Keep Leading!® Podcast 090 | Cracking the Leadership Code | Alain Hunkins

Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Keep Leading!® Podcast, the podcast dedicated to leadership development and insights. I’m your host, Eddie Turner, The Leadership Excelerator®. I work with leaders to accelerate performance and drive impact through the power of executive coaching, facilitation, and professional speaking.What does it take to really be successful as a leader in the 21st century? There are a lot of books on the shelf that claim to have the answer. My guest today says there is a secret code. He goes further. He says he has actually cracked the code. And he is here today to share the secrets with us. My guest today is Alain Hunkins. He is a sought-after leadership speaker, consultant trainer, and coach. His book just released in March 2020 is Cracking the Leadership Code: The Secrets to Building Strong Leaders. It is a number one bestselling new release in the Business Communication category on Amazon over his 20-year career, Alain has led over 2000 groups in 25 countries. He also serves on the faculty of Duke Corporate Education and has published over 400 articles on Leadership. I am excited to have Alain Hunkins on the Keep Leading!® Podcast.

Alain, welcome.

Eddie, thank you so much. It is an absolute pleasure to be with you here today.

Well, I am just thrilled to have you and before we go any further, you have a unique French name and I am probably not doing it justice. So, forgive me if I am not saying it right and please for the record say it from my listeners.

Sure, yeah, my name is Alain, which isn’t spelled the way it sounds in English. It’s because my mom is from Brussels, Belgium. She gave me one of the most common names you’ll find in a French-speaking country which is great when you’re growing up in a French-speaking country but not as easy when you grow up in Flushing, Queens in the 1970s. So, yeah, my name is Alain. So, that’s my name and I’m sticking to it.

All right, thank you for helping me with that. And, clearly, I did not spend enough time when I was in Paris and surrounding areas during my time in France. So, that just means that when we get past this COVID crisis, I need to go spend a little more time there.

Good reason to do so. That sounds great.

Well, I find your work fascinating and I got a chance to watch your interview with our mutual friend Marshall Goldsmith and our mutual friend General Tom Kolditz and you did a fascinating job.

Thank you. It was a pleasure and an honor to be with those two great people.

Indeed. So, everybody wants to know now, I’m sure, after the intro. Tell us about your book Cracking the Leadership Code and the Three Secrets of Building Strong Leaders.

Yeah, right. So, the secrets. So, here are the three secrets and I’m going to share them. You’re going to go “Those are the secrets?” Yeah, the three secrets to building strong leaders are Connection, Communication, and Collaboration. Now, as I say that, you’re thinking “That sounds like common sense” and, quite frankly, Eddie, it is. The thing is what I found in my research is that on average around the world only about 23% of people think their leaders in fact lead well, which begs the question if that is such common sense, then why isn’t it common practice. So, that’s what I wanted to explore, not just what makes great leaders great but what is keeping mediocre leaders mediocre because last time I checked, every single leader I talked to means well, they want to do a good job, they have good intentions but they haven’t been able to close the gap between what they intend and how they’re perceived by the people they lead.

Wonderful. And it could be argued that even though those are three common sense strategies, common sense is not so common, as the adage goes.

Exactly, exactly.

Well, tell us, since many leadership books out there claim to have cracked the code, what makes yours so different?

So, yeah, there’s tons and tons of leadership books out there and my book, people said “How long did it take you to write the book?” and, honestly, Eddie, it took 20 years. And the reason I say that is because this book was built from the bottom up rather than the top down. I didn’t sit down at a desk and go “What are the three secrets?” So, as you said in the intro, I’ve worked with thousands of groups over 20 years. And what I noticed was there are patterns of behavior. So, great leaders have certain patterns of behavior in common. Lousy leaders have patterns of behavior in common. And I started noticing the patterns and I’d hear stories and see examples and I started taking notes. And in 2011, those notes turned into a blog. And over the years, the blogs kept building up. And I looked back on those blogs and what I found was these three overarching themes – Connection, Communication, and Collaboration. And so, the book is written from the point of view not just “Okay, here are these three themes” but also because I’m an adult educator, when I tell people I wrote a business book but it’s not boring because so many are boring, right? And so, the key to all this is how do I bring the principles to life through stories, either stories of seeing the principle work in action or seeing people fail with the principle. And then we get the principle but then breaking those principles down into their component behaviors because I’m a huge believer that great leaders are made, not born and that the skills of becoming a great leader are things that you can do through practice but you have to understand what not only are the principles and the behaviors but what are the things that are going to trip you up.I’ll give you an example. So, Connection. So, everyone gets “Oh yeah, you need to connect” because at its core, leadership is a relationship. So, what I’ve noticed in my practice in my research is that the basis for strong relationships is empathy. So, empathy, I define as showing people you understand them and care how they feel. Now, as I say that, you’re probably thinking “Sounds pretty basic” like a pretty human simple thing to do. Well, the research shows that while 92% of CEOs say their organizations are empathetic, only 50% of people think their CEOs are empathetic. So, again, we have this gap.

