Navigating the New Leadership Landscape: A Conversation with Robin Pou

I had the privilege of hosting an engaging episode of "Innovators Unleashed" with leadership expert Robin Pou, where we explored the evolving dynamics of leadership in today's world. Our conversation unearthed some fascinating insights into the changing nature of leadership, with a special focus on the fading relevance of traditional command and control leadership. Here's a glimpse of the key takeaways from our enlightening discussion:

1. Command and Control Leadership's Demise: Robin Pou astutely pointed out that the old-school command and control leadership style is on its way out. We're witnessing a seismic shift driven by the emergence of millennial leaders who champion transparency, collaboration, and authenticity. Yet, it's crucial to recognize that not everyone has embraced this change, and some leaders persist with outdated approaches.

2. Addressing Employee Disengagement: Rejecting command and control methods can lead to employee disengagement and reduced productivity. Robin emphasized the importance of leaders initiating open conversations with team members to understand their unique visions within the organization. Building relationships and providing opportunities for employees to operate within their strengths can be the antidote to disengagement.

3. Talent Assessment Over Top Grading: Instead of perpetually striving for a roster of A players, Robin advocates for talent assessment. This means understanding each team member's strengths and enabling them to leverage these strengths daily. This approach can lead to heightened job satisfaction, increased retention rates, and greater productivity.

4. Flexibility as an Emotional Intelligence Skill: In a world characterized by rapid change, leaders must cultivate flexibility as a core emotional intelligence skill. Flexibility enables leaders to adapt to change, manage stress, and create a corporate culture that thrives amidst challenges.

5. Navigating the Remote Work Era: While remote work has become the norm, Robin stressed that nothing can truly replace face-to-face collaboration. The key is to strategically plan in-person meetings for moments of collaboration, innovation, and relationship building rather than mandating a daily office presence.

6. Leadership Doubt Index: Robin Pou introduced us to the Leadership Doubt Index, revealing that an astounding 97% of successful leaders experience doubt in their leadership abilities. This doubt is distinct from imposter syndrome and is commonly felt by seasoned leaders. The index underscores the importance of addressing leadership doubt to maintain effective leadership.

7. Generational Differences in Leadership: Our conversation touched on the generational divide in leadership styles, with millennials being more open to discussing their doubts and seeking help compared to Gen X and baby boomers. Bridging these generational gaps is essential as leadership continues to evolve.

In a world marked by rapid change, leadership, too, is evolving. My conversation with Robin Pou offered profound insights into the need to adapt leadership styles, confront doubts, and nurture cultures of transparency and collaboration in order to lead effectively in today's dynamic business environment. Leaders who embrace these changes are better positioned to navigate the challenges of our ever-shifting world.

To sign-up for Robin’s popular weekly leadership newsletter or to download the Leadership Doubt Index, please visit RobinPou.com or follow him on LinkedIn.

Clinton Henry: Robin, I'm so excited you're here today. I know in your work, you focus on your top leaders, established and emerging leaders. Are there any traditional leadership methods or approaches that you feel should change wholesale?

Robin Pou: Yeah, I mean. First of all, thanks for having me. Great to be part of the conversation. Congratulations on your podcast so far. That's an interesting question because we're working with the top leader in the organizations that we work with so publicly traded companies, high growth private companies. And at this exact moment in time, we are working with three generations of leaders. So we've got baby boomers, we've got millennials, and we've got Gen X. And what we're seeing is that the old leadership style of command and control is dead. The problem is not everybody knows that it's dead, meaning they're continuing to sort of wield this command and control style and who can help the people who otherwise have grown up underneath that system. That's all they know. And millennials, oldest one, perhaps 43 years old at this point are really to your point, wholesale rejecting the command and control style. The favorite word of I think that generation is transparency. Well, transparency means looking through both ways. And there are some things that leaders can't share with their rank and file. And then there's a lot of things that the individual employees would rather not share with their boss. So it's not truly transparent. But the spirit of the word is genuine, authentic, collaborative, relational. And so I don't know that we know what's going to replace command and control. But to your point, I think command and control is an old leadership institution is being torn down, if not completely torn down at this point. Just not everybody knows it.

