Liz Wiseman

Liz: Yeah. And sometimes … Exactly, Peter. Sometimes, these leaders do literally shut it down. Sort of like hand up, no thank you. I’ve got this. Or sometimes, you get this diminished effect because the leader is just really smart and capable, and so people hold back because they don’t need to contribute. They defer upward for ideas, for accountability, and … And so, we found these diminishing leaders get less than half of people’s intelligence, and when we asked that same question to people around leaders they deemed to be multipliers, the average was 95% of people’s capability and intelligence.

You know, what struck me first is it’s a 2X difference. And I can’t suggest that it’s twice the productivity, but what I can tell you is that when you lead this way, you get all of people’s ideas and capability, and you can imagine what happens when people go into work, working for diminishing leaders, be they tyrannical, narcissistical kind of diminishers, or maybe even just accidental diminishers. People come to work wanting to give 100%. 100% of their intelligence badges in every morning, but what happens when less than half of it gets used in a given day or a week or a month? What does it do to the environment when people resign themselves to only being able to half contribute? It creates these toxic environments around them.

Peter: Right, and we’ve seen … I mean, I’m sure you’ve seen. I’ve certainly seen these environments, where people come into work and feel like they have a lot to offer and it’s not so welcome and there’s not really an opportunity, so they begin to shut down more parts of them than they would even otherwise, because they just kind of give up and then eventually, they find another job if they’re smart.

I do want to speak the voice of the diminisher for a second, because I know leaders who will say, “You know, it’s true, there are a lot of great ideas on this team. But the fact is, we’ve got to execute on just a couple of things, so I don’t need everybody’s great ideas. I know where we need to act with urgency, we need to move forward incredibly fast. I appreciate that lots of people have ideas, but I don’t want to hear them because I need us to just take action in this direction, move forward. Don’t complicate things. I don’t want to do everything by consensus.” Et cetera. And I’m wondering whether there’s an upside to that, or whether that’s always destructive.

Liz: Yeah. Yeah, no, there’s probably not an upside to diminishing, but there’s an upside to clarity, and there’s a upside to conviction. What we find is that these multiplier leaders are not soft leaders. They’re not consensus driven leaders. In many ways, they’re decisive and they’re hard edge. In fact, when I submitted … And, Peter, I know you’ve written several books and you know that feeling of sending the book off to the publisher, the manuscript.

Peter: Right.

Liz: And waiting to hear back. When I sent the manuscript off to Harper Collins and I’m waiting to hear back, one of the things that struck me is when my publisher, responded back and she was like, “Wow, these are not cupcakes and kisses kinds of leaders.”

Peter: Right.

Liz: And she could see what I had come to see; that this wasn’t about nice guys versus mean guys as leaders. It’s about a type of leader who sees a need, has a mission, has … Whether it’s a vision, a goal, a mission, they have something they need to accomplish. But they need all of the intelligence of the team. They’re demanding that people contribute. But when it comes to making important decisions, they don’t just jump in and make the decisions like, “Okay, here’s what we’re going to do, I don’t need anyone else.” They play the role of debate maker. And the role of debate maker is to decide what’s the question we’re trying to answer, and to frame it, explain why it’s important, and then to invite people to weigh in. Not in a protracted debate, but more surgical. More like here’s a thing we’ve got to figure out. I need you, I need you, and I need you to give me your opinion. I’ve heard it. We’re going to stir it up and create a rigorous debate, even for only a few minutes, but then we’re going to make a decision and move forward.

And it’s amazing what happens when a leader allows other people to weigh in. They end up getting the buy-in, so they don’t need a command and control. By asking people to contribute, they’ve gotten the commitment behind it.

Peter: It seems like the framing is an incredibly important piece, right? Which is to say, we’re not just going to have an open conversation. We have a decision to make. These are the issues related to the decision. I want to hear people’s perspective before we make that decision. It’s framing it in a direction that moves forward, and you’re not stuck in discussion, but you’re moving from discussion to decision.

Liz: Yeah. You know, sometimes, Peter, when I put all of my research and the models and the book and all of that aside and just think, how would I lead like a multiplier? How would I lead in a way that invited people to be smart? I just simply stop and ask myself, what information would people need to make an intelligent decision? And then, it puts me in a mode of saying, oh, my job is to frame things for my team, to explain here’s what’s going on. Here’s why this is urgent.

Or sometimes, at minimum, like when I’m about to have a little diminishing moment, and we all are going to have a micromanaging kind of moment. Sometimes, the framing is simply, “Here’s why I don’t have time for debate on this. Here’s why I need to micro-manage this and be all over it”. And just explaining the rationale allows people to act intelligently and respond intelligently.

