the next six months, why don’t you just continue with your psychology? Because I had done one year in my master’s in St. Cloud in clinical psychology and he said, you’d be very happy to meet a professor who I know personally, Jean Piche. So I met and met Jean Piche and I enrolled in his class. And so I took a certificate in advanced childhood adolescent psychology. I didn’t speak French that well. And it’s interesting because I sat down one day talking to Jean Piche who was a guy who was brilliant, I guess next to Sigmund Freud, he probably was the father of psychology and Freud was the father of psychiatry. And we’re sitting down, and he had a big moustache. I’d never seen it on a pike. And he spoke and I said, professor, you speak very slowly, and I understand that a lot of these concepts are very heavy because he was talking about nature and nurture. He was doing a lot of research with his own daughter. Like one time he took her on a train and put her to hold on to the bars as the train was going and let her go. And she just held on for their life, this fair thing.

And the duty is doing a lot of stuff and a lot of things that I didn’t understand. But I spent two years and while I was there my father got a scholarship from me to go to the University of the East to do medicine. So I left Switzerland after a year and a half, then two years. And there is where I really came into a very interesting period of my life. Because at the time, coming on board the ship, as I said, I met Europe’s top model who was my girlfriend, and then she was doing a lot of stuff in Scandinavia and all over the world. And the person who was my good friend on the Liberty, the boat from New York till I have when we came over was a guy by the name of Sam Tribal. He was from Chicago.

He was in his last year in medical school at the University of Sam. And he had a beautiful villa down there. And also he had a friend, Joe Snutzer from Oklahoma. His father was in oil and they had this little ride on the neck and they used to show the most incredible parties. Well, Sam Shriver’s best friend was Jack Balance. So I met Jack balance. And Jack and I and Sam, we hung together. Jack had a place just outside of Luzan. He was separated from his wife. He had two daughters. But he spent most of his time in Sicily and we became very close friends. But with John Spencer, he used to have these fantastic parties with all these debutants and the international set. I got a chance to meet them. Princesses and people from royal family, from Iran, everything.

I mean, the so called international set. And sometimes we’d fly down to camp, film festivals. We’d all go down on a private plane and everything was there, the whole thing. I didn’t have to put my hands in my pocket at all. We were there when Off Your Nag, won the camp Festival, Marpessa Don and all those. But there’s so many coincidences because on the ship coming across, my model was in first class, but I was in the economic class, but I spent a lot of time in first class. And one day when I was sitting down there having lunch, I was talking and she said, “I want you to meet a friend of mine.”

And then I met Tyrone Power and Linda Christian, who was going to Europe to go to Madrid to film The Sun Also Rises With, right, well so my model friend says, look, when we get in Geneva, we’ll come down and see you guys. Well, he went down there and had a massive heart attack and died–Tyrone Power. So I never got a chance to go there. But they were in the Bahamas two weeks before they were on the ship there. So they were talking about the Bahamas and everything, and while I was there talking to them, this lady came, she said, “you sound Bahamian”. And I said yes. She said “I’m Bahamian too.” I said, “I’m Stafford Sands.” The Stafford Sands was the Bahamian politician and lawyer who actually put the Bahamas on the tourism map.

He was prejudiced as hell and… tall guy who really was a multi millionaire. But anyhow, she got mad and she was on her honeymoon, going to Europe. A lot of coincidences, a lot of things and what have you. So now I get the scholarship. My father got a scholarship to do medicine. I go to Jamaica, my first time in Jamaica, and that blew my mind because it was a country, one of the most beautiful islands I’ve ever experienced. And I’d never seen such mixtures of people. And I was at the University of the West Indies doing medicine. And they used to have on weekends, they used to have parties at the place where what they call Reunion and it’s that steel band, this type of thing. And I met a group of friends and what have you.

Cut a long story short, I met another lady who had gone to had got a degree in Boston University and come back and was teaching, and her sister was the headmistress of Alpha School in Jamaica, but she had some friends from Boston who used to fly down and they would hire private plane and they’d fly to Haiti for weekends or fly to the Virgin Island weekends. So I’m now the Bahamas’ little bright-eyed boy who got the first actual scholarship to go to the University of West Indies because the Bahamas was not associated with the University of the West Indies at that time, but they had just started to because Bermuda, the Bahamas and Barbados, they didn’t feel as if they were part of the West Indies. And that was the sort of fighting itself that they had.