Clinton Henry: Interesting. And so the that previous mindset of okay as a leader, I will take in the strategy from above and I will enforce it below and everybody will be marched to the same drumbeat. That is out the window. I imagine that mentality has created a decent amount of disengagement from employees who reject that. How do you handle that as a leader? How do you handle specifically the employee disengagement and potentially low productivity that results from that?

Robin Pou: Yeah. I mean, Gallup has done an annual poll which is gauging employee engagement and the way that they communicate it this year in 2023 is that 32% of employees are actively engaged. And so what does that actually mean? Well, as a leader, you're looking for somebody that's taking ownership and taking initiative and thinking two steps ahead. Those are the types of things that you would characterize as actively engaged. And so if somebody's two thirds of the employees are not actively engaged, they're doing the opposite. They're not taking initiative, they're not following through, they're not owning things, they're not thinking two steps ahead. The very things that their leaders are relying on them to do and get frustrated when they don't do it. So specifically to your question, well, what do you do as a leader? We encourage our leaders that we coach, that we work with to actually have the conversation with the team member. Ask the individual, what's your vision for your role at this company? The problem is, we as leaders don't always want that answer. What if we can't fulfill that? What if they ask for something that we're not prepared to do. And therefore we don't ask the question and we don't build the relationship the leader to that team member.

Clinton Henry: That's interesting because when you're talking about having team members that, let's say, aren't performing as you would expect. And let's say you have a few conversations about expectations and you're like, oh, this person is disengaged and maybe they're a B player if you're going to categorize. Is your mindset from a leadership standpoint to just be constantly top grading those B and C players and having only A players in your team? Or do you feel like there's utility in a B or C player?

Robin Pou: Yeah. That's a really interesting question because if you're constantly top grading, then you are looking for an entire team of A players. And any leader that you ask will have an opinion on that. I only want A players or I'll have a mix of A and B players. I'd like to change the narrative slightly and think about it not so much top grading as talent assessment. And so what is that person well, skilled to do? What are their strengths? So going back to Gallup, Clifton's StrengthsFinder, they do an annual workplace report and they said if an individual operates in their strengths every single day, they are six times more likely to report being to enjoying their job and that enjoying their job is a gateway to higher retention and greater productivity. All the things that we know that are the benefit. They also report a three times more likely to report an excellent personal life. So not only are you getting a productive, engaged employee at work, you're getting somebody who's got excellent personal life. That's a double whammy in a good way. So the point is, is that do you have regardless of A player B player, etcetera, do you understand what your employees strengths are and are they able to operate in those strengths on a daily basis? So I'd rather leaders kind of come at it from that perspective than constantly ranking A or B or moving them out or top grading, etcetera. So that may be an appropriate conversation, but I'd rather them start on what are their strengths and are they operating in their strengths on a daily basis.

Clinton Henry: I'm a big fan of Cliftonstrengths. I think it's an incredibly useful tool. And if you're going to leverage that within an organization, you'll have some employees that might be resistant to even going through that initial evaluation. How do you handle that resistance to that change specifically, but also a change in general?

Robin Pou: Yeah, well, we better get good at change because we have had an onslaught of change for what feels like years over the past 3 or 4 years. And I'll be talking to leaders and they're saying, Robin, a once in a 100 year event seems like it's happening on a quarterly basis. So not only is the degree of the challenge or the change growing, but the frequency of it is as well. And so this question about how do I manage change is pretty significant. We rely on an emotional intelligence assessment EQ-i 2.0 so just throwing all the assessments at you along with Stringsfinder. And what the emotional intelligence assessment is gauging is 15 different skills. Are you aware of your emotions? Are you expressing those in a constructive manner? Are you building mutually satisfying relationships, making decisions when emotions are involved and managing stress? These are the five categories of the 15 skills, and I think the number one emotional intelligence skill and we call them skills because they're developmental, meaning you can actually develop greater skill is flexibility. Your ability to withstand the change and hang in there in the moment when that change or that issue is happening is probably your quintessential emotional intelligence skill. So we put that language into the coaching sessions with our leaders because guess who isn't really flexible? The top leader. They have the positional authority. They get to design the leadership life that they want. And that shadow all the way down into the organization isn't always very flexible and sometimes it's brittle. And so I think the leader has to start first. They've got to be doing the work in the area of conditioning themselves for flexibility so as to establish a culture inside of the organization to be able to manage or deal with that change.

