Stephen M. R. Covey

Welcome to the Puck Venture Capital and Beyond, the show that examines the changing landscape of our world. We'll have candid conversations with VCs, entrepreneurs, and thought leaders grappling with our current challenges and providing solutions to key problems we face as a nation. I'm Jim Beer, president of CMVG Advisors. This podcast brings change makers to the table to discover the inner workings behind their decision making strategies and ultimately how they got to where they are today. The most significant breakthroughs are break withs.

You break with traditional thinking to have a breakthrough. And I think that trust and aspire is a break with, the traditional command and control type of leadership that becomes a breakthrough because it's different in kind, not just different in degree. On today's episode of The Puck, I have the pleasure of talking with Stephen m R Covey, a writer, public speaker, and the author of several books about trust and leadership. He is the son of the late businessman, Stephen R Covey, one of America's foremost authors and speakers, who inspired a generation with his book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. My conversation with MR Covey ranges from the latest concept of leadership and creative thinking to his insights into how to inspire trust in one another in a profoundly changing world, and how we can evolve into leaders who put service above self interest.

There's a lot to cover, so let's get to it. Steven, m r Covey. Welcome to the Puck. I'm excited for this conversation. I've been looking forward to this conversation.

And before we jump in, you wanna take a minute and give us a little bit of your background? Sure. Well, thank you, Jim. I'm thrilled to be here with you on the Puck. And I kind of in am in the leadership development space, and my father was doctor Stephen R.

Covey, who wrote the seven Habits of Highly Effective People. And initially, I I'd done some things, prior, did a little bit of time in doing investment banking and real estate development, but decided I wanted to join up with my dad at the time because it was before the seven habits had come out as a book. Wow. And I knew what he had in it because he'd been teaching it for a while, but he hadn't published a book yet. And so I thought, here's a chance to really change the world, make a dent in the universe, to quote Steve Jobs.

And I really thought it could do that and have a real impact because I had experienced it myself, and I'd seen my dad teach it and had the impact that it had on others. So I joined with him and helped build what was then, Stephen R. Covey and Associates that became Covey Leadership Centre. And I was on the business side of it, building the business, growing it, running it. We became, you know, global.

We tried to figure out a business model to work because we had a great mission, but we needed a good business model to have margin to fund the mission, And then we ended up doing a big merger with Franklin Quest to form Franklin Covey, that is also in the leadership development space, and that's been going on ever since the merger. It's been twenty five years plus. And I independently, after a while, I left and went on my own to write some of my own things. I couldn't do it while I was involved in doing the day to day leadership. And so I left to work on some things, and I wrote the Speed of Trust book and turned that into kind of a leadership development program and process, and I ended up really bringing it back to Franklin Covey, to the mothership, and we formed then the Global Speed of Trust practice within Franklin Covey, which is really a focus on trust, and now trust and inspiration, as part of the kind of leadership that's needed today.

So really my life has been in leadership development both on the two halves on on running this as a business, but also in being a thought leader and thinker and speaker on this, which I've really been doing the second half of my career. And that's something that I kind of took the baton from my dad, who'd been so good at this and started to do it myself. I was initially reluctant, Jim, as you might imagine, to try to follow in his footsteps because, you know, no matter what, I wasn't going to write the seven Habits. It's a rare book, and it was a little intimidating to me, even frightening, to have my father's name, to try to follow in his footsteps. That's why initially I went down the path of, well, I'll focus on the business side of this, running this, you know, being an operator.

And that was safer, and I had some skills in that. But once I found my voice around trust, the fear dissipated, and I no longer was worried about what other people thought. And I said, you know what? Now I found what I want to say, and so I went down the path of I'm going to write about this and speak about this because I believe in it. And so I've kind of had two career paths along the way.

Wow. That's that's inspiring. And we're going to talk about trust and inspire, and I want to get into kind of your finding your voice. But I want to also, just for our listeners, because there is such a history to the quote covey family institutions and so forth. Yeah.

So there's the covey leadership center. There's the Franklin covey. There's the covey link. There's the now global speed of trust practice. Can you walk our listeners a little bit through those permutations?

Yeah. So Covey Leadership Center was really the firm that my father founded. He really was the thought leader behind it with the seven Habits and Principle Center Leadership, First Things First, a number of books like that. And then I came in and ran it as a business and tried to scale it, take it global, which we did. And then at some point, we decided that we would merge the Covey Leadership Center with Franklin Quest, which was really the powerhouse in time management at the time.

And we at Covey had been in leadership development, but we also started to dabble in time management when my father wrote First Things First and said, you know, we can be in that space too. And in fact, we kind of reframed time management as life leadership. It's not just managing your time, it's leading your life. And so it made sense to combine, and we thought we could better achieve our mission if we combined than if we were out there competing in the marketplace. And so we did combine, and we formed Franklin Covey.

