Mary Agnes:

Hey there, Steve Lishansky, how are you today?

Steve Lishansky:                

Absolutely wonderful, thank you so much! It’s a gorgeous day and I really believe we make it what we want it to be, although it really makes it a lot easier when the colors are changing on the trees and the sun is shining and it’s warm outside.  

Mary Agnes:

Yeah, it definitely feels like new things around the horizon.

I wanted to today talk a little bit about early lessons from your career and then talk about how you developed the program that you teach most often now, and how those early lessons carried into what you do today. I know you started in the toy business, which is so uncommon and amazing but not surprising if someone knows you. So, could you talk about that part of your period, because it’s so much fun.  

Steve Lishansky:

Well, let’s understand something, that was my adult career because I first started really as an entrepreneur as a kid selling mistletoe door to door as a five-year old. I thought I really knew something and I figured when I got older really look back, who could resist a kid selling mistletoe at Christmas time for 5 cents? So, all through my early years, I always found ways to be entrepreneurial, to really make money, to find what people really needed and to do it. I run a lawn mowing business through my entire teenage years and was making five times minimum wage and more, often. So, I just was always looking for: what is it people need and want and would be willing to pay for?

When I got out of school, I was running sales, and again, be very entrepreneurial. I got an opportunity to get going as a sales rep and then I created some companies – sales rep companies – and then I created a company called So Much Fun Inc. What we did was we created and marketed toys to all the retailers around the world from Wal-Mart right on down to the local Hallmark store – and there’s great stories about that I’ll come to.  

But what was really interesting about the toy business especially back in the 80s when I was doing it was that it was a very vibrant, fast moving, competitive and challenging business where we were selling basically what I call “impulse” toys – low-cost items that people would look at and say, “That’s great. I’m going to buy it for $2, $3,” and we used to sell millions of them. When I say millions of them, people will know some of what we sold; I was actually the person who sold and marketed rainbows decals who were on the back of cars in the late 70s, early 80s. I sold little gelatin capsules that went into hot water, they melted, and out popped foam animals – teddy bears, dinosaurs – that sort. I sold glow-in-the-dark stars that many millions of people have on the ceilings of their kid’s rooms. And I left that business over 23 years ago. So, a lot of these products are still around.

But, we never knew that that would be the case. So what we had to do is we had to constantly reinvent ourselves assuming that every six months we needed to do something new because we didn’t know how long our products would live and we didn’t anticipate they’d live a long time as many of them have. Now, 25 years ago, my friends thought I was nuts having to reinvent ourselves, get everybody onboard for massive change every six months in our company. The reality of it is, I was just 25 years ahead of my time because that’s pretty much standard today. You better be able to reinvent yourself on the run or you run the risk of being out of business today.

One of the lessons I always share with people: it’s not so much what you did, it’s what you learned that would be valuable to people. And what I mean by that is that 25 years ago I was reinventing my organization every six months and engaging my entire staff to embrace that and to enjoy that and to want to be a part of it. Now, that wasn’t just a function of me as the CEO, that was a function of engaging the entire organization. For me, that’s what I call today leading change and that’s something that’s key to what I do with the senior executives of major corporations that I work with, as well as major entrepreneurial organizations that I work with.

The second thing that we did when you’re in a business selling impulse toys, many of which could be easily copied once we came out with them, we made it our competitive advantage to be able to take care of our clients way, way, way better than any of our competitors. We helped them buy the way they wanted to buy, we didn’t try and sell them. We organized our merchandising so it worked for them. We did everything we could to make them ecstatic raving fans, and we were very successful at that. And that’s the second thing that I’ve been doing since I started my consulting, coaching and leadership development organization, which is helping people build high-value relationships.

So, again, what I really learned in running a toy business it served me well in all the other major industries. I now participate in healthcare, pharmaceutical, finance, technology, is number one, how to lead change. And leading change doesn’t mean telling people what to do, it means engaging people to have the passion, enthusiasm and the creativity and innovation that takes to be in the midst of change. And number two, how to build high-value relationships with both internal and external clients. 

That’s sort of the quick overview of what I learned. What else would be helpful, Mary Agnes?                              

Mary Agnes:

You know, how important is it for corporations and leaders to be entrepreneurial? I mean, I feel like, in your career, in each individual role, you were kind of willing to shift with what you needed to be to support the client.    

Steve Lishansky:

Well, let’s define what entrepreneurial means in my mind. When I say people need to be entrepreneurial, they need to be creative, they need to be thinking about possibilities and opportunities, they need to be asking what’s the next curve coming up and how do I address that curve well. Because I’ll tell you what in this day and age, I’ve never seen it – when I say I’ve never seen work be so fast, so competitive, so overwhelming that one of the biggest things that I see missing is people thinking about what the future could hold. I call the tyranny of the to-do-list, people are so loaded with to-do-list that they’re not thinking about what else do I need to be thinking about, what else do I need to be considering, where else could we go, am I taking time to sit back and really think through who we are, the path that we’re on, the momentum that we’ve created, what’s working well about that, and what needs to change or we could be running ourselves really quickly into a brick wall. I’ll tell you what, so many people find themselves all of a sudden in a panic state because the market is changing and they haven’t, because their load is getting larger but their impact is getting smaller, they’re doing more than ever and yet they’re creating less value than they ever have. That’s a very, very dangerous equation.