Peter: That feels very important, that the leader’s role is to shape the discussion, the direction, and the boundaries around it, and then to let people be free within that to move forward in the way that they can best use their top resources.

Liz: Right. And we all know that there’s cases where people create boundaries about this big, right?

Peter: Right.

Liz: And then there are times when those walls and the boundaries are really wide. And as your team grows around you and you grow talent around you, I think you find people can get … Think you can let your team off leash.

Peter: Talk to me about diminishers and what you call accidental diminishers, right? Those people that we all know who probably don’t intend to be diminishers. I don’t know very many people who intend to be diminishers, but that’s ultimately the impact they end up having.

Liz: You know, it’s interesting. In some ways, this was the big surprise and the great disappointment of my research, actually, because when I started doing this research, it was so clear to me. I could see these leaders around whom everyone was brilliant, and then I could see the diminishers, the vampires, and they looked to me like bullies and tyrants and sometimes hot-headed leaders.

Peter: Can you give some examples of things they do or say that represent them, so that everyone has an image in their minds?

Liz: Oh, the true diminisher? Okay, so the classic true diminisher, when it comes to managing talent, they tend to be empire builders. They love to hire smart people, but they’re acquiring resource. In terms of the work environment, they’re tyrants. They create stress all around them. When it comes to setting direction, they tend to be know-it-alls. They’re quick with an answer, they know how to do everything. Meetings with them are going to end up looking like they’re the smartest person in the room. They’re decision-makers. And they’re micro-managers. Those are some of the classic traits of these …

Peter: It’s funny because some of those are the traits of classic, older style command and control leadership. It’s the way we thought leadership should be maybe 30 years ago.

Liz: Yeah. It’s what we have historically deemed as strong leaders. So this is what I studied. I studied these multiplier leaders, these diminishing leaders, and it was this nice contrast, and the world was easy. But then when I really dug into this, Peter, what I discovered is that most of the diminishing that’s happening in our workplaces, in our non profit organizations, in our schools, is coming from the accidental diminisher, which doesn’t look a lot like that. These are well intended people. These are people who are the first to sign up for management training. These are people who read management books, who listen to management podcasts. These are people who host management podcasts, and write management books. People like us, who really want to be great leaders, but are doing things that are actually sucking the life out of the people who work around us. And it’s done with the best of intent.

So it was more complicated and more interesting. And I actually find this is the key to creating really intelligent cultures and places where people can be brilliant and whole at work, is learning to spot the triggers for accidental diminishing.

Peter: Right. And it feels like the way you’ve described it, too, at least for a lot of accidental diminishers that I know, it comes out of this place of insecurity. It actually takes courage to say “I don’t know” in an organization. It takes courage to say, “I need other people’s input to figure out how to make this decision.” And so I think the more confident leaders are probably a little more willing to frame and have conversation than the leaders who are a little more insecure, and that insecurity leads to arrogance versus confidence. Security leads to confidence, in a sense. I wonder whether you’re seeing that happen in organizations and people.

Liz: We do. When I’m with groups and we’re talking about their diminishing leaders, once of the words that comes up over and over is they were insecure. And it’s caused me to really double down on a point of view that I’ve always had, is I want to work around brilliant people. But I also want to work around people who are really confident of their intelligence. I actually want to work for the person who thinks he or she is smart, brilliant, has genius, and they’re so confident in their own intelligence that they’re over it. You know? It’s like, hey, I’m brilliant. Okay. That felt good. Now I’m over it, and I can come into work every day not trying to prove I’m the smartest person in the world or in the room. I can use my own intelligence in a way that invites intelligence in others to see the right challenge, to ask the right question, to know how to frame the right debate. So I actually want to work with people who are supremely confident in their own intellect. And over it.

Peter: Give us a brief run-through of the five disciplines of the multiplier.

Liz: Here’s what we noticed that these multiplier leaders do that causes other people to step up around them, and to be fully accountable and at their best. The first is how they manage talent. Whereas that diminisher tends to be the empire builder, the multiplier tends to be a talent magnet. Not only do they see and scout talent, but talent tends to find them, and it’s because they use people for their native genius, the thing they do easily and freely. It would be like, okay, how does Peter’s mind built? What is he going to do that he just actually can’t help but do, and how do I channel that and use that against our biggest challenges?

Peter: It’s a point that you make in the book that I really liked, which is that one of the things that talent magnets do is they help people grow and move on to new things. Sid Finkelstein in his book, Superbosses, talked a lot about that.

