Security Market Watch
SMW #6 - Unravelling the Secrets of Successful Leadership in Cybersecurity Ft. Robert Heath
What's the secret to successful leadership in cybersecurity? Robert Heath, CEO of Legacy Leadership Consulting Group, joins us to unravel this mystery and much more! With his profound wisdom, Robert spotlights the significance of effectual communication for CISOs and security leaders. He unveils how articulating an organization's mission, vision, and values can be a game-changer in setting a clear direction and purpose for stakeholders. Trust us, you'll want to take notes!
But that's not all — the conversation takes a fascinating turn as we explore the hurdles of execution in leadership roles. Robert emphasizes the need for leaders to have a positive influence and directly impact the world. He stresses the importance of avoiding becoming a bottleneck, and also hails the benefits of hiring military personnel for cybersecurity roles. Ready for some real talk? We've got your back!
Lastly, we plunge into a thought-provoking debate about empowering leadership. We question the conventional lessons about leadership propagated in traditional education and shed light on how the traditional leadership pipeline is fractured. Robert underscores the perils of solo dependence in leadership and the detrimental effects of discouraging collaboration in school. So, grab your headphones, and prepare to discover how empowering teams can actually be the secret sauce to triumphant leadership. Let's get this conversation started!
Video: YouTube
Host: Josh Bruyning
Guest: Robert Heath
What's the secret to successful leadership in cybersecurity? Robert Heath, CEO of Legacy Leadership Consulting Group, joins us to unravel this mystery and much more! With his profound wisdom, Robert spotlights the significance of effectual communication for CISOs and security leaders. He unveils how articulating an organization's mission, vision, and values can be a game-changer in setting a clear direction and purpose for stakeholders. Trust us, you'll want to take notes!
But that's not all — the conversation takes a fascinating turn as we explore the hurdles of execution in leadership roles. Robert emphasizes the need for leaders to have a positive influence and directly impact the world. He stresses the importance of avoiding becoming a bottleneck, and also hails the benefits of hiring military personnel for cybersecurity roles. Ready for some real talk? We've got your back!
Lastly, we plunge into a thought-provoking debate about empowering leadership. We question the conventional lessons about leadership propagated in traditional education and shed light on how the traditional leadership pipeline is fractured. Robert underscores the perils of solo dependence in leadership and the detrimental effects of discouraging collaboration in school. So, grab your headphones, and prepare to discover how empowering teams can actually be the secret sauce to triumphant leadership. Let's get this conversation started!
Video: YouTube
Host: Josh Bruyning
Guest: Robert Heath
Welcome to this episode of Security Market Watch. Our guest today is Robert Heath, who is the president and CEO of Legacy Leadership Consulting Group and he is the chief vision officer, in addition to CEO and president. Robert, welcome to Security.
Speaker 2:Market Watch. Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure being here today.
Speaker 1:And Maggie, maggie, the Hurricane, dylan.
Speaker 2:I know you've had a rough week.
Speaker 1:You guys, you don't even know what it's taken for Maggie to be here today. So, maggie, thank you so much for joining us again for yet another episode of Security Market Watch, and when you're not here, your absence is felt.
Speaker 3:So thank you so much Of course, I love doing these and I'm excited to be with Robert today. We're going to hear a lot about your subject matter expert knowledge and leadership so it's going to be a good show.
Speaker 1:Today we're talking about leadership in cybersecurity, and Robert comes from a different angle, so I know this show. On the show, we usually talk to cybersecurity leaders, we are all about cybersecurity insights and we go straight to the source for cybersecurity industry and market insights. But today we've got a little bit of a treat for you. Robert is, as his name suggests, as the chief vision officer. He is an expert on leadership and on communication really that human aspect that we often forget in cybersecurity. So today we're talking about leadership in cybersecurity. How can CSOs and security leaders more effectively communicate to the board, communicate to their partners, communicate to their customers, without communication and without that human aspect, we really are kind of dead in the water. This is a real source spot for security and for security leaders. We often focus on technology, we often focus on the tools and oftentimes the controls are not tool-based controls. When we really get to the heart of it, it's human-based controls.
