The Power Shift Podcast – Transforming Power Within Authority with Ron Carucci
Sharon:
My guest today is Ron Carucci, co-founder and managing partner of Navalent. Ron has a 30-year track record of helping organizations adopt strategies that lead to accelerated growth and designing programs to execute those strategies. He’s a two-time TED speaker, the best-selling author of eight books, including the recent Amazon number one, Rising To Power. An author of the soon to be released book, To Be Honest, Lead With The Power Of Truth, Justice, and Purpose. Ron, you are a pioneer. You have a powerful message. I’ve so been looking forward to our conversation.
Ron Carucci:
Sharon, it’s a delight to be with you. Thanks for having me. It’s always good to catch up with an old friend.
Sharon:
Okay, so let’s just start off with some context here. What is power?
Ron Carucci:
It’s a widely misunderstood resource. Most people, the instant instinct, they will think of it as bad. Some of the people will use it for self-interest and some of the people will have power over other people. Most connotations, because of what we’ve seen, it’s not like people made this up, right? Because we’ve seen it so poorly used, but if you read Alvin Toffler’s book, Powershift, he says power is neither good nor bad. We’re all the byproducts of power. I think the quote is because of the many misusages to which power has been put, there’s a foul odor that hangs around it. But the reality is, it’s an extraordinary resource. If we harness it well and learn to steward it well, all of us, no matter where you are, no matter where you sit in a hierarchy, all of us have sources of power with which we can do extraordinary good.
Sharon:
Let us get into it. Following up on that Alvin Toffler quote, so when he says, in terms of powershift, that it doesn’t merely transfer power, it transforms it. What does that mean?
Ron Carucci:
Well, we’ve for so long looked at power as a zero-sum commodity. Some have it, some don’t, and the more some have, the less others do. But the reality is what he’s saying is that power is distributed through neutralizing access to information, through access to relationships, through access to voice and impact, through the fact that people are now more being willing to be influenced by expertise and experience more than authority. Power is distributed now. When you do that, when you democratize power and then when you can convince people of the fact that it has been democratized, because so many of us abandon our power before we even pick it up. Now you’ve got distributed power that if harnessed well collectively, now it’s a collective resource, it’s a communal resource as much as it is an individual resource. Now you’re transforming things quickly.
Sharon:
Got it. I want to talk first about some ideas from your book Rising To Power. Then we’re going to get into the book that’s upcoming. So one really powerful insight from your book is that I learned that a good number of executives who rise into power end up feeling disempowered. We think of them as all-powerful and that they’re having power over us but they’re actually disempowered. Can you enlighten us?
Ron Carucci:
Yeah. I mean, it was probably the most surprising finding in the research. We studied 2,700 leaders and isolated 100 of them in mid-ascent, to sort of slow motion. Why? I mean, the origins of that book were the painful question, and I’m sure you’ve seen it in your work, why are 50% to 60% of men and women, who are being escalated to bigger roles, failing within their first 18 months and why is that okay? I understand why recruiters love it because it’s an annuity for them but why are HR, why are all of us thinking we’re just going to roll the dice with a 50/50 shot on peoples’ careers? It just made no sense. It was personal because it started by a phone call I got from a CEO and a young rising executive who had been fired, that we helped put into a role, who everybody thought was a rising star and assumed who was going to go long distances, and were shocked when he flamed out.
I wanted to go investigate to find out what happened. Nobody wants a call from the CEO saying, “Part of the reason he failed is because you didn’t help get him ready.” Nobody wants that phone call.
What we learned, Sharon, was that we expected to find all of the typical disgusting Harvey Weinstein kind of misuses of power, for immoral gain, for financial gain, for self-interest, for personal investment. Those were there. But they, by far, were not the most common abuses of power. The most common abuse of power was the abandonment of it. People not wanting to use it. People setting it aside because it like holding nitroglycerin for them. They were so fearful of what they would do with it or so fearful of how others would perceive them that they chose to opt for the easier counterfeits; popularity, being liked, purchasing an MSC with Collusion, co-dependence, and doing all the things you did that concocted the appearance of leadership. But really, it’s all about self-soothing.