Mary Agnes:

How important is it that relationships stay firm throughout the process because if people are obsessed with the to-do-list, I wonder if they’re spending enough time building rapport and keeping that rapport alive?    

Steve Lishansky:

It’s one of the challenges that every leader has, every client relationship manager has, and more fundamentally every human being has – doing more does not necessarily produce more. One of the things that I fundamentally believe is the difference between the most successful people and those who are struggling, treading water and threatening to go under is who takes care of the people, the internal people and the clients and customers that they deal with better. Who is in tuned with them? Who understands what they’re looking for? And, who can help them figure out what they look for? Because I tell you what, so many people we deal with are too busy to be thinking. Our ability to help them think clearly is oftentimes whether you’re a leader or you’re serving your customers, it’s oftentimes one of the most valuable things anyone could ever do for the people that they deal with – help them get clear – which means being in relationship with them where they trust you enough to do that is extraordinarily valuable, and it’s one of the keys to massive success that every really successful person understands.    

Mary Agnes:

You know, when you bring up success, I want to ask what the two or three fundamentals of true success are, first how does somebody define true success and then I think the fundamentals are probably the same. We would make the mistake of thinking they’re different, but I think those fundamental core principles to reach success are probably would be the same.  

Steve Lishansky:

There’re two different issues here, we’re talking about what is success and I think different people would define that differently. I’ll tell you what I would think about that. The other one is what’s the path to success? I think that has a lot of more commonalities. Let me explain what I think success is, I think success needs to happen in three dimensions, certainly when I work with leaders, I really believe this is critical.

First dimension is personal – are people fulfilled? One of my experience is working with really extraordinary people and some challenged people, is that the most fulfilled people are also the most effective and successful people. They love who they are, they love what they do, and they love what their life encompasses. Isn’t that the key to fulfillment?

The second dimension of success is interpersonal – do we create and have extraordinary value in our relationships? Not just about communication, saying hello and sending thank you notes, all of which are really important. No, it’s about are we creating value for the people who we value in our relationships and are we getting value from the people that we need to deal with? To me, that’s the height of interpersonal effectiveness. We have and we create such exceptional value that it’s a total joy, delight and immensely successful relationship that we have.

The third dimension for me is organizational. I deal with leaders, but everybody is engaged in teams or social groups or organizations whether it’s at work or it’s at home in your community, in your spiritual pursuit, every one of us lives in some kind of community. And the question is: are we creating and are we supporting leadership in those organizations? You don’t have to be in charge to be an effective leader, what you have to do is help elevate the performance, the effectiveness, the focus of that group. That’s a tremendous contribution of leadership, not necessarily leadership position but of human dynamic of leadership where you can elevate the group that you’re a part of whether you’re the boss or you’re at the low on the totem pole, it makes no difference; and so much of that leadership is the ability to keep the focus where it matters, and to create value that would be worthy of that team, that group, that organization really being able to focus on and achieve.    

So, for me, that’s what success is in the important dimensions in my life: my personal life, my life with the people I deal with and the organizations that I deal with. Now, what’s the path to get there? That’s where I think there’s more commonality. Number one, are we clear about what matters? Are we clear about what’s most important? Because I’ll tell you what, whether you’re talking personally or you’re talking about the people that you deal with, your family, your friends, your organization and the companies that you work for and the organizations that you’re a part of, if you don’t know what’s most important, you’re basically on the hamster wheel is what I call it. You’re running, running, running, going nowhere. If you know what’s most important, the average intelligent person can figure out the path to make it happen. So, what happens is so many people substituted demand for action, a to-do list for being able to keep their focus on what matters most.

One of the most challenging things to do in our culture today is get clear about, keep your focus on what really matters, because if you can’t make it an impact on what’s most important in your life, it’s not going to be fulfilling, it’s not going to be very joyful, it’s not going to be very productive – and those are all things I just hate to see people get stuck in because the way out is not that difficult. And I think the single most important characteristic for success regardless of how you define it is to make sure you know what’s most important to you, to the people around you and to the organizations, teams and groups that you’re a part of.                     

Mary Agnes:

One of the things that I love about the book you’ve written is that it covers communication so completely. It really talks about communication not being in how we talk to each other, that it being in a shared philosophical idea. I think with corporations and even teams of any kind, communities, tribes, one of the things I see happening — and you covered this in your “Becoming an Indispensable Partner” workshop also – is that people may have a very clear idea of success. That if the group doesn’t have the same idea, it can be like a ship being oared in different directions, no one really fastened, everybody getting seasick. So, talk about that. How does a group or a leader or a team get a synchronized idea of what their goal and their success is?