And so Franklin Covey is the really the ongoing organization, and Covey Link is really was just my own personal venture when I went independent and worked on writing Speed of Trust. So that that's just a personal venture. Never intended to be a big brand. And then when I sold CubbyLink back to Franklin Covey, that's when we said, well, let's just call this the global speed of trust practice within Franklin Covey. So if you see Franklin Covey, that's the umbrella organization that continues my father's legacy, and the Global Speed of Trust practice is kind of my contribution on the thought leadership side to that entity.

So it all comes together, but it's really now Franklin Covey being the global brand. And we're operating now, Jim, in some 150 plus countries around the world. That's amazing. So you touched on again what brought you into this change of role from, you know, just doing the business side to finding your voice. I was touched by your intro in your new book where you say that in the, you know, the tribute to your mother and your father, you you know, I had the honor of knowing your father, and we met.

Yes. And I was a fan of his books and his seminars. But I do have a question, which was, What was it like growing up as the son of Stephen Govett? You know, amazing. It was the only thing I know, so I grew up with that.

But I kind of was aware growing up that I had some pretty special parents, because I would say this about my mother. She was my father's equal, just maybe not as public a figure as he, but she was equally remarkable. And, you know, I grew up with them as parents, so at one level I thought, well, they're just my mom and my dad like anyone else has parents or a family of some sort. Although I began to recognize that, hey, not everyone has my good of a situation, you know, a mom and a dad. And also, I began to recognize I've got pretty great parents, because I can talk to them and they'll listen, and they believe in me, and they help me come to believe in myself, and that's what it was like.

And so, it really was remarkable to have a dad who was so much at the forefront of leadership thinking, and yet, rather than just having all his efforts be externally to the public, he really focused on being there as a parent to us kids. And, so we learned these principles in our home. Each of the seven habits, he taught them independently before he had put them together as seven habits. I learned, you know, begin with the end in mind, be proactive, think win win, seek first to understand, then to be understood. We learned these individually as principles of leadership, and of how to lead your life and how to live before he'd even put them together into a cohesive whole of seven habits.

And so, that's why when the book was going to come out, I knew this was going to take hold because we'd grown up with it, and he'd lived it with us. And so, it really was a special thing, and I feel a sense of stewardship and responsibility to having been raised with such good parents and with with these great principles to try to do my best to model them myself, but also to pay it forward and to give it back and to continue on my father's legacy. So I feel a sense of stewardship to his legacy because it is significant. You know, I've had many people, much like the start of this call before we started even the podcast, you and I talking about how my father had inspired you, and how you had conversations with him after seminars, and really the impact that he had. I hear that frequently.

And what I share with people is what I shared with you at the start, and that is that as good as my father was in public, and he was really good as a teacher and as an author, as good as my father was in public, he was even better in private. As a husband to my mother, as a father to us kids, he was who you thought he was. The source of his power was his integrity. Living and believing the principles that he taught. He wasn't perfect, but he always would course correct, and get back on track, and without ego, with great humility, really believing in these principles and trying his best to live them.

And we saw that in the home, and sometimes you don't. And I also saw that backstage. You know, I've seen great presenters that can just wow an audience on stage, and they come off stage and they're like a different person. They don't show that same respect to the help, and the AV people, and the others. Well my father was good on stage and even better off stage.

He treated everyone with extraordinary respect, dignity. He'd believe in people. He'd inspire people that were AV people that were just putting his microphone on. He'd have a brief conversation with them, somehow connect with them. And I hear these stories all the time.

So I feel a sense of stewardship and responsibility, having grown up in really a great privileged situation, and having had such a great dad and mom. Well, from somebody who loved your book, Trust and Inspire, you're doing God's work, and you're doing a good job of doing it because you really are. We'll get into picking up the eighth habit, so to speak, but I think you're doing an amazing job. It triggered in my mind something I haven't thought about in a while, but I've always, when I've thought about going out and doing things in public or otherwise, I remember your father's quote, and I'll probably mess it up, but basically that, you know, no success in public life will make up for a failed, you know, private life, so to speak. Yeah.

And he he really would reinforce that. And so whenever my ego gets ahead of me, I remind me that if my three kids and my wife when they call me a hypocrite and they call me out on my stuff, I I go, oh, my god. There's Stephen Covey reminding me you gotta walk the talk. So that that's very, very inspiring. So having, you know, grown up in that background with that wonderful examples that you got from your parents, you now, in Trust and Inspire, you you lay out certain leadership principles.

Can you walk us through the leadership principles you include in your new book? Yes. Absolutely. The first is kind of recognize that our context is changing around us, and I like to make the point that the world has changed in profound ways, and yet our style of leadership has not kept pace with this changing world. You know, we all know about the changes.

I mean, this is a big part of What's on the Puck podcast is all the changes that are happening in society and the world, advancements in technologies and the like, and it's changing everything, and yet we're still kind of leading from the old model of leadership, what I call command and control, the traditional top down hierarchical type of thing, that actually served us well in the industrial revolution and, you know, scientific management. It brought efficiency and things like that in it, but it's not near as relevant today in a world where people have choices and options. Remote work and hybrid work, and where work is far more collaborative and interdependent and partner based than ever before. And you got these younger generations coming in. Millennials, Gen Z, upcoming Generation Alpha with completely different expectations, how they want to be engaged.