Clinton Henry:  Yes. For the past five years, the term I've heard a lot is grit. And I think that has to do with just the ability to deal and handle the change. When you're running into leaders specifically because it's easy to coach people beneath you, but sometimes it's harder to coach yourself. How do you have them upskill on that?

Robin Pou: Upskill on being flexible?

Clinton Henry: Yes.

Robin Pou: Well, what we do is we give them leadership skills or we build on the skills that they already have, which help them understand that they're running a team. And so if the captain of the team is not making room for the rest of the teammates, then they're not really taking the field very effectively because they just have one player. And when you make room for the other people that are on your team, guess what you're going to get? Different points of view, new ideas, different ways of doing things, feedback that might be critical about how that leader is actually executing their leadership. They don't have to go any further than stepping across the threshold of their office in the work from the office environment into the field, which is their direct reports in order to start conditioning themselves for the flexibility that they need to handle the issues on the outside of the business.

Clinton Henry:  Gotcha. That makes perfect sense. As we talk about living in a remote world and trying to increase collaboration, I think one thing that I constantly hear about people having communication issues internally or externally and meeting fatigue. Are there techniques or approaches that you have or that you've seen work to help combat some of those?

Robin Pou: Yeah. I mean, there's really no substitute for being face to face for collaborative meetings. I've got one group that I work with. They are still work from home or remote working post COVID, and the leaders prioritize a twice three times a year, two, three day in person meeting to be able to handle exactly those types of things. I mean, when you're in the routine day to day tasks, you don't necessarily need to be in the same office environment. But when you're collaborating, when you're strategizing, when you're ideating for the future in order to stay competitive in an ever increasing competitive environment, there's really just no substitute for being face to face. So that doesn't necessarily mean that everybody needs to be in the office from 9 to 5 Monday through Friday. But figuring out those environments where the leader can set the table for that in-person collaboration when it matters most.

Clinton Henry: Gotcha. So being strategic on your face to face meetings as opposed to forcing everybody in the office every day. We can be intelligent around that.

Robin Pou:  Yeah. If I had the solution on how to make a Zoom meeting interesting and collaborative and you and I would make a lot of money. It's just not the proper forum for certain types of conversations. But that doesn't mean remote working gets thrown out the window. It just means that you've got to be creative about how to create those environments for collaboration and relationship building apart from the Zoom or WebEx.

Clinton Henry: Exactly. Yeah. Robin, one of the things I was so excited to have you on to talk about was something that you recently published called the Leadership Index. Would you be so kind as to walk us through what that is and what you've learned?

Robin Pou: Yeah, absolutely. So over the course of the 13 years, working with top leaders, thousands and thousands of coaching hours, I started seeing certain trends emerge from the ways in which a leader would respond to what I call trigger events, situations that would cause them to question their leadership. And so when COVID hit, I ended up doing a short series for about 60 days, right when COVID started to really help leaders stay in the game. I called it panic or plan. You've got just as much temptation to panic as your opportunity to plan. You probably can't do both at the same time. And so what I discovered was an audience of people who started following that series that were having the exact same situation or leadership experience that I had observed and the previous decade with my coaching clients. So one thing leads to another. I started a newsletter called the Confident Leader Newsletter, which drops every Sunday night, which even expands the audience further. So I said, Man, we've got a larger than a small sample size here. Let's go validate this seven point thesis. All successful leaders experience doubt. They're not apt to talk about it. As achievers and successful people, they want to be fully confident because in the other nine areas of their leadership, they've arrived at complete confidence. And so this one thing is niggling at them, and if they don't get it resolved, then they start picking up coping mechanisms to fill the doubt gap. And that coping mechanism looks like bad leadership and they start getting less than positive results. So that's just a quick flyover of the thesis.