Steve Lishansky:                

We have a great metaphor for that because just this last weekend, they had what’s called the Head of the Charles Regatta here in Boston, which is the largest rowing contest in the world. And everybody from ranked amateurs to greatest teams in the world come and compete there, and everything from singles to eights with a coxswain (which is the person who tells them how to row). One of the things you start to see is that it’s your ability to get everybody aligned, big guys or very strong women rowing at the beat that the person in front of the scull is giving the count of; the degree to which they are aligned is the degree to which they’re going to be successful. Then, it comes down to the things that everybody else can do, build the strength, get yourself ready, make sure you have the skills. But I’ll tell you what, the ability to align around what’s most important is the single greatest fundamental that allows from small groups to two people working together to huge groups of hundreds of thousands working together to really be able to be effective. Are we aligned? Are we focused on what really matters? If we are, we’ve got a very strong capability of doing amazing things; if we don’t, then we run the risk of no matter how good we are individually of producing a fraction of what we’re capable of.

So, one of the things I always look for is: how well aligned, how much of a common understanding do we hold with the people that we’re working with? I mean, even if it’s just your assistant or your boss or your peers on a team, do we all know and agree and commit to what’s most important? Does this drive our thinking, our planning and our performance? If it doesn’t, we’re not going to win. If it does, we’ve got a chance to do something really extraordinary. And it’s amazing when you watch certain teams who really do amazing job of producing a meaningful result. And it’s not often just by effort; I’m a great believer that effort goes a long way. Effort by itself could be running in circles, essentially being on a hamster wheel; but clear focus on what really matters, clear agreement, alignment with the people that we’re doing it with can produce a level of acceleration and accomplishment that is way beyond what we normally expect. And that’s what we see when you see the super championship teams, whether you’re talking about sports, or you’re talking about business, or you’re talking about successful and meaningful nonprofits, or even you’re talking about government agencies. There are some great ones and they’re usually characterized by a leader and leadership practices throughout the group where people keep the focus on what matters and people keep aligned around delivering what matters. And for all the noise and the system – and I mean activity and information and everything that happens in our daily life — they know where they’re going. And more importantly, they know why that’s where they should be going. And I tell you what, those are the people who manage to get there faster, and better, and more successfully than anybody else.    

Mary Agnes:

Talk about why you wrote the book and how this is one of the primary goals in your writing this book, because I know this, we talked about this before, that getting teams aligned, getting the idea of success… in a group concurrence, everybody is moving swiftly, accurately and purposefully, hopefully toward a faster end game. Talk about what inspired you to write this book to begin with?

Steve Lishansky:

Well, my first premise is that there’s no individual no matter how good they are — look at the world’s greatest soccer player. I tell you what, Lionel Messi and [? 0:18:55] for Barcelona, but Barcelona is a championship team because everybody else is there too. Or, you look at the greatest basketball player of all times, and whether you think that’s Lebron James or Michael Jordan, both of them got nowhere till they got a team around them, even though they themselves were already obviously contenders of the greatest player of all time.

 One of my premises is that: The power of a team can beat any individual, or any small group of superstars, if that team can leverage the greatest talents, capabilities and resources. So, what I really believe is that the ability to communicate clearly – and what I mean by that is to keep the focus clearly on what’s most important, to be able to dialogue about that. To be able to share with each other and help us together keep our focus on what’s most important, and then to utilize our greatest talents, capabilities and resources. It’s almost like alchemy. What I mean by that is, it’s almost like a magical combining, and that’s what you see with great teams. It’s almost magical what happens for them. You look at them and go “I would have never imagined that team could do that even though they are composed of great players.” The team itself is far beyond what those great players could ever produce by themselves.

So, for me, how do you create a great group, a great team of players who can leverage their greatest talents, capabilities, and resources, and support that with the people that they’re with? How do we create multipliers in the way in which we communicate and relate and work together? Because when we do, we’ve got a much better chance of fulfillment, we’ve got a much greater chance of magnifying the value we can create, and we’ve got a much greater chance of being superstar teams.

 You know what, my experience Mary Agnes is, it’s not that difficult. And the challenge is, we’re constantly being whipsaw back and forth, or running as fast as we can on hamster wheel to the point we’re so tired we can’t think clearly about what really matters and why it matters – that we just don’t pay attention to the simple fundamental principles that allow an individual and a small group and a team and an organization to be outstanding. And having trained as what I call phenomenologist, really looking at the phenomena of success not just cute ideas and simple models, I’m not interested in techniques and tips. I’m interested in the fundamental principles and phenomena that are common to the most successful, that can be taught to everybody. And to me, that’s what I’ve spent my life at, that’s what I’ve dedicated my work to, and that’s what really gives me the greatest joy is to see people really learn these principles, produce extraordinary impact and results and value; nothing more fulfilling for me than to see people able to communicate more clearly, to relate more effectively, and to produce far more as a team than they ever thought possible.            

 Mary Agnes:

I think the book that you’ve written really covers that almost systemically. It just walks through the entire process and it covers communication: us, you, and them. What happens a lot with communication is, you could be the best communicator but if you’re just not speaking the language of the other guy, they’re not even getting it. So, I think the irony is, you don’t even have to be — I think like the best communicators and the best teams are led by great people who inspire greatness, but that doesn’t always look warm and fuzzy; Steve Jobs kinds of springs to mind, right? But he wasn’t the least bit warm and fuzzy with his team, and yet inspired absolute greatness and…

Steve Lishansky:                

Well, it depends on what you’re looking for. Let me just say something about that. Warm and fuzzy is just a set of values certain people hold and others couldn’t care less about. Communication is not what you say; communication is what happens with the people that you’re talking to. This is one of our fundamental mistakes when we start thinking about what communication is – “I said it, they don’t get it.” In fact, that’s a chapter in one of the book, because it goes like this, it’s something that every single executive I’ve ever worked with has said to me. They said, “I don’t know why they don’t get it. I’ve already told them a dozen times or substituted a hundred times, or substituted a thousand times.” To which I reply, “What’s your point?”