So it’s a different form of self-interest. It’s more like self-protection. I find this true, especially for CEOs, when they get into that seat they realize that you can’t lead by example, right? You don’t get to sign executive orders as a CEO, you have to lead through a distributed number of a couple of other people’s power. Suddenly, your power is diluted, or it’s distorted. But you get up there and suddenly you’re on the jumbotron with 19 versions of you being played out as your vision, as your leadership gets filtered through other people’s agendas. So suddenly you feel like I’m pulling all these levers to try and get whatever my Board has told me to do and nothing’s happening.
You realize the limits of your formal authority. You realize that your formal authority as the top job has some things to it, right? But you have to be very judicious about when you use it. Now my repertoire of power sources has to increase. I have broadened my toolkit of how I exercise the use of power. The problem is I waited until I got into the job to figure that out. It’s hard to sort of build all those tools while you’re on the jumbotron trying to lead the company. So many people are just ill-equipped to understand that the exertion of your will on others comes in many, many forms, not just your place of a hierarchy.
Sharon:
This is interesting because we often attribute behavioral reasons to the person as an individual and what it means about them and their abilities, or lack of abilities, and we kind of make judgments about it. But what you’re saying is that we’re kind of set up structurally to kind of misuse power. Can you help us understand that?
Ron Carucci:
Our systems, which is what, and we’ll talk about it later, are what led us to do the honesty study. It was our system’s shape behavior more than we want to believe, right? Governance, simple example. If you’re an executive in government where decision-making is distributed you have a certain finite set of decision rights that come with your role, or your team, or the team on which you sit. But that system of decisions is connected to a whole bunch of other sets of decisions that are resources and information and moving back and forth. People are choosing to share that information widely or not. They’re hoarding the resources or not. So you don’t appreciate that because you were in a meeting and you said, “We’re going to go with that campaign. We’re going to start next week and here’s the four million dollars you need to do it.” You actually think something happened. I said it, it’s my job. Why wouldn’t that be what now happened?
Of course, everybody’s always baffled to think, and you get to another meeting a week later, like wait, we talked about this last week. Why didn’t it happen?
Then the higher up you go, the more baffled you become. You’d think they’d be more enlightened to go, “Oh, I used to do this, too.” Just because you edited something, or because you said something, and, of course, everybody nodded their heads, doesn’t mean anything. The work to synchronize those choices takes a lot more work than just your words. What happens is our cultural norms of where loyalty resides, our tribal loyalty to our own function versus another function. Our bias is about power. My bias is about whether or not I trust your agenda about what you’re doing here or not, or if I think it was just a dumb decision. We all know what pocket vetoes look like because we all use those judiciously, use them liberally in organizations.
Leaders are not prepared for that reality. The kinds of ways you construct decisions with what information, with what transparency, with what inclusion, with what level of directiveness, and set a pattern in motion for how you design governing systems. If people can’t predict your choice-making apparatus, and they’re always flinching or wondering, “how’s this one going to go?” or, “am I here to give input? Am I here just to do what she says? Is she delegating to me, what’s going on here?” I’m sure you’ve seen it a million times, eight people sitting around a table and they’re all in different meetings.
They’re all there for different reasons. No one’s saying that. They all know it. Some of them like it because the ambiguity works to my advantage in the room, right? It’s my way. So I like the fact that we weren’t clear on things because that means by default my interpretation is right.
Sharon:
That is a truth bomb right there. So we’re going to come back to that transparency issue in just a moment but I really want to ask you… I’m often working with women executives who want to be change agents within their organization. We’re working together about how to use their power in the organization to usually around transforming the culture for the good of all. So, could you give some advisement about… I love what you said, “The biggest abuse of power is not using the power that you have.” Okay, let that reverberate for you as a listener. Could you provide some guidance? There I am, I’m an executive, and really, this is at any position you are at but especially if you even have the seat or position of power. What can you do?