So the world has changed. Our style of leadership needs to catch up with this changed world. And command and control, even the best version of it, what I call enlightened command and control, is not going to work. So we need a new way to lead in a new world of work, and I call it trust and inspire, in contrast to command and control. And the idea is basically to see the potential and the greatness that's inside of people, and to try to see your job as a leader to unleash that potential, not to try to control it, and to see people as whole people, meaning a body, a heart, a mind, and a spirit.

So your job as a leader is to inspire people, not merely motivate them. You know, if people were only economic beings, just a body, then motivation might be sufficient, you know, just pay them. And people do wanna be paid, so they do have a body, but they also have a heart, so they wanna care and connect and to love. They have a mind, they wanna grow and develop. They have a spirit, they wanna contribute and add value and make a difference, and have significance and meaning and purpose, contribution.

So inspiring can take you to a whole different place that motivating alone will never take you. So I view leadership as, excuse me, I view people as whole people with greatness inside of them. That's what a trust inspired leader does, whereas a command and control leader might say, well, there's a few people that have greatness in them. They're called high potentials, and with everyone else, you just kinda kind of contain them, control them. And at the end of the day, people are just primarily motivated by economics only.

And again, I'm not downplaying that. They are motivated by that, but they also want more, because they have a heart and mind and a spirit to go along with that body. And so that's how I view people. Then how I view leadership, some of the principles there are the idea that there there is enough for everyone. So my job as a leader is to elevate caring above competing.

And yes, let's compete in the marketplace, but let's care and collaborate in the workplace because there's enough for everyone. That's an abundance mentality that my father talked about in seven habits. It's not just a scarcity mentality. Scarcity might be good economic theory, but scarcity is lousy leadership theory. Abundance is a far greater approach to leadership because there's an abundance of everything that we're trying to create, of creativity, of innovation, of commitment, of joy, of energy, of passion, of respect, of empathy, of understanding.

You know, there's an abundance of all of this, and so it's a better way to lead. Another idea is that the leadership is stewardship. It's about responsibility, not rights. Influence, not position. Leadership is a choice, not a position.

So my job as a leader is to put service above self interest. And in the process, ironically, self interest is served. And then finally, another key idea is the idea that enduring influence is created from the inside out, as opposed to outside in. So if I buy that belief, then my job as a leader is to go first. See, someone needs to go first.

Leaders go first. They're the first to model the behaviors they would like to see. If they wanna see more openness and transparency, then they model openness and transparency. They wanna have more empathy, more respect, and understanding, they model empathy, understanding, and respect. They wanna have more trust, they're the first to give trust, as well as to be trustworthy.

They go first. And so if I look at I I kinda went through a series of five fundamental beliefs of a trust and inspire leader that is a more complete, a more whole, a more accurate paradigm or mental map of people and of leadership. Whereas command and control would be a less complete, less accurate, less whole paradigm of people and of leadership. So it's a more expansive approach to it. And those are the paradigms.

We start with paradigms first, and then we move to the actions. And really, there's three simple ones: to model, to trust, and to inspire. Modeling, trusting, inspiring. Modeling is who we are. Trusting is how we lead.

And inspiring is connecting to why. To why it matters. So as leaders, we model, we trust, we inspire. Those are stewardships we have. Responsibilities, jobs with a trust.

And the book is really around those five fundamental beliefs of how we view people in leadership, and then the key actions, the key stewardships we have as leaders to model, to trust, and to inspire those who we lead. And that's a better way of leading in our world today than the old hierarchical command and control. I'm the boss. I'm in charge. And these are my rights.

No, these are responsibilities I have. So it's kind of amy father used to always talk about the most significant breakthroughs are breakwiths. You breakwith traditional thinking to have a breakthrough. And I think that trust and aspire is a break with the traditional command and control type of leadership that becomes a breakthrough because it's different in kind, not just different in degree. That's beautiful.

And how did you settle on these principles, and how did you develop your own understanding of these principles of leadership? Really was a thirty plus year journey. First of all, I saw it modeled for my father, and he, in effect, taught principles of leadership and the seven habits, principles of leadership, that are consistent and aligned with this. He'd always focus on principles over practices, because principles could apply anywhere: they cross cultures, they cross time, they cross, different circumstances, whereas practices tend to be more specific to a culture, a time, a place. And so you can apply different practices to principles, but to focus on universal timeless principles was important.

And so it became the software in my mind of looking for principles. So I was looking for principles of leadership, and I could see these shifts happening in society. That, you know what? You can't just tell people what to do, maybe in a way that you used to, because people have choices and options. People don't wanna be managed.

People do wanna be led. And they wanna be trusted. They wanna be inspired. And they have greatness inside of them, so focus on seeing that, and helping them come to see it in themselves. I just began to observe and see this, and I'd see different expressions of it.

And I began to kind of codify over the years an organizing framework to try to say, what are the key principles of leadership? Well, it's got to start with the paradigm, the mindset of how we view people and how we view leadership. Because, you know, paradigm comes from the Greek paradigma. The mental map or model is trying to describe the territory. But what if you had an inaccurate map of the territory?