Speaker 2:It's all about the psychology.
Speaker 1:It's all about getting to the heart of people. So, robert, could you give us a rundown about what is your vision in your ideal world? You step into a new company, you've taken on new clients. What is one of the first things that you do to help people like the technical leaders and the CSOs and the chief information officers communicate better to their stakeholders and to their customers?
Speaker 2:I love it. No, that's a great question, I would say. One of the first things that I do when I come into an organization at all is the same thing that I'm going to do with you all right here is to talk about my vision, to talk about who I am, and the basic thing that we talk about with that is, I believe, that success happens when we're contributing to the greater good, when we're making an impact, when we're making a difference. What I'm able to do, and how I do that, is by solving and making sense of complex and complicated issues, solving complex problems for organizations, and what people can reliably expect from me when they're engaging with me is a system, a process, a solution that can get you predictable and sustainable results. Now, in doing that, I didn't just communicate kind of who I am and what I do, which I did, but I also am showing the clients that I work with how to do that very same thing to help their people understand what the mission, vision and values are, what the purpose is and what the marching orders are. And so I think that's the biggest thing, because so often people try to lead right, but it's just like if you're using Google Maps, you need to know two things in order for you to figure out a how in Google Maps. You need to know one where are we? And two, where do we want to go? And you can't just kind of say, uh, west, that's not detailed enough, right? You have to actually give it a city, a state, something where it can log in and then take you from where you are to where you're trying to go. And it's the same thing from a leadership perspective. You have to be able to articulate where it is that you're trying to get your people to, but you also have to be very clear about where you are. Otherwise you can't develop a map and a lot of organizations struggle with clearly articulating where they are right.
Speaker 2:It's one of the things that I deal with with with the organizations that I help a lot is helping them to really articulate where they are, because they think they know where they are, but there's no data, no background. All those types of things aren't really there, especially from the human side. We'll have data for days about the operation side or what, the what, the what, the um, the technical situation is, but what is your skills gap? What is your um? How many people do you have that can actually do the work at the level that you need it done. Those types of things we don't have as much data on. Right. We have tons of data on how many people we've actually hired or we've tried to bring in or what our turnover is and all the rest of that, but how many of the people, of the people that you've hired in the last six months, were actually qualified to do the job?
Speaker 1:Well, it's really hard to collect data on soft skills. You know, soft skills that's kind of a dirty term in in in cybersecurity or in any kind of technical area you know but you know what you're really talking is about. Talking about is, in addition to the data that we collect as engineers um, it's very difficult to collect that data on the soft skills, quantifying the soft skills. So how do you quantify success? How do you know? That question when you've actually like hit the mark.
Speaker 2:Yes, now, that is a great question, but I want to challenge the premise. Oftentimes people think that it's very difficult to quantify data on soft skills, but that's largely because it's more difficult than the other. It's not difficult, it's just more difficult than what you're used to doing. Right, and it's a relative deprivation. However, because there are people that do this type of statistical analysis and data collection all day, every day, right, there are Harvard professors and Duke professors and Yale professors that all they do is study how soft skills impact businesses, and they actually.
Speaker 2:There are plenty of studies that show how soft skills impact bottom lines of organizations. As a matter of fact, gallup wrote a book about it in 2019, called it's the Manager. In that book, they showed how improvements in engagement thought to be a soft skill that managers have. How do you get engagement, how do you keep people engaged? Thought to be a soft skill, but they showed how it impacts profitability, how it impacts productivity, how it impacts absence, how it impacts turnover. All of these are things that we can directly see the impact. And also they found that companies that are in the top tier kind of world class, top echelon of engaged employees and therefore have managers that are good at engaging employees return 147% better earnings than their peers.
Speaker 1:Wow, that's impressive.
Speaker 2:Right, and the thing about it which was so important is there's a lot of organizations that don't know how to track these very things you're talking about and a lot of it.
Speaker 2:What we talk about when I go into companies and deal with them is connecting the dots right.