Ron Carucci:
Well, there are a couple of ways. First of all, what I will say is I got a lot of questions asked after the study was published on Rising To Power, that I see differences. Truth be told in our data set there were not statistically significant differences. But I was really curious. If you look at the four dimensions at the end of the book, the sort of the context choice connection, my gut said innately women are better at those. I just had a feeling. So I went to prove it. So I went back and took all the research on women and leadership and I aligned them to the four findings and sure enough, we can prove naturally speaking women are better and more naturally inclined to those four findings, those four here are the answer to sticking the landing better than men are.
Sharon:
Okay. So can you break those down a little bit for us?
Ron Carucci:
One of the things we wanted to find was if 50% of the leaders are flaming out on the way up, what are the other half doing? What are the ones that are sticking the landing doing that are actually somehow thriving at higher altitudes and not skipping a beat? There were four findings that said these are the things that set those leaders apart. The first one was breath. Their ability to stitch the seams of an organization. So women naturally see things more wholly. Men break things down and are much more territorial.
So the fact that at the top of an organization your job is no longer to be functionally loyal, your job is to stitch seams. Your job is to build bridges across silos and make permeable borders. Women naturally build bridges far more effectively than men. But men can do this too, but you have to see capabilities, not functions. You can’t see marketing, consumer insights, and R&D, you have to see innovation.
Women are better able to do that. Take all this context, right? So being able to read the tea leaves around you. Women are far more contextually intelligent than men. So understanding that your job is not there to impose answers but to ask better questions. Your job is to ask, “why is it this way?” Not to go slap on your answer, which is why so many people on their way into organizations fail. They got that this is a mandate. They were hired to go do this. So they come in charging with their mythical mandate and ignore the context. Suddenly people back away and watch them flame out because they’re ignoring the fact that when you have to create change, you have to adapt as much in yourself as you do in the organization.
Sharon:
Okay. I just want to pick up on that before we go to the third one. Myth of the mandate. That’s so good. For a lot of leaders, but for sure for probably all the women executives that I work with, there is that pressure to prove yourself, to have the solutions, to come in with the 27 point slide PowerPoint.
Ron Carucci:
90 day plan.
Sharon:
Right. Right, exactly. What you’re saying is that a really important use of your power is to ask questions. I just was working with a CHRO recently who, when we first started working together, was quite a perfectionist and had this very kind of issue and felt like… It was actually during the time of the kind of cultural reckoning of the murder of George Floyd and she really wanted to be a change agent in her organization and create more inclusivity and belonging. So again, just exactly what you were saying, and you have research on it even, to back up her personal experience. But she felt so much pressure to bring in the scorecard and the metrics and, “what’s our plan going to be?” In our work together, by helping her kind of get into her power and know-how to use her power, that is exactly what she’s doing. She’s now asking the questions. She now holding space. But what do we really want the culture to be here, on her all-male management team, where she’s the only one? What is the culture?
I see that we kind of set goals and intentions for X in terms of representation and inclusion and we’re only at Y, which is very far off from our intentions, and she’s now holding a space for what’s really going on here, and kind of asking the bigger questions. What you’re saying is so powerful. I didn’t even know from your research that she has maybe not an extra ability, maybe many leaders have this, but this is a strength she can leverage. It’s to be that contextual thinker and to kind of hold space for the organization and ask questions. That is such a good recommendation. So what’s the third one?
Ron Carucci:
Choice. So how we make choices, particularly how we narrow choices. So how you construct your decisions and how you narrow the focus of your organization and say no. Most people don’t like to say no. Leadership is the ability to disappoint people in a way they can absorb.
Sharon:
That’s great.
Ron Carucci:
So many leaders dole out way too many yeses and dilute the resources, dilute the focus. Would you have a dollar for how many times you heard we have competing priorities? We have too many priorities. We don’t know what we’re doing. Priorities change every week. Well, that’s a problem. That’s a function of bad choice-making and not being able to say no. Not knowing what data to include, what voices to include, what declaration of voice to include, what consensus reaching to include, how you construct your choice-making apparatus. Being willing to say no is critical.
