Keep Leading!® Podcast 068 | Leading with Honesty and Purpose | Ron Carucci

Eddie Turner:

Hello, everyone! Welcome to Keep Leading LIVE and today we are streaming live on YouTube and Facebook as we are going to do every Monday at 1:00 p.m. Central Standard Time. The Keep Leading LIVE stream is, just like the Keep Leading!® 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 and leadership coaching, professional speaking, and facilitation.

When I saw the topic that my guest and I would discuss today, my mind went back to my childhood. I remember growing up and watching the original Superman starring George Reeves. And it looks like my guest remembers that as well. As kids, we love to recite the opening words of that series that ended with the phrase “He fights a never-ending battle for truth, justice, and the American Way.”

My guest today has spent 15 years researching truth, justice, and purpose. These are core human values that are applicable across the globe. His study of over 3,200 leaders will be shared in his upcoming book To Be Honest: Leading Through the Power of Truth, Justice and Purpose. My guest today is Ron Carucci. Ron has helped some of the world’s most influential executives tackle challenges of strategy, organization, and leadership. He’s a regular contributor to Harvard Business Review and Forbes. His work has also been featured in Fortune, CEO Magazine, Business Insider, MSNBC, Inc., Business Week, Smart Business, and so many others. I am super excited to welcome the amazing Ron Carucci.

Ron, welcome to Keep Leading LIVE.

Ron Carucci:

Eddie Turner, so great to be with you. Great to see you again live and can I just say how impressive it is to me that you, during a pandemic, get up every day and put a beautiful shirt and pant. Every day I’m thinking “How does he do that?” I haven’t put clothes on, I can’t remember, how long. You always look so beautiful.

Eddie Turner:

You’re very kind, Ron. Thank you so much for saying that. What else did I miss? What can we tell my listeners about you, those who are listening to us live right now?

Ron Carucci:

So, I get to spend my days as Managing Partner and Co-Founder of a firm called Navalent. We’re a boutique consulting firm that works in the areas of strategy, organization, and leadership and we get to roam the hallways of all kinds of organizations, wreaking havoc, and helping transformation happen and lovely executives through very disruptive times.

Eddie Turner:

Wreaking havoc and making things happen. Sometimes that’s the way to create new, right?

Ron Carucci:

It’s the role you find yourself in.

Eddie Turner:

It’s the role you find yourself in, to be sure. And we want to share with those who are watching us live that feel free to let us know you’re here by saying hello, share your comments with us, share your questions. I have several for Ron as we go along but we will absolutely take your questions as well.

I want to share something with everyone. I want to share with everyone a little bit about my friend Ron. We got a chance to know each other in what now seems like it was a million years ago and something that we didn’t know how important it was going to be but we certainly know now. Ron, I’ll let you talk about what I’m sharing here right now.

Ron Carucci:

Yeah, we got to meet in San Diego at a conference of our colleagues in the Marshall Goldsmith’s 100, a set of coaches and executives and leaders and thought leaders from around the world who come together in the service. So, Eddie and I got … there’s a selfie version of this but someone else took a kind picture of the two of us. Did see I looked good, again, and how dapper you look? You’re always camera ready. Anyway. So, this was a wonderful weekend back in January which, you’re right, seems like about a year ago, together to learn and grow and enjoy each other’s company and share our ideas and hope for the great things we want to do together.

Eddie Turner:

Yes, indeed, and because all of that was before the pandemic had struck us, we’ll never be able to stand that close together again, will we? Yeah, good times and even more so since we were able to be together in person at the Marshall Goldsmith 100 which we should tell everybody, you’re remember a Marshall Goldsmith 100 Coaches. That was a big event with Alan Mulally, the CEO of Ford, and he had spoken to us that day just an amazing speech that he gave to us that actually has sent us on the path that we’re on now with our weekly coaching program that we’re piloting that will show up in the next book he and Marshall produce.

Ron Carucci:

Yeah, absolutely.

Eddie Turner:

So, I want to talk about this amazing research that you’ve done. You’ve spent 15 years researching honesty, justice, and purpose. That’s just staggering to me. Tell us about that.