Speaker 2:The reason why there's kind of this firewall between those people that understand the soft skills and those people that understand the books is because a similar problem that a lot of CSOs and a lot of information officers struggle with, which is IT, just like HR, is often on a balance sheet, a cost center.
Speaker 2:It's not a value add to the organization, and so the language that crops up in cost centers is all about remaining within budget, staying underneath the budget. What are the numbers that we have been allocated and how can we in some way prove that we're worth the dollars that we've been allocated, without ever thinking about it from the perspective of what's the value add that we bring to the organization? You would never, in a supply chain situation, look at one supplier versus another supplier from the perspective of just budget. There's a quality component to it, there's a throughput component to it, there's also a budget or cost savings component to it, but those would all be looked at collectively if we are looking at moving to a different supplier, because you have all types of different cascading contingencies that we know about on the operation side, but every day in IT and in HR, conversations are had about cost that don't have an equal balance on the other side, about value add.
Speaker 1:So are you saying that that value add comes in the form of enhanced relationships, or how do you define that value add? If you're worried to and maybe I'm asking the wrong question and asking just you know how do we quantify this, but how do you? Quantify that value? How do you go to the CFO and say that you know, we've saved money here, here, here and here, but we've also added value by these activities that are sort of termed soft?
Speaker 2:Right, and in a lot of the spaces that you want to look at first of all, a lot of the things that we would be looking at would be cost savings. Productivity is a cost saving metric. You are able to produce more, which is technically more revenue, but it's more revenue at a lower cost, which means more profitability. That's the reason why productivity is important. Now, if we increase capacity, if our productivity remains constant, we know that we increase profitability at a constant rate of that which we increase capacity Right, because our old productivity was here which made it prohibitive to increase capacity, because we weren't getting the marginal utility of that capacity increase. Same thing with soft skills. The whole idea is if I can figure out how to make a team reduce how many communication. For example, I had a client and this is the R&D research and development team at a major auto parts supplier. They were able to figure out that working remotely and even working in the office at the time with their baseline to get a project out basically took about 5.6 hours a week for their project team working together to do the project work they need to do. They did an experiment where they figured out how they could maximize the utility of their time working in the office because the way that they were working in the office, they were still doing team calls in the office. So I drive in a half hour to work, I sit in front of my computer on a team's call with all people that are not in the same office as me around the country, around the world. I could have done that from home. I just lost a half hour of productivity, but I'm in the office and this is how things were working.
Speaker 2:They went and surveyed the team. They talked about what would be the best way for them to work together, what are the best working environments. They tried a couple of different things. So they did an experiment. They didn't just do anecdotal. This is what I feel they actually said. Here's what we're going to track. Here's what we're going to look at.
Speaker 2:They looked at four different things. They looked at how many teams messages they sent. They looked at how many emails they sent. They looked at how much time they had to spend in the office and they looked at how many times they had to redo tasks. And, across an eight week study of this team of eight, they figured out that doing it, doing the work differently, the way that they had decided to do it, reduced the number of emails, reduced the number of teams messages, reduced the amount of rework and reduced the time on those projects by 80%. They improved productivity 80% across the board and that's across all four of the different things they tried. The lowest they had was 79%. The highest they had was 86% improvement when they looked at what that actually saved the company annualized. That's $443,000 of annualized savings and productivity for a team of eight. Wow Right.
Speaker 1:I'm sure they can expand after that.
Speaker 2:Exactly so. This is what we do oftentimes is we help leaders to do exactly what you said, and I love the fact that you kind of framed it the way you did. Most people think that it's hard to quantify the soft skills. It's not, but you have to connect the dots. You have to understand why the soft skills are important, not just that they are important. A lot of people are walking around kind of parroting the mantra that soft skills are important because we know we read that in books, we saw that in our MBA classes. Leadership is important. We understand that. But one of the interesting things that we also need to pay attention to and Gallup told us this one in 10 people is naturally skilled as a leader. Only two more so three in 10 total have some sort of skills in leading and managing and empowered and engaged teams. Now what does that mean? That means that the majority of people in leadership understand the intellectual idea that leadership is important, but have no idea how to actually do that in a way that gets the results that the leadership is important.
