Uncommon Greatness with Mark Miller
Ross Romano: [00:00:00] Welcome in, everybody. You are listening to the Authority Podcast here on the Be Podcast Network. Thanks as always for being with us. It's going to be a great conversation with a returning guest, Mark Miller. Mark, in case you you haven't heard our other episode about the book Culture Rules or just to refresh your memory, Mark's a Wall Street Journal and international bestselling author, communicator, and he was the former vice president of high performance leadership for Chick-Fil-A.
Currently, Mark has served as the co-founder of Lead Every Day, which is an extension of his life inspired mission to encourage and equip leaders with the tools they need to be successful. Mark's been writing for about a decade now. 20 plus years. He teamed up with the author Ken Blanchard to co author the book, The One Minute Manager, and also The Secret, What Greater, What Great Leaders Know and Do, and he has over 1 [00:01:00] million books in print and we're in 25 languages, including the latest here, which is called Uncommon Greatness: Five Fundamentals to Transform Your Leadership.
That's what we're talking about today. Mark, thanks for being here.
Mark Miller: Oh, it's a pleasure to see you again. Thanks for the opportunity. And I do need to put a footnote there. I was inspired by the One Minute Manager. Ken Blanchard actually asked me to co author The Secret with him. And again, that was over 20 years ago. It's crazy how time flies. It's
Ross Romano: Yeah. And it seems you keep you keep your keyboard busy, right? I don't know how many keyboards you've gone through over the years. But I know you're working on yet another book and you know, as much as I enjoyed Culture Rules, I will say Uncommon Greatness, there's so much good stuff in this book and so much I hope we'll get to talk about a lot of it here today.
And then I think listeners will certainly gain from this. And I actually wanted to start. With a question. I don't want to even make the assumption that everybody's on the [00:02:00] same page, even though a lot of our listeners are in leadership positions, but why are leaders important
Mark Miller: Wow. I actually believe that everything rises and falls on leadership and some of your listeners may be familiar with a guy named John Maxwell. He kind of popularized that phrase, but I think it's been true throughout time. You think about schools, you think about churches, you think about colleges and universities, you think about hospitals, you think about businesses, you think about Armies.
You think about nations, everything rises and falls on leadership and organizations are incapable of outgrowing their leadership. So if you want to accomplish things in the world, you're gonna have to have leaders. I tell people often leaders are the indispensable lever. To change the world. You just you can't create a better world without leaders.
And I would say, parenthetically, those [00:03:00] leaders need to be skilled. I mean, there are a lot of men and women masquerading as leaders. They're not changing the world. In fact, they're probably creating a lot of the problems. then real leaders have to come and clean up and have to try and fix. But yeah. I mean, I guess the last piece, because I could talk about this for a long time, but leaders are actually the architects of the future.
The future has not yet been written, and it will be written by leaders. So, so these are men and women that rely on the, that vision, to rally people to create that future reality. So, any number of reasons, I think it's a high calling for the men and women who are in positions and call to leadership.
Ross Romano: and we often try to talk here about leadership, right? As a set of actions, disposition, like the things that the person is doing versus their title or role. And I think that also gives an understanding [00:04:00] of. For whom this particular book is written and more about the things a leader believes and cares about, right, versus that they have to have a particular title or it has to be C level or this or that.
Can you tell us a little bit more about that, how you went about the process of defining when I'm saying leaders here, when I'm speaking to them through these pages, this is who I'm, I have
Mark Miller: Yeah, well, thank you for asking that question. And let me say, I have been asked that question in one form or another a thousand times 25 years. And until 18 months ago, I didn't have a good answer, which may sound weird to you, because when people would ask the question you just asked, historically, I'd kind of look at them with a puzzled look on my face.
And they're going what's hard about that question? I said, well, what's hard about that question is the principles and practices that we're [00:05:00] writing about. They apply to senior leaders. They apply to mid level leaders. They apply to frontline supervisors and to aspiring leaders. And people would go, well, that's impossible.
So, well, no, that's the problem with the question. But it really wasn't the question. It was the way I was thinking about it. People were expecting, historically, and I was trying to provide a demographic response.
Ross Romano: right?
Mark Miller: 44 months ago, I had this breakthrough, which will be a blinding flash of the obvious to many of your listeners that I needed to think about a psychographic profile, because once you move into that domain, it's really clear that you're going to have men and women at all levels in an organization that reflect That worldview.
And so we said there are three attributes in the men and women that this content is for. And I would again say all of the content I've ever created is for the same [00:06:00] audience. And number one, they're leaders who believe they can make a difference. in the world. Now, it may be a small world. It may be their world.