Ron Carucci:

So, the 15-year-long study was accomplished with over 15 years of data. We didn’t necessarily do it in 15 years. So, our last book was called Rising to Power and it was based on a 10-year study. At that point, we had 2,700 interviews in our database to look at why do executives fail, why do we keep putting people in positions where within 18 months they’re no longer able to perform their jobs. So, that was our book, Rising to Power, and we thought what else could that data teach us about organizations and systems, what else could we learn about the conditions under which leaders are being asked to lead. So, in 15 years, when we then had 3,300 reviews, we went back to that data and we used some really cool AI tools. We used IBM Watson and some other algorithmic tools. And this time, rather than giving it some hypothesis we were looking for, we said “Let’s see how intelligent the artificial intelligence really is. Let’s let it tell us what we should be looking for?” And certainly enough, it began to show some incredible correlations between aspects of our own traditional life and whether or not people would behave honestly and justly.

Eddie Turner:

That’s quite impressive.

Ron Carucci:

And what it really correlated to us … Because everybody’s wanting purpose today, right? Everybody has purpose, watching their organizations to make it look like they have purpose but the reality is that strongly correlated to purpose are telling the truth and doing the right thing, justice and purpose. And without them, without honesty and justice, you can’t have purpose. Three are parts of the same coin. So, we learned that there are four conditions that will predict whether or not somebody will behave honestly and justly. So, we learned what those are.

The first was strategic clarity, meaning are you who you say you are. We all have statements about our organizations. We have brand promises. We have mission statements. We have value statements. We have all kinds of declarations that tell the world who we intend to be but if our actions and our words are not perceived to match, meaning our employees don’t see them that way or our customers don’t see them that way, if I cannot locate my own individual sense of purpose in the story you’re telling about yourself, you are three times more likely to have somebody lie, withhold the truth or behave unjustly.

Eddie Turner:

That’s interesting.

Ron Carucci:

Hugely.

Eddie Turner:

So, let me just say, first of all, I found it awfully cool that you used Watson for this. I thought Watson was only used for playing chess.

Ron Carucci:

Oh my god! It’s saving people in countries. It’s saving people on operating tables. It’s teaching us extraordinary things by the tetra bytes of data it’s analyzing. It is phenomenal. It’s actually a little bit creepy. Frankly, it’s a little scary.

Eddie Turner:

Yes.

Ron Carucci:

It read all 3,200 interviews and actually told us what they meant. And it wasn’t just a word search. It really is assigning deep meaning and then correlated all statistics to the correlations it finds. It’s kind of creepy scary.

Eddie Turner:

Indeed. And I say that facetiously because that’s the power of Watson the fact that, unlike previous systems, it has the ability to learn on the fly. And so, you were able to use this as a part of your research and I find that very impressive.

Ron Carucci:

Exciting.

Eddie Turner:

And I love something else that you said, Ron. You said without honesty and justice, you can’t have purpose.

Ron Carucci:

So, in the first finding I mentioned vision clarity. When there’s duplicity in the organization, when there’s a sense of “We say one thing but we do another,” you’ve now conditioned everybody to assume that’s what success means – “We say one thing and do another.” No one is going to feel a sense of purpose in their work if they’re having to hide who they are or be somebody other than who they say they are.

So, the other finding was accountability. So, when your accountability systems, how you measure contribution, not rewarded but measure it, seem to be unfair or unjust, you are three and a half or four times more likely to have people lie and withhold the truth. No sense of purpose when I believe my contributions aren’t being seen the way I meant for them to be seen in a fair way. The system just is governance. If you’re governing systems are not seen to be transparent, meaning I have to go underground to get information that I need to make decisions or the information I get in my role, I’m given the accountability but not the authority, you’re three and a half times more likely to have people lie or behave unjustly.

And lastly, and the most surprising was unity across organization. If you have border wars, if your silos are such that between Sales and Marketing or between Operations and Finance you have the classic border wars where there’s that much fragmentation in your organization, your six times more likely to have people lie or behave unjustly because when you fragment you organization, you fragment the truth. Now, we have dueling truths, which means I have to be right and you have to be wrong.

