Keep Leading!® Podcast 094 | Shaping Your Leadership Path | Alex Lazarus

All right. Hello, everyone! Welcome to Keep Leading LIVE™. I’m your host Eddie Turner and I am The Leadership Excelerator®. I work with leaders to accelerate performance and drive impact through the power of executive and leadership coaching, through facilitation, and through professional speaking. Keep Leading LIVE™ like the Keep Leading!® Podcast is dedicated to leadership development and insights.Today, what I want to talk about is our leadership path. One of the things I always say is sometimes my friends in Human Resources and HR, we do a great job of bringing people and talent to the organization but sometimes we screen out candidates we shouldn’t screen out at the résumé level because sometimes we’re looking for people who’ve done one thing their entire life, their entire career but really the person has done a little bit of this, a little bit of that, that’s our change agent. That person really has shown themselves to be adept at learning, adjusting, and acquiring new skills that we need, especially at a time like today.

So, how do we acknowledge those whose paths are different? How do we develop leadership by shaping our own path? Well, that’s what we’re going to talk about today with my esteemed guest, the amazing Alex Lazarus. You see her there.

Now, let me tell you a little bit about this amazing guest that I have. Alex heads up Lazarus and Maverick, a global network of experts in behavioral and change. They are also experts in high performance, leadership excellence, and organizational effectiveness. She has access to first class executive coaches and facilitators in most locations in the world. Now, that’s pretty bodacious, Alex, when I read that.

Something else about Alex. She’s worked at FOX and something that gives her credibility as one of the best moms in the world, she worked at Disney.

Yeah, that’s true.

And she worked at Richard Branson’s Virgin headquarters. She was responsible for People Management, strategy. She’s launched television channels, awards, franchise management and partnerships. Alex credits Richard Branson with inspiring her to put curiosity back in business. She is an award-winning marketer and a member of the prestigious Marshall Goldsmith 100 Coaches.Alex, welcome to Keep Leading LIVE™.

Hi, Eddie. I’m smiling because your music in the intro just got me dancing. It’s just impossible not to enter your show and just smile. You can throw any questions at me right now and I’d like “Yay!” Well, it’s a pleasure to be here, Eddie. I have seriously been considering canceling my Netflix subscription because your shows are so great and I just keep watching your podcast, listening to your podcast, watching your live shows. And I think you have been doing tremendous job in keeping us uplifted in this really difficult and testing times. So, I hope that you have a break coming up because what you have done, it’s really quite incredible how you brought community of thought leaders together to share, share in authentic real way what it’s like to be a leader, especially now. So, thank you.

You’re so sweet. Thank you so much for saying that. I appreciate you, Alex. And I’ll tell you what, something else you said that really just made my heart melt. You told me that you were watching this show with your 9-year-old son. I’m like “What? 9-year-old is watching my show.” So, I know you must really be watching today.

They are being evacuated to different parts of London for an hour. No, they are downstairs but they will be watching the replay, I’m sure.

I’m sure. So, tell us because Marshall said something when I was on his show with someone from London, that anyone with a British accent, someone who lives in London like you or UK, is automatically perceived as being 15% smarter than us as Americans. So, tell us where you’re from, tell us about you because your amazing accent resonates with the audience, I’m sure. It’s part of the reason why I smile.

It’s a great question because I’m not originally from UK. And whenever I’m in the UK and if I’m very, very tired, people ask me “Where are you from?” So, my accent starts to slip back into my mother tongue accent. However, when I go to the US, I remember once I was in New York and tried to help my mom with her not so well dog and we went to some vet hospital in downtown Manhattan and I got through to the beginning of the line just because the lady really loved my British accent. It was the first time somebody actually told me that I sound very British. I’m originally from Poland where I grew up, I went to high school there, and I came to London to come to university and two weeks later, well it was originally a two-week ticket and two-week extended to two months, six months. And sometime later, I won’t reveal my age, but sometime many decades later, I’m here and this is my home. I’ve got many homes. I’m a global citizen. And it’s been a wonderful place to have my career and have my family but wherever I go back to my home country, it’s just as delightful and especially, to make jokes in your mother tongue.