It may be their team or their home or, but you've got to have a sufficient sense of agency. You've got to have an internal locus of control. And so that's one people who believe they can make a difference. Number two is men and women. who believe in personal excellence. I'm not writing for slackers, and I'm not saying they're bad people, but I know slackers, and you know slackers, and I know people that are always looking for a shortcut, and I'm not saying they're bad people.
The leaders that are going to lead at the level we're talking about aren't looking for a shortcut. Now, they want to be efficient, And they don't want to waste time, energy, and effort, but they're not looking for a hack because they know there's some things you just can't hack. And then third and finally, we wrote this content and all of the [00:07:00] content for leaders who are energized by performance.
They love to get the right things done. And if those attributes resonate in your head and your heart, then this book's for you.
Ross Romano: Yeah, one of the important pieces of what you've just described is the ability to reflect and self identify and have self awareness of are these the things that motivate me? Is this what I care about? And if yes, okay, let me learn how to do it really well. If no it's not objectively good or bad, but I need to create a different plan here, right?
If I and that's kind of what I was thinking about. As far as in organizations generally kind of across the, you know, the economy and the workforce and the way that companies [00:08:00] recruit for and hire for leadership. And then what that actually looks like tangibly in their day to day is leadership properly incentivized?
Like, are the incentives. in place to make people want to commit to this type of leadership a type of leadership that is about service, right? That is about developing others. That's about the whole because I have, I've certainly observed plenty of cases where people with leadership titles, right?
Are able to succeed in their career independent of whatever success and value add, they're able to contribute to the organization, right? They may or may not help their organization grow, but they're able to do things where they are personally successful. They're [00:09:00] advancing in their career. They're getting good opportunities.
I think part of that to me seems to come from how leaders, are evaluating other potential leaders, right? And saying, okay, if we want to reach this uncommon greatness, which we'll, of course, talk more about here, but meaning, you know, it has to be something different than just the norm, different than what everybody else is doing.
If everybody's doing the same thing, it's hard to create great organizations. Are we looking for the things that would enable uncommon greatness? Or are we looking for, okay, There's a certain set of, you know, set of competencies that leaders have, and this is what we're looking for and et cetera. So I guess that's a long way of asking if we're an organization and what we want from our leaders is for them to be.
The types of leaders that we're talking about here, and then the types who believe in and care about [00:10:00] greatness, right, and who care about not only their personal success, but the success of their teams, and care about making a difference and an impact. Is the incentive structure aligned to that, or does it rely?
entirely and perhaps too much on the individual themselves to decide this is what I care about or I don't, but ultimately it, you know, it, it may be not what the organization is doing.
Mark Miller: Well, I think you raise a really good question about the alignment between the incentives and the behavior. But I think it's even bigger than that. It's philosophical alignment. It's structural alignment. It's you know, one of the questions that I'm. would be asking if I'm in that situation is how does the organization define leadership?
Because if they define it in a traditional context, it is probably competency [00:11:00] based and more than likely then will not meet the standard that we're trying to establish for uncommon greatness. Because see, there's nothing wrong with greatness. We're just saying there's a higher level. And so I think one of those important non trivial questions is what, and I think this is what you're actually asking is, what kind of leadership does the organization need?
Want. And what do they incentivize? But what I would tell you is at the end of the day, I think most organizations are ultimately incentivizing performance. performance over time. And uncommon greatness will generate more performance over time than traditional common leadership.
Ross Romano: Yeah, and there's one story you share in the book about having gone through a leadership assessment, right? And having a consultant that was part of that to evaluate the results and being very confused by the results [00:12:00] because in essence, you didn't, you Act as well, but you didn't
Mark Miller: I didn't conform.
Ross Romano: way
Mark Miller: conform to his concept.
Ross Romano: thought and a leader acted as far as you walk in the room and take charge and say, I'm the leader here. And this is what we're doing. And you had a very different approach to that. And it made me think about the fact that had that interaction happened at a different point in time, right?
Had it happened during the interview process. for hiring for a new leader in a position, or, you know, maybe at a part that was a little earlier in your career where the organization was still trying to make a determination about does this person have leadership potential? they may have totally dismissed you entirely and overlooked you and said, well, clearly this guy's not a leader, right?
Versus at least having it happen at a time where it forced, I'm sure somebody, maybe that particular consultant was still a little confused, but somebody to [00:13:00] maybe rethink their views on it and say you know, we know that this person's a leader because the track record is there and he's been here. And yet, You know, his, the findings here are different than what we expected.
What does that tell us about what leadership actually is versus what does that tell us about this person? But it seemed to me that You know, the approach that you had seemed, it was intuitive to me, but I've been in the same place of saying, I feel like the person I'm talking to here doesn't really understand leadership.