Anyhow, I flunked all my exams and got very depressed. They took the scholarship away from me. I tried to talk to my father. My father was so–when I think about it sometimes I still feel very depressed about it because he was looking forward to becoming home and this type of thing. And that’s when I met Pauline. Pauline was visiting her sister, who had just divorced her husband, and she came to Nassau. In that time, Nassau was wide open. She got a job working for Pauline’s sister, right? And Pauline was there visiting her, and a friend introduced to her. And so we became very close friends. There was no romance around like that.

And she told me, she said, It’s time for you to sit down and really settle down and really not get way laid by all this kind of partying and flying here and flying in, this type of thing. International said, “forget about that, you’re getting older. What are you going to do with your life? You didn’t fail your exams because you’re stupid. You fail your exams because you partied too much. You didn’t study.” So I decided that I wasn’t going to go back to Jamaica anymore. It was too dangerous for me, so I decided I was going to go to London. So I met Pauline in June and I left in October. And two weeks before I left, I realized how much I loved her. And I said to myself, what am I going to do without Pauline?

So she, you know, as I said, no romance. She said, you know, let’s keep in touch and if you’re serious, I’ll be a Christmas person. So I left to London and I went and got a tutor. Well, I didn’t pass my exams yet because I had to retake them and got there in October. I had cousins who were doing law. There are a lot of cousins. So I stayed with them. And on Christmas Day in 1961, Pauline landed in London. And in December the 16th, 1962, we married and had a son, Sean, who passed away 15 years ago. And we stayed in London for two years. And I decided that I don’t want to stay in London, I want to go back to Europe. But instead of going to France, he went to Strasbourg, which is the best thing. We stayed in Strasbourg.

She got a job in the Council of Europe. I was doing medicine then. Everybody thought it was going to be a cardio. All of this, because I had a beautiful area of music and I used to get all these diagnostics straight and everything else, and they were wondering, how did you do it? Because I would hear like a mitral valve and boom, like symbols, and I said, this guy’s got a micro. And then once he retested, how did you know? Cardiologist. But I had an inguinal hernia. And my surgeon was a professor by name of Dr Adloff. And while I was recuperating in the hospital, I was reading a book on psychology and psychoanalysis by Francis Nuttin, N-U-T-T-I-N who was a psychologist.

He said, “Are you interested in this?” And I said, “yeah.” He said, “Why are you doing this?” And I said, “My father wants me to be a doctor.” He said, “but how much psychology have you done?” I said, “Well, I did one year master’s program. I have a thing. I did a little bit of work with Jean Piche.” And so he said, “I’ve been a surgeon for 15 years, but we are starting a new institute of abnormal psychology, and it’s being headed by one of Europe’s top neuropsychiatrists, Dr. RD Laing, why don’t you come over with us, you know, be practical.” So he was saying, “If you got now a year and a half to become a medical doctor, and after you become a medical doctor, if you want to do psychiatry, you got another three years.” He said, if you join ICQ, he said that all the prerequisites that you had is only going to take you three years to get your doctorate, probably two years based on how you work. So I said, well, I felt very much at home in psychology. Medicine, like he said, was exciting, and perhaps I could have made more money. But you can use a stethoscope. You can take your blood. It’s too easy. And one of my books I wrote about my first experience in the Bahamas.

How do you deal with a woman who has deep compensated and thinks that she’s a horse and was galloping around my office and asking me to ride her? That excites me. That excites me. How do you deal with a girl who, every month long period, comes out with festering boils? What has caused that? How is that sort of anxiety transduced into actual physiological manifestations of boils? That’s what excites me. I’ve always had an inquiring mind, why is this happening? How can somebody who’s born so called natural or normal suddenly think that they’re a horse or have these boils, or go through terrible swings of elation and being manic and all of that depression and want to kill themselves? That is what excited me. What psychic me was psychology. I’ve never really worked in my life, really. For me, it was such a passion to get to my office and try to know without having to give an injection. Although my professional partner, Mike Nellis, a brilliant psychiatrist, so we worked together. And so there were times when many of my patients sent to him because they had to be know.

