Jack Zenger-Global Leadership Expert

Jack Zenger is a bestselling author, speaker, and a national columnist for Forbes and Harvard Business Review. With more than five decades of experience, Jack is considered a world expert in the field of leadership development and organizational behavior.

He is the author and co-author of 13 books including including How To Be Exceptional: Drive Leadership Success by Magnifying Your Strengths, The Extraordinary Leader, Turning Good Managers into Great Leaders and The Inspiring Leader: Unlocking the Secrets of How Extraordinary Leaders Motivate, along with his newest book Speed: How Leaders Accelerate Successful Execution (McGraw Hill, 2016)

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Transcript

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good morning good afternoon good evening and however you are listening to this episode of leadership bites it's absolutely fabulous to have you here so who do we have today i have got jack zenger now jack zenger is well we say best-selling author but he's actually the author of 13 books which just absolutely shows you the depth of his expertise and insight in the space and place of leadership he's a best-selling author he's a speaker he's a columnist for forbes and harvard business review he's got five decades of experience and he really is considered to be a world expert in the field of leadership he's written books such as how to be exceptional drive leadership success by magnifying your strengths the extraordinary leader turning good managers into great leaders the inspiring leader unlocking the secrets of how extraordinary leaders motivate along with his newest book which was released in 2016 speed how leaders accelerate successful execution i mean it's a list of excellence i was beyond thrilled to get jack on this episode of the podcast and well without any further ado enjoy the episode welcome to leadership bites with myself your host guy bloom this is a leadership podcast where i have conversations with colleagues i chat with guests and sometimes they'll be just me talking you can connect with me at livingbrave.com and when you enjoy the episode subscribe and please tell everyone so jack it's absolutely a privilege to have you on this episode of leadership bytes i've done a little intro which will give people a bit of a line of sight on you but i think it would be marvelous just to hear in your own words who jack zanger is and just in in essence the the field that you play in and where you put your energy and what it is that you think about yeah well you know i guess the first thing that people may want to know about me those who don't have any idea is that i'm not exactly a spring chicken i will in a few days here i will i will turn 89 years of age so wow one of the things about me that maybe is uh is you know useful to understand is that i have spent probably 60 years of my life in this general area of thinking about leadership and leadership development now i've done that from three different perspectives i've done it from the perspective of a an academic i taught for a few years at usc that's the university of southern california here in the states at stanford i was an adjunct professor in the school of business so i was an academic and then i went on to kind of work in the corporate world so i for 11 years was on the inside of an organization as the vp of human resources and then i decided to launch out and become an external consultant supplier to the industry but but in all of these cases the the common thread was my profound interest in the topic of leadership i was always fascinated as a young boy i'd grown up working alongside my father who was a hospital administrator and i i quickly kind of could see what a high amount of leverage a person who is in a senior leadership position could have for doing good and for making positive changes in an organization so my career has spanned these three arenas of entrepreneur academic corporate but always with this common thread of leadership uh i i'm not sure where this all came from but and i certainly think i was blessed with a an optimistic point of view i always believed that the the best lies ahead of me and strangely enough i still think the best life which i fantastic which i know sounds strange for lots of people but but i think there's some there's just some exciting things that are going on today and and i believe that you know with all of the turmoil going on right now at this moment with the pandemic and the you know million people who have died as the consequence i'm still extremely optimistic about what the future holds for for our profession what it holds for organizations uh what what we can accomplish i i think we we've had some things happen certainly here on on this side of the pond uh that have caused a greater awareness of social justice and i believe that we will painstakingly make some progress in in that arena i think we've made some real you know progress in terms of realizing and revisiting the importance of better work-life balance and having people be able to be be at home and do so in a highly productive way so i'm excited about the fact that maybe business travel will not be quite as prevalent as it has in the past we'll be able to kind of manage that better through the use of technology and just as you and i today are talking you know in a very efficient way it didn't take one of us getting on an airplane and going uh for days you know and wear and tear on the family and on time and on body and soul to make all this happen uh so i i'm very much a a believer that um people have a huge potential which isn't always tapped and that uh when you treat people with kind of great respect and dignity and you you seek out from them what their thinking and their ideas are that there's just an almost an unlimited amount of of potential that that can be expressed and so we see these these moments in time when people rise to such extraordinary heights and do such marvelous things and it's when leaders create for them this you know this kind of environment where they can they can be unleashed and and the cap can be taken off the bottle and they can have such positive impact on the world about them so you know that's that's really at the heart of what i've been doing we i've my interests over the years have have ranged kind of broadly from you know self-managing work teams to productivity improvement but it's always come back to this common thread of what