So even though I feel like I'm properly describing how I would approach it and I know how it works, it doesn't sound to them like what they expect or want to hear because. You know, we're predisposed to have somebody who can just rattle off that elevator pitch. Hey, I'm going to come into your company.
I'm going to do X, Y, Z, and then everything's going to happen. And, you know, without the context of it, without some humility, without saying, look I'm going to, I [00:14:00] need to understand the team around me and what are they good at? Right. And, or what are our goals? If again, if I just assume I know exactly everything that's supposed to happen at this organization once I'm there, then that's going to lead potentially toward common greatness, but it doesn't mean we're going to do anything new because I'm just running the same playbook.
Mark Miller: Right. So let me back up half a step. For those that have not read the book, I want to give a little bit the context in that story. So I had I've been given the opportunity to hire a high end, high impact consultant to do an assessment on my leadership, and it was one of those where they don't just send you a computer report, they actually send a consultant to sit down with you and review your results, and this guy came in, and he was very concerned about my results.
It was as if he didn't even want to have the conversation. I mean, I knew something was wrong as soon as he walked in and I asked him if he was okay. And he said, well, yeah, sorta, I guess, kinda. And I said, well, what's the matter? And he said, it's about your results. [00:15:00] And I said, well, tell me what did you learn that is troubling you?
And he said, when you walk in a room, you're not trying to take charge. And I said, that's correct. And he said, well, that's what leaders do. And I said, that's what leaders do to in your paradigm. What I'm trying to do when I walk in a room is try to figure out how I can add the most value. And sometimes that's to take charge, and sometimes that's to take out the trash.
And I believe that's the proper way to view leadership. So that'll fill in some gaps for your listeners. To your point, I think what you're underscoring is how important it is for an organization to understand their concept. And I would take it a step further, not just conceptual understanding. I think every organization that is serious about developing leaders needs a definition of leadership.
And then you recruit. You select, you train, you educate, you develop, you recognize, and you reward men and women [00:16:00] that align with your definition. And so, the book is the story of how we did that 25 years ago at Chick fil A, and it's still the play that they're running today. Different organizations have and will come up with different definitions.
I think this book is to serve leaders that are on that journey and wondering how might we define Leadership.
Ross Romano: Yeah, for, think it's quite likely that your personal journey to leadership in your career influences your understanding of the uncommon versus uncommon. Of course, there's a ton of research behind it too, but I'm sure even when you look at that and reflect on it, that your perspective of how you advance through your career can you share a little bit of that with our listeners who might not know, but I think it also will illustrate that.
you know, what uncommon versus common might look like, because if I just read to them what I read at the [00:17:00] beginning of this episode with the high level bullet points about your career and said, fill in your best guess about, you know, everything that came before all of that, that most people probably would assume it might be different than what it really is.
Mark Miller: I'll give you a couple of highlights, and if there's something you're probing for that I missed, just say, hey, talk about this, talk about that, because I know you know my story pretty well. I started as an hourly team member in one of the Chick fil A restaurants a hundred years ago, and I was awful. I was awful.
I felt like I was going to be fired at any point. It was that bad. I felt like every day was going to be my last day. And so I made a strategic career decision, which I'm quick to point out is not advice, but I quit because I thought it would be better to leave than have to explain for the rest of my life why I got fired at Chick fil A.
And so I left and I went and got another job. And six months later, I got laid off and I thought, shoot, I need a job. Now, I'm a teenager, I'm 19 at this point, and I'm going to [00:18:00] school at night trying to get my education, and so I thought I can't work in the restaurant, maybe I could work at their corporate headquarters, which of course makes no sense in any universe, but it's like, I'm just a kid, right?
So I walked in and told them I wanted a job working in their warehouse, because I knew they had a warehouse. And the receptionist told me to have a seat, and just a few minutes later, Truett Cathy, the founder of Chick fil A, the guy who invented the chicken sandwich, came out and took me into his office to conduct the interview.
Which, that didn't even make sense to me as a kid. I knew who he was. He was the CEO. And I'm puzzled even as we're walking to his office, why is he talking to me about a job in the warehouse? Well, I didn't learn that day, but I later learned he only had 15 employees. So if you've only got 15 employees, it makes a little more sense for the head man or the head woman to be conducting those interviews.
And so, Truett gave me that job and I started working in the warehouse and the mail room. And I had the opportunity over 40, almost [00:19:00] 45 years Transcribed to hold 8 or 10 or 12 different roles, to serve in 12 different roles. I got to start several things, and I don't think it had a whole lot to do with my talent necessarily.