And of course, he would have patients who he saw who didn’t need medication, and he wanted me to evaluate them, because psychologists, we do the evaluation, we do the diagnosis, and he would actually go. So we had a wonderful relationship for almost 40 years, and he’s retired now. So I went to the institute and in two and a half years. I got my doctorate. I had to write a thesis. It’s a very interesting process. In the French schools, when you are a doctoral student, you have a written exam, you have an aural exam, and then you have to defend your thesis. You don’t get to defend your thesis until you will pass your written and you pass your aural, and then you defend your thesis. And when you defend your thesis, it’s published in all the newspapers.

And I went this huge auditorium and it was not only humbling, it’s a frightening experience because the chairperson was a very severe, hard guy. And then I had members of CANPA who was one of my lab instructors there. And then they had an outside psychologist who was involved with occupational therapy. They would do a lot of tests. And so for three and a half hours they grilled me. I’m sitting down there and the three of them up on the top the stage. One time I stopped, I said, “Excuse me, I didn’t understand your question.” I said, “You have to know French is not my natural language.” They said, “Are you telling us that you’re going to get a doctorate from the University of Strasbourg and you can’t speak French?”

So I said, “No, I was just saying that your question was so complicated. Could you repeat it again for for me. So they deliberated for about probably about half hour, 45 minutes. And they came back and everybody came back and the chair got it and he said, “Mr. McCartney, we want to congratulate you. You have got all the requirements for doctorate in psychology from the University of Strasbourg.” And then he paused. Alec Monteon prayers. So what do you have to say? Pauline, my children or my friend says the first time in their life that I was totally speechless. I became dumb. I should have started talking. I said, “thank you very much.” And that was the 26 June 1967. And my good friend Rick, who was in the same class as me, but he took Economics at the University of Geneva. He was then the human resource manager of the World Health Organization in Geneva. And he offered me a job, fantastic job. He said, “Come here as a family, we provide your car with your diplomatic license, but we want you to be part of a team to travel to these countries, developing mental health programs and testing and such thing.” At the same time, my mother had died and my father was there alone, and what he wanted was to see his son come home a doctor. So I gave up really, even at that time, a lucrative position to go back to the Bahamas. And we got there in October, but I didn’t start working until December because they had to have a special actor with no psychologist.

I was the first Bahamian psychologist and I didn’t even have an office at the hospital where I was, but my father was still alive. And what was the crown in glory is that one year after I was there, the Sir Victor Sasoon foundation established the Golden Heart Award. The Golden Heart Award was for that person who the community believed had contributed the most during that year. And the first person to get that award was a German doctor who came in the Bahamas and went to the poor islands and worked without pay helping them. She was from the first Bahamian, and the second awardee was me and my father’s like it was a big affair. And at that time they had Maya’s Society Orchestra come down from New York. They had all these people because she was married. She was Victor Sasoon’s nurse.

He was an English lord, and he married her. And then he died of a heart attack. And they developed the Heart Foundation to help Bahamians who couldn’t afford transplants and this type of thing. And they had a lot of that time, Robert Mitchum and his wife, they were there together, so we had to table them. And the prime minister of the bombs and my father was there and walking on air was incredible to see, because you know because he was a little island boy from Milutra who came to Nassau and did well, never had a chance to go to college. And so the rest is history. I became the President of the Caribbean Federation for Mental Health. I had 26 countries under my administration throughout the Caribbean, and I had to visit all of them and set up mental health programs and set up allied health programs in the Bahamas. And then I wrote the first sort of book, trying to analyze it started as a pamphlet because I was then president of the Bahamas Mental Health Association as well, and they knew nothing about mental health. And so I started writing that I thought were pamphlets to educate people, what psychology was all about, because there were a lot of superstitions in the ground with regards to men. And have they thought of these kids who would retire? That it was a sin, that God had cursed them all? A lot of stuff. And so there’s a lot of education to do.

So I started out with a pamphlet and it developed into a book, the first book that tried to analyze the behavior, psyche and also tool to talk about what are some psychologists, what is psychiatrist, what’s the social work of occupational therapists. I talked about alcoholism, and my book is in all the older book sales in the Bahamas. And I got this call in 1973 where he became independent. And I got this call that says, “Dr. McCartney, can I meet you? I’m from Brazil and I’ve just read your book and I would like to meet you. Could you and your wife meet us down at the sheriff in British colonial to have dinner”?