Telling jokes in your mother tongue. Wonderful. Well, thank you for sharing a little bit about your background and where you’re from. And what we’d like to know now is a little bit more about your leadership path because everybody takes a different path. So, tell us about your leadership path, Alex.

Absolutely. And I think that the world we live in now enables people to have all kinds of different leadership paths. It doesn’t have to be so linear perhaps as when I had to have it but the way I describe my leadership path is by merging that leadership is not just a corporate or organizational competency. It’s a personal competency. So, I learned leadership and self-leadership in a way, again, just through my upbringing. And I know this show is all about being real and just sharing candidly what makes us who we are and how this impacts on how we lead others. I had a situation where my parents immigrated to the US, I was very young, I was a teenager and I was left sort of to, I wouldn’t say defend for myself but I was definitely exposed at a very young age to the concept of leading myself. And that lesson and life lesson has really taught me a lot about the power of decisions and how a decision in a moment will have an impact on the next moment and on the next moment and not the next moment. So, with the decision comes choice. So, I learned very quickly about the importance of a conscious choice and an importance of decision. And I also learned that if you make a wrong decision and you choose to do that, you just got to bear the consequences. Sometimes they’re worth especially when you’re a teenager and sometimes they’re not. And that’s how you learn really about what leadership is.My leadership path then, as I mentioned earlier, I came to UK, I was very young when I came to the UK and I came still at a time where the cultural diversity wasn’t as normal as it is now in 2020. I have had a few opportunities to gain work experience, I was very grateful for that but I also had a situation where I went for a job at a well-known company and I was asked to spell certain English words and I was told I probably don’t have enough knowledge about the UK market to warrant me the job. So, when I went to Virgin, I will always be indebted to Virgin because nobody asked me where I was from, nobody asked me one of those sort of tedious boring questions that you’d ask a very young person before they even know themselves. They embraced my spirit and I embraced their spirit and it was a fantastic company to work for. And watching somebody that’s like Richard, and I do call him quite a lot is because as a young person coming from a former Soviet Union country where the certain leadership paradigm drummed into my head of a very much command-control, you met a leader at such a young age who was very inclusive, whether you were young or of a different age, that just was not important and I really like that. And also, you just saw how much you can get out of people if you just show them that they can do it, that you believe in them, that you don’t hire on just existing expertise but you’re hire on potential. And I think Virgin was very ahead of the game back in two decades ago, it is now two decades ago. It’s amazing just to think about it but Richard had such legacy on our corporate memories that last June, 30 of us or so, we hired a house in North Yorkshire in the UK and we just got back together. It’s our 20th anniversary from the time when we did a similar thing when we were much younger and freer and it was amazing. It was a three-day spent on trekking across beautiful countryside and reminiscing about those days. And I think that is the power of an incredible leadership, a leader that makes you think about who and how do you want to be, not just in the workplace, not just at your desk but who do you want to be in life and how do you want to come back to yourself. That to me was a very fundamental switch. I came from two very drastic different perspectives, the command-control of the former Soviet bloc and then into a very democratized style of leadership. And I thought “I like that. I really like that.” Something about autonomy and mastery and purpose, those three components of how to really get people intrinsically motivated, it spoke to me and I thought “If I can replicate that when I am a leader one day myself, I will” and I hope I did that.

Well, good. And you make an interesting point that ties into what I was saying in the opening regarding the idea of hiring for potential rather than for experience. Can you talk about the reason that can be a differentiator in the leadership space for both the hirer and the person being hired?