Liz: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Peter: And the concern always is, but then I’m going to lose all my good people, and the point that you make is reputation precedes you and that there’s a steady stream of great talent. There’s a line of people that want to keep working for you. And so that you don’t have to worry about am I going to give away my best talent, because new talent is coming all the time.

Liz: Yeah, there’s always this moment where when people are talking about multipliers and diminishers and someone usually will assert that, “Multipliers have better retention rates, right, Liz?” And my answer is no. Actually, not necessarily. Not typically, even, as they do tend to have a flow of talent. They do become like superbosses, and I had the good fortune of working for one of these superbosses that Sydney Finkelstein mentions in Superbosses.

And, you know, I heard so many people say that about their multiplier leaders. They’re like, man, I would work for him anytime, anywhere. These are people we want to go and work for because they see our talent, they use it, they shine a spotlight on it, and just at the point where we’re at an apex, maybe in our productivity and our career, they say, “Hey, Liz? You’re ready to go do the next hard thing.” Like, move along, sister. They’re kind of actually keeping people not in their zone of productivity as much as their zone of learning and contribution, which is uncomfortable for everyone in some ways.

Peter: Creating intensity is another one.

Liz: Yeah. Yeah, so this is about the work environment they create. Whereas that diminisher creates stress around her, the multiplier creates safety. It’s intellectual safety where people can do their best work. It’s the difference between working in a tense environment and an intense environment. One of my favorite examples of this is K.R. Sridhar at Bloom Energy. They’re a cleantech startup, and he says, “I try to create an intense environment.” And one of his distinctions was, I require my scientists, the people who work for him, I absolutely demand that they run the experiments, but I don’t hold them accountable for the results of the experiments.

Peter: So it’s about process as opposed to outcome, necessarily.

Liz: Right. Because he’s asking people to take accountable for what’s in their control. And if you’re going to innovate and push the envelope with science, you can’t hold people accountable for the outcome of that. But you can absolutely hold them accountable for asking the questions, preparing the … running good experiments, learning.

Peter: Does that hold true for sales as well? Science, it makes sense, in terms of the point of research. Sales, you could argue the same thing, which is that it can hold you accountable for making X numbers of sales calls and X numbers of reach-outs. But ultimately, what you’ll hear in terms of sales is ultimately, the outcome is what ends up mattering. What do you see in sales organizations?

Liz: You know, one of my favorite examples of an intense leader, this liberator kind of discipline for the multipliers is Rob Enslin at SAP, who is this phenomenal sales leader. We know the world of the sales leader, and this is a sales executive who has a quota in the billions of dollars, and when the economy would go bad, and very times so many other leaders would just push and drag in numbers, this is when he would step back, ask the right questions, demand that his team thought through the issues, but create a safe environment where it was okay to say, “You know that deal? That’s just popped out of our pipeline. We’ve lost that one.” And one of the things about him that his people said is he’s a sales leader who never gets surprised. Because people are willing to tell him the truth. He’s created a safe place for people to say, “Here’s what’s really going on in the market.”

Peter: Right.

Liz: I don’t think they miss their numbers very often.

Peter: Right. You talked a little bit already about debating decisions, extending challenges, instilling ownership and accountability. Those are the other three. I’m kind of curious about … because we talked a little bit about the idea of challenges and debating. The strongest way to instill ownership and accountability, is it by getting other people’s ideas? Are there other elements to that that you can share?

Liz: You know, I think it’s about putting other people in charge. I think there’s so many leaders who are stuck in this conundrum where they want their people to step up, but they haven’t let go themselves. It’s almost like … Let me see if I can find a pen here at my desk. It’s like the pen represents accountability, and if I were saying, “Okay, Peter, I want you to take ownership of it.” And I hand you this pen and say, “Okay, go ahead and take ownership. It’s yours. Run with it. You’re in charge.” And then I’m wondering why you haven’t grabbed onto the pen, and I’m home talking to my husband, going, “Yeah, I put Peter in charge, but he’s just not running with it.” See, the problem is, most leaders never let go.

Peter: Right.

Liz: Yeah. For someone else to take charge, I have to let go. There has to be this hand-off. Imagine a baton race where the lead runner hasn’t let go of the baton and let the next person go. I heard people say this over and over about these multiplier leaders; “Oh, they’re really empowering. They empower others.” As an author, Peter, you can appreciate this. I made sure that I never included the word empowerment in the manuscript. It was one of the final things I did before I sent it off to the publisher is make sure the word empowerment never showed up, because I just wasn’t sure what the word meant, you know? It seemed vague. But when you really click on empowerment, what empowerment means is to give power.