The last one, which I think everyone will universally recognize as being much more natural to women, is connection. It’s how you build relationships with peers, direct reports, and bosses, 360. The interesting thing about the example of our population that we studied was not what they needed people from but what they could do for others. They were prioritized by who can I help be successful, not by who is there to contribute to what my agenda was? And everybody knew it. Every company has them, right? Sharon, you’ve seen them. Everybody wants to work for them. Everybody wants to be in their presence. When you are in their presence you sense I’m going to learn something, that my wellbeing is cared for, that my interests are held in their heart. You just know that about them. That’s this person, right?
Breath, context, choice, connection. The killer part of the research was this. I had my team do 99 different rationalities because I hated the notion of this but the reality was what set people apart was all four. So, if you had three of the four you were in the failure group. So to be successful and stick a landing on the ascent, you have to be good at all four of them. The great news is you can learn them all. They’re all learnable capabilities. You can all cultivate them and develop them. We talk about that in the book. The time to start doing that is not when you get your first vice president job. The time to start doing that is when you have your first senior manager job and start cultivating your networks and your relationships and your choice-making apparatus and how you interact with other people and how you read contexts. Build those capabilities so that when you get that role you’re far more prepared for it.
Sharon:
Fantastic. What a road map that you have put together. Let’s come back to this idea of transparency that you seeded a few minutes ago and truth-telling. It was something about that study that you did, something in there sparked your curiosity and then you took it deeper and, in fact, for 15 years you’ve been doing a study that has now culminated. You can now tell us what it is that you found. What did you find?
Ron Carucci:
The first study was a 10-year study and that was for Rising To Power. But we isolated for individual leadership factors there. But I thought there are systemic factors. We can’t keep saying things like 5,000 people woke up at Wells Fargo all on the same day and thought, hey, here’s an idea. The Volkswagen process to try and hide diesel fuel numbers. Nobody had a huddle in a meeting and said, hey, we got this. Those seeds were sown in the water years before those moments came to be. So I thought what are the systemic factors that are doing this? So we took the same body of research, the same body of data, but now we used IBM Watson, so we have great AI intelligence that will read and analyze the data and quantify with statistics what we’re finding in the qualitative data. It’s fascinating technology that can read this data.
So we fed it 15 years of data and we’re able to isolate for the factors that you can now correlate to telling the truth, behaving fairly, and survey rate of purpose. So honesty is to find truth, justice, and purpose. Say the right thing, do the right thing, and say and do the right thing for the right reason.
To the point you made in your email earlier, which is the bars gone up. We are doubling down on transparency, honesty, and openness because the experience has gone so low. The lower the bar feels, the higher the bar will be raised. It’s no longer enough just to tell the truth, or just to do the right thing, or just to have good reasons for it. You have to do all three.
We’ve found four factors that will determine and predict whether or not people in your organization will do those things. The first was, be who you say you are. Your statements of identity, your mission, your vision, your purpose. If your employees feel like you are who you say you are, your actions and your words match.
Sharon:
You’re congruent.
Ron Carucci:
Yep, there’s congruence. In daily practice, you are three times more likely to have people tell the truth, behave fairly, and have a purpose. But if you’ve institutionalized duplicity, if those words are meant for the wall and for public consumption and for your screen savers and external marketing campaigns, but the lived experience departs from it and people just roll their eyes when they hear mission and values. Now you’re three times more likely to have people lie, cheat, and show their interests first.
The second one was transparency and governance, decision making. If what happens in the room is not orchestrated theater but what happens at the table is the information being shared, I can trust it. It’s not being doctored. It’s not being withheld. This is not faux inclusion where I’m in a room where you’re trying to make it look like it’s my time to participate but you’ve already made the choice. I don’t have to rely on the rumor mail or gossip mail or backchannel ways to get information. But there is transparency in how choices are constructed and my voice at the table is welcome. There is a spirit of descent in that inclusion and transparency. Now you are three and a half times more likely to have people tell the truth and behave fairly.
But if it’s not, what happens if a table is orchestrated theater and the only way I can get information that I can trust is through my underground? Now you’re three and a half times more likely to have people lie and cheat.