So, why is it leading with empathy is so hard? And this is one, I think, anyone can relate to. One of the biggest challenges to leading with empathy is impatience. The fact is showing people that you understand them sand care how they feel isn’t some item just to check off of your to-do list. Human relationships move at the speed of humans, not at the speed of light like information technology. So, showing people that you care means having patience. And, as you know, patience is in short supply these days. All of us have busy plates. We’re full up. We’ve got stuff to do. We’ve got results to deliver. And, in fact, a lot of organizations have ‘drive for results’ is listed as a core leadership competency. The challenge of course is driving for results shouldn’t come at the expense of driving over people who deliver those results. So, part of the journey of the book is showing people you’ve got to embrace paradox if you’re going to be a leader. You have to have the wisdom to know when to go fast and when to go slow. And so, that’s what the book is really about, about basically giving people a very engaging practical roadmap to accelerate their learning curve to becoming a better leader.

Excellent. And I appreciate your emphasis and dedication in the book to the quality of empathy and your definition that you provided as well. Here in the United States, at one point, one famous politician derided it and basically classified it as a trait of the weak but more and more 21st century leadership and transformational leaders are understanding that empathy is a core competency of great leaders.Now, something else that sets your book apart from other leadership books out there, when I open your book up, I’m just blown away by the list of endorsements that you have and who they’re from. That says a lot. Now, I’ve seen some great endorsements before. Now, in your case, once I got past the great Marshall Goldsmith, the amazing Tasha Eurich, the legendary Brian Tracy, Jim Koons, Barry Posner and on and on and on, there’s one I came to that really stood out, Gen. Tom Kolditz. Now, I happen to have him as one of my clients, I do some work for him and I have just an amazing amount of respect for him. He is one of the top leadership thinkers I have ever been around. I am just really mesmerized by him as a leader both as an academic who studies it but also as a practitioner who lives it and here’s what he said about your book, and this is saying something – “Superb book, Cracking the Leadership Code does much to simplify leadership for all of us who practice it and teach it. Alain’s work is extraordinarily narrative. I’m inspired by how much of his own life he shares with us and you will be too. He pulls together so many ideas in the leadership space and does so in a readable engaging format that this book represents. Real value.” He goes on to say a lot of other things but he concludes by saying “I enjoyed every minute and every page of this book.” Now, I’ve heard what he has said about a lot of leadership books and he doesn’t hold many of them in much high regard at all. So, to say that your book represents real value and that he enjoyed every minute, every page of it that made me say “Okay, I can’t wait to devour this.” And so, you have really gotten some serious leadership thinkers to say great things about the book and, as I started reading it, I could see why.

Thank you. Yeah, it was such an honor to get Gen. Kolditz’s endorsement as well as so many of those other people and Jim Koons and Barry Posner have been heroes to me since I’ve grown up in this field and a lot of my thinking is based on their thinking. So, reaching out to them was so important to me and validating because I feel like I’m standing on the shoulders of giants and I feel my work is about passing on this wisdom to the next generation for the time that we live in. As you were saying, empathy in 21st century leadership, I mean, look at the world in the year 2020 and what we’re going through and it’s very clear that we need a different type of thinking and belief structure for our institutions and organizations for us to be able to navigate through the complexity of crises that we’re all facing.

Indeed. And speaking of us needing a different type of thinking to navigate the complexity and the crises that we’re facing, you tell a wonderful story about an organization that needed a solution to customer service about their wait times in your book. Can you share that with our listeners?

Sure, yeah. So, in 2007, the leadership of a large well-known organization had this problem, which you just mentioned, which is that their customer satisfaction was low. In fact, customers were complaining that they were waiting too long online at their thousands of retail locations. So, leadership put their best strategic thinking hats on and they put together an 87-page manual. And they reviewed all the problems and they decided what they were going to do to reduce the wait times, how they were going to deal with the customer dissatisfaction of these long wait times is they would take the clocks out of the lobbies of their offices. So, who is this crazy organization? It’s the United States Postal Service. Yeah, they took the clocks out of all the post offices thinking if people can’t see what time it is, then they won’t mind waiting so long. I mean, I saw that and it’s one of those shake your head moments, SMH moments as people might say on social media.