What if we had an inaccurate or incomplete paradigm of people? We saw people as just economic beings who had to be controlled. And what if we had an inaccurate map of leadership? That leadership was hierarchical and position oriented versus truly collaborative and influence oriented. And, you know, around stewardship, not rights.

And responsibility is not position. And so, to kind of try to find an organizing framework to package it so that you can make it accessible, that's what my father did with seven Habits, is he took universal principles, found key principles that applied to both personal development and interpersonal, and then he put them together in a framework. And I've tried to do a similar thing by looking at leadership principles, how we view people, how we view leadership, and then the key responsibilities of leaders today, and organize these, put them into a framework, and into an expression of it. And that's where the expression ultimately came, you know, moving from command and control to trust and inspire, which most people can resonate with. They hear it, and it's aspirational.

And they have people reflect upon leaders who believed in them, in their lives, who were trust and inspire leaders to them, someone that believed in them maybe more than they believed in themselves, and what that kind of leadership did for them, how they responded to it, and to say, what if you could become that kind of leader for another? To try to give people a vision of what's possible and how this kind of leadership, they probably have experienced it. They might not have called it trust and inspire, but they probably anytime you have someone to believe in you, you know, what that does to you, how you respond to it, You don't need to be managed when that's happening because you're being led, you're being trusted and inspired. And just to try to say, we can become this kind of leader for others, just like other like some have been for us. And so just trying to find the right ways to frame it, to language it, and, that's what I tried to do with this, Trust and Inspire.

Give people a vision and really a roadmap to becoming the kind of leader that the world needs today. Totally makes sense. As you were thinking about developing your own leadership style and this whole notion of trust and inspire, in your book, you talk about a story, the green and clean story. Do you want to share anything about that with our listeners? Yeah, absolutely.

Thank you. Green and Clean is a story my father uses in Seven Habits to talk about delegating and empowering people. And the story is about me when I was just a young seven year old boy, where he's teaching me how to take care of the yard, the lawn. We had a a lawn with three different segments of lawn, and this is back in the days before automatic sprinklers. So you had to manually do it, and you know as a young seven year old that's a big job.

I began my book, Trust and Inspire, with the green and clean story from my perspective of what it was like for me because as a young seven year old I had someone who was empowering me and who believed in me. And so the long story made short is my father, he trained me over like a two week period that I want the yard to be green and clean. You know, how you do it is up to you, but if I were you, I'd turn on the sprinklers, and and he kind of trained me in in how to do this, and but the whole focus was on green and clean. These are results. These are outcomes.

He would clean part of the yard and leave the other part unclean, and say, No, look, that part is clean, that one's not. And he trained me. And then he trained me around being accountable to the idea of green and clean by saying, Look, why don't every week we can walk around the yard, and you can tell me how you're doing? I don't judge you. You judge yourself, and you judge yourself against Green and Clean.

You tell me how it's going. And so he kind of trained me over two weeks, turns the job over to me, and this was, by the way, in the middle of the summer. It's scorching hot. He turns it over to me. It was on a Saturday.

He says, Okay, son. It's your job. So Saturday goes by, and I did nothing. I'm I'm just out playing with my friends. Sunday goes by, nothing.

Monday, nothing. Tuesday, nothing. Wednesday, nothing. It's been five days. The lawn is turning yellow at this point by the hour because it's scorching hot, and the sun is beating down.

We'd had a neighborhood barbecue over the weekend, and there was garbage just strewn throughout the entire backyard where the barbecue was. You know, it was anything but green and clean. And my dad was kind of close to just kind of taking the job back and just saying, you know what? He's too young. Maybe I started too young with him.

He can't handle this yet, but he decided not to give up on me. He decided to stay with it, and so what he did do is he kind of went back to the agreement that he had built with me, that we would walk the yard, and I would tell him how it was going. So he said, Simon, why don't we walk the yard and you can tell me how things are going? Like we agreed, we do every week. And so we began to walk the yard, and I could look down and see, Hey, this yard, this is not green.

This is yellow. And, you know, I knew the difference, and it wasn't clean. It was messy, and I began to break down and cry, and I said, dad, this is just so hard. And he kinda said, well, what's hard? You haven't done one single thing yet.

You know, but what was hard, Jim, was me to learn to take responsibility to own this, to be accountable and to own it. And I said, dad, will you help me? He said, what was our agreement? And I said, Well, you told me that you would help me if you have time. That's right.

Do you have time, Dad? I've got time, he said. So I ran in the house, I got two garbage sacks, I took one of them, and then I gave one to him. And then I began to direct him and said, Dad, would you go over there by the barbecue there and pick up all that garbage that's strewn throughout because it kinda makes me sick. And he says, hey, I'm your helper.

I'll do whatever you want. You tell me what you want. I began to direct him. He began to follow my lead and do what I had asked him to do, and I realized at that moment, this is my job. I own this.