And statistically, what was scary about the data is that it’s cumulative. So, if you have a lack of clarity, if your accountability is seen to be unfair, if your governance process is not transparent, and you have border wars, you’re 16 times more likely to find yourself on the cover of a New York Times story in a scandal you never want to be in.

Eddie Turner:

Isn’t that something?

Ron Carucci:

It’s profoundly insightful data because then you can act on it. They’re all very fixable situations. And the good news is our physical models told us you don’t have to be perfect. If you improve your clarity by 10%, you can have an enormous increase in truth-telling. So, the goal isn’t perfection. It’s better.

Eddie Turner:

So, the question of today is what is truth, right?

Ron Carucci:

I think we have done a great disservice to people, Eddie, by telling people that speaking your truth is the same as speaking the truth.

Eddie Turner:

Yes.

Ron Carucci:

And they’re very different things.

Eddie Turner:

Yes.

Ron Carucci:

We’ve taught people that by being outraged and by being angry and speaking truth to power, by [inaudible][13:02] big middle finger really that somehow that makes it truthful. It’s perfectly okay to have a very strong opinion about something or to feel very convicted about something but when we conflate it with the truth, we dangerously blur the lines of what honesty really means. And I think that’s something we have to correct. We’ve liberated a lot of voices who’ve been oppressed and that’s important to do but we can’t tell those voices that “Because you said, it makes it so.”

Eddie Turner:

So, what can leaders do to be the catalyst for bringing this into their organizations?

Ron Carucci:

First one is talk about your statements, right? So, put your statements of identity on the table – your mission, your values, your purposes – and ask your team “Are we living these? Are there any places where we’re behaving in ways unintentionally that contradict us?” Talk about your governance processes. Ask people “Do you feel appropriately about the decisions you’re being asked to contribute to? Do you feel empowered?” because a lot of leaders, you and I grew up in the ‘70s and ‘0s when empowerment was a new movement and it was a good intention, right? We thought that empowerment was include people in the decisions that affect them. Well, what it became was [inaudible][14:16]. I don’t really want to give up control as a leader but my goal is to make it look like you’re involved. So, I mean, you could ask anybody that you couldn’t sell to “How many of you have ever gone into a meeting where the decision that you were there to make, it looked like it was already made? Within four seconds that the problem you were going to solve, is just a ruse. It’s orchestrated theater.” Well, don’t do that. Really ask people “Do you feel appropriately involved in decisions that you’re being asked to make and do you feel you have access to the information you need to do it? Do you feel like your contributions are fairly judged? Do you feel like I understand what’s expected of you?” And then, lastly, ask yourself “Who are the critical stakeholders in our organization that depend on us as a team and who do we depend on and what’s our relationship with them like?” Every team has a “Oh, they’re here again” or “They accessed again.” Well, if you have a rival or a nemesis inside your company, that’s wrong, right? That fragment is costing you. There’s a price tag to the fact that you have to make them a ‘they’ and make them wrong so you can justify being right. And every amount of energy you spend on winning against that rival is effort you’re not using to compete against your real competitors.

Eddie Turner:

To create those factions internally where you should be one team, you you’ve broken everybody up.

Ron Carucci:

Your job is to build bridges, not separate them and make the fragments worse. And so, just ask the question, just simply bring your team together and have a conversation around “Do we have any risk of dishonesty? Do we have any sense that I could be creating conditions under which you decide that telling me the truth is too risky for you?” I would love to find a way to disaggregate courage and truth-telling. We talked about that logical safety requires that people have the courage to say what’s on their mind all [inaudible][16:15] ideas. And I get why people perceive it to be a risk, Eddie, but I think the risk is that if we can continue to tell people that it requires risk and tell the truth, we’re inferring that it’s safe not to, that you’re safer moment is to not be honest, that holding back, not doing what’s right is better and it’s not.

