What tips do you have for leaders?
I mean, there are just a billion potential tips for leaders.
But I think the one that I run across the most
in the leaders that I work with is why are you leading?
What is drawing you to be a leader?
What's the aspiration there?
And where that comes from is that we're taught
through society and from the youngest age
that what we need to pursue
is the next rung on the ladder
or moving up into the right,
going from one thing to another.
But often we're not thinking about
what better outcomes look like for ourselves.
And so, so many of the leaders that I work with,
I'm really trying to understand,
are they leading because this is something
they really believe in,
something that they really wanna do,
or are they leading because
this is what they think is expected of them?
This is what the world has told them to do
and is it actually right for them?
So the biggest tip that I have is for people to do
a little bit of introspection to say,
is the life that they're leading as a leader,
the life they want to be living?
Or is there a version of that
that looks better than where they are now?
But I feel like that the answer that might come
might not be as easy as just a little introspecting.
So I wanna go to your journey.
If you did that for yourself,
and what did you find, what did you explore, Eric?
Yeah, I think you're right.
It's never easy.
And to say that it's easy is disingenuous completely.
But I remember very, very clearly
having gone through one of the hardest things
I've ever gone through in my life,
a really tragic loss of my father.
And I continued going through the leadership ranks
and pursuing bigger and bigger jobs
through the largest grief that I felt in life
in a lot of ways.
And it wasn't until I was finally able to get
some sense of closure or resolution on what I was feeling
that I was able to take a step back and really think,
what do I care about?
What are the beliefs that I hold about the world
and the way that I live life that are important to me?
And if I could just break that down into a smaller bit,
what does a perfect day look like for me?
How am I spending my time in a day
that feels like it's so aligned with who I am as a person?
And so I really took that on as a project
and realized that a lot of what I was doing
was outside of what I believed or wanted to be doing
in my leadership roles,
and instead carved a new leadership path
where I could spend more of my time,
not just in a day, but every five minutes,
doing things that really light me up
and really bring me to my best leadership potential.
Wow.
So you didn't completely change your path,
but you incorporated that little by little in your life?
Yeah, I mean, I think it's really hard, right?
It's like people, it's something in dreams or movies
where we get to just turn our lives upside down and say,
okay, we're gonna go do this thing we've never done before
and excel at it.
But rather treating this whole thing,
I'm in my late 40s now,
and treating this whole life as sort of this journey
that we're on where there's gonna be twists and turns.
And the idea that there's a right answer,
there's an idea that there's an end goal
that we have to reach as a leader,
whether it's a CEO of a company
or the chief marketing officer or anything in the C-suite,
that that's finally the golden ticket
that's gonna answer all of our questions.
That's what I'm trying to dismantle
because you can have all of these things
and look so good on paper or on your social feeds,
but feel pretty empty and hollow inside
at the end of the day.
So, I think a lot of people want to achieve being a leader
because of the status it provides
and the position that it holds for them in life
without thinking, is this really something that I want
and something that's good for me?
And I think that that's what requires the introspection
and the analysis to say, what is the right path?
Or what could I be doing that feels more expansive to me?
There's so much I wanna explore here.
How, so, and I don't have a question designed for this,
is it's a very random thoughts.
So, when you found out for yourself,
like, hey, this might be my path to doing things.
But then I see a lot of people,
so I had recently, I had one of my friends,
he couldn't find a job and he's been struggling through that,
but he wants to start a business because he's looking up.
And he, instead of applying for 10 other jobs
in other places, he's jumping head on
into this business venture which he knows nothing about,
how to run a business.
But seems like you did not do that.
You did something very different
and you took a different approach.
How did that path, like, what was that path like for you?
Yeah, I mean, I think it's a good question.
It's always so tempting when we leave one thing
to use a cliche to like throw the baby out
with the bath water, right?
And to say, everything that we've learned
or accumulated up to this date is now irrelevant
because I'm doing this new thing now.
But what I did and what I always urge people to do is,
I spent most of my career post-academia as a marketer,
as a brand builder, as a marketer.
And as I got more senior in those roles,
I was taking on more of the parts of the function
that I didn't like as much or didn't gravitate to as much.
Not that they're not important,
it's just I personally wasn't lit up by them.
So I did some introspection and said,
what are the parts of what I've done
that I really love to do?
That included writing, presenting,
making sure that if I was doing marketing,
that it was focused on the foundational storytelling
and brand building pieces that can then be used
as part of growth and performance drivers,
but I don't wanna spend my time optimizing advertisements.
That's not what I wanna be doing.
I'm a brand builder, I'm a speaker,
I'm a writer and I'm a storyteller.
So how can I create what I'm doing,
leaning into what I was strong at based on the equity
that I've had from the places that I've been,
build on that equity instead of throwing out everything,
keeping what's really good and getting rid of the things
that I don't want anymore.
Wow, that is, wow.
Say that one more time for our listeners.
That was so good.
Yeah, so I mean, you can almost think about it as like,
remember when we were kids, we had a backpack, right?
And as you get more senior organizations,
you're adding more and more stuff into that backpack
that you have, but when you realize that that backpack's
bursting at the seams and so full and kind of breaking,
you've gotta figure out in your next thing,
what are you gonna unload from that?
What are you gonna keep in that backpack that you really
love that you can't do without?
And what can you say, you know what,
I don't need to be doing this anymore.
I've done it, I don't really like it
or I'm not that good at it.
And maybe I wanna lean into what I'm really strong at
and what I really love to do.
So your backpack's a little bit lighter
and you're a little bit happier.
So what did you get rid of for your backpack?
Yeah, I mean, I got rid of, I turned out, you know,
I don't love, probably because of the way I was raised
and maybe a lot of people are like this,
but I was raised without any authority whatsoever.