I think it was a let the kid do it, let the kid do it, and I'd do anything. I started our corporate communications group when I was, I guess I might have just turned 20. And I started our quality and customer satisfaction group, and I started our organizational effectiveness group, and I started our.
Leadership Development Practice, which was under the larger banner of training and development at the time, which I was also responsible for, and we provided training for team members, operators, the men and women that run the restaurants and corporate staff and we spun off the Leadership Development Group.
I was a director in field operations, actually working with the restaurants. I had half the chain that, were under my stewardship at that time. It's a smaller organization for sure, but [00:20:00] I had 15 consultants who served those individual restaurants and did that for about four years. And so I really have had trouble holding down a job.
And somebody asked me, I've been asked this a couple of times, like, what does, do all of those have in common? And I thought, well, that's interesting. I could only come up with one thing they all have in common. I didn't ask for any of those jobs. I serve at the pleasure of the organization. I did have one opportunity to choose a role.
If the president of the company came to me and he said, Hey would love to know if you're interested in leading national marketing, which was in keeping with the bizarre career that I was in the midst of, because I'd never worked in marketing and It's the president of the company that asked me that question.
And I said, okay, I said here's something I'd love for you to do for me, which I'm not sure what he thought about that. But this was my response. I said, you've got perspective that I'll never have. Like you're the president of the company. And I'd been there at the time, [00:21:00] probably 15 years. So he knew me and I knew him. And I said, I'd like you to project a decade into the future in your imagination. And think about me on the path I'm on or the marketing path. you tell me which of those paths do you think I will add the most value to the business. And I said, that's the job I'd like to have. So he said, I'll get back to you.
And so it took him about three days. And I don't know if he thought about it for three days, but three days later, he called me and it was a really short call. He said, you're staying in operations. I said, yes, sir. Thank you. And I hung up and somebody else got the marketing job. So other than that, I never even had a conversation of substance about any of them.
It's like, will you do this? Yeah. Will you do that? Will you do this? Will you do this? Because. I serve at the pleasure of the organization. So does that influence my paradigm [00:22:00] that I think leaders are supposed to serve? Yeah, I think it's the highest calling for a leader. It's not just to serve the organization, but the people who are doing the work.
Because in almost none of those jobs was I doing the work. So I'm trying to help the people who are doing the work be wildly successful. And that's kind of been my playbook over and over.
Ross Romano: Yeah. And it speaks to, from the organizational perspective, confidence should look like in leadership, in developing talent, in, in understanding, if we're creating the culture and the people growth and the learning and development that we want to create here, we're confident that our people who are here, if we're giving them different opportunities, that they're going to get great results.
Versus saying, you know what, I have this [00:23:00] position that we have open, and it has to be an external hire, and they have to have this, and this credentials, and that way, you know, I think that person will succeed, and if they fail, well, you know, they had all the credentials, so it's not my fault that they failed.
And it doesn't mean that there's not a place for all of those things, right? And there's not a place for We want to look at some different options here and determine, and as a leader too, I have to be confident enough to say, look, I'm going to hire the best possible people I can hire. I don't need to feel like I'm always the smartest in the room.
I want to hire people who are going to push me and push the organization. That's how we're going to be great. But also being confident to say, look, if we're doing the things we're supposed to be doing, then that should mean that the people who are in the organization now are equipped to take on some challenges.
Mark Miller: All right. So I got two, two stories that come to mind. They're both [00:24:00] short. I want to share them in response to what you just said. I've always wanted to surround myself with the smartest people possible. I mean, if you give me something hard to work on, My, my instinct honed over 45 years is put the smartest people you can find on the planet in the room.
And sometimes it's internal people, sometimes it's external people, sometimes it's a combination. I mean, I've been using a research team out of Stanford for three or four of my last books, because they're the smartest people I can find. And so, I love bi So. As it relates to me as a leader, I remember 40 years ago in my first real leadership job, I hired a guy making more than me on my team. Now, I can't, I was just a kid and so I wasn't sure about that. And so I went to my boss and I said, Hey, I got a question for you. Like, does this feel weird to you? [00:25:00] And he said, well, which part? I said, well, I just hired a guy who makes more than I do. Now, I wasn't asking for a raise. I was grappling with this as a leader.
He was talented, he was gifted, and this is the market rate, and I hired him. And my leader said, well, you've got a fundamental decision to make. And I said, I do? He said, yeah, do you trust us? I decided that I did, and things kind of worked out, right? But, so, I want to get smart people around me, and I think that's, if there is a hack, I said, this book and my content is not for people looking for a hack. Well, that's actually one hack that I endorse, is get the smartest people you can find, internal, external, or a combination, if you're working on something hard.