Look, my dad's not telling me what to do, I'm telling him what to do. It's my job. My dad treated me according to my potential, not my behavior, and I began to live up to that potential. I began to see myself differently. I'm responsible.

I can do this. And from that moment, I took care of that lawn, and it was green, and it was clean. Not only for that summer, but for many, many summers to come. Now my dad's main purpose with this was was not so much the green and clean lawn. He wanted that, but it really was to grow his child, to grow He said my main purpose, grow kids.

You know, raise kids, not grass. But here's the great news about it. He both raised the child, and he got the green and clean lawn to boot. He got them both. And I began to see myself differently, and really, that was the first leadership imprint in my mind that I remember to this day, because my father believed in me and helped me come to believe in myself.

He treated me according to my potential, not my behavior, and I lived up to it, and I became it. And it's impacted how I view leadership, how I view people, because I had someone that started with me as a seven year old. It's simple. It's just not always easy. And I think if this can work with a seven year old, I bet it can work with a 27 year old or a 47 year old or a 67 year old, with anyone.

We respond to being trusted. We respond to building an agreement together with each other. Not something dictated to you, but something you build with another, and then we're more committed to it. We've had greater involvement, and we do better in performing. My father got the result, but he grew the child.

That's what leadership is all about, getting results in a way that grows people. And our ability to get the results in the future has just gone up. I learned it with Green and Clean from my father as a seven year old boy. Wow. It's inspiring, and it's an example of how he inspired you and built that.

So you also talk about the importance of being an authentic leader, and there's a lot of different ways to talk about that. But one of the ways you talk about it in your book is the story about princess Diana who captured the imagination of a lot of people. And and a lot of our listeners, you know, are are younger and and may not remember her in the same way. But you tell a story about a time when there was a lot of fear and a lot of prejudice against people with AIDS, and yet you tell a story about Princess Diana. Do you want to share that story and why you think it's important?

Yeah. You know, we look back at it now, and it looks easy, but at the time it wasn't because people didn't know, and there was a lot of bias and fear that we don't know how age was spread, and some people really thought that you touched people you could get it. But science was evolving and people were starting to learn. What Princess Diana did at the time was she went and visited a hospital that was filled with AIDS patients. And, you know, she's a very public figure, and she and so there's cameras with her.

She went to this hospital and began to meet with AIDS patients, and again, very little was known at the time. But she made a point of not just speaking to them, but to go up to them individually, one by one, and to touch them, to shake their hands, to touch them, to show compassion for them and empathy, but also to physically touch them. That she was not afraid, and that she believed that was the right thing to do, and also that she would be okay. But she modeled this. She went first.

She demonstrated both compassion, but also empathy, understanding, and she really kind of let out the entire world that this is the right thing to do. These are human beings that deserve our empathy, our respect, our understanding, and we can be with them and touch them at a time when people weren't quite sure. It was really you you know, today it looks commonplace. It was remarkable at the time, and someone went first. And she was the one, and that was who she was.

She believed that. She demonstrated it. She modeled it. That's really the the authentic leadership is, you know, honesty is when your words match reality. Authenticity and integrity is when your reality matches your words.

You are who you say you are. And her reality is going in and showing compassion, empathy, and physically touching people that at the time it was not known if it was this safe or not. But believing that it was, and acting on that belief, and that human beings deserve and need respect, acting upon that, That's authenticity. And that kind of empathy is really a powerful thing. And, so she went first.

And that's kind of one of the key principles of leadership. Someone needs to go first. Leaders go first. Including sometimes taking a risk because it's the right thing to do. And so I think it's just a wonderful illustration that I wanted to pay tribute to her in using her as an example of going first.

So your dad wrote The Seven Habits, and he wrote a lot about principle centered leadership. And you've been writing about leadership through the lens of trusting and inspiring. Can you walk us through your dad's version of leadership and how you see it evolving? Yeah. It's interesting because if you take the name of his book, that was a follow on the seven habits: Principle Centered Leadership.

In a sense, that was the organizing framework around it, was that leadership needs to be based upon enduring, timeless principles, Like fairness, and respect, and kindness, and contribution, and empowerment, and belief in people, and the like. And so, there are enduring principles, and if you organize leadership around that, principles, not practices, that, you know, not fads that come and go, in and out, but enduring, timeless principles, that's a stronger form of leadership, more enduring form of leadership. So, principle centered leadership. So the focus on principles, but here's another key focus to my father's approach, was that it needed to be inside out. In other words, you start with yourself, you look in the mirror, versus looking out at everybody else and saying, Hey, as soon as they change, then I can change.

They're the boss, they're in charge, they've got to change first. No. We always look in the mirror. What can I do? Inside out.

You talked about this when you gave the example with your wife and children, of you trying to model and make sure that you're being authentic to who you are, and they hold you to that. And, you know, my father talked about how private victories precede public victories. And so that's really the first three habits in seven habits is having that daily private victory with yourself, and that precedes than having public victories as you interface and interact with other people because you first had that victory with yourself. And so that's the idea of inside out. So all of my father's writings were affected by really those two overarching ideas of focus on enduring principles and focus on working from the inside out, as opposed to outside in.