Here’s a very simple litmus test as a leader you can do. If somebody is not coming into your office or into your Zoom room these days two or three times a week, regularly telling you something that you find uncomfortable to hear or about your leadership that could be better, you can be very confident that your leadership sucks. The one thing you need to know is if you’re not having people regularly come to you with difficult information, that’s the only litmus test you need. You have to assume your leadership is ineffective.

Eddie Turner:

Well, you can’t put any plainer than that. Well, thank you very much, Ron.

Well, we’ve got to people tune in on Facebook Live and above four people tune in on YouTube. So, we will say hello to those viewers and welcome them to drop any comments or questions they have at this time for Ron. And what we’re going to do here is just do a brief insert for the audio version of this that will be coming out in about a month.

I’m talking to Ron Carucci. He is a bestselling author, two times TEDx speaker, a Harvard Business Review and Forbes contributor and one of Marshall Goldsmith’s 100 Coaches known as the MG100. We’ll have more with Ron right after this.

Eddie Turner:

We’re back. And I’m talking to Ron Carucci. He is a bestselling author, two times TEDx speaker, Harvard Business Review and Forbes contributor and one of Marshall Goldsmith’s 100 Coaches. And we are talking, and I should show this, by the way, talking about leading with honesty and purpose.

Wow! What a subject that I think is good at any point in history for us to talk about but certainly today a lot of discussion about that, a lot of headlines across the globe. So, I know this is a subject that’s going to resonate with a lot of people. And you’ve done a lot of research that really validates your findings.

Ron Carucci:

Eddie, I think one of the things that was so moving to us in the interviews was the painful stories of leaders saying … In one large consumer products food company, Head of Strategy was talking to us and he said they had just gone through a failed merger and it was one of those catastrophic failures that you sort of have to hide your head when you look at, 4-billion-dollar acquisition. And he said “Ron, if we’re honest,” notice the qualifier, “if we’re honest, we knew it was going to fail. We knew that we didn’t have the capabilities to make them successful. We knew that while they would be great in our portfolio, we wouldn’t be great for them but when we’re desperate, we’re losing our way, the food industry is falling apart where we haven’t kept up and we were desperate. So, we’re grasping at anything.” And then he said the telling words to me. He said “We don’t know who we are anymore. We’re still making things up.” How many leaders are in positions where out of their own desperation they just can’t tell the truth to each other. And I thought to myself I’ve done thousands of these interviews where we become the priests where people tell you things about themselves but I thought “Gosh, he can tell me now but why at the moment when it counted most couldn’t they tell each other how they all felt?” And I think we haven’t made honesty … We take it for granted. We all have integrity on our value statements, we have our ethics compliance policies but in a day where the truth seems to be so elusive where fake news and dueling facts, it’s no longer about whether we have information is power. It’s the interpretation of the information wins, right?

Eddie Turner:

Yes, unfortunately.

Ron Carucci:

How can we make honesty more a badge of honor? How can we make it respected? How can we make it noble again? Honesty is a team sport. It’s not an individual attribute. It’s a collective capacity. And if our environments don’t cultivate it, the default mode is deceit. And I think we can do better, don’t you?

Eddie Turner:

Absolutely, absolutely. And that’s why I wanted to have you to talk about it because we want to get those strategies. So, we look forward to getting those strategies in your upcoming book that covers this and reveals your findings in more detail.

Also, you are an author of eight other books and I find that just fascinating and I want to share with my audience very briefly here for a moment. And if someone has seen you for the first time, they would love to be able to pick one under of your books. I know it’s like asking the pick your favorite child. Which book should they start with?