is it that we can help leaders understand about themselves how is it that we can give them better self-awareness how can we help them and look at their own behavior how can we help them improve that behavior in positive ways and i guess the other thing that's really i think been a bedrock of what i've tried to do and be is to always emphasize good science that this thing that we're engaged in is really important and there is some good science around it and if we can keep coming back to to what's the evidence what's the what are the what are the are the research underpinnings of whatever practice we're espousing so much of what has happened in the past in in this general field of leadership development has been very you know someone's personal opinions the latest book that they wrote but it wasn't always based on any solid evidence and i think one of the things that i've tried to do in these last years of my career is to have a much more rigorous objective analytical look yet so what what does the data really say about what what truly pays off what makes a difference in uh in leadership effectiveness so that tells you a little bit about me wow okay well there's a feast of things there for me jack so thank you thank you for that i guess because you brought up that span that you've been in this space and it really struck me a conversation i had with somebody a couple of years ago and he was a gentleman who said i've come to the conclusion that i rob people of their experiences and you know that kind of it sounded very insightful but i didn't quite get it and i said what what do you mean when you say that and he said well back in the day when i started in leadership guy and he was a more mature man than myself he said we didn't have the internet and it wasn't digital and when something went wrong you had a week to put it right more or less because you had to write a report or ring somebody up and you could kind of delay things and then when you did speak to somebody generally speaking you'd already put it right and that was kind of the way of things he said but these days of course people know about three and a half minutes after it's gone wrong and you're on the phone on a zoom call or whatever it is and that means you say i recognize that i've started to micromanage people more not because my understanding of leadership has changed but the pressure on me has changed and that led me to ask want to ask you a question which is in this time that you've had in this space do you think the truth of leadership the inherent truth of what it is to lead somebody or a team or an organization has changed or is it no it's really just the context that people are operating in guy you know lack of less forgiveness less time and i just you know it may not be the best question i've ever asked but it's hopefully you get the essence of what i'm trying to ask you well yeah well i do believe that we are circling you know around about the the flame uh and that we're getting closer and closer to having an accurate and a practical understanding of what leadership truly is so one of the advantages of of you know 60 years doing this this work in general i've seen this enormous transformation from a fascination and a focus on command and control being better at directing and instead a much greater focus and emphasis on treating people with dignity and respect and realizing that there is that the the best answers is as a rule kind of lie within the person themselves that my work within individuals isn't me kind of injecting some brilliant new knowledge in them but it really is in helping them to to find within themselves the good answers and on occasions suggesting some things that they might want to consider that gives them a new point of view a new frame of reference but i think we have made real progress in terms of what constitutes truly effective authentic leadership and how we can help more people acquire that and so yes i think that the pace of today's world has uh has you know put the pressure on leaders to both gather better information and but it's it's also put the pressure on them to practice good good leadership principles and and put into put into practice some some things that we've known for a long time but we haven't always done and and that that's what i think is is really encouraging about what's happening today is that we're putting into practice ideas concepts principles that were popular 50 years ago but weren't were popular in terms of the the theoretical press but not not practiced okay so do you am i hearing from you that you have a sense that the times that we're operating in you know the phrase if you keep on doing what you've always done you get what you've always got so there is a recognition that things have to be done differently yes right okay because i i sometimes wonder if i mean intellectually i think that completely makes sense but i just wonder how that will fare against people's fear of failure or whether or not they the intellectualization of this is the right thing to do i know it's the right thing to do but i'm scared because this is this is a complex situation and yeah and i i might but i do know if i if i just crack on i'll get something done and i just wonder how you kind of see that well let me just circle back a little bit and that is to say i'm not suggesting that everything that has been being done in the past needs to be done differently in the future i think we've had we've had very solid sound leaders who have practiced some wonderful you know principles of leadership in times past and i think they need to stay they they need to be perpetuated what we also have seen though is there's been a lot of of uh things that weren't weren't done as effectively as they could be so i i just think it's that ever it's that constant quest for looking for the better way looking for the the more efficient the more effective the more the more respectful way of dealing with people and i think we're we have made real progress in in that arena and i hope we can continue to to accelerate that progress is there i mean i'm looking you know whenever i see that somebody's written or co-authored 13 books it almost it always makes me realize that i'm watching too much television so that's uh that's i've only got the one so i always think about that but when i look at 13 books and i definitely i'm investing in a couple of them that's for sure which is you know i wonder if there's any do you have any when you look back do you