Oh, absolutely. I have this one saying which is “My new role should be I’m an EFTO” and that stands for an expert on finding things out. Very often I do leadership courses or I coach on the one-to-one and clients who have been celebrated as experts are finding this new space of a turnover of expertise very dynamic at the moment and sometimes it’s a little daunting to think “Maybe I don’t know everything today” and that ability to believe in your potential is at that point really, really important to realize that that’s something you can tap into. So, I say to my clients, my mentees and people I work with that it’s very important to be comfortable about not knowing things but it’s very important to also be very comfortable about finding things out. So, that’s about curiosity. It’s also about how you communicate it, how you ground yourself in front of clients with clients where you partner with them and say “This is a really interesting perspective you are adding to this conversation and we’ll find things out.”Now, I think it’s the fundamental importance when you are the hiring person and when you’re getting hired on potential because I think work is one of life’s activities and I think that organizational leaders, I believe, have a duty to create communities that role model what should be happening outside of organizational life at the same time that through our friendships after work, we also want to role model what we then bring into the organizations. It’s not exclusive to the other. And as we create that great community of human beings together by enabling talent and tapping into unspotted talent and growing somebody’s self-belief, you really can tap into creativity that you didn’t even know existed within that person or within this, let’s say, social ranks in the organization which I don’t believe. When you hire someone on potential, it’s little like a flower. It just needs a bit of the right condition, a bit of watering, a bit of feeding and nurturing and you see what you have not created by how much you’ve contributed to someone else’s success. I think that’s real leadership. I think that’s leadership. Giving people chances will lead to more diversity, will lead to more inclusion and will lead to good practice on a community level whether it’s organizational or whether it’s somewhere else because I do think what goes around comes around. The incredible gesture that Virgin granted me created my behavioral habits that I hopefully that and I’ll be continuing that pattern for as long as I can.

Wonderful. Yeah and along those lines I often quote Dr. Willie Jolley. Dr. Willey Jolley says that “Sometimes we have to believe in someone else until they can believe in themselves and that’s exactly the beauty that comes from doing what you’re talking about.”

Yes. And there was also, I can’t remember who said that, but it was also a beautiful quote which said that “To believe in good, you have to believe that good is there.” And I think that’s also an important aspect of hiring because we don’t hire people in our own image. We want to hire people who might make us feel a little bit uneasy, those feelings that have been branded 10 years ago as suspicious. All it means is that you are being introduced to perhaps a new way of being, a new way of thinking and if this is that discomfort with the unknown, that’s exactly what we have to master. I’ve just recently a couple of weeks ago ran a leadership session for some of our internal stakeholders and industry friends and some of my clients with the film producer for King’s Speech. And Gareth Elizabeth who’s a fantastic, fantastic leader and speaker and Gareth was saying how in the arts and entertainment industry, it’s very, very important to be very conscious about not hiring talent in your own image and you just have lots of little mini-me’s. And we know that arts and entertainment is one genre, we learn so much through arts and entertainment, we learn from that sector things that sometimes are not spoken openly in other more traditional segments of society. So, If I can hire, if I do hire, when I did hire, I hired typically because I saw a spark in that person or I saw their thinking that I didn’t think I had and I was very in awe of that.

Not hiring a bunch of mini-me’s.

Exactly.

This is the lesson of the day, right?

It is.

So many times, people are afraid to look outside of themselves, they don’t want that person that’s different but really that is where that person’s leadership path can take shape and ourselves as leaders, we can take shape if we are willing to expand our own boundaries. So, thank you for highlighting that.We’ll have more right after this.

Awesome. So, Alex, I’m thoroughly enjoying our conversation. What I’d like to do now is take a brief pause for acknowledging a few people key to the show. I have several people who sponsor the Keep Leading!® Podcast and I thank all my sponsors.This month especially I want to do a special acknowledgement to Starbucks. I appreciate Starbucks. And Goldman Sachs, I appreciate your support of the Keep Leading!® Podcast and Keep Leading LIVE™ along with C Suite Radio. C Suite Radio, part of the C Suite Network, turning up the volume on business through podcasts like this. So, I appreciate the support of the C Suite.

And, finally, the Grand Heron International Coaching Organization in Canada. Absolutely love those folks and the work that they’re doing. The key to sustainable leadership lies in the ability to thrive during uncertainty, ambiguity, and change. Grand Heron International brings you the Coaching Assistance Program, giving your employees on-demand coaching to manage through a challenging situation and arrive at a solution. Visit GrandHeronInternational.ca/Podcast to learn more.