Because the reality of it is, it doesn’t make any difference what you say unless it produces the result that you’re looking for in the other person, unless it produces the understanding or the clarity you’re looking for in the other person. Communication is not what you say, it’s what happens with the people you’re talking to; and until we get that, I’ll tell you what, you’ll never be an effective communicator except haphazardly because as human beings we learn how to adapt. But I’ll tell you what, excellence in communication and relationship really comes from getting out of you saying what you think you need to say and getting and to seeing what’s happening to that other person, or those other people that I’m talking when I say what I say. And when you begin to understand what’s going on outside of you, when you begin to pay attention to that and really help that person get clear about what you’re trying to communicate, you will find a level of effectiveness and success that’s outstanding. Not good, not great, outstanding. It’s really not that difficult, but it is that critical.         

Mary Agnes:

You know, I wanted to quote something you said in the book that I think really kind of captures this especially well. In Chapter 5 you said, “Although we’re all wired to make our own interpretations, we must learn to leave nothing to interpretation when we speak to others, and despite our inevitable assumptions we must also bridge any gaps by verifying what others mean when they speak to us.” I just think that’s one of the – if I could just grab that little space, those two sentences and walk around with them tattooed to my heart and my mouth, that I feel like it would be such a better life, because communication and success doesn’t just happen in work, in our families, it happens with the person checking you out in the grocery store, the hotel clerk. Achieving well interpreted successful goals in any instant is so important to our life and our joy. I mean, that tells about those interpretations really gets in the way. Doesn’t it?

Steve Lishansky:                

Well, one of the great fallacies of human beings that we never question until we’re faced with it day in and day out almost all the time, is that – everybody is just like us, they must think like us, act like us, and interpret like us; therefore, I’m just going to say what I have to say and they should get it. Except it doesn’t work at all, and you discover very quickly nobody interprets just like you. And the fact that we assume that when somebody says to you, “I need it better, faster, cheaper,” we know what that means is one of the greatest fallacies and dangers in business we could ever entertain. Because what they mean by better, what they mean by faster, what they mean by cheaper could be radically different than what we interpret that to mean; and therefore, it’s absolutely critical that we understand where people are coming from and what they mean more than we think we know what they mean.

I do an exercise all the time, all over the world, and it’s the same everywhere – we understand the words but we don’t understand the people. I tell you what, which is more important, understanding the words that they’re saying in the way in which we interpret, or understanding the person in what they really mean when they’re talking to us? We know what the answer to that is; we just don’t operate like that. We operate as, “Well, they said. I know what that means. I’m off and running.”

That’s why we are so busy and we do so much work that really doesn’t matter, that’s not valuable, because we’re thinking this is what they mean and that’s not at all what they meant. And we’re thinking we said something clearly and they’re off doing it, until they come back a week, a moth or a year later and we discovered they had no clue what we really meant. We live in our world of assumption that I said it; they got it, now I can move on. I’ll tell you what, this is why it’s so critical to really think about what’s most important, because if we’re not focused on what’s most important, we’re on the hamster wheel and we’re running like crazy little hamsters and we’re not going anywhere. I tell you what – it’s such a waste of human talent, potential, capability and the ability to produce meaningful results that matter to the people that we care about, for ourselves and for the world. I tell you what, again, it’s not that hard but it is that important and that critical to shift the way we think if we’re ever going to be successful the level we’re capable of.   

 Mary Agnes:

I feel like we’ve covered the primary things I wanted to cover for today, but I really look forward to our next discussion and to go a little bit deeper on some of the issues, like, how do you achieve that? What we need to achieve obviously, I feel a lot more comfortable and I’m sure the audience does. And real question of what happens next? How do you begin to create those relationships where there are no misinterpretations, everybody is moving in the right direction and we’re all achieving great success. Woo-hoo!

Steve Lishansky:                

And there are steps to do it and I look forward to really exploring those steps. We’re not just talking about some of the fundamentals of what goes on and what we could do, but really to lay out the step-by-step process for people to really understand it. I’ve been doing it all over the world for more than 20 years now and it’s a joy to share with people because everybody gets it. And this is what I call human dynamics because I’ve done this in China, I’ve done it in Europe, I’ve done it all over the America. I’ve done it many, many places, people from more than 40countries have been in the program; we don’t change a thing. I call this trans-cultural, it’s beyond culture. It’s about how human beings function and I look forward to really exploring that more in-depth with you.  

Mary Agnes:

That sounds great. I’ll see you here next Tuesday same time. We’ll pick up the discussion and we’ll leave it out live for on-demand whenever everyone’s ready to listen to it, because people are so busy. Thanks for being here Steve, and thanks for sharing this great wisdom. And we look forward to the book coming out very soon…

Steve Lishansky:

It will be. Thank you so much, it’s real pleasure. I look forward to our next conversation.            

Mary Agnes: Hey there, Steve Lishansky, how are you today? Steve Lishansky: Absolutely wonderful, thank you so much! It’s a gorgeous day and I really believe we make it what we want it to be, although it really makes it a lot easier when the colors are changing on the trees and the sun is shining and it’s warm outside. Mary Agnes: Yeah, it definitely feels like new things around the horizon. I wanted to today talk a little bit about early lessons from your career and then talk about how you developed the program that you teach most often now, and how those early lessons carried into what you do today. I know you started in the toy business, which is so uncommon and amazing but not surprising if someone knows you. So, could you talk about that part of your period, because it’s so much fun. Steve Lishansky: Well, let’s understand something, that was my adult career because I first started really as an entrepreneur as a kid selling mistletoe door to door as a five-year old. I thought I really knew something and I figured when I got older really look back, who could resist a kid selling mistletoe at Christmas time for 5 cents? So, all through my early years, I always found ways to be entrepreneurial, to really make money, to find what people really needed and to do it. I run a lawn mowing business through my entire teenage years and was making five times minimum wage and more, often. So, I just was always looking for: what is it people need and want and would be willing to pay for? When I got out of school, I was running sales, and again, be very entrepreneurial. I got an opportunity to get going as a sales rep and then I created some companies – sales rep companies – and then I created a company called So Much Fun Inc. What we did was we created and marketed toys to all the retailers around the world from Wal-Mart right on down to the local Hallmark store – and there’s great stories about that I’ll come to. But what was really interesting about the toy business especially back in the 80s when I was doing it was that it was a very vibrant, fast moving, competitive and challenging business where we were selling basically what I call “impulse” toys – low-cost items that people would look at and say, “That’s great. I’m going to buy it for $2, $3,” and we used to sell millions of them. When I say millions of them, people will know some of what we sold; I was actually the person who sold and marketed rainbows decals who were on the back of cars in the late 70s, early 80s. I sold little gelatin capsules that went into hot water, they melted, and out popped foam animals – teddy bears, dinosaurs – that sort. I sold glow-in-the-dark stars that many millions of people have on the ceilings of their kid’s rooms. And I left that business over 23 years ago. So, a lot of these products are still around. But, we never knew that that would be the case. So what we had to do is we had to constantly reinvent ourselves assuming that every six months we needed to do something new because we didn’t know how long our products would live and we didn’t anticipate they’d live a long time as many of them have. Now, 25 years ago, my friends thought I was nuts having to reinvent ourselves, get everybody onboard for massive change every six months in our company. The reality of it is, I was just 25 years ahead of my time because that’s pretty much standard today. You better be able to reinvent yourself on the run or you run the risk of being out of business today. One of the lessons I always share with people: it’s not so much what you did, it’s what you learned that would be valuable to people. And what I mean by that is that 25 years ago I was reinventing my organization every six months and engaging my entire staff to embrace that and to enjoy that and to want to be a part of it. Now, that wasn’t just a function of me as the CEO, that was a function of engaging the entire organization. For me, that’s what I call today leading change and that’s something that’s key to what I do with the senior executives of major corporations that I work with, as well as major entrepreneurial organizations that I work with. The second thing that we did when you’re in a business selling impulse toys, many of which could be easily copied once we came out with them, we made it our competitive advantage to be able to take care of our clients way, way, way better than any of our competitors. We helped them buy the way they wanted to buy, we didn’t try and sell them. We organized our merchandising so it worked for them. We did everything we could to make them ecstatic raving fans, and we were very successful at that. And that’s the second thing that I’ve been doing since I started my consulting, coaching and leadership development organization, which is helping people build high-value relationships. So, again, what I really learned in running a toy business it served me well in all the other major industries. I now participate in healthcare, pharmaceutical, finance, technology, is number one, how to lead change. And leading change doesn’t mean telling people what to do, it means engaging people to have the passion, enthusiasm and the creativity and innovation that takes to be in the midst of change. And number two, how to build high-value relationships with both internal and external clients. That’s sort of the quick overview of what I learned. What else would be helpful, Mary Agnes? Mary Agnes: You know, how important is it for corporations and leaders to be entrepreneurial? I mean, I feel like, in your career, in each individual role, you were kind of willing to shift with what you needed to be to support the client. Steve Lishansky: Well, let’s define what entrepreneurial means in my mind. When I say people need to be entrepreneurial, they need to be creative, they need to be thinking about possibilities and opportunities, they need to be asking what’s the next curve coming up and how do I address that curve well. Because I’ll tell you what in this day and age, I’ve never seen it – when I say I’ve never seen work be so fast, so competitive, so overwhelming that one of the biggest things that I see missing is people thinking about what the future could hold. I call the tyranny of the to-do-list, people are so loaded with to-do-list that they’re not thinking about what else do I need to be thinking about, what else do I need to be considering, where else could we go, am I taking time to sit back and really think through who we are, the path that we’re on, the momentum that we’ve created, what’s working well about that, and what needs to change or we could be running ourselves really quickly into a brick wall. I’ll tell you what, so many people find themselves all of a sudden in a panic state because the market is changing and they haven’t, because their load is getting larger but their impact is getting smaller, they’re doing more than ever and yet they’re creating less value than they ever have. That’s