go that's what i think stands out for me in in in my academic purview there are even though i may have written or spoken about or referenced a lot of things the standout ones for me are because i had dave ulrich on the podcast and he interestingly said you know i don't necessarily want to be known for my first idea which i thought was very good because you know he said over the years i've changed my mind right which i thought was brilliant because he you know he says but it's imprints so what can you do so i just wondered if for you there's anything that yeah you know i've said a lot of things right over the years but the things i think i stand by the most are or or the ones i'm most connected to are um it'd be great maybe to get a sense of that from you well yeah i i smile because david was a friend i mean i i i can just hear him saying that and i think he's absolutely right that we've all said things early in our careers that we kind of wince when we hear them now i guess what i'm maybe most proud of and what what i think maybe was will be the contribution that may uh last is that for a long time we had approached leadership development as if it were a very individual affair that we were trying to help the individual change his or her behavior in in ever better ways and that the focus was was very much on the person i think what's uh changed in my thinking in the last few years is that you can't divorce the context in which people work and the the organization has a very major role to play in terms of creating the environment where effective leadership can be practiced and more effective leaders can be developed and so i think recognizing that interplay between the organization and the individual and what we can do to kind of help organizations realize what they can do it isn't rocket science it isn't uh it isn't anything mysterious but when organizations you know when when the senior management organizations shows real interest gets highly involved creates the the ongoing sustainment processes when when you put all those things together then you can see you know real magic happen so in the last version of our book called the extraordinary leader we we made some major changes and the major changes in the book were the addition of six chapters that had to do with what the organization needs to do in order to make leadership development really work and if i if i've left anything behind it maybe will be it will be that idea now you know there have been some other things that that my colleague joe falkman and i have published and written about that that may make some contribution to this discipline uh we we had this interesting aha when we were looking inside our our database of some nearly a million and a half 360 degree feedback instruments and we came to the discovery you came to to to understand that for every one of these leadership competencies that we'd been focused on for a long time there were a handful of other behaviors that went hand in hand with that so that notion of there being companion behaviors or or enabling behaviors or whatever you want to call them that idea that by doing one it's like it's like cross-training and athletics by doing one you get better at the other and by helping people understand what those are you can help leaders have multiple pathways toward improving their leadership effectiveness so it isn't just one not one path it's not just doing one thing that will help you become better at strategic thinking or better at problem solving or better at collaboration and teamwork or better at whatever but there are multiple ways of doing that and they differ from individual by individual i think that idea may also be something that will will live on and i think other people will come to to recognize the the validity of that of that approach so just from my own understanding and clarity there what i'm hearing in that interplay of organization with the person there's i've just done some work with an organization that focuses on workplaces and i never really appreciated how for example the dynamics of a workspace let alone the culture have an impact on the way that people work i mean i inherently knew it but i didn't pay attention until i started working with them as an organization then i suddenly went oh okay i really get it so there's something then i think i'm hearing there that says just in that kind of maybe in that kind of metaphor of that or that understanding that these factors play a part in what it is the person has to work with i mean i can turn up with a motivation i can turn up within a a personal accountability but actually this is going to be dampened or damaged or reinforced or enhanced by the environment that i culturally find myself in is that is that what i'm hearing there you can make a heaven or a hell for me absolutely and right i think so that's what again from an organizational standpoint one of the opportunities we have is to help corporate executives public sector executives to understand what they do to create this environment to create this context for for leadership makes a big makes a big dent on how successful overall leadership development efforts will be for that organization yeah okay and when you talked about companion behaviors were you giving the idea of almost like physically by doing one kind of exercise it can help with multiple areas that one might be doing in a sport is it that kind of sense of that one behavior shift can actually help you in multiple disciplines as a leader absolutely absolutely right and so what we've what we've seen is that many times we've thought historically that these leadership competencies were very individual very separate very distinct from each other what we see from the research is that no no no they're they're very intertwined they're they're hopelessly linked together and when you get better at one it does tend to influence the others but there but as you then single out any leadership competency that you want to help somebody be improve upon what you see is that there are some some other behaviors that that in some cases look pretty obvious like look pretty intuitive and then there's other cases where it isn't it isn't it isn't as intuitive so for example one of the things we've learned about strategic thinking is that encouraging leaders to get up out of their offices and go out and talk to customers has a very high correlation with a leader's ability to be good at strategic thinking so so those who get really high