Ron Carucci:

I think the first one that I wrote, Rising to Power. I think it’s the 10-year prequel to the book I’m writing now, to be honest, but I think it’s a great look at what this leadership today look like. It’s a 10-year study on what set apart the most successful executives from those that failed. We’ve known for more than 30 years that more than half of leaders would, as they ascend into higher ranks, fail in the first 18 months and that’s been okay. I mean, obviously, recruiters love it because it’s an annuity for them. What were taking in these otherwise promising women and men and setting them up to fail? How can we stop that? So, that was almost like a cause driven book for us to say “We can stop this. We can stop putting men and women into positions where they’re set up to fail and help them succeed.” And so, we sort of set out on this mission to turn over every landmine we know they’re stepping in. and the great news about the research was that we were able to isolate “Well, if half of them are failing, what is the other half doing? What are the ones that are sticking the landing and thriving at higher altitude is actually doing to be successful? And the book isolates what those are as well. So, it’s a great blueprint if you’re making an ascent to a higher altitude in your organization. It’s a companion and a guide to you to make sure that you don’t get altitude sickness and that when you get up there, you can thrive and succeed in the role you dreamed of.

Eddie Turner:

Excellent. So, that would be a good one for them to start with. And I want my viewers to know also something else about you. Not only have you authored eight different books but you are a prolific author or producer of content. And when I look at so many things you’ve written, we talked about earlier just some of those places but I want to share just a few titles that folks may find interesting. How Great Leaders Persevere When Things Are in Shambles, you wrote that in February 2020 for Forbes. March 2020 for you wrote the article Finding Hope in the Face of a Pandemic. Your June 2019, HBO, I think it’s fascinating, How to Work with Someone Who Thinks They’re Always Right and How to Make Your Leadership Team Absolutely Exceptional. I just read four but you’ve produced literally hundreds of these in journals everywhere.

Ron Carucci:

Thought leadership is a new muscle for me. I’ve always written but in our field there’s a lot of people doing what we do, a lot of people do what we do. And when the naked eye is trying to pick, how do I choose who to ask for help from. Part of the way we have to stand out is to make sure that our ideas can resonate with them. Well, the first thing is just to actually write them down. And so, it never occurred to me that writing was a way to help just share your ideas and be helpful to people. It’s also a way for people who are trying to determine what’s the right support for them as a consultant or a coach and one of the ways to do that is, and only in the last three or four years I’m learning this, you have to make sure that they can find your ideas, first of all. And when they find them, they resonate with them.

Eddie Turner:

That’s a good point, right? One of my mentors, Tim Durkin, always said “You can’t be the world’s best-kept secret.”

Ron Carucci:

My coach, our good friend Dorie Clark, when she first met me, she said “If your goal was to be the best kept secret, I think you’ve done a marvelous job.” Because you and I grew up in a world where if you built it, they did come. And now if you build it and they don’t even know your name, they won’t come because they don’t even know that.

Eddie Turner:

Well, Dorie’s phenomenal. She’s spot on. So, she helped you with that. That’s fantastic.

Ron Carucci:

She’s been an incredible friend to me the last four or five years. And if you had told me five years ago that I would have done any of these things, I would have said you’re nuts.

Eddie Turner:

Wow! Isn’t that something? And I would have just thought this is just always naturally a part of who you are. So, that’s something else that’s intriguing. When we look at people like you, Ron, and your level of success, all the things you’ve accomplished and how prodigious your body of work is, we may just think it’s always been easy. You shared the situation with Dorie and how she was helpful to you but is there another part of your life where you went “Wow! Here’s what I’m meant to do and here’s what it’s going to take for me to get there?”

Ron Carucci:

Well, I think these last five years have been a lot. I mean, I think I had to go ask for help. I was the executive coach and consultant, being called by CEOs and in organizations to be the helper, to help them and to be the answer [inaudible][27:37]. And I realized I didn’t know how to do that. I was tired of working with sociopaths. I didn’t want to work with them anymore. I wanted to work with a group of men and woman who really care about their organizations and want to lead them to transformations that stick but I wasn’t finding those people as much as I wanted to and I didn’t know how to find them. I didn’t know how much I didn’t know about not finding him. So, Dorie helped me realize I wasn’t in the right galaxy.

Eddie Turner:

Wow!