So, those are the folks I want to acknowledge. And of course, the Keep Leading!® Podcast, download it on Apple or anywhere you get your podcast but on Apple especially. If you write a review, give me a five-star rating if you think it’s worth five stars. That is most appreciated.

Question comes in from Lonnie Williams for you, Alex. Coming back with the amazing Alex Lazarus. I should mention that she’s a CEO and a leadership coach. She’s a behavioral change scientist, business consulting expert and a member of the esteemed Marshall Goldsmith 100 Coaches. We have a question that’s coming in from Facebook. Lonnie Williams actually has a question – “As leaders, do you believe in tools such as Clifton Strengths Finder?” How do you feel about that, Alex? Do you use that one?

I don’t use that one, Lonnie. Do I believe in tools in general and tools that aim to identify strengths awareness for development? I do believe that they can have a huge value. It just depends on how they are and how they facilitate it. And also, it goes down to a thing a person believes of the facilitator and the coach. Do we believe that we’re typed? Do we believe in typing? Do we believe that we can all change? What is our position with regards to change? So, to give you an answer about general tools that identify strengths or areas for development or habits or default behaviors under pressure, I think, these can be really useful frameworks for conversation. And then what you do with that, you obviously take that on, you merge that with your own developmental journey whether you’re a coach or whether you’re a facilitator, but the tools that I would be hesitant to use are those that have a claim to know us through and through, to type us, and to pat me on the shoulder for being the creative or for being the explorer. I stay away from those labels because I think they can be unhelpful when we are challenging people to diversify ourselves in order to get on and build a better rapport with people who are unlike us.I hope that answered to your question.

Excellent. Alex, thank you for that answer and thank you for that question, Lonnie.So, you told us how you shaped your leadership path. What advice do you have for individuals tuned in listening to us right now who have questions about shaping their own leadership path?

Thank you. This is a very good question. I think in practical terms, I mentioned kind of my maybe conceptual, my philosophical also contribution to leadership as a personal competency as well as a corporate. The one thing that really helps to go through, the age is that leadership is to lead other people and to have a team to manage something. And it doesn’t mean that you have to be a point of authority to see decisiveness but to understand what does it mean to lead and to lead is to influence. What is it that you are trying to influence in which direction? And you can only really practice the leading others through interacting with other people. And I say often that leadership is a combination of interactions and contexts. And if you can win-win-win, so it’s a triple win for everybody involved, you then have an ecosystem through each interaction. And if you can get the best out of people through each interaction and the best out of yourself and in each context that you are adaptable, you’re a bit of a shape-shifter, still authentic but you also know that different contexts require different style of leadership. If you can practice that and learn and at the same time develop yourself through different self-awareness tools through feedback, 360 feedback, have your goal map, have let’s say a vision board so you do have an ultimate plan and some kind of a path that will guide you for the next couple of years, I think that’s really, really useful. What I do see where people are starting to resent leadership is when they are leading people. So, they have been fantastic managers. And then they step up to leadership role. And things like conflict management, difficult conversations, these are things that emotionally train them. They are exhausted at the end of the day because maybe they haven’t had the training. And then what I’m noticing as well is that once we go through leadership training with our clients, whether it’s groups or individuals, that interaction which, as I said earlier, is a big part of what leadership really is, becomes easy to them because they have tools and I call those discussion tools and it can range from complex conversation, etc. So, I would say that the number one is really to practice leading others and that can be your role at home, that can be if you’re younger and you haven’t got a team and you don’t intend to have but perhaps it’s a charitable project, it’s a passion project, and identify your stakeholders and see how much you can get people on to your vision and join you on your vision.And then one last thing about that, I think, about leadership in practice which isn’t easy and especially, I think, now with the global pandemic and COVID that’s testing us and is asking of us quite a lot, I think, at the moment but the one thing I would go back to every single behavior will have an impact on the rest of your day and your reputation is to think about that, that everything I communicate and everything I don’t communicate will influence people to either look at me as a leader, look up to me, look through me, or look away from me. And as the leader, I used to say that to myself a lot is “What I’m doing right now, is this getting the people that I lead and manage on to our vision or am I doing something that is really anti-leadership and actually they will want to look away from me?” Sometimes, we do those behaviors when we are absolutely under pressure and we snap but I think reflectiveness comes into place where you just learn, refine your style, self-manage yourself and ask yourself this question “What do others whom I supposed to lead, what is their reaction to my leadership style?”