So I've adopted that same stance and approach as I've looked at leadership, and I'm framing this around trust and inspiration, and saying, Let's look for enduring principles around people and around leadership, and let's always focus from the inside out. That's the idea of go first, and don't wait on others to lead. And, you know, you can even lead your boss by, you know, you don't have to wait on someone. And it might be very difficult in some situations, but we are, you know, responsible. If we think that the problem is out there as everybody else, that very thinking is the problem, and we've disempowered ourselves.

We've got to lead out, go first. Look in the mirror, go first. I'll give you one last piece on leadership that came from my father, and that I took and have tried to expand in trust and inspire. And here is a simple definition for leadership that my father had. He said, Leadership is communicating people's worth and potential so clearly that they come to see it in themselves.

See, you think about that. That what what is leadership? It's communicating another's worth and potential so clearly that that person comes to see their worth and potential in themselves. And that's a beautiful idea. It's inspiring.

And so in Trust and Inspire, I'm taking that key idea and then even expanding it and saying, it's not just communicating their worth and potential, it's seeing it. You know, because as Thoreau said, it's not what we look at that matters, it's what we see. And two people could look at the same person, one see nothing, and the other see enormous potential and greatness, and talent inside of them. So our first job as a leader: see the potential. See the greatness that's inside of people.

It might be lying dormant, you know, like the I tell the story of Death Valley, California, where nothing grows there because it's so hot, so dry. But in 2005, six inches of rain fell in just a very brief period. And sure enough, a short time later, these wildflowers popped up and carpeted the entire valley. So it turns out it wasn't dead after all. It was just dormant.

The seeds were there all along, but they needed the right conditions to come out and to grow. And people are a lot like that. The potential for greatness is there, but it might be unseen. It might be dormant. But if we see ourselves as leaders, as gardeners, not mechanics, gardeners creating conditions for the seeds to flourish, for the people to flourish, to grow, to develop, versus mechanics that go around fixing things and fixing people.

No, we're not mechanics, we're gardeners creating conditions. But we see the potential inside of people, we see the greatness. And then we communicate the greatness, the potential, the worth, the potential inside of people so that they come to see it in themselves. And then we develop the greatness, and then we unleash the greatness. See, communicate, develop, unleash potential greatness that's inside of people.

But it starts with seeing. I'm reminded of Michelangelo when he carved the David, the great statue of David, you know, big slab of marble. And he said this. He said about the David, I saw the angel in the marble, and I carved until I set him free. And if you go to Italy where they have the David, they show some other statues that are called the prisoners that are partially carved out, but Michelangelo consciously left them there, not completely carved out to kind of show you gotta see it.

It's in this marble, this slab, and I've given you a partial thing, but I haven't completely done it. The David is a complete carving of what I see. And in a sense, that's leadership. Seeing the potential and the greatness of those that we lead, those around us, and then communicating that to others so they come to see it. Developing it, unleashing it, giving them opportunities, giving them chances to run with it.

So that's my expansion of my father's idea of leadership, which I think is a beautiful idea, and I've tried to build upon that and go deeper. Totally makes sense, and that's a beautiful sentiment. So as we move towards the end of this wonderful talk that could go on from my perspective for a long time because it's thoroughly in enjoyable. But zooming out a bit, Steven, I've heard over the last several years about a leadership vacuum. And when we look into the world, I think we do see an absence of mentors.

And and in our in our political landscape is so polarized. And many people have complicated relationships with religion, for instance. How do you think we got here, and what can we do to remedy this? Yeah. We're operating in a world of declining trust, where the trust is going down all around us.

We might even say that there's a crisis of trust. And the danger of a low trust world is that it tends to perpetuate itself. None of us want to get burned, so we all become a little bit more careful, more cautious, more guarded, and people in turn respond back more careful, more cautious, more guarded. And we can find ourselves perpetuating a vicious downward cycle of distrust and suspicion, creating more distrust and suspicion, and everybody feeling justified in the process. Distrust is contagious.

And one of the key reasons for that distrust is that there's a lack of understanding, a lack of empathy. And I think too often we've confused agreement and understanding. And because people see the world differently, we say, well that's not the way I see the world. We quickly dismiss them and move on. We don't have goodwill, we don't extend trust, and we don't we're not empathic, and and so if we can focus as a way of building that trust, by first trying to understand another.

And understanding does not necessarily mean agreeing. In fact, we might completely disagree. We might see the world completely differently. But it's just showing that we show the respect for another human being, that that we're trying to understand how they see that world in a way where they feel understood. See, sometimes people say, yeah, I understand what they're saying, but they don't feel understood by you.

And again, that doesn't mean you have to say, I agree with them. No. You just wanna be able to say, so let me see if I capture where you're coming from. Here's how you're viewing this, how you're seeing this, and you feel strong about this for these reasons. Am I capturing?

Am I understanding? Again, that doesn't mean I agree with this. It just means I'm trying to understand you where in a way that you feel understood. So the test of understanding is not when you tell someone, hey, I understand you. No.

