Seriously, Chris,

you need to read this book because it's written as a novel.

It's written as a business parable with an application section in the back.

The story...

The story arc in this book is about a company whose CEO takes her eye off the ball on the values that are important to them.

Somebody else comes in and forces her out and within a very short period of time dismantles the culture that she had created.

Because he's ambitious and looking for, you know, essentially building his own CV, his own resume.

It's probably easier for you to help a company that has fewer layers, right? How do you think about it as they start to expand and get more layers trying to preserve whatever leadership culture structure you put in there?

So if you could share a, You know, like what are some of the, the, the, the core principles in the radical promise? Like you could share with us that, you know, where leaders can start, like what, you know, in terms of where their credibility is now or what level that is and what they can be doing to build that.

Sure.

So yeah, let's start, let's start with that, that first, uh, observation of yours, Chris.

Yeah.

Leadership has got nothing to do with your position or title.

And I'll try to be polite about this, but I've met plenty of people over the years in my work who sit very prominently on their company's organizational chart.

have very lofty and impressive sounding titles, have thousands of people sometimes that report to them, yet still have, and this is the polite part, a bit of work to do as far as their leadership goes, right? So being an effective leader does not automatically come with the territory of the title or where you perch on the org chart.

They're kind of floating below the radar, just doing the bare minimum just to get by or, all of these things so i'd love you know yeah i love what you're saying there because this is reality you know and yeah

Yeah

... as to what that, what that stands for.

So you're right, it is, it is a framework.

Um, I wrote about it first in my first book, which is called "The Radical Leap", which came out, the first edition was in 2004.

So it's been out there in the world for quite some time, and used by a lot of people in, in a lot of different organizations.

LEAP stands for Love, Energy, Audacity, and Proof.

And there's a verb in front of each one of those.

Mm-hmm

Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

So how do I increase the odds there is, is what we were talking about.

Now we gotta flip it over and it's, it, it's the, the same thing that I, I don't wanna overcommit just because you, you n- want it at a particular time, and I want to be able to deliver it to you.

It's better for me to say, "I can't do it by then, but I will do it by, by this time, given everything that I have on my plate." Th- that's better than to say, "Yes, I will do that for you," and then not do it.

I mean, that's, that's, that's sh- I, I hope that would be obvious to people.

But here's what happens, this is what I've noticed.

When you make this part of the discussion as to are, you know, what commitments are we making to each other in the moment, all day long, then it increases the awareness.

No, they're not.

Talk about that a little bit.

Yeah.

So my, my co-authors in the book, Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner, have been conducting research on leadership for, oh man, 50 years now.

Um, Jim is my most significant mentor, so it was a really cool full circle thing writing a book with him.

But their research, um, started with a very simple question, which is what do you look for and admire in a leader, someone whose direction you would willingly follow? The key word there is willingly.

Not because you have to, but because you want to.

And they asked that question all around the world, across industries, across cultures, and the simple answer that came up again and again back then and still to this day is credibility.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

And if I don't have that opportunity to grow, I'm going to be dissatisfied.

And if I come to you, the leader, and I say, you know, I'm still doing the same job I did when I walked in the door and I don't feel challenged.

You know, you said I have an opportunity to grow here.

And then I could come back to you and say, no, I didn't.

I never said that.

So from a leadership perspective, what a really great leader will do is try to find the promises that people are inferring by virtue of being here.

It's not a thing, it's the

Can you share a little bit about that as a foundation to where we're going today? Yeah.

Sure.

Yeah.

In fact, I'll step back and give folks a little broader context.

So I've been at the work of leadership development now for 35 years.

And this journey has taken me to, it's kind of a poetic way of saying it, but to literally just about every kind of business you can think of and just about every kind of industry.

So I've got a very broad base of perspective on what makes business work and more specifically, what makes leaders effective in these businesses.

wall of my office, collaboration.

So frame that up for us from the book.

Yeah, so it again comes back to this awareness thing.

If it's true that people are likely to construe what we say as a promise or a contract, then we need to develop the habit of speaking as though everything that comes out of our mouth is a contract.

The old saying, my word is my bond.

To really take that literally and develop the attitude that says there's no such thing as a casual promise or a casual commitment.

And that is an attitudinal approach, right? First of all, I'm making a decision that that is going to be the standard that I set for myself, right? And then it comes back to that awareness.

It's can I hear the words? Not only can I hear the words that are coming out of my mouth, but can I hear the words that are about to come out of my mouth? Because I want to make sure that I can follow through on whatever it is.

And now we as an organization, I mean, I can just see, as I was reading the book, I can just see how this expands out in a way that has huge impact, financial impact on your business.

Okay.

Uh, and the flip side of that is maybe even more important.

I can't tell you how many people I've met that have no positional authority.

They're, they're, they're nobody's boss, they're nobody's manager, they're nobody's supervisor.

They're out there doing the work, and they're great leaders by virtue of who they are, how they show up, how they live their lives, and, and their ability to influence people around them to change things for the better.

Which by the way, is a- also a great description of a great salesperson.

Their ability to influence people to change their lives for the better.

In a very positive way.

So what is your take just on that stat? And really, what is the best way to combat that and just make your employees be more engaged and have better retention, all those kinds of things? It's a loaded question, but yeah.

Yeah, no, it's a great question.

And it's a really important one.

First of all, let me give you some context for that.

That number has not budged in 30 years.

It has not budged.

That level of disengagement at 75% level, I mean, maybe a percentage point here or there, but it's in a significant way, has not budged.

Hmm.

Well, there you go.

It starts by posing that question to ourselves.

If you look at your customer policies, for example, and ask the question, does this, whatever this system, policy, procedure is, does this show our customers that we love them? Or another way of asking the question is, if we really loved our customers, would we do it this way? So, for example, there's a, a company that I've cited quite a bit, I've written about and spoken about a lot.

It's called Trailer Bridge.

They're in Jacksonville, Florida.

They ask that question in just about every context when they were bringing the company out of bankruptcy and trying to turn it around.

And one of the questions they asked was, do our policies and procedures show our customers that we love them? So real quickly, these guys are in the shipping and logistics business, so they ship barge loads of stuff from mainland US primarily to Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, and all that.

Mm.