Good. In this pursuit of their own leadership style, because I’m sure there are many, is there one single mistake you see many people making over and over throughout your global practice?

Yes, there is. One is we noticing because no man is an island anymore and the command and control is not enough to get the best out of people. And if it is, it’s just through fear and threat and it’s very short-lived. And the war on talent, although I don’t quite like this expression, but to get really good people at the moment isn’t as easy as it used to be. So, you want to hold on to great people and you want to develop great people. The number one mistake is, I think, inability to speed read the room and persisting to be who you think you are, how you’ve always been and using that almost as an excuse – “You got me to this place.” And I think as the leader of MG100, Marshall Goldsmith, has said in his book “What got you here won’t get you there.” So, persistence with being how we’ve always been and fear, maybe a lack of courage to look at yourself and say “Which bits of me I could say goodbye to because they don’t work for me anymore? I need to evolve”. It doesn’t mean I’ve been bad up till now. It doesn’t mean I haven’t been effective but it’s that invitation to keep on evolving and keep on growing, have a learner’s mindset. So, mistake number one, I think, I have seen is a sort of snobs and quite a stubborn attitude, my way or highway, and they’ve got to adapt and that is very short-lived. I’ve seen executives, I haven’t coached them personally, but I have known and seen executives hit a glass or hit a ceiling much early in their career than others because the board was concerned about their people skills and their lack of adaptability even though they were fantastic experts in the market.And another thing just to add to that, I just remembered, my organization coached somebody who was, again, a really impressive person. However, their sponsor for that coaching said to us in the brief “It’s easy to buy experts. It’s easy to buy expertise. Expertise is everywhere but leading skills, that’s the heart of it. That’s what I want that person to acquire.” And that really stayed with me because it seemed that in that particular sector, I’m not going to mention which one, expertise seemed to be something much more accessible and the competitiveness in the market in terms of talent is probably quite high or there’s a lot of talent in that particular sector but the one thing that the sponsor was looking for was looking for a great expert who was an incredible people leader and they were willing to invest in that person a substantial amount of money to keep developing those people skills.

You can buy experts everywhere but not in leadership.

Well, I think it comes with democratization of knowledge and expertise. When I was at university, you had to go physically to the library to learn. You carry your heavy books and you learn.

You couldn’t just google everything?

I know. Well, that gives you my age. I couldn’t Google everything. I couldn’t believe there’s something that invented as a Google. I remember that. It was a fantastic thing. I wish I had that. I have a huge appetite for learning and curiosity got me to wrong places sometimes but I think the expertise and the knowledge is democratized. And I keep telling people in a knowledge economy it’s about the quality of your thinking. It’s not about what you knew yesterday. It’s about how you find things out and how you connect the dots in a very creative way which we know that creative thinking is one of the top competencies identified by the World Economic Forum 2020. I used to quote that a few years ago and here we are.

Here we are.Well, I am talking to the amazing Alex Lazarus and we are talking about shaping your leadership path. I have been thoroughly enjoying this conversation. As we move to wind up, I’m going to encourage you if you have any questions for Alex, please drop it into the chat box there. Hit the like button if you like what we’re talking about. Share this episode with your network and they can tune in to our conversation as well.

Alex, what is the main point that you want to leave with our listeners who’ve tuned into today’s session?