It's when they tell you, I feel understood. Thank you for listening to me. Thank you for hearing me. I feel heard. I feel valued.

I feel understood. And we still might disagree. So we need that understanding. We need the extension of trust. We need the goodwill, assuming positive intent as a starting point so that we can have our differences become strengths.

Whereas right now, they're weaknesses. They divide us. And instead, differences in an environment of trust can be the source of creativity and innovation. That's what great innovation specialists say is that innovation flourishes when there's a collision of differences in an environment of trust. So we need more trust, more empathy, more understanding, more goodwill, and we need someone to go first.

It's a little bit frightening because you feel like you might be taken advantage of or walked over, but we gotta take that risk in trying to understand first. My father said, seek first to understand, then to be understood. You you have will have greater influence with others. So we need this. And so we need leaders that can lead out in this way, and we and then we need models of this kind of leadership, and models who can become mentors.

We need on the global stage. We need the Nelson Mandela's of the world. We need more of that. We need them on the business stage. We need leaders more akin to what we see with a leader like Satya Nadella at Microsoft, a different kind of leader that has humility, as well as courage, a lot of empathy, as well as performance.

I mean, look at the results. But he has a growth mindset for everyone. See? And he's helped this company adopt a growth mindset, not just for the leaders, but for everyone in the company. So that you see the greatness inside of people, you unleash it.

And it's really remarkable what he and the team and Kathleen Hogan and who's the head of, people and of human resources, what they've done to unleash the greatness of the organization by first unleashing the greatness of their own people. Carol Batchelder did this at Popeye's in the in the massive turnaround led under her leadership of she was a trust and inspire leader, that unleashed the greatness of the organization by first unleashing the greatness of her own people. And she modeled it. She went first. There's many others that are doing this today, Colleen Wegman at Wegmans Food Markets.

I just was with one, Rob Clayton in Education, a superintendent of schools that's unleashing the greatness in the students by first unleashing the greatness in their own people. So we need models, and we need models who can become mentors, have a better way to lead. You know, not the traditional hierarchical, command and control. There's plenty of that out there, But they might get results, but are they doing it in a way that inspires trust? We need models that get results in a way that grows people, in a way that inspires trust.

The ones I mentioned are doing that. So yes, we need more trust. We need more empathy. We need more goodwill, but we also need models and mentors and leaders who go first in doing this. And that's why there is a vacuum.

But I believe part of it is we gotta describe what we need. It's clear we're moving from command and control. Most people would would say, yes. That kind of leadership is not gonna work very well today. It's less clear what we're moving toward.

That's why I'm trying to name it. It's like the Greek philosopher. Forget who it was. You know, the beginning of wisdom is the definition of terms. Let's describe it.

I'm calling it trust and inspire. It's immediately accessible. It's aspirational. We wanna be trusted and inspired ourselves. And we want what if we could be this for another two and lead in this way?

It's just that people wanna say, well, can you do this and still not get burned? And when you say, Sanjay Sanjay Nadella is doing it, you say, okay. Maybe you can. You know, if we can find models and mentors, and that gives us hope, and we need that today. And so that's really part of my charge is we not only need this in our teams and our organizations, we need it in our neighborhoods, in our communities, in our society.

Trust and inspire leaders who go first. And hopefully, hopefully, your work will continue to inspire those people to step up to the mic, so to speak, and to become mentors and so forth, and starting by doing their own work and looking in the mirror. So as we finish, lastly, I noticed, interestingly, in the acknowledgment of your book that you said that there's a part of you that feels like you're finishing your father's work from the book, The Eighth Habit. Do you want to explain a little bit about that for our listeners? Sure.

The Eighth Habit was kind of the follow on book to the seven habits, and I think in many ways it's my father's most insightful book. It's not necessarily his best book because the seven Habits was so beautifully put together, but the Eighth Habit is filled with great insights. But my father would have these breakthroughs, these epiphanies, and and then he'd rewrite the book from a different angle, but he kept all of it in there. So he didn't kind of take some stuff out. So it's just chock full of ideas, but sometimes it's harder to get your arms around it because there's just so many ideas and so many frameworks.

So I felt like, gosh, some of the things he's highlighting here, like, people are whole people. Body, heart, mind, spirit. So that was an idea that I felt like, So what's the implication of people being whole people? And for me, it became very clear. So don't focus on motivating, focus on inspiring.

Because motivating is still kind of speaking to the compartment inside of someone that people are economic beings. They have a body. Motivate them. Rewards. Do rewards work?

Sure. They motivate people to want to get more rewards. I'm not against them. We need them. But inspiration can take them to a whole new place because, yes, it starts with rewards.

You reward them. You do feed the body, But you also nurture the heart with caring and with connection and with love and with belonging. And then you also feed the mind with growth and development and opportunity. People want that. They wanna grow.

And then you also tap into the spirit, the idea that people want purpose and meaning and contribution in your life. Life is about contribution, not accumulation. People want to live lives of significance. They want to matter. They want to survive first.