Speaker 2:Truism Was birthed from right. What we know is that when we have good leaders, we've all seen this like a magician right. You, you see the effects of a good leader, but you don't necessarily see what they're doing, because most of what they're doing is hidden. It's inside their minds and inside the minds of those that they lead. And so what we're what we help companies to do is to really demystify what's happening and to connect those dots so that everybody can see what's going on, so that when you see that if you increase the amount of you know, you're going to see things that you praise in an organization that are in alignment with what you want, then you see those behaviors increase. You see your incentives align.
Speaker 2:This is a common economic principle, right Incentivization. Everybody follows the incentives that are given in an economy. When there's a low supply of something and a high demand, the incentive is for there to be more supply. So you see supply begin to increase because the price difference is there, and then equilibrium begins to happen as more people jump into the market and therefore supply is higher, and so the demand and the supply meet in the price point low. It's like this is basic economics, economics 101, right, I was an econ major undergrad, so that might have something to do with why I talk in terms of economics, but the basic point is it's helping people to connect the dots of things that we already understand to things that we don't quite understand.
Speaker 2:It's not that it is impossible, it's that we understand completely how to run a good business. We understand what the inputs and the outputs have to be on a balance sheet. Right, cfos have been doing this since time immemorial right Since the Medici started accounting. Right, we understand being able to look at a ledger and see whether something's profitable or not. The question is, what are the inputs that lend most to us being profitable? And what has happened in the past is that people have struggled to connect the dots between the soft skill inputs and profitability.
Speaker 2:But that doesn't mean that they didn't have an impact. It's just that we didn't know how to measure them. Just like we didn't know how to measure, you know the difference in we didn't know how to measure how far away stars were. You know 100 years ago. But now we understand that generally, if you're seeing a star in the sky and that's light from thousands of years ago, that's not light from today. Right, because we understand that. It's just, the marketplace is changing and the studies are changing and the tools are changing. But one of the cool things about. It is because the tools are changing business leaders, especially in the technology area, because this is something where you can use this language and use this connecting of the dots to actually show your impact as well. Right, I was just talking to a group and we're part of a mastermind together, so I'm not a technologist per se. I am in the agile world. I am a certified scrum master. Certified product scrum product owner.
Speaker 1:Let me stop you right there. Good, we have too many technologies.
Speaker 2:All right. Well, thank you, I appreciate that, and I guess I was saying I speak the language. I'm just not from the country, if that makes sense. And so in that space we were talking about how that. You know they're a coaching team, agile coaches and trainers and professionals helping the organization to understand how to do project management better and how to specifically their housed underneath the IT department.
Speaker 2:But one of the things that they're struggling with is articulating their value to the organization. The organization is going and trying to force them to find billable hours to projects in the organization, because that's the language that all of the value people in the organization speak. Now they've got plenty of qualitative data of their value. They got plenty of people saying we love what you all do. Thank you so much. They just did a presentation for the head of their North American region and got rave reviews. But the problem that so many people run into is there's a difference between people liking you and people being willing to pay you, and every department in every business has to deal with that reality that someone can like you a lot but they don't like you enough to want to take money out of their pocket. So the question is, how are you going to put money in their pocket so that Alex Hormozzi says it this way how can you create an offer that is better than free?
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. Sometimes people give things away for free and I'm like, if you give that to me for free? Number one it takes more time and effort, and we hear this a lot, actually in software. So you give your product away for free. If the time to value is not short, then the cost of that software, the cost of that service or the cost of that goes up. So even if you give it away for free, it's costing me something. So I love that. That is completely relevant in our industry.