Well, we met and Anana Helena and not only became friends, but his father was one of the top gynecologists in Brazil, a Harvard graduate who much from a middle class family but married one of the richest families. And he was the first doctor to open a 400 bed private hospital in Rio. And he set up a foundation, and Anana was his only son. So when he died, there was an incredible endowed foundation called Dini Brass out of Brazil. And Dini Brass hooked up with Epoch, the International Population and Population Reproductive Council. And they were situated here at Mount Sinai Hospital. They were a group of gynecologists, urologists, psychiatrists, a few psychologists and sex therapists.

And with this foundation, they had to meet every year in some capital of the world to organize a week of workshops and seminars and bring in the local people to talk about population dynamics and contraception and all this kind of thing. And so they asked me whether I would be part of the board directors, which I accepted. In the same time, when I accepted to be on the board of directors for Brass and E Park, I got a call from the editor of our newspaper saying, there’s a gentleman, can you come down there? I want you to meet. And I went down there and I met the council from Taiwan, from the United Nations, who lives in the Bahamas and had heard about me. And he invited Pauline and I, all expenses paid, to go to Taiwan as guests of their government.

I was with Dini Brass and had to travel somewhere. This is 1973. We just got independent. And I was then president of the Caribbean Federal Mental Health Association. I was just rolling with the board. I started the Bahamas Psychological Association. And then I was invited to China. So Pauline and I decided to take off for two and a half months because we’d never been around the world. And then once we’d go with Dini Brass, either Madrid or Paris or Rio or Ecuador or Jamaica or the Bahamas or whatever, we would have our seminars. And then his wife and I, Pauline and I, we’d take off somewhere about two or three months, get a car and drive all over Europe or drive all over South America.

But he’s like going to Brazil because he had the old family home in Rio, an old stately mansion, which is just elegant. And then they had his father and mother had a place in Tropolis when the king of Portugal moved this whole court down. That’s where they had their home.. And then he had a beautiful cabin in a place called Bouzios, which is like 320 miles outside of Rio. And that is where all the few from Buenos Aires and Door and Peru, whatever, used to fly down. Just an incredible place. The most wonderful seafood restaurants you’d find from 1973 up to, I guess, about five years ago, did a lot of traveling, and then I started teaching as an adjunct for Nova and Nova sent me. I went to Japan, took three weeks to teaching there. And I used to teach go to Jacksonville, Port St. Lucie, Panama, Jamaica, the Bahamas and Jamaica. Especially because my wife is from Jamaican. She had family there, and I had a lot of friends there. And so for 15 consecutive years every course started because organizational behavior, that’s my forte in organizational development because Mike and I did a lot of the work syntax in BORCO and some of the Fortune 200 300 things doing all development going in, because it was an accidental situation where there was a development of a drug problem in the Bahamas and BORCO. After that, we’d come down to some seminar, workshops, and we decided that doing motivational workshops and seminars didn’t work.

We had to go through a whole process of turning the whole organization around over a period of time, dealing with the physical plan, dealing with interpersonal relationships, looking at leadership, what have you. And then I met Dr. Koshi. One of my friends, our mutual friend was Jane Gibson. And when they came on, Jane had a cocktail party, and that was the first time Pauline was introduced to Susie. Doc wasn’t there. Doc was in the kitchen sitting down at the table, having a drink. And so as soon as I walked in, I said, “Hey, I want a drink.” And I went there. And Charlie Blackpool, who was James Sultan. Charlie was there. Charlie says I want some big Doc. Say hi, Doc. How you doing? And we sat down, we talked, and then Susie and Pauline just clicked almost immediately. And Doc and I talked.

But I think what happened, he’d come down here, and we’d spend time and Susie and the girls that got shopping, and Doc and I, he’d do his thing here. And then I always took him back to the hotel. But we spent an hour, and we talk about all kinds of things. He helped me so much in understanding human behavior. We had one difference, because he used to say that you have to really go on the person’s background, right? And you see, I was trained as a traditional psychoanalyst, and I realized that didn’t work at all. And so I had to develop an almost eclectic approach to understanding behavior. So Mike Nelson and I, we developed what we call a therapeutical learning process, teaching people how to be their own therapist.