I had complete control over my childhood and my life.
I was raised by just a single mom who worked three jobs,
you know, she didn't graduate high school
and so worked really hard to just make ends meet.
And so this idea of authority,
this idea of always having to manage up
is not something that I've loved.
And it's something you have to be really good at
if you take on a big corporate role,
you have to be really good at figuring
how to quote unquote manage up.
And it's not something I ever love to do.
I'm not a very political person, I've never loved to.
So what better thing could I be doing
but run my own company?
Yeah, that's awesome.
Wow, thank you for sharing that, that's amazing.
Okay, I have one more question for you, Eric.
I think today's segment has already been great.
I think that was very practical insights
that you shared with us.
Thank you.
My question for you is,
what defines a great leader to you, Eric?
There's so many, I guess I'd start with,
I start with four things,
four principles of leadership
that I really think make a great leader.
The first is having a vision,
having an idea of where it is that you're going.
And it doesn't have to be a grand vision
like Martin Luther King or changing the world,
just a vision for where you want your company
or your business to go.
What is that vision?
That vision is useless if you don't have the passion
that's attached to the vision.
How much do you really care about it?
The most successful leaders in the world
care about what they're doing so much that
it's part of the air that they breathe
and the water that they drink.
And it's related to the vision that they have
about where they're going.
So you've got the vision, you've got the passion,
but everybody knows that those things aren't that useful
unless you have persuasion,
the ability to bring people along
on the journey of the vision that you have
and to inspire people with the passion
that you have as a leader.
But then the fourth thing is perhaps
the most important thing at all, and that's humility.
And you can think about humility
as literally a line across a page.
And leaders are either kind of above or below that line
at any given time, right?
We experience this all the time in terms of our humility.
When we're below the line,
and we all know how this works
in our personal relationships.
When you're below the line,
you're committed to being right,
you're closed and you're defensive.
We've all been there probably multiple times a day.
We really wanna be right.
We're not really open to new ideas
and we're gonna defend our ideas at all costs.
But the best leaders are the ones
that can rise above that line
where they're not committed to being right,
but committed to learning.
Where they're not closed, they're open,
they're not defensive, they're curious.
So again, it's vision, passion for that vision,
persuasion to bring people along
and the humility to know whether you're being above
or below that line and trying to rise above it
as much as possible.
How does someone improve in these four areas?
I mean, the first is, you know,
it's outside of what you learn in business school
or outside of what you learn in classrooms.
But vision comes from a lot from intuition.
What is the intuition or the beliefs
that we have about the world
and what we can do to make this world a little bit better?
I'd hope that leaders are going into what they're doing
because they see a problem in the world, they wanna fix it.
That's every leader I've ever worked with
spot some kind of problem, big or small
and has a solution to solve that problem.
So again, it's really making sure
that you're really crystal clear through language
and articulating what the problem is
and what your solution is to that problem.
That's what helps you define what a really good vision is.
You can think about a vision is not, you know,
what is your big lofty vision in the world,
but what does a perfect world look like
if you do everything you say you're gonna do?
What does an ideal world look like?
You know, in terms of passion, you just gotta have it, right?
We've all met people who go through the motions,
who are doing what they do and it's a job
and that's totally okay.
But those are not often the best leaders
because they're not inspiring people
to come along on the journey with them.
The persuasion piece, that is always about
learning what successful communication is,
not broadly, but for every individual
that you're talking to.
How do you really take the empathetic inputs
that you have through other people
and then how do you communicate
based on what you're getting back?
And that's where this idea that started in the 50s
of active listening comes from.
The idea of active listening
is that you're listening so hard
that it actually changes your mind
and changes your direction.
And the best leaders in the world
practice active listening,
really hearing the empathetic input
and then responding to it.
And that's where persuasion really comes from.
And then humility, it's so interesting, right?
Because we're seeing such a lack of it in these days
in a lot of ways.
We're not seeing people really rise above
being committed to being right and close and defensive.
But you know, if you really look at the people
that inspire us and the people that we look up to
as heroes in the world,
there are people that are generally curious,
not just about other people,
but about the world around them,
generally open to new ideas
and being pushed on their thinking.
And even if you take people that maybe are polarized right
now, people like Elon Musk, for example,
who we love him as an entrepreneur,
the jury's out on what direction he's going in
from lots of perspectives,
but he is somebody who has been open in the past
to really being pushed in his ideas,
really being open to being pushed in his ideas,
not being committed to being right.
And the question is, what happens when somebody starts
to drift below the line?
And when we start to see people drift below the line.
So again, you know, it's really about listening
to other people and really taking in those empathetic inputs
in order to communicate better.
Thank you for sharing that with us today.
Well, that's awesome.
Do you recommend any books to read when it comes
to the listening side or the leadership skills side
or whatever you, something that will actually help people?
Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, it's interesting.
It's like so much of what I've read around this
hasn't necessarily been in book form,
but through either Harvard Business Review articles
or watching the leadership style of people that I admire,
whether it's the CEO of Patagonia or other people
that are really making a mark
through differentiating leadership styles
and inspiring people in the world
to think differently about business.
So I don't know if there's like a singular book,
but then again, I'm not also the biggest business book reader.
I try to lead into fiction,
read fiction as much as possible.
I stay away from reading too many business books
to be honest with you.
Thank you for being here today.
I'm really happy that you tuned in to Vision Pros Live.
I'm looking forward to seeing your reactions
as these episodes continue to move forward.
This is gonna get more and more fun.
We'll have more and more engagement as well.
We'll invite people to participate in the show
and thank you for giving us your time and attention.
Have an excellent time building out your vision
and becoming a Vision Pro yourself.