Speaker 2:That's the key, right, because there's a psychic load, there's a time, there's all the things that go into the learning curve, right, all that and that's exactly what a lot of CISOs are dealing with right now. Because, again, you know, when we were talking offline, one of the things we talked about was there's a lot of times where the frustration or the danger or the threat that a CISO may see isn't spoken in the language of those people who are evaluating how much money to spend dealing with that threat, and so there's this kind of there's this articulation, just like in the leadership is important world, that you should just know how valuable it is and there is no price on it. It's priceless. It's like, no, there's a price because there's a cost to remedy this situation. And the question is is the problem that we're going to have commensurate with the cost that it's going to take for us to keep the problem away?
Speaker 2:Right, I was a lawyer before I got into leadership development, leadership training, and we can talk a little bit about my background. I came from teaching right and then into law and to the Marine Corps and that's where I saw a lot about a lot about leadership. But one of the things that is a lawyer that we did. Is you always looked at the cost benefit analysis of anything right? What is the likelihood of the perceived danger versus what is the cost of eliminating or mitigating the perceived danger?
Speaker 2:And in that space exactly, is risk management right? And in the Marine Corps we had what's called an ORM operational risk matrix. We would have to look at what is the what is the danger that's possible if we do this operation, what's the probability of this and what's the purpose of doing this operation. If the purpose is high enough, then it necessitates a mitigation plan. Then we have to look at can we actually mitigate it to make the risk tolerable? If we can mitigate it enough to make the risk tolerable, then we go ahead and we do it.
Speaker 2:But those are all considerations that you need to be able to articulate and quantify rather than just kind of anecdotal qualitative data on that space. And oftentimes people will go into boardrooms and go into meetings and have a lot of qualitative data where we feel this will be better because, or this will be cheaper, when somebody's not caring about the fact that it's going to be cheaper, because it can't be cheaper than zero, or can it? And that's the point when you can make it cheaper than zero, when you can actually make it, put money back into your pocket. Now I feel like an idiot not to do what you're telling me to do Now. I run the risk of losing that opportunity and having to explain why I lost us money by not saying yes to you.
Speaker 1:Can we put that on a t-shirt?
Speaker 3:So that kind of is a really good segue and I've got a little case study I want to talk about real quick that ties in with everything. And also thank you for my new favorite word, demystification, that I will now be using I Today, prime example, I'm talking with a smaller municipality of a very Eastern state that has a lot of ties to the government and, basically, god loved this person. He was so open with us about where they were at, basically saying we have zero plan for cyber security, we only have two people on our team.
Speaker 3:I've got a hundred and seventy, you know, county employees. We're talking courts, jails, I mean all of this stuff right, and then he tells us they have nothing in place.
Speaker 3:He's basically asking us to present to the board for him almost and so at that point I'm like okay, from a leadership perspective, we got a couple of things to look at. Number one his person on his team only has three years of experience. So now he's not only training somebody but having to show him how to be a leader in front of boards, and he's coming to a cyber security organization to help get him there. He's got Officers who have been in the service for 25 years who don't want to make any changes and they legally don't have to because they can use the laws there and bypass what they're being told to do. So when you get in these types of situations in your experience, obviously, of the Marine Corps, is a really good example To kind of get through some of these challenges. What is a way that and I actually had to write this down, so my notes don't don't make fun of me Bridge tech speak to uninformed and uneducated leaders as well as to up-and-coming leaders in the same room.
Speaker 2:Right now. I like that and I think there's two things right. First thing is to remember who the burden is on, right, and one of the things we do a program that we call the legacy leadership lab, and basically what we use it for is to train middle management, right, those are people who generally squozen between operations and and managing the day-to-day and then the big vision right, an operation and strategic Kind of initiatives or the organization. So you have your, your executive leadership teams, your seniors, your senior executive leaders, your VP's, your senior VP's up here and you've got your kind of middle senior managers, managers in this, in this space, executive managers, right. And then you have your kind of team leads, supervisors, etc. In that, in that lower space, and what winds up happening in that middle management space is they're the most knowledgeable, the most experienced. They actually are the SMEs, the subject matter experts that are walking into the rooms and They've gotten to that position and they feel like they're owed a certain amount of deference, that they don't understand why they don't get.