The third was accountability. If our accountability systems are seen as fair, meaning the way I believe you as my boss assess my contribution, not reward it, but assess it as fair, I feel seen, I feel known, I feel understood. You’re four times more likely to have people behave fairly and tell the truth. But if I feel like you don’t know who I am, I’m being stuffed in a category that I don’t feel like I belong in, with a number or a letter or a label, if I feel like you don’t understand what it takes for me to do the work I do for you, or if you inflate my work to buy my loyalty and I know it. In other words, if it’s not an honest look at what I’m not good at and what I am good at, now I have to embellish my accomplishments and hide my mistakes from you. Now you’re four times more likely to have people lie, cheat, and be self-interested.
The last one was probably the biggest shocker of things, was border wars, the way people come across functions in the individual study was breath. What happens when marketing and sales come together? What happens when supply, chain, and operations come together? Is there territorialism? Is there unabated conflict? Are there KPIs that conflict with each other? Are there family feuds where people are at war? When there is unresolved conflict and unresolved wars at those seams where you have to collaborate, you are six times more likely to have people lie and cheat and be self-interested because when you fragment the organization you fragment the truth. So now we have dueling truths which means I don’t really care about the truth anymore, I just care about winning. But if you have cohesion, if you have stitched those seams well and there is a coherent way for folks to collaborate across borders, now you’re six times more likely to have people behave fairly and tell the truth.
The interesting part about the study, Sharon, was that it’s cumulative. The way the statistical models worked is that you add them up. So if you suck at all those things you’re inserting risk in your enterprise by a factor of 16. You are setting the stage for a Wells Fargo, to be in a headline story you never wanted to be in. But if you get good at those things and it’s not all or nothing you can improve transparency by 25% and as a result get more honest behavior by 15%. So incremental improvements count.
But if you’ve mastered those four things, if you design your organization to produce those kinds of people, you have set yourself apart by a factor of 16. People are going to be loyal to your brands, trust your products, trust your employees, your employees will trust you and they’ll stay longer. They’ll give you their best talent. They’ll bring their best ideas. They won’t hide themselves. You’ll attract the best talent and the best customers.
Sharon:
Yeah, that’s what seems so clear to me, that it’s not only about your specific metric, which is whether people are going to behave honestly or not, but it has everything to do with creating a culture in which people are going to bring you their best, everyone’s going to thrive, and obviously, the product that they put out is going to be the best. It seems to me that you’ve broken down the factors that create kind of a nirvana experience for anyone who is actually an employee or a leader in that organization.
Ron Carucci:
That was the goal. I wanted to know. There’s all the companies we hear about and we always remember working for. So the book is about heroes. The book is not a book of villains. The book is all the people, all the leaders that are creating those nirvana experiences that we want to work for and that we want to emulate. The book is nothing but a book of stories and cases of people that you want to cheer on, that inspire you. I wanted to study the exemplars. I wanted to know somebody’s doing this right. I know the headlines are all cluttered with the stories that make our stomachs sick and turn our heads because that’s what gets clicks, likes, and ratings. But I don’t think that’s the majority. I think there are plenty of examples and plenty of wonderful people in the world whose example we could follow.
Sharon:
And how you could become that person too.
Ron Carucci:
In your own version. You become your version of that person.
Sharon:
Your own version.
Ron Carucci:
But these are not some special DNA of certain kinds of people, like people who were set aside in the genome pool. These are all ordinary people that did extraordinary things in how they lead and how they set the table. Look at Jacinda Ardern and how she led the pandemic in New Zealand. We looked at some marvelous cases all around the world, way outside the business world, to understand. We looked at gang rivalry in Los Angeles and how people from rivaling gangs came together. There were lots of business cases too, and people for whom this was real, for whom living truth, justice, and purpose was real for them and they made sure it was real for their organizations and their leaders. I think we all know, we can look around and go, “we know we need to do better.”
Sharon:
Just tell us the name of the book, because it’s coming out in May 2021, but just so we can all write it down here.
Ron Carucci:
The book’s called To Be Honest, Lead With The Power Of Truth, Justice, And Purpose.
Sharon:
Got it. I’m going to get a copy not only for myself but every colleague and friend that I know.
Ron Carucci:
Bless you.