That’s a hard one. The main point, I think, leadership is a hard gig and it comes with responsibility. It’s also one of the most fascinating things I have done. And I’m passionate about enabling leaders to take those risks to exert themselves to meet other people. That means taking care of other people. That means building positive humanistic communities but it also means you yourself could get exhausted at certain points. So, surround yourself with well-wishers. Just because you are a CEO or you are a president or you are an MD, very high up there, doesn’t mean, and I know that firsthand from my clients, doesn’t mean that you do not need help and support. So, I would say to leaders, regardless of the experience that you have, is to really be kind to yourself because if you are snapping, if you are overextending your strengths, if you are running on empty, you are communicating that to others and you are also role modeling that. I’m just going back to one of the organizations I worked with. I led a team at Disney and then overnight I had another team to manage which was great but I also knew that we were boarding on workaholics. So, I said “Guys, we’re going to, from now on, shut our computers at 5:30 and leave by 6:00.” It was unheard of but we managed to do that and I knew I had to role-model that because I was looking around what I used to call the shop floor, the large open plan office, and I was thinking “Why are we still here 10 o’clock? I know we love our job and I know the new pizzas will come in and I know we love our jobs but there’s life that needs to happen too.” So, I’d say to you this. Look after yourself. It is a marathon and it is absolutely normal to have really hard months, hard days. As a leader of an organization, you might be responsible for P&L. So, there are other really serious considerations to get over and obstacles and bad situations especially now with the market situation going into a direction we never predicted but find a balance and find a group of well-wishers to remind you of your core purpose and to have that community that you need to have. So, don’t do it all alone.

Don’t do it all alone. What a great message to convey. And also, want to share a message to convey from David Lawhorn. He says “Great show as always, Eddie Turner,” thank you “but what a world-class guest in Alex.”

Thank you so much, David. Thank you very much.

Thank you for saying that, David. She is indeed a world-class guest. And we appreciate you joining us all the way from the UK today.Tell us the best piece of leadership advice you’ve ever received or your favorite leadership quote.

The favorite advice, and actually wasn’t maybe advice or something to reflect on, and I’ll bring a book The Currency of Connection by a very dear friend of mine Teresa Mitrovic who just released that book and it’s all about trust and I think that’s the most useful my daily or, as I said, going back to leadership, it’s about interactions and context. So, I do ask myself very much inspired by Teresa with her book The Currency of Connection is “Do what I do, do what I say builds trust or do I unconsciously create breakages in trust?” and that goes back into self-awareness, that goes back into asking myself “Does my personality, does my way of action possibly trample on someone else’s agenda? How do I position myself with this situation?” So, trust-based relationship is really important thing for me. We all get very busy sometimes, we all get very distracted with our personal life and managing businesses etc. etc. but we need to stop and pause and just think about our key stakeholders, personal and professional, and just ask yourself “How I have dealt with that, have I communicated that I’m trustworthy, that I trust the other person?” And I think it just ties in with the power of relationships. Especially now as we will have multiple careers, we all have multiple project teams, we will not have that what we had the team identity to build over 10 years. We have to band and disband with different groups of people quite quickly, building rapport building trust virtually fast and making sure that your behaviors feed that authenticity around trust. I think that’s really important and that’s something that if I could call you, so if I have a personal religion, I’ll be thinking about trust a lot.

All right. Where can my listeners learn more about you, Alex?

Yes, thank you. We have a website. It’s called www.LazarusAndMaverick.co.uk. And please follow me on LinkedIn. Message me. I’ll message you back. Let’s talk. Let’s connect. If there’s anything I can help you with, answer any additional questions, I’ll be more than happy to do that.

Fantastic. Well, I’ll be sure to put this into the show notes so that everyone can just find you via a click. Reach out to Alex, everyone. She’s absolutely amazing, as you’ve listened to her for the last 30 or 40 minutes here, you see that, and she has quite a powerful network. And if you’re looking for executive coaches, start with her network. She’s in every part of the globe, as she said earlier. So, we appreciate that.

We have access. We have been loving what we are doing, creating those exceptional leaders, companies from Spotify, Disney, AIG, KPMG and others and we don’t see just one sector being a specialization. Human beings are very similar in different parts of the world. So, we are very glad to work with different diverse groups of people.

Wonderful. Thank you for being a guest on Keep Leading LIVE™.

Thank you so much, Eddie. You are a wonderful host and I’m delighted to be here.

Thank You, Alex.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. Leadership is 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, no matter what you’re doing, always keep leading.