You know, Maslow's hierarchy of these is real, but there's the upper reaches of it. Even Maslow himself went from self actualization in the highest to self transcendence in a follow on essay, being something even greater, you know, something beyond yourself, meaning, purpose, contribution. So inspiration will take you to a whole different place than motivation alone. So my father didn't complete that idea, but he did say people are whole people. And so that's what I felt inspired to do with this book, to try to give people a new way of leading in a new world of work, and give people a roadmap to how we can become trust and inspire.

And it's building upon the principles my father laid out in the eighth habit and also in the seventh habits, but in a fresh, new way, and in a contrasting way of you know, because we learn best by contrast. So command and control, let's contrast that with trust and inspire. And that inspires us. There's a better way to do this. It's not just incremental.

It's a break with. It's different not just in degree, it's different in kind and so forth. And so that's the idea. And maybe the last thing I'll add is around inspiration. And this is the idea of my father teed it up in trust and inspire, assuming in the eighth habit, and I'm trying to really highlight this in trust and inspire.

It's in the title, trust and inspire. And this is back to the idea of the PUCK, and what you do with this podcast, and where trends are going, where things are going, where thought leadership is going, where technology is going. You escape to where the Puck is going to be, the Wayne Gretzky quote that we both look at. Well, I think the puck in leadership is going towards inspiration. People want to be inspired.

It's partly back to this vacuum. You know, we're living in a low trust world. We're also living in an uninspired world where where there's, you know, there's not enough inspiration. We long for that. We seek that.

And the paradigm shift in the Trust Inspire book is that everyone can inspire. It's a learnable skill. It's not just for the charismatic. We've often conflated charisma with inspiration, thinking you gotta be charismatic to inspire. No, they're different things.

I know some people who are charismatic, but who are not inspiring. I know others who no one would describe as charismatic, but who are remarkably inspiring because of who they are, how they lead, how they connect, how they care. Inspiring others is a learnable skill everyone can inspire. When we connect with people through a sense of caring and belonging, and then connect people to purpose and to meaning and to contribution, when we model the behavior by going first, and when we trust people, we can inspire intentionally. It's a learnable skill, and it's a stewardship we have.

And people want to be inspired. That's where leadership is going, towards inspiration. Even a study from Bain and Company, they showed that inspired employees are a 125% more productive than merely satisfied employees. Now you might expect that because satisfaction is not the highest bar, but listen to this. They're even 56% more productive than fully engaged employees.

So there's something even beyond engagement. And we've been focused on engagement for twenty years. And what's beyond engagement is inspiration, which includes engagement, so the road to inspiration goes through engagement, but now we've added to it that sense of caring and belonging, and a sense of purpose and meaning and contribution to the engagement. And suddenly, there's another level of productivity that's good for the company, but listen to this. There's another level of well-being that's good for the person, the employee, greater energy, greater joy, so everyone wins.

And the the person wins. They wanna be inspired. And when they feel inspired, their well-being is higher. Their mental health, emotional, and physical energy, The joy, the happiness is fun. It's energizing, and you feel like you're part of something that matters.

And then your productivity is higher, so everything goes up. So that's where leadership is going. That's where the puck is going in leadership towards inspiration. I call it trust and inspire. Well, Steven, that's a wonderful, wonderful way to wrap up a thoroughly enjoyable conversation.

And I and I would also, you know, I think add to that based on the my own experience and reading is that in today's world, this authenticity and this looking in the mirror and doing the work and then essentially being an authentic leader, I think people crave that. But I think we're living in an age of transparency. And I think more so than ever, people that are not walking the talk, the hypocrisy comes out and there's no hiding from it. And so I think, no, we don't have to be perfect, But if we don't grab a hold of ourselves and do our own work and inspire those around us and the and the younger generations, then we're gonna have a problem. Because at the end of the day, I think people in general know the difference between falsehood and authenticity.

And I think more so than ever, people are insisting on authenticity. Beautiful. You expressed it perfectly, beautifully. I agree completely. Authenticity, real and versus counterfeit or artificial or fake.

And that inspires their craving it. They relate to it. And that includes also the flip flop of that, the vulnerability. You know, the a leader that's relatable, that's real and vulnerable. They let people see into how they are real.

I love the word intimacy. Let's spell it into me. See. That's I n t o m e s e. I let people see into me that I'm real.

I'm authentic. Not putting on a front or airs. People relate to that. They're inspired by it. And when they see an authentic leader, they wanna follow that, and they feel that inspiration.

So we can inspire by being our best authentic selves. There's these three stewardships we have as a leader. Again, a stewardship is a job with a trust, and there's three of them for the people who we lead and serve, to model, to trust, and to inspire. And if we can go first in each of those three stewardships in modeling and trusting and inspiring, I believe we'll be the kind of authentic leader you're talking about, and we'll bring out the greatness in those around us. Beautiful.

Thank you, Steven. The top venture capital beyond is produced by CMVG Advisors. If you enjoyed the conversation today and haven't yet subscribed to our show, you can find us on iTunes, Apple Podcasts, and SoundCloud. Feel free to leave a review while you are there and maybe even a five star rating. Thanks for listening.

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