And that’s when I told him that I was going to bring a situation leadership and retaught leadership, because it really correlates so closely with our methodology, just a methodology. And our methodology was very simple. Number one, there were three things, because most of our patients, a lot of time, we did more teaching, right? We listened to them, and they said the same old thing over and over. So we thought that if we taught them, number one, what made them, what determined their personality, how they function as human beings and feelings, okay? And also too certain interpersonal skills. How do you communicate, solve problems, how do you manage conflict? So if we taught them these skills, they wouldn’t have to rely on us seeing us two or three times a week.

They would save money and we would save the boredom of having to sit down and listen to the same thing over and over. And so that works well. And so I shared this with Doc and I told Doc, I said, I’m more for cognitive therapy now than the so called I’m trying to explore the subconscious, which is a waste of time as a Freudian analyst. And I said, what is very important now is that on a conscious level, we function at three levels. We function the conscious level, preconscious level and the subconscious level. The conscious is right here. And now your preconscious, what you can recall, remember in your subconscious, what you should recall. The old unconscious, your subconscious is from a time you were conceived. What has happened to you is there, but you don’t know what’s really going on.

You feel a certain way or you act a certain way, but you don’t understand, not aware. Yeah, but I said that’s happening at the same time. Right now we are functioning at the conscious, preconscious, subconscious level. So I said our approach now is to get people to specify what is bothering you, what are you doing that you are upset about? Or let me help you analyze what’s happened to you. And so once you specify that you could work out a sort of behaviorally and a sort of program to modify that behavior, you may not totally do away with it. I think you don’t really know. It’s always there, but at least you can function fairly well.

You don’t have to go and find out whether you’re anal retentive or you’ve got an oral problem, that’s why you drink too much and all that kind of stuff. Hell, if you drink too much, how do you go through the process of dealing with your narcotic problem so you don’t waste time? When I first started going to the Bahamas, it was a disaster because the average behavior didn’t know that I was talking about for example, I said, “Tell me about your dreams.” They thought once they told me the dreams we had a racetrack at the time, they thought I was going to give them the Cornella, the numbers. And it just didn’t work. And I was so frustrated. I said, hell know, I’m around this. How do I deal with my own people?

Because in the Bahamas, I mean, we had every ethnic group of people and you had a lot of Haitians and Bahamians and Jamaicans and tribalians and Martiniqueans and what have you. And they were all very know. They believed in obey San Diego, Wudu Makumba and all these kind of things. And so that was the environment I had to deal with and I had to be very open, very eclectic and not get too upset when the methodology that I started didn’t work. Because sometimes we’re so passionate about our work and we’ve got a methodology that we see very clearly, but if it isn’t working too well, we get depressed about it. And so we have to really become our own therapists. How do you get out of that? Of course, there are certain physiological factors that we have no control over.

That’s why we use medication to sort of try to balance your endorphins and all the different types of things in the synaptic area of your cells I mean, to neurons and what have you. But for me, it really has been an incredible journey with the people I’ve met, how things have happened to me, how things, whether they are coincidence or what the failures were, the roadmap to successes or to a new stage in my life and how I developed. And thank God, most of the time I learned from it. But I made some horrible mistakes. I started the first sort of walk in mental health in the whole Caribbean called the Bahamas Family Institute. And I used to bring people for seminar. Max Malsby, his rational behavior therapy.

I had Bill Simon out of New York, and I was involved with a whole group out of New York who was somewhat out on guard with regards to mental health as it applies to.

Sam Shriver

Leadership and all that entails. What would you pass on to people as it applies to just the process of influence and leadership and all that you and Dr. Hershey talked about? If you had to impart one bit of wisdom from all of these years and all of these accomplishments, what do you think it would be?

Dr. Tim McCartney

Well, first of all, I think you have to recognize that in any given population, you’ve got different kinds of people. You have leaders, you have followers, you have people who sit on the fence, what have you. And as a professional, you have to cater to the needs of all of these people. And I think the most important thing is for you to maintain an integrity and your passion when they see that you really care. You didn’t just say, I care, or you give some methodology and insist that they follow this. But if they can feel your passion, more than likely you will have a better chance of helping them help themselves. Right? Because you can only show them a methodology. You can only impart certain knowledge. You can teach them things, but they have to make the choice as to whether the

In This Episode

Kelly Chickos, Senior Manager of Global Learning and Development at STERIS, talks about the challenges women face as leaders.