Speaker 2:And what I took, what I saw all the managers that we take through that program is you have to earn the right to make a recommendation and you don't earn the right to make a recommendation by being right. Right being right soothes your ego. Being right makes you feel great about you because you got the answer right, because that's what we've been Talked growing up, going through school, that our job is just to get the right answer. But that's not leadership. Right in leadership, being right doesn't serve you as a leader. It doesn't serve the world. You have to be able to show other people that you're right in a way that changes or affects their behavior. That's leadership. You have to have right plus influence if you're going to actually impact the world. And that Forces us to then look at things through a different lens.
Speaker 2:Now, when I walk into that room, I don't walk into that room saying you should all listen to me, right? I walk into that room knowing that I'm competent and I'm qualified and I've earned the right to be in the room. But I still have one more threshold, one more hurdle, and that's I now have to get you all to see what I see. And the key is I can't tell you Look through my eyes and see what I see. I've got to go where you are and explain what I see through your eyes, and that's where a lot of people struggle, and so in a situation like that, for example, where you have board members that are a verse to change they're not a verse to change in a vacuum. If you actually look back through the history of that board, they've made changes.
Speaker 2:The question that you have to ask yourself is what made them make changes in these instances? But Even though they were a change of verse, they were willing to make changes. How did that happen? And how can I present my scenario in such a way that I'll be like the times when they made changes and Not like the times when they just was?
Speaker 2:That sticks in the mud, right, but oftentimes we have to take away this kind of concept of they're the idiots with the power, right. One of the things that we have to realize is that Oftentimes we can judge people who are in power From the outside, looking in, thinking that we would do better if we were in their space. But you know, everyone always says there, but by the grace of God, go. I like, be, be, be, be, be careful of your hubris and Thinking that you know how to do everything, because when you're put into those shoes, then you start to understand all of the problems that come with being in those shoes right now, you can only see the problems that you can criticize. Right, there's a reason that Certain people do certain jobs, that certain people excel in certain professions and that other people struggle with them, and it's not right.
Speaker 2:I remember I was listening to a podcast. It's completely separate, completely off topic, it's a non sequitur, but I promised it cycles back. This was a podcast of professional football players right and retired professional football players and one of the things that they talked about was they were not and they were talking about themselves. I wasn't the most talented guy that came out of my school. There were many guys that came out of my school that were much more talented than me, but this is called the national football league. It's professional football and there were lots of talented guys who couldn't be professionals and that's why they didn't make it in the league. And similarly, there are lots of smart people who can't be executives and that's why people don't listen to them, because part of being an executive is that you have to right, execute, you have to get things done, and here's the beauty of being an executive that nobody tells anyone. It's not you doing it anymore, you're ensuring that it's getting done.
Speaker 2:Right it's the misnomer of being an executive right Exit. An executive means that you execute, that you do, but the reality of being executive is that you're responsible for getting done, not responsible for doing. You are in charge of making sure that the people who are the subject matter experts, who have the expertise, who have the talent, who have the time, are getting the work done according to the specifications. You are not the person is supposed to be doing the work. If you are, the person is doing the work, you are generally underperforming because the job is bigger than you. That's why you have a team.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:I get another snippet.
Speaker 3:I want to take that snippet again. It's like how many leaders do we know where they can't hand over work? They can't let go their control freaks. They have to have their hands and everything. I see it all the time. That's so true.
Speaker 2:Yep, no. So I want you to look behind me. That's the first book that I wrote. Why can't people just do their jobs? Now I want you to notice something that you see that's different about the picture, and it's the answer to that question. One of them's red one of them's red right and they're in the front Conspicuously. And the question is why can't people just do their jobs? And the answer is staring you in the face. Oftentimes people can't do their jobs because the leader becomes the bottleneck.
Speaker 1:That's, that's true. I don't need. I look we've talked about this before, robert, and I don't know if you understand how deep this runs and our industry in the industry of cyber security, I mean, this is so pertinent to what's happening today. It's because what happens? Let me just give you the backdrop right, I mean for a technologist, for somebody who's not a technologist, you definitely speak the language and I think your military background it's probably like hiring from the military and cyber security really helps.