Well, we hired a group Gradient Metrics to do an objective scientific survey research project for us over the course of the summer. And we got the results back in August and then dropped the results, the Leadership Doubt index last month. Our thesis was proved in that 97% of successful leaders experienced doubt. Now, the reason that we say successful is because this is not imposter syndrome. So if the only solution that's out in the marketplace for a leader when they're questioning themselves is imposter syndrome, but that's typically somebody that's new in their leadership tenure. It doesn't fit for the successful leader because we tested we said, do you feel effective? Are you generally confident? Do you find yourself successful? Do others think of you as a successful leader? So we really wanted to make sure is this just imposter syndrome? And what we found is that it's a cousin. So we've created a construct by way of this leadership Dow, which fits the reality of a leader who's questioning an aspect of their leadership. And it really was astounding what we found and the negative impact. Something like 67% of leaders who are experiencing chronic leadership doubt have questioned whether or not they've hit their maximum potential leadership, which could not be further from the truth. Leadership is developmental. There's more horizons for them to achieve, and yet they're considering opting out of leadership and successful leaders, effective leaders. We can ill afford to lose any good leaders. We need as many as we can. So I appreciate your interest. And that was a long little monologue, but we're very passionate about what we found because it's healing on some level to know that you're not alone.

Clinton Henry: Yeah, I think it's reassuring to a lot of people. If imposter syndrome is the hammer, everything's a nail and there's more out there. And to know that there are people in similar situations who are by and large successful leaders but still have questions or maybe barriers internally that they can work on. As you said, you're always improving. That's more than reassuring. I think it's almost affirming. So I'm so excited that you released that for everyone to consume.

Robin Pou: Yeah, absolutely. I used to say all successful leaders experience doubt. They just don't talk about it. And the results came back from the index. The findings were that 50% talk about it with somebody in their company and 50% don't, which was a little bit of an anathema to me because I had this construct of nobody talking about it. Well, we ran the dissection, the segmentation of the audience, the millennials talk about it with somebody inside their organization. Gen X and Baby Boomers don't. And when I first formed that thesis or that opinion, I was only working with baby boomers and Gen X so my client base didn't have a sufficient population of millennials. So my thesis was slightly off base, although when you cut it across the generations, it's true for X and boomers, they're not apt to talk about it. But millennials are like, Hey, who can help me with this? So I just found that exceptionally reassuring because 75% of the workforce either this year or next year are going to be millennials. Well, if we can normalize the experience of doubt leadership, we can neutralize it and we can actually harness the benefits of that doubt, that questioning that comes with the leadership journey that everybody's on.

Clinton Henry: Well, the generational differences, the delta between the three or [] is fascinating, especially if you talk to a lot of boomer and Gen X leaders, their views of the millennial leader.

Robin Pou: And we're back to this command and control. There's a construct for how leadership should go, do this or else. And if you don't, I'm going to fire you. Well, that doesn't exist anymore. And so you find people who are dealing with a world that no longer exists, and yet they're leading our organizations. 80% of the S&P 500 is currently run by a baby boomer CEO who is 67 years old, which is five years longer than the historical average. They're not letting go of the scepter of leadership. So we have a leadership revolution. We are on the precipice of a leadership revolution. I just hope it's a quiet velvet revolution and not a bloody one.

Clinton Henry: Well, either way, it will definitely be exciting. And Rob I'm so thrilled that you were able to share all this with us. Thank you again for the time. It was an absolute pleasure talking to you.

Robin Pou:  Yeah, thanks so much Clinton for having me and being interested in the work that we're doing. Appreciate it.