Sharon:
I want to bring up an example of actually someone who we know in common who embodies this, so Alan Mulally, and what makes me think about this is that … So Ron and I, we have the great honor, really, to be in a community together of the Marshall Goldsmith top 100 coaches. The last time that we met live, in person, we had the incredible insider informant opportunity to hear from Alan Mulally in the group about his experiences when he was brought into Ford to kind of turn it around. He has his own process that he has written about and you can go learn about but it was a process that just provided structure for transparency. He told this story of how he would come in every morning and all the executives would have to go over their scorecard and report out at the beginning. People were doing just the kind of thing you’re talking about, kind of fudging or hesitant to kind of bring forth what was really going on in their organization, and he didn’t stand for it. He really was a role model for that being honest, that truth, that transparency.
He was very clear that if you want to work in this culture you need to go along with this and play full out with it and if not then you are not welcome here. We were all kind of riveted by that story. It seems to be kind of a perfect example of what it is that you’re talking about. One of the things that I wanted to ask you, since we’re talking here on the Powershift podcast, is what does being honest, truthful, transparent, what does that have to do with power? This is really key, actually, because when I’m coaching women leaders … Everyone in an organization, it’s not just women leaders but that’s just who I’m coaching.
I’m always hearing facts should matter. You know, that kind of honest assessment that you’re talking about, of talent. It should be a meritocracy. It shouldn’t be based on who you know and loyalties and all those kinds of things. What is the connection between your telling us the power of truth and what’s the truth about power? What’s the connection here?
Ron Carucci:
Yeah. Well, that’s a great question, Sharon, and I think the glue between them is justice. We all want to believe in meritocracy but we all know, if we look at our organizations, we know that we don’t have those. We know that every organization has people who are privileged. If you’re a tech company, engineers are privileged. If you’re a brand company, marketers are privileged. We all know we have certain identities that are privileged. White guys, right? Organizational injustice is everywhere. We’ve all seen it. We’re sitting in a staff meeting and the leader turns to somebody over there, the head of finance, and he missed the business review meeting last week and gets a chewing out for missing that meeting. The head of sales also missed that meeting but because sales bring in revenue, he didn’t get chewed out. When the boss turns his head, the head of sales turns to you and winks.
Sharon:
Winks, yeah.
Ron Carucci:
What do you do in that moment? You’re in the cafeteria and you notice four people ahead in line of one of your old time colleagues, a black person, you notice the cashier politely asks to see his badge. He’s worked there for years. Doesn’t ask anybody else to see their badge. The black person walks away and you can see his shoulders sink a little bit and shaking his head. What do you do? You see all the men getting their budgets approved, all the good departments, and the woman who leads the hard department gets 75% of her budget approved. It happens every day. Our companies have bullies. We all know who they are.
You have a voice. You have a voice. If you have authority with that voice all the better, but silence is consent. We see these things. We can say something. We can draw attention to them. Our performance management systems, our selection systems, our resource allocation systems especially have biases built into them.
Sharon:
Yes, they do.
Ron Carucci:
Somebody has to say something. Somebody has to say, “Did we all notice that this is the third year in a row we’ve resourced this project? It happens to be all the white guys. When these over here by X,Y,Z people didn’t get funded, anybody want to help me understand that? Just curious.” We can be syncretic. We can be non-judgemental. We can be compassionate. We can be empathic. But we can say something.
Be an upstander. So if I work in this organization and this is happening in my organization, I have a stake in its outcome and deciding that I do, and where I can, right the wrong. If I am a team leader or I’m a department leader or a function leader or a region leader, there are certainly injustices happening in my patch of the world. Root them out.
Silence, the other one is silence. Who is not speaking in your staff meeting? Who is not bringing their voice? What is happening in your staff meeting that could be encouraging people to say it’s not safe for me to bring my voice here?
Sharon:
Okay, so what about a fear factor then?
Ron Carucci:
What are you doing to make them afraid? Here’s my one piece of advice for leaders. If you don’t have somebody coming into your office regularly, once, twice a week, saying something that makes you uncomfortable, be very confident your leadership sucks.
Sharon:
That’s great.
Ron Carucci:
End of story. It’s that simple.
Sharon:
But what if you want to speak up but you work for such a leader?