Speaker 1:You have people who are coming in from the an engineering background because, like the CISO role is fairly new, cybersecurity in in its current form is pretty new. It's probably maybe 15, 20 years, 20 years old. And so you have these people who are coming up from the engineering line, from IT, and they're really used to you know, they're really used to doing and that is how they validate their work, and that's how they know that they're contributing and that's how they validate their value exactly I do.
Speaker 1:So I don't want to be all doom and gloom here, but I'm gonna ask this question for the people who are listening. If you're a CISO or an executive and you're sort of in this picture, you know it takes a little bit of humility to go. Yeah, I'm in that camp. I don't feel like I'm as effective as I could be, you know, because I'm really focused on the technical and maybe somebody's told you that before, but is there?
Speaker 1:To what? To what extent can someone who has come through those lines, who you know they're struggling with, being effective as a leader? How likely, in your experience, is it to transform that person from a doer to someone who can get things done? I love it.
Speaker 2:I love it, so so the first thing I want to do is, while I was, I was beating them up a little bit tongue-in-cheek a little bit earlier. The reason I wrote that book is actually for that person in the front who's struggling with that question, right? And because the reality is, everybody that comes into leadership Generally comes through that same pipeline. It doesn't matter whether you're in technology, whether you're in education, whether you're in operations. Most people come to leadership because they were very good professionals. Now, here's one of the things that you have to pay attention to About what I like to call the traditional leadership pipeline, which is broken right.
Speaker 2:All throughout that pipeline, from kindergarten all the way through your corporate leadership position, you have been taught a certain number of things. Number one You've been taught that, though, the person that makes the fewest mistakes wins, right, and if I want to make the fewest amount of mistakes, the person I can rely on is myself. I can't rely on other people, because I already make a lot of mistakes. If it's two of us now, that's just double the mistakes. I can't have that right. The other thing that we're taught in school and as we continue, right, leadership is all about collaboration. However, if you collaborate in school, it's generally called collusion right, or another word that we are very scared of, which is called cheating, cheating Right.
Speaker 2:And so, if you get together, and you're amazing With your fellow students and y'all figure out how to get the right answers on a test and how to learn it all Amazingly and to do it Well, that's called cheating right. If you do homework together, if you help each other and do all the rest, that that's called cheating right. So we've learned that. And we've also learned that it doesn't matter how much you grow or how much you improve. It matters how good you are when you start again. This goes back to the zero defect.
Speaker 2:If I go into fifth grade and I'm reading on a seventh grade level, I will never struggle with any of the work in fifth grade. I will read in my reading class. I will constantly get high marks and everybody will look at me and I will be amazing If I come in the fifth grade on a second grade reading level, even if I grow and get to a sixth grade reading level by the time I'm at the end of fifth grade. So I'm on target to move into my next grade. I've done more growth, more work, more Improvement than anybody else in the class, but I will improve my reading Improvement than anybody else in the class but I will have statistically one or lowest grades in the class, because I will have struggled for the majority of the time and then I will have gotten on to grade level, but all while I was in second grade and third grade and I'm getting Cs, ds, nefs Right, and so we're taught that it doesn't matter how much you grow.
Speaker 2:We're taught that it matters how good you are, and how Good you are is judged on what you do. And so we get to our executive positions. By being great professionals. We do, we. We get really good at managing our idl synchrocies to get the job done. We even get so good that we can do other people's jobs for them. And then people say well, since you're so good that you do other people's jobs for them, how about we put you in charge of this team and maybe you can either do their jobs for them and bring them up, or Hopefully, you can like teach them and train them and bring them up. But the hopefully is we really just want to see productivity improve. So we're gonna give you this team Right and we have none of the skills to deal with those other people's idl synchrocies. We just barely got to figuring out how to deal with our own. And oh, by the way, I've not been taught that my job is to help them get it done. I've been taught that my job is to get it done, and so we get stuck in that space. So to your question can people learn?