Indeed.

And what’s amazing is, I think, as we shake our heads at that, for me, I go “Wow!” I’ve seen that kind of behavior in a lot of organizations. And at the end of the day, it’s not the strategy, it’s not the execution. It’s a group of leaders that thought that up. So, how is it that we could be in a place that someone would actually make that happen? So, to me, this idea of leadership sets the tone, and you’re probably familiar with Gallup’s research on how much leaders make a difference, it turns out that 70% of the difference between lousy, good, and great culture is directly attributed to the team leader. So, leaders make such a difference at every level in every organization.

Indeed. And is there any parallel to what we see unfolding around us today with the COVID crisis?

Oh my gosh! I mean, in terms of what to do … I mean, one of the things is look at how often leaders say one thing and then they expect people to do something else when in fact we watch behavior. I mean, for example, now I know we’re recording this, it’s the end of June, but look at this whole issue about wearing masks has become politicized. What we know is there is a technology that reduces transmission rates by over 70% of COVID-19 and it’s called wearing a mask. And many countries around the world have done this but in the United States, somehow wearing a mask is impinging on freedom, some people think. And the fact that we could even be having this conversation is a bit like “We’re really taking clocks out of the lobby? Is that the level that we’re thinking?” And so, part of it has a lot to do with where are our priorities as leaders. The fact is keeping the American public safe should be the number one priority. It doesn’t matter what side or political party you fall in. Keeping people safe should transcend all of that. And yet, even something as simple as what can we do to make sure that people don’t get sick and die gets spun through some kind of weird echo chamber. So, yeah, there’s a lot of lessons about what’s going on right now, for sure.

Absolutely. I thought about it in terms of the mass but also in terms of the idea that if we don’t test, then everything goes away. So, I loved your illustration in the book about a real-life story that took place in this country not so long ago and, as they say, history doesn’t just repeat itself, it rhymes.I’m talking to the amazing Alain Hunkins. He is a coach consultant and he is the author of Cracking the Leadership Code. We’ll have more insights with him right after this.

We’re back. I’m talking with Alain Hunkins. He is the author of Cracking the Leadership Code: Three Secrets to Building Strong Leaders. We were doing a deep dive into your book right before the break and wonderful story, life lesson from something that has happened in the past in the United States and how we see that unfolding again but let’s shift to the organizational side of things. What frameworks do you use in your work as a leader?

Well, interesting. So, oftentimes when I start with working with organizations whether it’s at the individual or team level is an assessment of some kind. I’m a huge believer, one of my mentors said many years ago, that you cannot change what you do not notice. And I know that you had Tasha Eurich on a few episodes ago, she’s written such great stuff on the idea of insight in self-awareness. And the big gap that I see is before we try to teach any leadership skill sets, we have to look first at the leadership mindset. I think there’s a lot of people who basically are in positions of leadership but they haven’t actually embraced the role of leadership, if that makes sense. So, they’re in charge but they don’t recognize what that really means and that leadership is a mindset. And what I found in terms of the framework is, you talked earlier about that history repeats itself, it often rhymes, is one of the things I often do is work to help leaders understand the history of leadership. The fact is the reason we have 77% mediocrity across leadership is because so many of us have inherited bad habits. And I write about this extensively in the first section of the book because I think it’s so important, which is why do we lead the way we do? Well, we learn from our leaders, for good or for bad, and they learn from their leaders and so on and so forth but the question to me was, great, but who started this. It’s not as though organizations have lived around for thousands of years. And you don’t have to go back that far. You go back actually to the beginning of the 20th century and you find Frederick Winslow Taylor who is considered the father of the field of Management. Now, what’s interesting about Taylor is he was by design a mechanical engineer and he saw the workplace as an engineering problem to be solved. And I got to remember this is really early 20th century where 95% of the labor force was doing manual assembly line work in a factory like day in day out, making widgets again and again and time and time again. And his belief … Let’s just put it this way. He was not the most people of people, people, right? He was not very people focused. In fact, we wonder where the term Human Resources came from. We used to be called human beings until we had organizations and then we became human resources because he really saw people as these interchangeable parts like in a machine. In fact, I’m going to share a quote from his 1911 book Principles of Scientific Management that might just either make your jaw drop or make your head spin. This is how Winslow Taylor describes the ideal worker and I’m going to quote the quote part because I couldn’t make this up if I tried. He said the ideal worker would be “so stupid that he more nearly resembled in his mental makeup the ox than any other type.” So, you got to remember, at the time the thinking was leadership or management did all the thinking and labor just shut up and complied. In fact, one of Taylor’s biggest disciples was Henry Ford who was the founder of Ford Motor Company and he famously said of his employees “Why is it when I want a pair of hands, they come with a brain attached?” So, this was the mechanistic mindset.