 

Episode Transcript

Introduction

Welcome to Leadership Quick Takes from The Center for Leadership Studies. In this episode, Kelly Chicos, senior manager of Global Learning and Development at STERIS Corporation, talks about the challenges women face as leaders. For The Center for Leadership Studies, here’s your host, Sam Shriver.

Sam Shriver

How about women in leadership? Do women leaders, in particular, from your experience, face different challenges than their male counterparts?

Kelly Chickos

Let me start with the question. As a male, has anyone ever asked you how do you do it all?

Sam Shriver

No.

Kelly Chicos

Okay. So, as a woman in leadership, I get that question all the time, and I got it more so when my children were younger, and I was working full time. So, that is definitely a huge challenge. So, the solution for that challenge for me was having a great partner. My husband was a tremendous help in all the family responsibilities and such so that we could both have successful careers. But I think women hear that message all the time that you can’t have it all. And sometimes very talented women will, I’ll call it, opt-out from higher opportunities because they feel that they can’t be successful in leading a family and in leading at work. So, it’s unfortunate that some women feel that they have to opt-out.

The other thing regarding women in leadership that comes to mind is if you talk to a male that is mentoring a woman so often, they will say that they’re really looking at mentoring so she can show up stronger, have a higher degree of self-esteem. But if that same male is coaching another male, he may say he’s coaching on business finance strategy, so they’re not equal conversations.

Conclusion

Thank you for listening to Leadership Quick Takes from The Center for Leadership Studies. For additional information on our services and products, please visit Situational.com or call 919-335-8763. At The Center for Leadership Studies, we build leaders.

In This Episode

Kelly Chickos, Senior Manager of Global Learning and Development at STERIS, discusses the impact of Situational Leadership®.

 

Episode Transcript

Introduction

Welcome to Leadership Quick Takes from The Center for Leadership Studies. In this episode, Kelly Chickos, Senior Manager of Global Learning and Development at STERIS Corporation, discusses the rationale for investing in leadership training. For The Center for Leadership Studies, here’s your host, Sam Shriver.

Sam Shriver

So, bottom line, why invest in leadership training?

Kelly Chickos

I have never taught Situational Leadership®, building leaders, without at least one person coming to me after class and saying, this is great stuff. I can use this outside of work. And that’s so powerful. And really, we’re making leaders that it’s just beyond a workplace. So, I think any leadership development that people like me offer need to have value outside of work because we’re building great talents. We really want to strive to do that. I also think that we need to be mindful of the type of training that we continue to deliver. Organizations everywhere are becoming more matrix, and that’s not going to change. So the traditional baby boomer kind of viewpoint of that command control of, I have a boss, my boss has a boss, that’s really going away.

And that doesn’t mean to imply that organizations are getting flat, but you can influence at every single level. And the reality is adults learn what adults want to learn. You’ve got to give them things that are really going to align with your business and help them grow as individuals. And back to the topic of millennials. There’s that misconception that millennials walk in the door and they want to be the CEO in three months. That’s a misconception. What they do want to do is grow and learn, grow and learn and grow and learn. And if they’re not doing that, then we could lose them. So we have to be very mindful of that. We also have to be mindful that some leaders really take it personally when they lose an employee, especially if they lose an employee to another department.

And we got to shape that thinking a little bit that if you’ve really developed a talented individual and they’re advancing, but they’re staying within the company, that’s a reflection on you because you help develop that person for their next opportunity. We want to keep talent within the organization.

Conclusion

Thank you for listening to Leadership Quick Takes from The Center for Leadership Studies. For additional information on our services and products, please visit Situational.com or call 919-335-8763 at The Center for Leadership Studies, we build leaders.

In This Episode

Kelly Chickos, Senior Manager of Global Learning and Development at STERIS Corporation, shares the challenges of creating global training.

 

Episode Transcript

Introduction

Welcome to Leadership Quick Takes from The Center for Leadership Studies. In this episode, Kelly Chickos, senior manager of global learning and development at STERIS Corporation, shares the challenges of creating global training. For The Center for Leadership Studies, here’s your host, Sam Shriver.

Sam Shriver

So, when it comes to leadership training, what would you say your biggest challenge is?