Speaker 2:Yes, in the book I outline exactly how you go from being an executive, an executor, a doer type of leader, to being an empower, an empowering type of leader, someone who actually enables others to act on your behalf, and how you can dramatically improve your productivity, dramatically improve and maximize your time, your efficacy, your efficiency and your profitability in your organization if you are able to figure out how to tap into getting other people to A take ownership and B to give them the space and the freedom to be innovative and to create an environment where it's optimized for their growth. Because over time here's the beauty of it If you take over a team let's say you take over a team, you're amazing. They're only 20% as good as you. Each person is only individually 20% as good as you, and you've got five people Right now. They can do as much work as you can do, but watch this when they improve just an extra 20%. So they still are nowhere near as good as you.
Speaker 2:Comparatively, they're 40% where you are, but right now your team has just now turned into two of you. If they improve just another 20% to where they're 60% as good as you, they're still. They can't hold a candle to you individually. But now your team can work and do three times as much as you can accomplish, and if you become the type of leader that can get them to be as good as you, now you've got five times the work that you can accomplish. But wait, there's still more. What happens when you actually teach them how to be better than you? Because they get there faster, because they don't have to jump into and run into all of the landmines that you ran into on the way to becoming as good as you? Now you can get 10X, 20x from that same team. But what?
Speaker 1:it requires.
Speaker 2:is you understanding that your job is not to do the work? Your job is to take off what I call the chief problem solver hat and to put on the chief obstacle remover hat man. I wish we had more time, robert.
Speaker 1:I really wish we had more time because, like I said and I'll say it once, I'll say it a million times and I'll die on this hill we need more people like you in the technology space. I really appreciate the time, Maggie. Last word goes to you.
Speaker 3:Oh man, you put me on the spot. No I just thank you so much. You really did. I wasn't expecting that. No, first of all, I'm sitting here as a student, like I need to take more notes or something.
Speaker 1:No, you said that I really feel like I'm in a Primo University class. You can't live your stuff at Carlson yeah.
Speaker 3:Yes, the way you deliver. It's impactful, it's powerful, it's inspiring. You're so in your zone and you are so brilliant and meant to do what you're doing. I just thank you. I'm so glad you're here. We need more of you.
Speaker 3:And you've really excelled in this area and I hope it inspires other leaders, because that's what we need, especially in the tech space there's so I cannot tell you how many times I know Josh hears this as well. We are constantly hearing clients of our say, well, it's tech talk, I'm not really good with people or I couldn't do what you do, and it's just a matter of a tweak of that belief in yourself and the humility involved and all of that and being okay with failure and being open with your team in that regard, because that's how you empower people, because, at the end of the day, we're all humans.
Speaker 3:So I love everything that you said and I know I would love to have you as a reoccurring guest. Maybe you want to. However long it took, as more challenges come on, with everything going so crazy fast in the tech space. So thank you. But if people want to get a hold of you, robert, what's the best way, or what websites anything like that they need to go to?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's a great question. So one thing if you want to get a hold of us, you can get go to legacythrivecom Again, that's legacy L-E-G-A-C-Y, thrive T-H-R-I-V-Ecom. And then you can also shoot me an email. Reach out to me at robertatllcgcom.
Speaker 1:Awesome, and you can find me on LinkedIn, just LinkedIn. Slash Josh. I think it's Josh Burning. Chained from Josh will burn I think it's Josh Burning. But mainly, please, please, please, go to our YouTube channel, smash that like button and subscribe and get more shows like this and these conversations out to as many people as possible, because I think we're doing a lot of good when we have guests like Robert on the show. We're just trying to get more insights, more information and make the world a lot more secure, so we can't do that without your help.
Speaker 2:Awesome.
Speaker 1:Thank you for being here again. Robert Maggie, thank you as well. And thank you, dear listener or watcher. However, you're consuming this podcast episode. Thank you so much for tuning into this episode of Security Market Watch. Thanks bye.
Speaker 2:Thanks for having me. It's been a pleasure you did All right.