I’ve heard a lot of Ford quotes but I haven’t heard that one.

Yeah, that’s one. So, what’s interesting is on one side you had this command and control, this is the way things are. On the other side, Henry Ford also paid the workers 5 dollars a day which at the time was twice the going rate and it actually gave birth to what became the American middle class. So, the world though has radically changed since the days of Taylor and Ford. And amazingly enough, Taylor’s ideas of seeing people like a pair of hands and whatnot, that caught on it spread like wildfire. In fact, his work became the core curriculum for a little startup school that you might have heard of, Harvard Business School. So, that’s where they got the ideas. In fact, Principles of Scientific Management became recognized as the most influential business book of the 20th century. So, this is the legacy that we’re living out. Now, that might have worked if you were leading a bunch of factory workers on an assembly line. It certainly doesn’t work in the knowledge economy that we live in today where you need people to be way more than a pair of hands. And trying to get people just to comply, let’s face it, with technology, with things like LinkedIn and Glassdoor and the transparency we have with technology, people know where the grass is greener. And in fact, the Bureau of Labor Statistics has found that the median tenure of workers today, age 25 to 34, is only 2.8 years. So, no one’s sticking around to a lousy workplace. They’re going to find somewhere else to go. In fact, Gen Y and Gen Z, who make up 61% of the workforce now, they’ll go “Hey, I’ll live back home with mom and dad before I take a lousy job if that’s what it takes.” And they’ve changed the game for all of us in a lot of good ways.So, again, going back to your original question, when I think about operating from a place of 21st century leadership, I start by helping leaders look at the mindset and I actually have them assess “Where is your mindset? How much do you default to command and control?” because let’s face it, it’s easier to tell people what to do than to draw it out of them. I call it lazy leadership and a lot of us are familiar with that. We’ve either done it or we’ve certainly seen it.

Wonderful. Thank you. And that reminds me something one of my previous guests said, Simon T. Bailey, he said “Gone are the days where you check your head and heart at the door when you come to work.” Now, organizations want you to show up with more than just your hands, to your point, the antithesis of what the doctrine was that was cultivated there because if people are just showing up just making widgets and not having a head and heart involved, that’s where we get the service issues and so many other things that come up that we don’t like. So, very well said.Now, one of the things I was supposed to do is complete a book about collaboration. It was going to be called Facilitated Collaboration and I did not do that. So, I was excited when I saw in your book. You have a whole chapter dedicated to Collaboration. Can you share just a couple of the techniques around collaboration that you wrote about in your book?

Absolutely, yes. So, collaboration has got so many different aspects to it. And one of the things that has really helped me in my own thinking around this is I took a page out of the field which is relatively new science of Behavioral Economics. For years, traditional economics believed that people always acted in their best economic self-interest. Well, along came people like Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel Prize, he’s the author of Thinking Fast and Slow. So, with Behavioral Economics, the idea is that people act in often irrational ways and there are ways also for us if we want to, we can nudge people’s behavior by offering them certain environments. So, for example, they have found that if you want people to eat smaller portions of food, a way to do that is serve the food on smaller plates because it makes it seem like there’s more food on a smaller plate, right? It’s just an optical illusion. Yet it works. For some crazy reason, it works. Same thing with organ donation. If you want people to default and check off yes on their driver’s license are they going to be an organ donator, well, then make the default that yes, you are donating unless you have to then change your mind, right? So, what are the default settings? So, this is a great tool for leaders to think about because what we know is that for us to have a highly engaging collaborative environment, we need to have the default settings of that environment support employees so that we can work at our best.And what I found in my research is there are four fundamental human needs that need to be satisfied for us to perform at our best. So, the first is the need for safety. Now, there’s obviously physical safety which is why everyone’s working from home right now and not traveling because we have that physical safety need but there’s also psychological safety which has been made famous by professor Amy Edmondson at Harvard. This has to do with the ability for people to feel that they’re safe, they can show up as their whole selves and speak up and speak their mind at work without fear of repercussion, that there’s equal amounts of air time. So, one simple thing any of us can do is when you’re having team meetings, are you hearing from everyone and is everyone getting the same amount of air time. That’s something really good to notice. And if it’s not happening, what’s the cost of that because you’re probably not creating as much psychological safety as you need to. So, that’s the first big need. Fundamental need is safety.