marks at their in their strategic thinking are also the ones that get high marks in terms of their getting up and going out and connecting with customers so there is that customer relationship makes a difference and so there are some non-obvious activities or behaviors that seem to have a strong correlation with any one given capability or or or competency another example is you know we we think when we talk about the importance of leaders being ethical and having high integrity and honesty what what is it about high integrity and honesty what how how do you teach that how do you how do you inject that in people well you know that's not easy i mean and it's not not obvious one of the things we found from our research on on that topic was that leaders who are perceived as having high integrity and honesty are those who tend to be more assertive and you would say to yourself oh wait a minute those are two totally different things my being assertive is totally different than my being ethical and honest and yet if you you know think about it more and you say i'm working in an organization i see some things going on but i don't believe to be appropriate if i choose to be quiet say nothing not respond am i being ethical and honest or is it the person who has the courage to say it's i will i will speak up i will speak out i will make i will call my upper management's attention to these practices that are incorrect even if it means me losing my job that kind of assertiveness and that kind of that kind of behavior seems to be descriptive of the most ethical and honest people at least as seen through the eyes of their colleagues that's quite interesting is it yes the intellectualization of my integrity or my ethics right are a beautiful thing but if they don't manifest in the real world then it's an intellectual exercise right so yeah okay so the assertiveness or whatever or bravery or whatever it might be but the willingness to hold space right on my opinion and to step into harm's way potentially yeah is what turns it from a an isolated intervention inside my head into something that adds value to the world yeah yeah yeah yeah okay that's a that's what i'm going to reflect on a little bit more so i like that thank you for that so you know as you you know if i ask you you i i when covid happened to us i didn't talk about it too much to people because i thought well you know this will be old news on the podcasts and um you know a couple of weeks from now you know people will be going why were you making such a big deal of it you know mental mental note to self um that's not saying that to be there to be the case so it almost probably doesn't matter what it is in the sense of okay we've got this virus but what we have is this you know insert sort of title here but we have this external force that is putting a lot of pressure on i guess the echo never mind society but yes society and the economics that go along with that and i heard a statement from somebody the other day i won't say the name because it'll get a reaction from people as to whether or not they like them but what they what they actually said was you know if we're not careful there won't be an economy to come back to which i i think is very interesting this interplay between doing the right thing by people but also if we're not careful the damage inherently could be a lot more damaging and i wonder in terms of the conversations that you're having about leading in in times where the future is i mean the future's always unknown but you can have a bit of a best guess at what it might be and i just wonder how your or what the conversations are that you're having where people are looking to lead into a 12 to 18 month maybe two year period of i don't really know where this goes and i just wonder if that's triggering any particular kind of conversations for you well i believe i i believe that the that is triggering the eliciting are first of all those of a bit of humility because there were a lot of people who shared your view that this was going to be a very transitory very fleeting kind of event and that turned out not to be the case i think it it has caused leaders in general to become a little more reflective and i think if it's had any major impact on the people i talk to it seems to be the leaders have recognized that their behavior is extraordinarily contagious that their mental attitude really is contagious and that one of the things that's very much needed in in today's world is for there to be some sense of of honesty and integrity about what but we don't know the answer to all these questions but in the in the midst of all that to still maintain optimism uh excitement about the future and a willingness to kind of pitch in and do your best to to make whatever the future world is going to be to to to get there as quickly and smoothly as as as as possible and so i you know i see people in in similar roles to the one that i have in terms of they're spending a little more time kind of reaching out to people seeing how they're doing personally i think that's happening more than it has historically and and i think that recognizing that again this this balance of of work along with family life i think we've seen how valuable that that that family uh context is and i think it's whether people are you know how whatever that definition of family is for them uh but we've seen some good things happening as a consequence of it and we'll find our way through this but yes so i i guess what i'm hearing there is it's almost as if you you know we you go on courses and you go on workshops and people say it's the human being and the human doing and you know the the intellectualization of of balancing those two has has always been in the leadership development space but maybe what this has done has gone good luck if you don't know bring that into your reality you know people have memories they they are now going to react to not just the what you're asking them to do but the manner in which you're taking it to into account the reality that this is this is bigger than our product or our service yes yes yeah very much yeah so yeah there's a call on that okay so that that's that that really resonates so looking forward to the future just as we kind of maybe kind of bring this conversation to its conclusion where's your where's your energy what are you working on looking at or yeah just even what we may be expecting to see from you well it may sound strange but but one of the things i've