Ron Carucci:
If they’re a complete sociopath, get a different job.
But if you’re not sure, if you’re not sure, ask them. Simply say, listen, all the literature these days talks about people speaking up and sharing their ideas and bringing concerns or raising their concerns, how would you like me to do that? What are your preferences for how people on your team do that so I know? I know the rules.
Sharon:
Got it.
Ron Carucci:
Give them control.
Sharon:
This is a good lead in – because I really wanted to ask you this question – so all of our listeners, we want you to be reflecting on yourself like am I being honest, am I kind of standing and being impeccable for my 50% in everything that I do in role modeling what Ron is talking about, but what if you’re in a situation where you’d really want other people in your organization, your family, your community to be honest and transparent and meeting with justice in the way that you’re talking about, but they’re not? What’s a solution?
Ron Carucci:
Start by raising the conversation. Here’s a simple one to do. Just take your mission statement or your value statement, pick one of the statements your company says about itself, a purpose statement. Bring it off the wall. Bring it to the room and say, hey, curious if you think we live this. How does this show up in our work? Where have we shined? Where have we not shined? What’s our overall story? Be who you say you are. Think about if somebody is going to decode you and sort of watch you for a day, videotape you for an entire day, follow you around, what words would they write down? What would you want on the billboard advertising your life? Think about how you share information. Who do you not share information with? Who do you include in your choices? Who are your go-to folks and why are they your go-to folks? What does that say about who you don’t go to? Who have you excluded? Ask yourself who is your they. Everybody has one.
Them, the person that annoys you. You roll your eyes when you see them coming. You don’t want to see them on your caller ID. You cancel meetings with them. Who is your they because that person has incredible instructive power for you. There’s a reason that has to do with you that you avoid them. They could be the most annoying person in the world but they’re triggering something in you. Go build a bridge. Go have coffee. Go find out about what is it about the difference from you or a similarity you don’t want to see and build a bridge. Let people see you not “othering” something because if you’re “othering” somebody you’ve now made it okay to other people. So think about who you other, no matter how distasteful you find them, and figure out how to be more curious and empathic with them. The same way you want people to do for you. Those are all practical things we can do, all of us, to raise the honesty quotient around us.
Sharon:
And I love it. Of all the wisdom bombs that you dropped throughout this whole podcast episode, and there were so many, that might be the ultimate takeaway, is that you have more power than you think and you can use it in all the ways that you enumerated to be that role model, to make a difference within your organization.
Ron Carucci, this has been such an honor to have you on the show. Please tell us again the name of your book that we need to go out and get now for ourselves and everyone in our network. Then also how can our listeners follow up with you and see how they can bring you in to help their organizations have these structures as well?
Ron Carucci:
Yeah. So thank you very much. Again, the book is To Be Honest, Lead With The Power Of Truth, Justice, And Purpose, available now on Amazon, and pre-orders really help so thank you. You can come to our website at navalent.com. We’ve got great videos. We’ve got whitepapers. We’ve got some free ebooks on leading transformation. We have a new ebook on designing your virtual workplace. So lots of great resources there, at our website. If you want to know more about the book, there’s a whole video series on the book. Go to tobehonest.net and you’ll see a whole bunch of video content there about the research of the book and the findings. So stay in touch. Follow me on LinkedIn, on Twitter. Would love to keep the conversation going.
Sharon:
You can read him, he’s published widely in HBR and Forbes and many other places. The world needs you, Ron Carucci. Thank you so much.
Ron Carucci:
Sharon, you’re a pleasure. Thank you so much. Good to be with you.
The Power Shift podcast is all about redefining the idea of “power” and how women use it for good, not with the traditional idea of force. Listen to thought-provoking and practical interviews to help listeners understand power from every angle– how a person gets ‘in her power’, how power works in the workplace, and how power can shift.
Host Dr. Sharon Melnick is a business psychologist who’s a best-selling author, speaker, and sought-after executive coach who helps women executives be an intentional Culture Carrier in their organizations and helps women get promoted to next level opportunities. Because every woman in her power is a Change Agent!
You can listen to The Power Shift Podcast with Dr. Sharon Melnick here at these links:
