The Evolving Leader

‘Certainty: How Great Bosses Change Minds’ with Mike Mears

• Mike Mears • Season 7 • Episode 20

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In this compelling episode of The Evolving Leader, we sit down with Mike Mears, former CIA leadership head and author of "Certainty: How Great Bosses Can Change Minds and Drive Innovation." Mike shares powerful insights from his extraordinary career – from his days as a combat platoon leader and nuclear missile commander to his transformative work at GE and the CIA. Discover how his relentless curiosity led him to question conventional leadership practices, the pivotal moments that reshaped his approach, and the lessons he's learned about inspiring teams in a world driven by uncertainty.

 How can leaders inspire and motivate in a world driven by uncertainty? Join us as we explore the habits, mindsets, and actionable insights that can transform how you lead and connect with your team.


Further reading from Mike Mears:

Certainty. How Great Bosses Can Change Minds and Drive Innovation:

https://www.certaintyleadershipbook.com/

 

Mike Mears’s Website:

https://www.mikemears.biz

 

Mike Mears’s Leadership Newsletter:

https://landing.mailerlite.com/webforms/landing/i5b5t0

 

 

Other reading from Jean Gomes and Scott Allender:
Leading In A Non-Linear World (J Gomes, 2023)

The Enneagram of Emotional Intelligence (S Allender, 2023)

 

 

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Twitter               @Evolving_Leader

Bluesky            @evolvingleader.bsky.social

YouTube           @evolvingleader

 

The Evolving Leader is researched, written and presented by Jean Gomes and Scott Allender with production by Phil Kerby. It is an Outside production.

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Leadership is a loaded word. It's burdened by the multiple meanings that we give to it, the role of leadership, the stereotypes that we have in our heads, the act of leadership, the relationships we have with leaders, good and bad, their place in our society, and the wisdom that the best leaders accumulate over their lives, in many ways, the types of leaders that we have at any given moment in time reflect the state of the world and the expectations and hopes we have for our future. In this show, we talk to Mike Mears, who has accumulated a lot of wisdom working in the CIA from agent to head of leadership in startups and in running large divisions in companies like GE we explore the leadership platitudes that he's busted in his career. Driven by a relentless curiosity and eagerness to make sense of his expectations. Tune in for a fascinating conversation on The Evolving leader. Hi folks. Welcome to The Evolving Leader the show born from the belief that we need deeper, more accountable and more human leadership to confront the world's biggest and I'm Jean Gomes.

Scott Allender:

What are you bringing with you today? Mr. Gomes,

Jean Gomes:

I'm bringing a sense of challenges. I'm Scott Allender serenity and calm. I've had a really great week. I've managed to to have one of those rare times where I've been able to contemplate and think and write, and, you know, it's been wonderful. Had some really great conversations with people. So I am feeling very satisfied. Actually. Have to say, How are you feeling? I'm feeling today. I'm bringing a little little heaviness, a little sadness. It was a it was a deeply difficult week, personally, the last, last several days. But I'm also bringing a lot of gratitude for community and friendship and family and just, yeah, just the people in my life, which includes you, my friend, and this show and the opportunity to have conversations like the one we're about to have. I've been looking forward to this for quite some time. Today, we're joined by Mike Mears, Mike who has led a really extraordinary life, studied at Harvard and West Point. He was a commander of a nuclear missile site and decorated for valour as a US Army combat platoon leader. He's held positions as senior vice president at GE investments and other large organisations. He's led turnarounds and launched several startups. But what we're particularly intrigued by is his time at the CIA where he headed the Leadership Academy and retired as its chief of human resources. He's about to launch a new book called certainty, how

Mike Mears:

Scott, thank you for having an old spy on. great bosses can change minds and drive innovation. Mike,

Scott Allender:

I'm going to ask you about that spyness In a minute. welcome to The Evolving Leader.

Jean Gomes:

Mike, welcome to the show. How are you feeling today?

Mike Mears:

I am actually feeling Ducky, close to maybe euphoric, because we are getting ready to talk about my obsessive subject, which is leadership, something I think about all the time, and I love, love talking about it. So you've got a very happy, happy interviewee here. Now I want to step aside, though, what a what an unusual question to open a podcast with, but it's absolutely brilliant and and I want to get into this later, but what you did is you did a check in which you talk about, in your book, the nonlinear world leading in the non linear world. And I want to get back to later. We can talk about what does the check in due to the human mind, you know when you're doing them, but that's that's a cool way to start.

Jean Gomes:

Thank you. Well, it certainly settles us into what

Mike Mears:

Well, you know, let's get some cheap laughs we're doing and gets us really focused on it. So great for calling that out and let here. And I'll say Jean Scott, if I tell you I have to kill you. Do you know how many times I've heard that, that questions from Jean, by the way, that's that's like being a lawyer. You tell somebody your lawyer and they start telling you lawyer jokes. Oh, I It's like fingernails on a chalkboard. Anyway, it is true that I can't talk about it because we sign an oath. So. Um, and I can hear the podcasters out at podcast land starting to tune out right now. I just say, Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Got two things for you. The first is, if you meet me and we're in a bar or a pub, I can tell you stories that will curl your hair. I just can't, can't do it publicly, on on something recorded. So that's their guarantee. And then the second thing is, if you ask me specific questions I can answer, like you could ask me, Mike, where did you live in the 1980s little dry in parts, but I'm rather surprised how much it disclosed. Now the second book Jean is centres on SIS or M i Six and stunning book called The Spy and the traitor, about a chap named Gordievsky who was the resident in London. And it's so such an unbelievable and suspenseful story. I don't want to give it up, giving any hints. It's like a beach read. It's so well done so that that's a keeper.

Scott Allender:

Thank you for that. I've noted both of those. Yeah,

Jean Gomes:

we'll put links in the show notes for those two and and I have to say that Mike, we were on a virtual in a virtual bar a few weeks ago, and did tell me some amazing stories, which I didn't write down so like nobody has to come up after me. So you start the book with a somewhat surprising encounter with your boss at the CIA that leads you on a very long journey of discovery about leadership and change. Can you tell us about that and what it unfurled in your mind?

Mike Mears:

Now, I am telling a spy story, and it starts out like a bad again, a bad spy novel where I'm in the bowels of CIA and my phone rings, and the somebody says the ddo, which is the Deputy Director of Operations, that's our the spy master. They report up to the director wants to see you right away, and he's the man or woman who really knows everything they they're read into all the cases. They're running all these operations. They know all the secrets. So you know how you get that little spike of fear when the big boss calls sometimes. And so I gave it the old Well, can you, could you tell me what the subject is? And they said, No. He just said, Get Get up here right away. So I went rushing up there, and he looked up to me, and he asked me a really mundane question, but it's one that I've thought about every day since. And the question was this, why is it, Mike, when I pull the levers, nothing happens. So think about it. We got somebody in one of the most powerful positions in the world, and I knew by lever, Scott in HR, you know the metrics and rewards and training, or all these levers we pull. So here's somebody in one of the most powerful positions in the world, and people are not doing what the boss wants, and it just stopped me in my tracks, because I my title was an odd one, which was senior counsellor for leadership and management. I was the guru. I knew everything thought I did, but I didn't know the answer to that question of, Why, what is it we're applying wrong, or what is it we're applying right? And so it's a fascinating journey to sit and pick up that question every morning. Flits through your mind. Everything you read or see somehow, unconsciously will get linked to that question. And so you really make some breakthroughs about leadership and human nature and so forth.

Scott Allender:

What was your biggest shift in terms of your how it changed your approach to leadership?

Mike Mears:

Well, one you know this, I'm embarrassed to tell you this, it took me four or five years to come up with why the levers don't work as well, boss. It's human nature. You know, if you tell them, they won't listen and what's in their heads, not in yours, and they won't tell you what's in their head. You know, it's pretty, pretty simple. And then, then he probably would ask me, Well, why? And I would say, well, what's the, what's your basic human instinct? And, and he would have said survival. And say, yeah, it's the survival instincts unconscious, but it controls fear and reward, and that's basically what it's all about. So I think once I latched on to this idea that the levers don't quite work with human nature, that was the big breakthrough, because it started me talking to the neuroscientists, psychologists, so forth about how does, how does the human mind really work? And it was familiar to me, because here I am, basically, I want to reverse engineer human nature to see, what should we keep doing that we're doing in leadership world. What do we stop doing? It's not effective at all. And then what new things could we do to inspire, motivate people, and so on. So really, that was the productive moment to start thinking of thinking that way. So,

Scott Allender:

speaking of what's in our heads and human nature, you point out a number of ways in which our brain is still optimised for an environment that really no longer exists. So what's happening in our brains when we meet modern challenges?

Mike Mears:

Well, you know, it's funny this, here's another quasi spy story. I was in Innsbruck, Austria with an old spy buddy, and we decided to jump on a train and go up to bolsano, Italy in the Alps there, there's a museum for somebody named Otzi. And Otzi, I don't know if you remember this, it's called the Ice Man. Originally was a discovery. They made two German two Germans made in the Alps in 19, I think 93 and it was a frozen remains of a stone age man, 5300, years ago. So what's remarkable is, as you know, as you know, wood and clothing and leather all decay after a couple 100 years. So we really don't know what was Stone Age life like. So this guy was completely preserved with his full kit. I mean, he had everything, his weapons, his medical kit, food, everything, and so going up there and seeing that, it's just, I would recommend it for anybody the museum. They've got his frozen remains in a cabinet that you can look in and see, and all of his clothing and so forth. And he suddenly, it dawns on you. You know, people haven't changed much in that period of time. So all the all the issues and fears and beliefs that he had, and certainly the way his mind operated is just like ours, and where he's concerned about, obviously, he was concerned about wolves. He was concerned about getting food on the table, where we, on the other hand, are very, very concerned, less concerned about that kind of survival, physical survival, than we are with social survival. Because we're, we have our social animals, just like Otzi was, because that, that's what's kept us alive, is that we really need the support of others. We can't, can't make it alone. And so today, it's fascinating. You guys have covered this so well. You look at the environment is totally different and ever changing. You got this technology pouring down on us. I've polled 2000 people, and this is not scientific, but it's anecdotal. 2000 people on what percent of your day at the workplace Do you spend, either in meetings or doing emails? And it's fascinating. It doesn't matter whether they're Japanese or Germans or Americans or Brits, you come up with the same number? Well, geez, I guess it's about 85% of my day. So think about that, and and that gives you, let's say it's roughly true. That gives you about 15% of your day to do leadership stuff, the rest of your job, and to reflect. And you know that's, that's not, that's not enough time to do that. And so you guys have said this, and I believe it deeply, which is what we need to do in the workplace is more and better good leadership. But in today's environment, I think you gotta square it. Uh, to really build in that psychological safety and trust and so forth that we need to do.

Jean Gomes:

So, one of the things that that comes out in the book is this disconnect between managers and their people around the real motivations at work that are playing out. Can we talk about that? Understand what you've kind of learned through your experiences of a how that works, and what you can do to kind of improve that alignment,

Mike Mears:

and especially on the motivation front. You mean, yeah, I got, I got called into a interesting job one time at Savannah River site, which is one of the 16 US national labs, basically. And they said, we really want to know what our employees are thinking. So I did an old I'd worked at GE for during the golden years in the 90s. So I stole one of Jack Welch's ideas called quick win, which, and I just went down, he called it workout, but I call it quick win. So I just went down and had sessions with employees say, you know, what is it? What is it that's troubling you? And and so the first thing they came up with was, we have, we don't have enough communications. And that didn't surprise me, because that's number one everywhere. Even even good bosses, employees, will feel that. And then the second question was, their second problem they raised was, we have too many meetings. So I'm thinking, Wait a minute, you you need more communications, but you have too few meetings. That's a paradox, isn't it? And so I started really intensely interviewing employees, and sometimes, actually you do go have a beer to loosen lips about what is it that they really wanted to know? Because when I told it to the lab director, I gave that they just started more meetings, and they had more information on websites, emails and so on, and it didn't scratch the itch. So what you know, basically, it's it got down to something very human, which is all we want to know is, Hey, Boss, how am I doing? Is our relationship, okay? Is there a big purpose here that I'm linked into? Do my colleagues respect? I mean, it's all this truly, truly basic stuff that's unconscious and hidden away, but extraordinary powerful and that's an itch that's got to be scratched, and it wasn't being done with emails from the top and pronouncements and talks and all hands, meetings and that type of thing. That stuff has got to be addressed. Back to your opening question about feelings, that the check in you did with me, that question, that stuff like that's got to be addressed on one on one communication. One communications. It could even be idle chit chat, or it could be following up with questions that like, how are you feeling today, that express concern and so forth. It could be through active listening and all these powerful things we have in our quiver to lead people, but we don't use so it moved it back to basics, and that's that's what motivates us. Because if you take the questions I just said and you flip them, you get into intrinsic rewards, which are, you know, far more powerful than the extrinsic and the intrinsic rewards are, you know, sense of purpose, the sense of autonomy. I've got a little little control over, over my life. It's buy in. All these things are really what get us cooking, and what that's that's basically, how do you, how do you really inspire people? So

Jean Gomes:

when, when you hold the mirror up to to people that you've worked with and say, you know, it's not about communication, it's about addressing core needs of feeling valued, making a contribution, having the ability to influence things and so on. And it requires that that deeper touch of, you know, one on one relationships, most of them probably will acknowledge that and then go, I haven't got time to do that. How do you actually break the cycle where they they actually see the value of doing that, you

Mike Mears:

know, let me, that's a good question. Let me. Let me go back to the check ins. And this is something I call habitual process. This is where we we have, those of us that do leadership development and training. I. Don't get real high marks for having people graduate and go back to the workplace and and apply it. And you know, part of that reason is they're going back to the cold bath. So it's the culture. Yeah, I get that. Part of the reason is that 85% tie up with meetings and and emails. I get that, but I'll tell you what the big thing is, is habit, habitual behaviour of that supervisor. Because, you know, we've all read, at least on the internet, or atomic habits, or something we've read about. Okay, what's the key to to breaking habit? And I'll tell you I don't see anything really satisfying there, because I'm looking for a golden key I can turn, and I'll start going to the gym, and I haven't, I just don't see it. And the best you get is advice Mark Twain gave us 160 years ago, which is, don't fling habit out the window. Take it down the steps, one step at a time. You know, it's tiny steps. So what happens with leadership training? You get them all fired up on all these things they should do and why they should do it based on in my my realm is based on the human mild mind robberies. So they've got the why, and they've got the techniques, and then they practice them, but they won't do them. So I get back to this, this concept I made up of called habitual process. If you think about the check in, that is a process where you go to your employees and all you're doing is for five minutes. You could give them positive feedback. You could ask questions and listen. It's a very quick exchange, but you're doing so many of these little steps that you wanted to teach them in in training and you wanted to apply. So my theory is, if you could get them to do check ins, you're dragging along a lot of good leadership behaviours. So how do you do that? And what? What I did last month, I worked with a group here in the United States at department Homeland Security, big group, and we developed a programme where they're required to do check ins. When they get back, they're schooled on them. They're required to do them. They have to publicly profess to their employees. Hey guys, just want you to know I learned how to do check ins and training. And I'm going to, I'm going to start doing them. Well, there's, there's a big mover toward breaking habit. But here's the real trick you're not doing making this bureaucratic bureaucratic, but they're required to simply, once a week, three bullet point report goes up to a certain person higher up on what did they learn from their check ins that way? So what you've done theirs now you've got the accountability nailed down, and that's what you really need to push the habit. And so we're experimenting with this now. But isn't that that's, that's, I think, a really powerful idea, if you grab a process that's got habits embedded, and you can really politely push people to do it, wow. Yeah, I

Scott Allender:

love that. How do you how do, how does a leader do that at scale? We have listeners all around the world with, you know, leading various different size teams. And so somebody could be listening thinking, I really love this. But, you know, my my team is massive, right? I I just can't see myself being able to do that level of connection on a with everyone. How might they approach this?

Mike Mears:

You know, I'm going to get this is going to get into the weird parts of brain functioning to answer this one. But I would, what I look at is, obviously the at the executive level. You've got a cascade. And how do you do that? Because you're right back in the old spy master seat. I'm pulling levers, and nothing's happened. So here's an experiment we did, I did at State Department about well within the last year, and we transformed the toxic unit, but this is what it involves. You know the name of that my book is certainty, right? And so my theory is, okay, we cling to the status quo. That's our survival instinct, and then the boss has got this future vision on, how are we going to improve operations, or how do we prove quality life or whatever, and and we basically, as humans, reverse, resist change and cling to status quo. But the leaders got to get us over here to a new world. How do they do that? So all that stuff in between is really the important stuff, because leadership is. All about getting others to change. If you don't have change or improvement, you can just manage so I ran into a couple of neuroscientists that were working on the brain's insight mechanism, and it's something I'd never really thought a lot about. And when you have an aha, it is, it is a totally magical moment. Because they their conjecture was that this is something occurs in in not in the prefrontal cortex. Notice it's not rapid analytical thinking. This has got to be something else. And what they teamed up and what they discovered is a tiny spot above the right ear that literally explodes with energy. So it's like the cartoon with the bulb going on, literally explodes. And instantaneously, new neuron connections are made, the energy levels of the brain change and so on. But you have to be in a somewhat relaxed state for that to occur, and that doesn't often occur in the in the workplace. And they, they kept, they've kept working on this and published a book called The Eureka factor. John Kunos and Beamon, Dave beaming. And they the fascinating thing was, I started talking to Kunos and said, Well, what? What happens inside the brain on with chemicals? And he said, Well, you know this 30 some chemicals sloshing around the brain. He said, They combine in a certain way. When you have an insight in which you can, which give you at that moment of that explosion, gives you a complete sense of certainty. Bingo. That was my magic word, because you're trying to take people to move them to a an uncertain environment. So how could you do that and make it a certain environment and and the bottom line is, your ideas are not going to take root, but if it's their idea, wow, that's what's going to happen. So how do you apply that and and not manipulating people, but nicely, force them to have insights so that you can get done, Scott, what you just said, the executive can move the organisation. So what we did at state was took this unit that was really in bad shape, low morale and so on, and we had them do what I call leadership reviews, which are, you could do quarterly or every 60 days. I mean, we do budget reviews. Why the heck don't we do leadership reviews? They do, they're all positive and so forth. But here's what what we did. We use what I call an insight prompt, which is, you know, this has been done before, but not at this scale. So we gave each of them a question about, okay, What? What? One, two or three, things can you do that will transform your workplace or make people's lives better, or get rid of they had seven years of backlog in this organisation, can you imagine, or get rid of the backlog and so forth. And so they were also given 60 days to think about it, and this is critical, because you have to plant the seed, but it can't be spur of the moment. It's not like asking traditional questions. It's mental homework that's got a time lapse, but at the end of it, it's got to have accountability. And accountability is you're going to come back to the boss and report out. And so they did that. And I was expecting, this is such a battered unit. I was expecting maybe 20% good ideas, and then the rest would be probably pretty mediocre stuff. You know, people just fearful, but they're so they're coming up with stuff. So what happened was about 30% of the ideas were what I would call good ideas. Another 40% were out of the box ideas. And what that the reason was these people had been pent up for years, and they're at the work level. They know what needs to be done. They just weren't allowed to do it by an autocratic leader. So there was this explosion, and widely the manager, there is just a super humane turnaround, guys, natural, great leader. And what he did was he approved every one of those questions or suggestions, and then he just got everybody together and they aligned him up. Okay, what's most critical? What's hardest to do? You do the little matrix. And he made an. I made a list or schedule of priorities, and everybody bought into it, and they're often races so and I can give you two, you want two real world examples, and I, I've talked to Jean about this, but one time, another CIA story. I'm walking down the hall with a with a CIA director, and he turned to me, and he said, Mike, why is it they're not being more innovative? And I knew he was talking about the employees, because that was his one thing. He wanted the change culture make it bring in more innovation. And then He paused and they say, said, I've already told them in my first five speeches, I want more creativity. So how would you answer that question? This both terribly naive but kind of cosmic at the same time. So luckily, we turned off. Had to go in the staff room for a meeting. I never, never had to answer that one. Now, years later, Leon Panetta was holding a meeting when he was CIA director, and this was during the bin Laden days when the hunt was going on for him. And of course, he had dropped he knew we were on to him electronically. So he got rid of everything there was, there was no, no traces, no footprints. And so there was a five o'clock Wednesday meeting. Panetta had, maybe, you know, 20 of us in the room. And he, he we talked about other ideas to catch bin Laden and updates and so on. So anyway, he turns, Panetta turns to this one hapless case officer, and says, So, so Joe, what do we do here? What new ideas do you have? And and Joe went, Chief, I'm sorry, I'm out ideas. And everybody hears out of ideas. So Panetta flared up. And then he did what good leaders do. He relaxed. He said, Look, I'm sorry. I'm not angry at you. I was just angry at the situation, and he said, Let's do this. Let's let's adjourn a meeting, and you come back next week with 10 new ideas to catch bin Laden. Well, that's an insight prompt. He's given a mental homework. The accountability is at the end, because they know they've got to be come up with 10 new ideas. So what happens is they're now thinking about that question, reflecting on it when they're in the shower, when they're driving to and from work. So next week, meeting open, and they came in with 37 new ideas to catch bin Laden. Wow, that's the power of this. So so that's something a CEO can do. And again, you could answer, you could ask questions, have people address questions on, how do we make this culture better? What can you do to specifically get us to x or, I mean, all kinds of questions you can ask and you let them bake, where there's in a safe environment, where they're free for a week or or two months to think about it and reflect they will have in some insights, and then you just pull, pull that stuff back. So that's that. And there are a lot of other things too. I think something I call full inclusion or full participation. There's, there's other things that you can do at that level. But

Jean Gomes:

I'd like to come back to the mental prompts in the moment. But love your suggestions on feedback and how you can avoid the social harm that we inflict on each other through either using the famous, you know, kind of sandwich method or other techniques. Can you explore with us what you've learned about this and how it you know how it can hamper progress if we don't get it right?

Mike Mears:

I heard about a study that they were doing at UCLA on the west coast in the states on something they call social pain, which is really strong, the strong negative emotions that we experience at times and and psychologists have been working on this. And so if somebody does anything that disturbs your sense of certainty, again, let's go back to that word. You'll you'll have a negative responses visible in the brain and I want an MRI. So for example, if, if there's a change in your autonomy or your control of a situation that gets spurred, if there's an abrupt change, negative change in relationships with anybody you know, your spouse, your your partner, your whoever that has spurs these negative emotions. If there's something you see extraordinarily unfair that that springs those emotions. So anything again, it goes kind of back to uncertainty. And so what I saw on one of the experiments was what happened. When you basically give somebody negative news, negative feedback, for example, and it was not a pretty picture, because the prefrontal cortex just kind of shuts down, turns black, and all those other components of the brain, obviously amygdala, but also the salt connected, they all flare up, and so at that moment, there's no chance for learning. And you've got an individual who's very, very upset. And there people are debriefed after these experiments to say, what, what emotion Did you see? And some, some you know, say with jealousy, some say anger, at different different emotions that they describe. It all basically boils down to you didn't get your message across. So some of the most popular methods are, you know, the situational method, the sandwich method, which is the good news, bad news, good news. I call that the sewage sandwich. They you know how many times you do that, when the third employee going in as knows, oh boy, I'm getting the good news. Bad news, good news here, the bad news again, shuts them down. And anytime, for example, if you use past tense and I say, Scott, you came into work late yesterday, and this is what it did to the other employees. That's called the situational behaviour method. I have just totally messed up your brain in a negative way because you interpret that because I use past tense as blame. So if had I used future tense, hey, you know what we could do? We could look at your schedule and see how we can change things fit your work life balance and and because if you if you're here, you know at eight o'clock, this means we can do this. And you this done, you get home earlier. It's just changing something as silly as tenses that affect the brain and and reversing those and you get much better results. Now, why does it why does that situational method not work when I when I accuse you of being late you were I'm pointing that out as the anchor. Well, the trouble is, in your mind, you are justified in being late because you were you had to drop your child off at daycare. You did that, and the the lady at daycare wasn't there. She'd gotten a phone call, and so you have to wait to drop the your child off and and then you got behind an 18 wheeler truck that broke down. There's reasons, legitimate reasons, for your being late. In your mind, the boss is not taking that into account, and it's so it feels like, Hey, you're blaming me when I was totally justified. Because we all feel justified in whatever we do, pretty much. So it's just one trick you can use. And I've got what I'll do. I'll send you guys. I've got 16 tricks like that, all based on psychology studies that you can use to make giving feedback a lot better. And let me the one last tip. I've got to say this, if I had my life to live over, I would give more positive feedback. I didn't do it enough. I thought my A players, I thought my B players. Knew they were good. So why? Why had given positive feedback? So my advice, literally to everybody, is back to that intrinsic reward discussion we had, is just up your positive feedback eight fold. You ought to look at giving every employee every week, one at a boy or at a girl, that that would be my, my goal and the impact. It's really interesting. Gallup's looking at that now, I think that the half life is about a week from a boss giving somebody praise. It decays, obviously over time, but what you've done is you have reassured them, and you answered all those silly questions with just the positive feedback. Remember the questions of boss, am I doing a good job? Am I? Is there a bigger purpose here? And all of those angsty like unconscious questions go away for a week, oh, and then they start building back up again. You gotta start all over.

Scott Allender:

I love that. Can we come back to the mental prompts you were talking about a moment ago, and you mentioned something about the full inclusion approach. And I, I've perched my ears up, and I'd love to hear you talk about that. You

Mike Mears:

know, I it's funny. I don't know what to call it, and it's something I learned from Jack Welch, actually. And this was the story of Phil. Lying around GE at the time, which was the union chief at GE was retiring. And of course, that, you know, they the relationship was very testy between the union and management, but, but they had a retirement dinner, well, chatter, retirement dinner for the chief and and it was very cordial, and went very well. And at the end, the the union chief stood up and talk, gave a really impassioned talk about how how much he loved GE, how great the employees were, and how much he appreciated Welch, just letting him work there, have that position and so on. And then right at the end, he looked at Welch, and he says, you know, Mr. Welch, you you had use of my hands for 34 years. And if you'd only asked, you could've had my brain too. Wow, bam, talking about getting hit in the middle of forehead. And I think that's where, I don't know, but I think that's where Jack Welch had an aha, or an epiphany of, yeah, wait a minute, there's one brain me up here calling all the shots, and I've got this organisation of more than 100,000 people. And what if it would happen if I started engaging all those brains so, and you can't fully engage all the brains all the time, and the reason is, again, that the wear and tear on the human mind, you know, we're we use up a lot of glucose to concentrate And to think and make decisions. But my, what I like to see is to for leaders, at least every three weeks, ensure that they have done that, that they have fully engaged every mind. And the way, way Welch did it, you know, I mentioned the workout programme, or the quick win thing is he would use that get everybody in a room. Now here's the requirement. It's not like brainstorming, where only the extroverts talk. Everybody has to talk, and they're brainstorming ideas on improvements and so on. So that I count that as full engagement. Another one is he, and later as that, he cleared out the underbrush of bureaucracy at GE. Then he moved on to six signal, and that does the same thing, because they found that we can use all these tools and we can solve process problems, but we can't get them implemented. And the solution was we'll bring the employees in as part of the process. They get to work on it. And when they did that, not only did the employees have buy in, but they came up with better solutions, because it was the employees who own and do the process. So again, that's another way of this kind of full and full inclusion idea. And I think what it does, you know, trust is based on the old law of reciprocity. So it's a gift you're giving somebody when you give them a problem you can't solve, or you're delegating something, I'm not dumping work, but delegating some real kind of thought problems somebody that's that's really a gift I'm showing you. I trust you to do this, and when you do that enough, obviously you're you're building up trust between people.

Sara Deschamps:

If the conversations we've been having on The Evolving Leader have helped you in any way, please share this episode with your network friends and family. Thank you so much for listening. Now let's get back to the conversation.

Jean Gomes:

If we zoom out for a moment, because everything we're talking about is set in a very interesting context right now, what's happening in corporate America, what's happening in government, what's happening in the CIA, the certainties that people have had for many years, many decades, are starting to come into question, if you are sitting there advising the most senior people in in these organisations about how to navigate that, what's your you know, kind of like, top foundational kind of ideas right now in terms of helping people to cope with this upending of of our you know, kind of tense of expectation

Mike Mears:

before I answer that, let me tell you the depths of the problem we I have never seen as much fear in a workforce as the federal workforce in the US and And the trouble is that you've got you, remember, I talked about social pain all the what registers it? Well, if you tell somebody, I'm going to do a reorganisation that rings every bell, you're changing relationships, you're questioning their autonomy, you're putting on so. Certainty into the it feels unfair. You're putting uncertainty in the system. So that's one thing they've got going against them, workforce. And then the second thing is, there's also a demonization going on in some areas of the press, of government workers. And then thirdly, I think you're you're what you're seeing. The model for fixing government is kind of a sledgehammer approach, whereas I think a scalpel would do very nicely. The Chiefs of human capital that I've talked to in federal government know who the 5% bad performers are. I mean, they're and they're extremely bad. They can't get rid of them, so just change the rules and laws, and let's, let's get rid of the bottom 5% instead of issuing threats and buyouts that that haven't been fully thought out to people, and then burning off the people the best that can go and get jobs outside. So I just wanted to give you a preface that this is beyond a serious issue, and I've never seen fear in in the workplace like that. So I'm going to send you a paper on that I've written up, and it's kind of like Samizdat literature in the old Soviet Union. It's just things that frontline manager can do to start lessening that fear. Now, you're not going to get rid of all of it, you know, because this is such a mega event, but you're going to get rid of some. So I'll shoot you that some eight, eight tips, something that that I've worked on, that that they should do. And the biggest is, just for gosh sakes, the tendency during crises like this for frontline managers is to is that communications need of employees goes up five fold. But the trouble is, the managers now are in a hole. They don't know. They don't have the answers to the questions, so their tendency to communicate drops five fold. So you get this double whammy during crises like this. So So what are the answers? Well, the answers aren't at executive level. They're really at the frontline manager level. And frontline manager is going to have to get out and and do one on one conversations very brief, they're going to have to have the courage to say, I don't know. And if you're an autocratic boss, you think if you say, I don't know, that people won't respect you. And the opposite is true, because you're being honest with people when you say, I don't know what's next, but So build those connections. One on one. Number two reinforce positivity. And that is for, gosh, sex, it takes you five seconds to give somebody a positive feedback do it. And if you don't know what good thing they've done that week, that you can give them positive feedback on them, just ask the question Juanita, what? What one thing Have you done this week that you're most proud of? She knows she'll give you the answer, because you don't know everything every employee is doing. And then you turn around and you give her, you give her a response. Another thing they could be doing is asking motivating questions. Questions are so important, as you guys have pointed out so many times, because they lock the brain in place and people we absolutely focus on a question. So I would ask questions like, What do you enjoy most about work? You get them in a positive frame here. What are your goals for the future? How can I support your positive your professional development here? Or just even, you know, how can I help you? This is this pretty, pretty basic stuff. So I'll send you a complete list. There's no sense for me yammering on and about it, but the delegation again, on, we talked about this full inclusion that'll give people a charge and something to focus on, if it's meaningful delegation on, could be soft issues. How do you prove how should we improve our culture here and so forth? Seek, seek their advice, genuinely on, on all the issues that you're tied up as a frontline manager. That's another gift that builds trust. The act of the one on one conversation, even if it's just chit chat, build psychological safety. So it's just, you know, we're really getting back to the basics we've all talked about, but in fact, you know, it's so crucial to do it right now, and what that'll do is not remove the direct fears, but it's going to so relieve the angst from that other all those other unknowns of you. How am I doing boss? And it gives people that human contact, which is so crucial that's going to take some stress away, and that makes the rest of this stuff, this the needless change that's going on. It makes it bearable for for everybody.

Scott Allender:

So you mentioned a while back that if you had to do your career over you would give more positive feedback. And I'm curious, if you were building a business right now, can you give us some of the principles you would use to build a culture that embodies everything that you've been outlined?

Mike Mears:

You know, I guess it, because I've done a lot of way back when I did a lot of startups and so on. And so the great thing is that the founder of a company, or if you were starting a business, you've got the most impact on culture. And basically, I view culture as a summation of how have all the managers treated employees over the term of the existence of the organisation, with the huge amount, or bigger amount, being granted to the person that started up the company. And so, you know, I think I would just go back and pull out my this idea of, it's a shortcut, but the idea of certainty, how can I get certainty in everybody's mind? And what that's going to mean is, mean you're going to be have a more participative environment, and you're going to, you're going to do all the stuff that we've or look at all the things we just talked about. But here's a big one. You know, at CIA, we are very, very worried about narcissists and psychopaths joining the workforce, and it's called the insider threat, and now it's seeped out into the world, because cyber people are worried about that. But we don't need a Rick Ames going over to the Russians with with all the goodies, and he's, by the way, a star both those books I'd mentioned, we really, really concerned. So the front end assessments are unbelievable. And this stems from a discovery, believe it or not, in 1943 by the OSS, you had the OSS psychologist went to the general Donovan and said, Chief, we're losing a lot of people in we parachute them in France and so forth to bad leadership. And we think if we leave our Jungian baggage and our Freudian baggage at the door, we're going to be able to assess people that would predict future behaviour won't be perfect. It's gonna be far better than what we're doing now. So the Brits were doing that too. Sis was working on this, both tops all top secret, and so were the Germans. Well, the Americans were the only one that cracked the code. And then in 1948 published a book called assessment of men. Don't try to buy it as 3000 bucks original, wow. But what that did is that kicked off the assessment industry. So today you got Gallup count talent, plus connects to companies like that. And this gets back to the question, Are leaders born or made? And of course, it's both, but some people have higher leadership aptitude than others. You've probably worked for when I asked the assessment companies, and I've asked several, what percent of the people that you assess for leadership skills, you know, that's stuff like, they've got drive empathy, their positivity, you know that they've they've got the whole package. I said, what percent of the people that you assess would you call natural leaders? And the answer is about 8% so what you want to do is on starting up a company, or long winded answer to your but the first thing I would do is I would make sure I up my selection validity, and I could with the managers I'm hiring that are going to lead my people. And when you do that, it's not just you and me as layman interviewing people. That's cut pretty low coefficient of validity, but it's stuff like the psychological assessments. It's professionally done, behavioural interviews, backward looking, behaviorally based OJT, things that have more validity and even a little bit improvement on your selection validity is unbelievable impact on on an organisation. And you can look at Ritz Carlton, for example, they they give assessments to everybody, and they put people in the right place, exactly the right place, where their talents can be used the most. And here's a cool story. They they gave a set, they give assessments like I say, to everybody, and they discovered a woman in the who was a maid. Did in housekeeping, and her leadership aptitude was off the chart. So what did they do? Well, they thank goodness they didn't just throw her in a leadership position, and they didn't even start giving her training, but they got her a coach, and they started working with this woman, and today she's a senior VP at Ritz Carlton. Now that's pretty cool. So yeah, to find this talent and unleash human beings, start with those managers on the selection side and get the validity up so that, so that they're going to treat the people right, and that way an answer to your previous question about, what does the executive do? I mean, that's that would be the first step. Because in my work I've done, I look, if you've got more than 20% poor and awful bosses as measured by the employees, you've got serious problems in an organisation, really starts to lug so you want to get that number down as low as you can, 6% 5% and an organisation can fly.

Jean Gomes:

So we're coming to the end of our time, and I'd love to step into the metaphorical elevator, and someone says, you know, oh my goodness, your mic. Mears, can you give me one lesson about being a great leader that I should really take on board? What would that? What would that single lesson be? Do you think, wow,

Mike Mears:

you know, again, I think what it is is leadership is so simple, but there's so many pieces that it's got a forgettable simplicity, and that's why I've been trying to how do you boil it down? And you guys have done a good job. So in my book, I would take a Mrs. Manager, Mr. Manager, type out the word certainty and cut it off, and then put scotch tape on it, and tape it to your bed, your bathroom mirror. And every day when you're brushing your teeth, think, okay, so how am I today going to bring certainty in people's brains? And I think the biggest single thing people can do and is to take 20 minutes a week, and it could be over coffee Saturday morning and think through, how am I going to inspire my people this week? How am I going to find out what they're thinking? Who am I going to give praise to? How am I going to do my check in, just to stop, get out of that automatic brain and actually concentrate and think about a plan of what you're going to do. And again, it doesn't take that long, but that is that would be the most one important 20 or 30 minutes of your week to think it through. Now you can go do it. Love

Scott Allender:

them. Gosh, this is such a rich conversation. I wish we could keep going, because I feel like we've just scratched the surface, and you've given us so much to take away so much practical insights and so much benefits of your wisdom, and we're really, really grateful for your time. Well,

Mike Mears:

thank you two for doing what you're doing. I'm telling you this just I want to give you a plug. This is most amazing bank of podcasts I've ever seen anywhere. I mean, it is so rich and broad and at a high level, it's not platitudinal. So I salute you guys too. Thank

Jean Gomes:

you. That's very good, very kind of you. Yes.

Scott Allender:

And dear listener, thank you for being with us for this conversation until next time, remember the world is evolving. Are you? You?

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Jean Gomes

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Scott Allender

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