a very, very dangerous equation. Mary Agnes: How important is it that relationships stay firm throughout the process because if people are obsessed with the to-do-list, I wonder if they’re spending enough time building rapport and keeping that rapport alive? Steve Lishansky: It’s one of the challenges that every leader has, every client relationship manager has, and more fundamentally every human being has – doing more does not necessarily produce more. One of the things that I fundamentally believe is the difference between the most successful people and those who are struggling, treading water and threatening to go under is who takes care of the people, the internal people and the clients and customers that they deal with better. Who is in tuned with them? Who understands what they’re looking for? And, who can help them figure out what they look for? Because I tell you what, so many people we deal with are too busy to be thinking. Our ability to help them think clearly is oftentimes whether you’re a leader or you’re serving your customers, it’s oftentimes one of the most valuable things anyone could ever do for the people that they deal with – help them get clear – which means being in relationship with them where they trust you enough to do that is extraordinarily valuable, and it’s one of the keys to massive success that every really successful person understands. Mary Agnes: You know, when you bring up success, I want to ask what the two or three fundamentals of true success are, first how does somebody define true success and then I think the fundamentals are probably the same. We would make the mistake of thinking they’re different, but I think those fundamental core principles to reach success are probably would be the same. Steve Lishansky: There’re two different issues here, we’re talking about what is success and I think different people would define that differently. I’ll tell you what I would think about that. The other one is what’s the path to success? I think that has a lot of more commonalities. Let me explain what I think success is, I think success needs to happen in three dimensions, certainly when I work with leaders, I really believe this is critical. First dimension is personal – are people fulfilled? One of my experience is working with really extraordinary people and some challenged people, is that the most fulfilled people are also the most effective and successful people. They love who they are, they love what they do, and they love what their life encompasses. Isn’t that the key to fulfillment? The second dimension of success is interpersonal – do we create and have extraordinary value in our relationships? Not just about communication, saying hello and sending thank you notes, all of which are really important. No, it’s about are we creating value for the people who we value in our relationships and are we getting value from the people that we need to deal with? To me, that’s the height of interpersonal effectiveness. We have and we create such exceptional value that it’s a total joy, delight and immensely successful relationship that we have. The third dimension for me is organizational. I deal with leaders, but everybody is engaged in teams or social groups or organizations whether it’s at work or it’s at home in your community, in your spiritual pursuit, every one of us lives in some kind of community. And the question is: are we creating and are we supporting leadership in those organizations? You don’t have to be in charge to be an effective leader, what you have to do is help elevate the performance, the effectiveness, the focus of that group. That’s a tremendous contribution of leadership, not necessarily leadership position but of human dynamic of leadership where you can elevate the group that you’re a part of whether you’re the boss or you’re at the low on the totem pole, it makes no difference; and so much of that leadership is the ability to keep the focus where it matters, and to create value that would be worthy of that team, that group, that organization really being able to focus on and achieve. So, for me, that’s what success is in the important dimensions in my life: my personal life, my life with the people I deal with and the organizations that I deal with. Now, what’s the path to get there? That’s where I think there’s more commonality. Number one, are we clear about what matters? Are we clear about what’s most important? Because I’ll tell you what, whether you’re talking personally or you’re talking about the people that you deal with, your family, your friends, your organization and the companies that you work for and the organizations that you’re a part of, if you don’t know what’s most important, you’re basically on the hamster wheel is what I call it. You’re running, running, running, going nowhere. If you know what’s most important, the average intelligent person can figure out the path to make it happen. So, what happens is so many people substituted demand for action, a to-do list for being able to keep their focus on what matters most. One of the most challenging things to do in our culture today is get clear about, keep your focus on what really matters, because if you can’t make it an impact on what’s most important in your life, it’s not going to be fulfilling, it’s not going to be very joyful, it’s not going to be very productive – and those are all things I just hate to see people get stuck in because the way out is not that difficult. And I think the single most important characteristic for success regardless of how you define it is to make sure you know what’s most important to you, to the people around you and to the organizations, teams and groups that you’re a part of. Mary Agnes: One of the things that I love about the book you’ve written is that it covers communication so completely. It really talks about communication not being in how we talk to each other, that it being in a shared philosophical idea. I think with corporations and even teams of any kind, communities, tribes, one of the things I see happening — and you covered this in your “Becoming an Indispensable Partner” workshop also – is that people may have a very clear idea of success. That if the group doesn’t have the same idea, it can be like a ship being oared in different directions, no one really fastened, everybody getting seasick. So, talk about that. How does a group or a leader or a team get a synchronized idea of what their goal and their success is? Steve Lishansky: We have a great metaphor for that because just this last weekend, they had what’s called the Head of the Charles Regatta here in Boston, which is the largest rowing contest in the world. And everybody from ranked amateurs to greatest teams in the world come and compete there, and everything from singles to eights with a coxswain (which is the person who tells them how to row). One of the things you start to see is that it’s your ability to get