Peter: Right.

Liz: And so if you want other people to step up and take ownership, you have to say, “Okay, it’s yours, which means it’s not mine.”

Peter: Great. So this is great, because I’m thinking of a leader who’s an accidental diminisher. Or from everyone else’s perspective, a diminisher, and I think from his, an accidental diminisher. And I think that’s absolutely not his intention. He does exactly that, right? Which is to give the pen but not let go. And one of the challenges is he’ll say, “Look, I’m happy to let go if they actually follow through and do it, but two months down the road, they still haven’t done it, and at a certain point, I have to jump in and do it. Because I have a standard, and they’re not meeting the standard, and I’ve been very, very clear, but they’re not prioritizing it or they’re not doing it, or et cetera, and I’ve got to take it back or I’ve got to hold onto its tail, and et cetera.” What do you say to that person?

Liz: I’m going to give you my favorite, very practical ways to put other people in charge, and then a caveat to that. The first would be to remember the pen. That people can’t take it unless you have let go of it. One of my favorite examples was John Chambers, when he was CEO of Cisco. He’s fairly new in the CEO role. He is hiring his very first vice president into the company, a guy named Doug, and Doug’s going to run customer support, and he says to Doug, “Doug, when it comes to this part of the business, you get 51% of the vote and 100% of the accountability.” I just don’t know a faster way to tell someone else that they’re in charge than to say, “You get 51% of the vote.”

Peter: So who is holding him accountable? Who is-

Liz: John.

Peter: When you say the 100% of accountability. So he’s still there, kind of saying, “You’re getting the vote, and you’re making the decision, but I’m going to hold you accountable, but let me be clear on the measures in which I’m going to use to hold you accountable, and they’re going to be public enough between us, and it’s going to be very, very clear objectively whether you’re meeting them or not,” so that he’s not having to sit there constantly and say, “You’re not meeting my measure. Let me tell you what my measure is; it just changed.”

Liz: Yes. And I think the 51% of the vote is really important. If someone tells me I have 51% of the vote, and 100% of the accountability, it reminds me, I don’t have 100% of the vote. 51 means there’s someone else who has 49, so what Chambers is saying is, hey, you know what? This is your part of the business. You run support. I run the company. I’m 49% of the vote, meaning I want to give you direction. I want to be informed. I want to be consulted. I want to offer ideas that I have, but in the end, if you and I disagree or you don’t have time to loop me or whatever, I back you. I just think it’s a really, really clear way to put somebody else in charge.

Another one of my favorite … In fact, it’s so empowering. Just on Saturday, my husband and I were working on a little house remodel project, which was really … I was leading it, and he kind of walked in, he goes, “Liz, you got this. You’ve got 51% of the vote.” And I’m like, “Dang, I do! I do! I like that!” But I also remembered, 49. I need to consult him with a little of this.

Here’s one of my favorite sassiest ways to do this is … Because I think in some ways, collaboration has been an enemy of good leadership. I think so many of us want to collaborate, but don’t we really all want to know who’s really fundamentally in charge?

Peter: Right.

Liz: I think it’s like we can work together, but you got to know who’s in charge. I often use the 51-49% when I’m collaborating with someone. We’ll say, okay, let’s work together on this, but who’s 51%? Okay, you got this, you got that. Sometimes I’ll tell people, “Okay, this is yours. You have 51% of the vote.” And then here’s what I say, just to make it absolutely clear. I say, “I’m now going to cross this off my to-do list.” And I remember there’s this one guy I used to work with, Ben Putterman. I love him, he works at Tesla now. And he would stop and he would say, “Are you saying that I should have that on my to-do list?” I’m like, “Yeah, that’s exactly what I’m saying.” And he goes, “So I’m in charge. I should be doing something about this?” I’m like, “Yeah, exactly. Good interpretive skills.”

Or some days, I would say to him, “Ben, you know what? I want you to run with this. You’re in charge.” And then I would say, “I’m going to stop worrying about this.” Or, “I’m not going to wake up tomorrow thinking about this.” And then he would pause again and go, “So are you trying to tell me I should wake up thinking about this?” Yes! Exactly.

Peter: It’s a great example. It’s such a great example, because that level of clarity is what’s necessary, because people, in crazy ways, misunderstand all the time and that’s just human nature.

Liz: It is. And we want to work together, and so we’re like, okay, well, we’ll do it together. Well, if we’re doing it together …

Peter: Then no one’s personally accountable.