Ron Carucci:

I thought having ideas and just sort of having them appear in the internet somewhere was good enough. And it’s a technological science and there’s just so many aspects of what it means to be heard in a very noisy world of many, many good ideas and many not-so-good ideas. So, it has been grueling, almost like a building a whole new set of muscles, that I never had before. And so, in the last four or five years I’ve been in an intensive sort of rebirthing of my role in the world. And it’s not over. By no means have I conquered or mastered. I’m far from that. I’m still learning that having and sharing ideas that matter to people is an art and a science and there’s no shortage of ideas in the world. And you and I have both met the sharp-elbow person who I said “I don’t want to be that guy.” I thought “What is the right degree of integrity and honesty and sharing caring ideas and getting your voice heard in a way that isn’t obnoxious and disgusting?” I don’t know the answer to that question but I think every day I’m trying to figure it out.

Eddie Turner:

And it looks like you’ve done a lot to figure it out and we all are still learning and have a long way to go but you’re in an enviable position, sir.

Ron Carucci:

Thank you. So kind of you.

Eddie Turner:

Ron, I’m so impressed with your work and all that you’ve accomplished and what you do. I enjoy reading your articles and following you on social media and that’s why I wanted to have you on the show. You shared a lot with us today. What would you say is the thought that you want, those who are watching us live and those who’re listening to the podcast version, what do you want them to take away?

Ron Carucci:

When you have a truth that needs to be told, be more afraid of not telling it than telling it. fear the New York Times headline that you could have prevented. The world won’t punish you for doing the right thing and being just. You may fear that but check those headlines in your head. Every slippery slope of cut and you compromise from who you say you are to who you want to be, you have a leader, you have a voice. Use it. Leadership is the ability to disappoint people at a rate they can absorb. Sometimes you have to say hard things. Sometimes you have to say disappointing truths. You can do it with compassion and love and care but to withhold those truths is more cruel than to tell them.

Eddie Turner:

Yes. Dr. Ronald Heifetz. That’s one of my favorite quotes from him, yes, and in the world of adaptive leadership, one of the lessons he taught us. Well said, Ron. Well said. I appreciate that.

What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever heard or receive or a quote that our leaders can use to keep leading?

Ron Carucci:

My mentor, she’s still my mentor, she’s now, 80 but she’s been my mentor for 30 years. My career would have never gone anywhere without her but she taught me early on, she said “Nothing in life is irrevocable except death,” meaning you get do-overs. She said “Worry about the chances you don’t take. You’ll never learn and grow. You can get back up. You can get do-overs.” So, take your shots when the opportunity comes. Try. If you make a mistake, you can apologize, you can move on, you can do it again but we spend so much time fearing the what-if versus thinking “Why not?”

Eddie Turner:

How about that? That is powerful indeed and something for us to consider to Keep Leading LIVE.

Where can my listeners learn more about you, Ron?

Ron Carucci:

I’d love to stay in touch with your friends, Eddie. Your friends are my friends. Come visit us at Navalent.com. We’ve got lots of great resources there. We’ve got a free quarterly magazine. We’ve got lots of fun videos. We have a free eBook. If you’re leading some major change in your organization or you have a transformation coming up, you can find our playbook on how we do it at Navalent.com/Transformation. So, that’s a free resource for you. Lots of other great content – blogs, videos, white papers, eBooks for you to come and enjoy. So, come and stay and with us and hang out. You can also find me on Twitter at @RonCarucci and also on LinkedIn.

Eddie Turner:

Outstanding, Ron. So, thank you. We’ll make sure we put that in the show notes for everybody to be able to get connected to you and your organization to follow you online and certainly to be able to read your book and see the announcement.

Ron Carucci:

That’s great, Eddie.

Eddie Turner:

All right. Take care, Ron. Thank you for being here with us as a guest on Keep Leading LIVE.

Ron Carucci:

Eddie, it was such a pleasure. Thanks so much for having me. You take care.

Eddie Turner:

And thank you for was tuning in. This is the end of this episode. We want to remind you that leadership is not about our title or our position. Leadership is activity. It’s about action. It’s not a garment that we put on and we take off. Leadership is something that must be a part of our core and it emanates from all that we do. So, whatever you’re doing, always keep leading.