everybody aligned, big guys or very strong women rowing at the beat that the person in front of the scull is giving the count of; the degree to which they are aligned is the degree to which they’re going to be successful. Then, it comes down to the things that everybody else can do, build the strength, get yourself ready, make sure you have the skills. But I’ll tell you what, the ability to align around what’s most important is the single greatest fundamental that allows from small groups to two people working together to huge groups of hundreds of thousands working together to really be able to be effective. Are we aligned? Are we focused on what really matters? If we are, we’ve got a very strong capability of doing amazing things; if we don’t, then we run the risk of no matter how good we are individually of producing a fraction of what we’re capable of. So, one of the things I always look for is: how well aligned, how much of a common understanding do we hold with the people that we’re working with? I mean, even if it’s just your assistant or your boss or your peers on a team, do we all know and agree and commit to what’s most important? Does this drive our thinking, our planning and our performance? If it doesn’t, we’re not going to win. If it does, we’ve got a chance to do something really extraordinary. And it’s amazing when you watch certain teams who really do amazing job of producing a meaningful result. And it’s not often just by effort; I’m a great believer that effort goes a long way. Effort by itself could be running in circles, essentially being on a hamster wheel; but clear focus on what really matters, clear agreement, alignment with the people that we’re doing it with can produce a level of acceleration and accomplishment that is way beyond what we normally expect. And that’s what we see when you see the super championship teams, whether you’re talking about sports, or you’re talking about business, or you’re talking about successful and meaningful nonprofits, or even you’re talking about government agencies. There are some great ones and they’re usually characterized by a leader and leadership practices throughout the group where people keep the focus on what matters and people keep aligned around delivering what matters. And for all the noise and the system – and I mean activity and information and everything that happens in our daily life — they know where they’re going. And more importantly, they know why that’s where they should be going. And I tell you what, those are the people who manage to get there faster, and better, and more successfully than anybody else. Mary Agnes: Talk about why you wrote the book and how this is one of the primary goals in your writing this book, because I know this, we talked about this before, that getting teams aligned, getting the idea of success… in a group concurrence, everybody is moving swiftly, accurately and purposefully, hopefully toward a faster end game. Talk about what inspired you to write this book to begin with? Steve Lishansky: Well, my first premise is that there’s no individual no matter how good they are — look at the world’s greatest soccer player. I tell you what, Lionel Messi and [? 0:18:55] for Barcelona, but Barcelona is a championship team because everybody else is there too. Or, you look at the greatest basketball player of all times, and whether you think that’s Lebron James or Michael Jordan, both of them got nowhere till they got a team around them, even though they themselves were already obviously contenders of the greatest player of all time. One of my premises is that: The power of a team can beat any individual, or any small group of superstars, if that team can leverage the greatest talents, capabilities and resources. So, what I really believe is that the ability to communicate clearly – and what I mean by that is to keep the focus clearly on what’s most important, to be able to dialogue about that. To be able to share with each other and help us together keep our focus on what’s most important, and then to utilize our greatest talents, capabilities and resources. It’s almost like alchemy. What I mean by that is, it’s almost like a magical combining, and that’s what you see with great teams. It’s almost magical what happens for them. You look at them and go “I would have never imagined that team could do that even though they are composed of great players.” The team itself is far beyond what those great players could ever produce by themselves. So, for me, how do you create a great group, a great team of players who can leverage their greatest talents, capabilities, and resources, and support that with the people that they’re with? How do we create multipliers in the way in which we communicate and relate and work together? Because when we do, we’ve got a much better chance of fulfillment, we’ve got a much greater chance of magnifying the value we can create, and we’ve got a much greater chance of being superstar teams. You know what, my experience Mary Agnes is, it’s not that difficult. And the challenge is, we’re constantly being whipsaw back and forth, or running as fast as we can on hamster wheel to the point we’re so tired we can’t think clearly about what really matters and why it matters – that we just don’t pay attention to the simple fundamental principles that allow an individual and a small group and a team and an organization to be outstanding. And having trained as what I call phenomenologist, really looking at the phenomena of success not just cute ideas and simple models, I’m not interested in techniques and tips. I’m interested in the fundamental principles and phenomena that are common to the most successful, that can be taught to everybody. And to me, that’s what I’ve spent my life at, that’s what I’ve dedicated my work to, and that’s what really gives me the greatest joy is to see people really learn these principles, produce extraordinary impact and results and value; nothing more fulfilling for me than to see people able to communicate more clearly, to relate more effectively, and to produce far more as a team than they ever thought possible. Mary Agnes: I think the book that you’ve written really covers that almost systemically. It just walks through the entire process and it covers communication: us, you, and them. What happens a lot with communication is, you could be the best communicator but if you’re just not speaking the language of the other guy, they’re not even getting it. So, I think the irony is, you don’t even have to be — I think like the best communicators and the best teams are led by great people who inspire greatness, but that doesn’t always look warm and fuzzy; Steve Jobs kinds of springs to mind, right? But he wasn’t the least bit warm and fuzzy with his team, and yet inspired absolute greatness and… Steve Lishansky: Well, it depends on what you’re looking for. Let me just say something about that. Warm and fuzzy is just