The next one is energy. The fact is we need to be engaged in an energized environment. So, a simple thing that you can do … We all have this need for energy. I’m sure you’ve experienced this, Eddie, where you come to a meeting and the meeting goes on and on, it’s two hours and it still hasn’t stopped and it’s now two and a half hours and you’re thinking “I can’t think anymore.” So, a simple thing is take a break every 90 minutes or more often. So, as a leader, are you intentionally scheduling breaks because you know there’s going to be this psychological and biological diminishing returns if you don’t. So, it’s a simple example of we all have needs for energy and we want to have those needs met.

The third big need is the need for purpose. We all want to feel that what we do matters because when we feel that what we’re doing contributes to something greater than ourselves, we bring more energy to us. So, that being said, we are working in an organization. How are we serving the world? Do we bring our customers and our clients to talk to our teams to let them know the impact that we’re having? Because the more connected, the clearer the line of sight between what I do every day and the impact it’s having on the end user makes a huge difference in terms of how motivated people are to keep showing up.

And then the fourth need is around the need for ownership. As we were talking about before the break, no one wants a micromanager. And this sense that people, yes, they want clear definitions of what they need to accomplish and have clear objectives and metrics but they’d like some latitude and freedom and autonomy on how they go about achieving those needs because they want to be able to bring their whole selves and their creative selves to solving these problems. We’re all in the creative problem-solving business these days no matter what industry we’re in.

So, when we as leaders understand these four fundamental needs, again, Safety, Energy, Ownership, and purpose and start to nudge people in the environment so that they can perform at their best, you’re going to end up with a much more collaborative and effective work culture.

Very nice. Thank you. What’s the main message you want to convey to our listeners today?

Great question. So, leadership is a process. It is not a destination. And recognize that leadership progress comes from leadership practice. I’ll share this through a story. So, when you commit to being an intentional effective leader, the lesson starts showing up sometimes in the most surprising of places. So, this one happened to be in the dentist’s chair. So, I was having my teeth cleaned by my dental hygienist whose name is Jackie. And Jackie is amazing. She’s an amazing hygienist. So, I stopped and asked her, I said “Jackie, you’re a dental professional. Look, there’s all these toothbrushes on the market. There are sonic power toothbrushes. There are battery-operated toothbrushes. Which one is the best one for me? Which one should I use?” And she turned to me, Eddie, and she said “Oh, the best toothbrush? Well, that’s really easy. It’s the one you’ll use twice a day.” And so, as I think about the path of intentional leadership, you can start with connection or you can start with communication or you can start with collaboration but make a choice, take action and get started and be intentional about wanting to improve yourself. All leadership development starts with personal development. If you commit to that path and find some tools and some support to help you along the way, it is amazing how much you can get done if you are consistent at it. You won’t see the changes in two days or two weeks but if you continue on that journey, it’s amazing how much you can transform yourself and your teams within six months, a year and beyond.

Wonderful. Where can my listeners learn more about you?

Sure, Eddie. So, the easiest place to go is to the book website which is www.CrackingTheLeadershipCode.com. While you’re there, you can learn all about the book. You can also download the first chapter and get a preview of the book. And that connects you right to my website AlainHunkins.com and there you can learn all about the work that I do with individuals, teams and organizations whether it’s through speaking, coaching, training or consulting, all under the broader umbrella of wanting to make people better leaders.

I appreciate that. Alain, thank you so much for being here as a guest today and helping us crack the leadership code on the Keep Leading!® Podcast.

Eddie, thank you so much. It’s really been an honor and a pleasure to be with you today.

Thank you.And thank you for listening. That concludes this episode everyone. I’m Eddie Turner, The Leadership Excelerator®, reminding you that leadership is not about our title or our position. Leadership is an activity. Leadership is action. It’s not the case of once a leader, always a leader. It’s not a garment we put on and take off. We must be a leader at our core and allow it to emanate in all we do. So, whatever you’re doing, always keep leading.