Liz: Our rule is in our house, if nobody’s in charge of feeding the cats, the cats will starve. You know? We got to know who’s in charge of this-

Peter: Yeah, that’s great. Having that conversation, deciding who has the 51%, deciding who has the 100% of accountability.

Liz: Right, and who’s got it on their to-do list and who’s going to wake up in the morning thinking about it. And then here’s another one. If you’re having trouble with ownership and delivering to people’s facts, one of the techniques I’ve seen people use really well is for the leader to describe what done looks like. You will know you’re done when this happens. Yeah, sometimes I do things as simple as when I’m asking someone to prepare a document or some preparation, I’ll say, “What I’m expecting is a document with a staple in it,” which is my way of saying, “It’s not a paragraph. It’s not a one pager. It has a staple.” Or, “You’ll know you’re done when you can boil this down to a single piece of paper.”

Peter: I love it.

Liz: So the more you can tell people what done looks like in your mind … I think most leaders fall short because they just are moving too fast, and there’s the lazy thing that kicks in, and we don’t stop to take here’s what my expectation is and let me share it. And in absence of that, how would I know? How would I know?

Peter: In the last minute or so that we have, I love the idea of your 30 day challenge. I’m sort of running an experiment, trying to shift to more of a multiplier capability. Can you throw that challenge out to listeners?

Liz: The challenge is, what is a small thing that you can do to be more of a multiplier? And I’ll just toss out a few you might consider. One is instead of telling, ask people. I would encourage you to take the extreme question challenge, and the challenge is this. Go into a meeting, a one on one, a touch base with someone, a staff meeting, and say, “My job is only to ask questions.” My promise to you if you take this challenge is that it will be hard. It might be brutally hard. But, it will reshape the way you see your role as a leader. So maybe you take the extreme question challenge.

Maybe if you tend to over-contribute, you’re bringing too much of the energy, too much of the ideas, you’re accidentally diminishing that way, maybe you take the poker chip challenge and you come into a meeting and you bring a set of four chips with you, in your head. And each one represents something you say or contribute. We find that the best leaders know when it’s time to be big, and they play a chip with a big idea, a big ask, a statement, a clarification. And then they also know when it’s time to be small. And not disengage, but intellectually retreat and create space for other people to contribute, or maybe you identify the native genius of the people on your team, or maybe even more important than that, the native genius of someone on your team that you’re having trouble with. The person you don’t see value in. And instead of asking, “Is this person smart? Really, is this person smart?” Ask instead, “In what way is this person smart?”

Or maybe you take the rubber band challenge and … oh goodness, maybe … Let’s see if I have an even rubber band here with me. Is you take a rubber band challenge and instead of giving people things to do, you think of work as a rubber band, and this is delegating work, and you think about it more like this; what can I give someone to do that’s the max stretch?

Peter: Stretching out the rubber band.

Liz: The thing that’s going to stretch them to the point where they’re uncomfortable and almost feel like they’re going to break, and then my job as a leader in that uncomfortable stretch where Liz is struggling and I’m asking her to do something hard, is simply to just hold the position and let her come to me and have the satisfaction of figuring out the hard thing. My job is to learn how to set stretch right.

Peter: Sit in the discomfort of someone else’s discomfort without alleviating it.

Liz: You know, I think that’s exactly right. Too many leaders haven’t become comfortable watching other people being uncomfortable. Yeah, and I think that’s the genesis of accidental diminishing is that often, it’s not our disbeliefs in people. It’s that sometimes we care too much, and we’re too quick to save, and too quick to offer an idea rather than sit in silence for a few minutes.

Peter: We have been talking with Liz Wiseman. We’re talking about one of her books: Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter. Liz, you’ve certainly made me smarter in this conversation. I thoroughly appreciate your perspective. I think the book is excellent. I think people should run out and buy it, and it’s already helped me lead more effectively, and it will have the same impact on whoever reads it. So, Liz, thank you. Thank you for sharing your ideas, and thank you for being on the Bregman leadership podcast.

Liz: Thank you. Thank you for your leadership and for teaching all of us.

Peter: Before we go into the closing music, I want to remind you again that my master level coach training is happening in a few short weeks. I’d love to see you there. To register, visit peterbregman.com/leadership-coach-training, or check out the URL in iTunes.

I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Bregman leadership podcast. If you did, it would really help us if you subscribe on iTunes and leave a review. A common problem that I see in companies is a lot of busyness, a lot of hard work that fails to move the organization as a whole forward. That’s the problem that we solve with our big arrow process. For more information about that, or to access all of my articles, videos, and podcasts, visit peterbregman.com. Thank you, Clare Marshall, for producing this episode, and thank you for listening.