a set of values certain people hold and others couldn’t care less about. Communication is not what you say; communication is what happens with the people that you’re talking to. This is one of our fundamental mistakes when we start thinking about what communication is – “I said it, they don’t get it.” In fact, that’s a chapter in one of the book, because it goes like this, it’s something that every single executive I’ve ever worked with has said to me. They said, “I don’t know why they don’t get it. I’ve already told them a dozen times or substituted a hundred times, or substituted a thousand times.” To which I reply, “What’s your point?” Because the reality of it is, it doesn’t make any difference what you say unless it produces the result that you’re looking for in the other person, unless it produces the understanding or the clarity you’re looking for in the other person. Communication is not what you say, it’s what happens with the people you’re talking to; and until we get that, I’ll tell you what, you’ll never be an effective communicator except haphazardly because as human beings we learn how to adapt. But I’ll tell you what, excellence in communication and relationship really comes from getting out of you saying what you think you need to say and getting and to seeing what’s happening to that other person, or those other people that I’m talking when I say what I say. And when you begin to understand what’s going on outside of you, when you begin to pay attention to that and really help that person get clear about what you’re trying to communicate, you will find a level of effectiveness and success that’s outstanding. Not good, not great, outstanding. It’s really not that difficult, but it is that critical. Mary Agnes: You know, I wanted to quote something you said in the book that I think really kind of captures this especially well. In Chapter 5 you said, “Although we’re all wired to make our own interpretations, we must learn to leave nothing to interpretation when we speak to others, and despite our inevitable assumptions we must also bridge any gaps by verifying what others mean when they speak to us.” I just think that’s one of the – if I could just grab that little space, those two sentences and walk around with them tattooed to my heart and my mouth, that I feel like it would be such a better life, because communication and success doesn’t just happen in work, in our families, it happens with the person checking you out in the grocery store, the hotel clerk. Achieving well interpreted successful goals in any instant is so important to our life and our joy. I mean, that tells about those interpretations really gets in the way. Doesn’t it? Steve Lishansky: Well, one of the great fallacies of human beings that we never question until we’re faced with it day in and day out almost all the time, is that – everybody is just like us, they must think like us, act like us, and interpret like us; therefore, I’m just going to say what I have to say and they should get it. Except it doesn’t work at all, and you discover very quickly nobody interprets just like you. And the fact that we assume that when somebody says to you, “I need it better, faster, cheaper,” we know what that means is one of the greatest fallacies and dangers in business we could ever entertain. Because what they mean by better, what they mean by faster, what they mean by cheaper could be radically different than what we interpret that to mean; and therefore, it’s absolutely critical that we understand where people are coming from and what they mean more than we think we know what they mean. I do an exercise all the time, all over the world, and it’s the same everywhere – we understand the words but we don’t understand the people. I tell you what, which is more important, understanding the words that they’re saying in the way in which we interpret, or understanding the person in what they really mean when they’re talking to us? We know what the answer to that is; we just don’t operate like that. We operate as, “Well, they said. I know what that means. I’m off and running.” That’s why we are so busy and we do so much work that really doesn’t matter, that’s not valuable, because we’re thinking this is what they mean and that’s not at all what they meant. And we’re thinking we said something clearly and they’re off doing it, until they come back a week, a moth or a year later and we discovered they had no clue what we really meant. We live in our world of assumption that I said it; they got it, now I can move on. I’ll tell you what, this is why it’s so critical to really think about what’s most important, because if we’re not focused on what’s most important, we’re on the hamster wheel and we’re running like crazy little hamsters and we’re not going anywhere. I tell you what – it’s such a waste of human talent, potential, capability and the ability to produce meaningful results that matter to the people that we care about, for ourselves and for the world. I tell you what, again, it’s not that hard but it is that important and that critical to shift the way we think if we’re ever going to be successful the level we’re capable of. Mary Agnes: I feel like we’ve covered the primary things I wanted to cover for today, but I really look forward to our next discussion and to go a little bit deeper on some of the issues, like, how do you achieve that? What we need to achieve obviously, I feel a lot more comfortable and I’m sure the audience does. And real question of what happens next? How do you begin to create those relationships where there are no misinterpretations, everybody is moving in the right direction and we’re all achieving great success. Woo-hoo! Steve Lishansky: And there are steps to do it and I look forward to really exploring those steps. We’re not just talking about some of the fundamentals of what goes on and what we could do, but really to lay out the step-by-step process for people to really understand it. I’ve been doing it all over the world for more than 20 years now and it’s a joy to share with people because everybody gets it. And this is what I call human dynamics because I’ve done this in China, I’ve done it in Europe, I’ve done it all over the America. I’ve done it many, many places, people from more than 40countries have been in the program; we don’t change a thing. I call this trans-cultural, it’s beyond culture. It’s about how human beings function and I look forward to really exploring that more in-depth with you. Mary Agnes: That sounds great. I’ll see you here next Tuesday same time. We’ll pick up the discussion and we’ll leave it out live for on-demand whenever everyone’s ready to listen to it, because people are so busy. Thanks for being here Steve, and thanks for sharing this great wisdom. And we look forward to the book coming out very soon… Steve Lishansky: It will be. Thank you so much, it’s real pleasure. I look forward to our next conversation.