Kelly Chickos

My biggest challenge is really working hard for a global reach. There are things that we do very well locally, but I think we miss so many opportunities because I’m headquartered here to really reach a lot of our global leaders. It’s a challenge with resource availability and rapid growth in the business. But we’re a global company, and we have to continue to work on that. So, two days ago, I had one of my frontline leadership sessions, and the topic was motivation. We have a global representation, and one of the items in the curriculum for motivation is Susan Fowler’s YouTube video on the Mystery of Motivation. Great video. Because of bandwidth challenges, I like to have each participant launch it from their own computer at their own location. And one of my participants in China said we don’t have YouTube in China.

I never realized that. I didn’t know. So, what I had to do was play it from my system. And, of course, with the network, there was a lag. But I learned something I didn’t know that they didn’t have YouTube as a learning resource in China.

Conclusion

Thank you for listening to Leadership Quick Takes from The Center for Leadership Studies. For additional information on our services and products, please visit Situational.com or call 919-335-8763. At The Center for Leadership, we build leaders.

In This Episode

Kelly Chickos, Senior Manager of Global Learning and Development at STERIS Corporation, talks about the benefits of leadership training.

 

Episode Transcript

Introduction

Welcome to Leadership Quick Takes from The Center for Leadership Studies. In this episode, Kelly Chickos, senior manager of global learning and development at STERIS Corporation, talks about Situational Leadership®’s role in her training curriculum for The Center for Leadership Studies, here’s your host, Sam Shriver.

Sam Shriver

So, what challenge or opportunity does leadership training address for you?

Kelly Chickos

There are several, and I think the answer is in our values at stairs. And one of our core values is people, the foundation. We have a strong safety culture, so we are committed to the safety and to the success of our people. The other item is our value of customer first, always. The customer is the most important person in our business to be treated with the utmost respect. So learning and providing superior products and service solutions to our customers, but in that, our internal colleagues are also our customers as well. So we know influence is key. And if we’re constantly leading, we can be getting to better solutions for our customers, we can get to better innovation. And innovation is another one of our key values at stairs. So that’s an itch that it scratches.

But outside of our values, I think it also aligns with keeping great talent. And what company does not want to keep great talent? So, with employee engagement, the stronger our leaders are, the more engaged our employees are going to be.

Conclusion

Thank you for listening to Leadership Quick Takes from The Center for Leadership Studies. For additional information on our services and products, please visit Situational.com or call 919-335-8763. At The Center for Leadership Studies, we build leaders.

In This Episode

Kelly Chickos, Senior Manager of Global Learning and Development at STERIS Corporation, defines leadership.

 

Episode Transcript

Introduction

Welcome to Leadership Quick Takes from The Center for Leadership Studies. In this episode, Kelly Chickos, senior manager of global learning and development at STERIS Corporation, defines leadership. For the Center for Leadership Studies, here’s your host, Sam Shriver.

Sam Shriver

So, how exactly do you define leadership?

Kelly Chickos

Having been in learning and development for two decades, I would definitely use the word influence, just as Dr. Hersey used the word influence to describe leadership. And what’s unfortunate is, if you listen to Ted Talks and other podcasts, what happens that’s kind of scary is that people define leadership as doing great things. Like they use Martin Luther King as an example, and Bill Gates and, yes, great leaders. But sometimes, it becomes so overwhelming for people that they need to do these great and heroic things in order to be considered a leader. And the reality is you can be a leader every single day in how you’re influencing. So it’s not about the title that you have. It’s about what you do. So the kid that addresses another kid that’s bullying and tells a bus driver, that’s leadership.

And that’s what our culture really needs, is that day-to-day leadership. And that’s what can happen through influencing and being very thoughtful about who you’re leading and what do they need from you as the leader. We work so hard to demystify the impression that you have to have a title in order to be a leader. And so often, people think that a title of leadership gives you more power to make decisions. The reality is that your leadership skills give you the power to influence decisions. And it’s really helping people understand the day-to-day milestones in how they can influence. They have to convince themselves in what they’re doing that they are a leader.

Conclusion

Thank you for listening to Leadership Quick Takes from The Center for Leadership Studies. For additional information on our services and products, please visit Situational.com or call 919-335-8763 at The Center for Leadership Studies, we build leaders.