really become intrigued with is the the overall importance of organizations creating a more open culture in which people are are prone to give each other helpful information share valuable information that could help them to be even more effective we often refer to this as feedback you know in terms of me giving you feedback you're giving me feedback and i've become fascinated late about this topic and feedback because one of the things that we've seen from our research is that probably one of the most powerful things you can get leaders to do is to ask for feedback from their colleagues so while their colleagues do appreciate them giving feedback to them periodically they even appreciate more the the leader who asks for feedback and i've been intrigued about why that is so why is it that me seeing my leader asking me about you know ideas about his or her behavior and how it could be altered to be even more effective what is there about that that is so so powerful and i i think it's because my leader asking me for feedback is a message of history his or her respect for me his or her wanting truly to improve himself or herself and it re it changes the culture so i'm intrigued with the you know with the idea that if you want to truly create a a culture of feedback that maybe the most powerful single thing you could do would be to get people to ask for it because when people ask for feedback then it becomes much more much easier for me to to give them ideas and give them information and and to make suggestions about a better process or a better approach i will tell you that that i have a i have a belief that for which i don't have any strong evidence and that that that belief i built a career on that so let's move on yeah yeah that belief is that the very process of asking for feedback from other people does something pretty magical to you and that is i think it increases your level of self-confidence i think it increases just that very act of of asking for feedback it takes a little bit of courage takes a little it it has a little bit of risk involved in it but when you do it you find out oh other people have good ideas they're willing to share them with me and aft by doing that with some frequency you soon become very open to to better ideas and what we have seen from our research is that the people who do that are the ones who create an environment of continuous improvement that both for themselves and for the people that they work with there is this continuous cycle of ever higher and higher performance and productivity the the the self-confidence topic is one that's just has fascinated me through much of the 60 years i've been doing this because i think self-confidence is rooted you know is so much the foundation for many of the leadership behaviors that we've always valued and we've espoused and but we've never known quite how to help people gain greater self-confidence some people seem to be born with a certain amount of it and and uh it hasn't been clear because simply achieving and accomplishing doesn't do that i mean simply having higher levels of you know items on your resume doesn't give you high levels of self confidence so i'm intrigued by this simple act of asking for feedback but i don't have any good proof of that yet so if you'd like to kind of join me in my my quest to find the answer to that i would i would welcome you i'm on board i'm on board and it rings true with me there's something about familiarity with my fear and you know unless you're a fundamental sociopath then you know people fear very often getting feedback and it's interesting to see people reject positive feedback sometimes as much as they reject any other form of feedback which is again you know quite interesting about that right kind of focus but what i do notice is that working so i've spent most of my adult life teaching martial arts and coaching in that space and what's interesting about that is all the best martial artists are great at doing two things one is putting themselves into a space with the where they're training with individuals who are as good as if not better than they are which by definition leads to learning pressure and when i say constant failure i mean yes they have successes i.e they they won that round or that doubt or that that sparring session but they're continually losing but by their own design because there's a lesson to be learned there and they're getting they're getting bio feedback i.e how does that body respond to this they're getting intellectual feedback as in you know maybe if you put your let your arm to the left and to the right and what you see is the confidence doesn't grow through success the confidence grows through failure slash receiving constant feedback absolutely i've often said that uh any any progress that i've seen you know in myself and and in my the people i work around is it has come when they deliberately put themselves in a position of being uncomfortable so it you don't you don't grow when you're in total comfort you grow when you deliberately put yourself up in a place where you can you can grow and you can learn you can test yourself so i'm now just writing the zenger and bloom how leaders grow book and um i'll be sending it to you this afternoon for your thoughts and you're laughing as if i'm actually not going to do it so listen you know these things for me anyway probably more for me than for you i can have conversations with somebody such as your good self until you say to me you know guy we really have to call this to a close so before we before you instinctively do that i just want to say thank you for your time i reached out to you and you know this stranger from afar sent you an email and you brilliantly responded to it and said you know hey why not so thank you so much for doing that very well i appreciate it it's been a pleasure so on that note i'm going to bring this to a close and if you could just stay on the line for two moments just so i can make sure everything's uh sort of recorded not that we'll do it again if it hasn't but if you could just give me a second so thanks very much jack that's it so i hope you enjoyed the episode please share so others get to hear about us and subscribe so you keep up to date on new episodes also visit livingbrave.com if you want to connect with me and find out more about executive coaching team effectiveness and changing culture oh and of course you can buy my book living brave leadership on amazon so on that note see you soon