If you're not working on something hard, then you can put anybody in a room. But if you're working on real hard stuff, try to assemble the [00:26:00] smartest group of people you can. And I never, I always, I want everybody in the room to be smarter than me. Because I'm the guy that's going to ask the questions that they're going to find the answers to. But the related story, and you made some comment about an organization that has confidence in their people. To learn and grow. I would say, and I may have told this story the last time I was with you, I don't remember, but the defining moment in my 40 plus year career was right after I moved out of the warehouse.
And so I'd just been asked to start corporate communications, which we didn't even call it that back then. We called it audio visual services. Which is interesting. I ultimately ended up hiring a guy to run that, back to hiring smart people. He was one of two global communications leaders for IBM, is the guy I hired to take my place.
Because I said, I don't know near enough about what we're actually trying to do here, [00:27:00] but as a defining moment I'd been in that role less than six months, the communications, AV support, whatever they called it back then. And my boss came to me and said, I want to talk to you about your future. And I was wondering if I was in trouble.
I mean, I'm 19 years old, right? At the time, might have just turned 20. I mean, I was just a kid and I've been on the job maybe a week and my boss comes in and wants to talk about the future. And I'm going, okay. And he said, I want to tell you how the world works. And I remember saying, you know how the world works?
It's like, this was just, this was blowing my mind and he hadn't even started. And he said, yeah. He said there's only one path to more influence. more impact and more opportunity. I said, okay, start over. He said, there's only one path to more influence, more impact, and more opportunity. And I said, what is it?
And he said, lifelong learning. And I said, you've got to be kidding me. He said, no, that's it. He said, you look at the people who [00:28:00] continue to grow their influence, they continue to grow their impact, and they continue to grow their opportunity. And that's what they all have in common.
Ross Romano: Yeah,
Mark Miller: then to sign up for lifelong learning.
I always tell people, my parents wish I'd have decided earlier because I was a lousy student. But that's what I believe was the secret sauce that allowed me not only to change jobs, a half dozen of those were career changes, right? When you're going to lead a training function versus an operations function versus start a quality and customer satisfaction group, it's like, Those are different, right?
So, the fact that I'd said, hey, I'm gonna commit to lifelong learning, I think is, it was the, again, secret sauce, maybe secret weapon that allowed me, um, to be as adaptive as the organization allowed me to be.
Ross Romano: and even as you were, especially as you were giving that example around, [00:29:00] you know, the hiring pieces, it's makes me think about, imposter syndrome and leaders that struggle with that and how I kind of think of it as it's a decision. Are you trying to be an imposter? Right? In which case you should feel that if you're trying to be something you're not.
And if you're not, then you lean into authentically what you are. If you move, the further you move up into leadership roles, The more and more it's inevitable that you're going to have people who are working for you that know a lot of things that you don't know, because you're going to have a much broader
Mark Miller: I hope so. I
Ross Romano: not, you know, your first experience with management or leadership might be managing people who are junior versions of yourself. And okay, you've done the things that they've done before, and you're more experienced, but as you move up, you're going to have all these other things going on. And you are either thinking, That well, they're all looking at me and thinking [00:30:00] I'm not capable because I don't know these things that they know instead of thinking, what can I do again?
That's going to have a positive impact here. What can I do as far as communicating the vision and setting the strategy and setting them up for success? And that's really what people want. And it makes me think about, you know, This global, the global leadership crisis. And you have a lot of data on this about that.
And I guess my question about it is, what is it? What is it a crisis of? Is it a crisis of leadership ability? Is it a crisis of? Belief in the ability of others to become leaders, right? Like, what are the underpinnings of the crisis we're seeing in the data that does show that, you know, organizations don't believe they have enough leadership for their current needs leaders don't believe that there are enough emerging leaders to take on the challenges of the future, right?
So clearly that's there. But. What's fueling it,
Mark Miller: [00:31:00] Well, okay, so yeah, that is a huge question. So, thank you. I love huge questions, so let me see if I can kind of boil it down. I think it's a multifaceted crisis. You just outlined one, which is I think an appropriate place to start. We surveyed leaders around the world, thousands of them. 30 percent say they don't have enough.
So I think that's a crisis. I think when you have problems to solve and opportunities to seize, You give them to leaders and then they put together the team and the resources and the vision and they lead and they solve the problem or seize the opportunity. So 30 percent of the leaders in the world say their companies don't have enough.
That's a crisis. 50 percent of those leaders said they don't anticipate closing that gap, which to me is, that's pretty close to leadership malpractice right there. I mean, you can't say in my mind that you're stewarding the future if you're admitting, you're [00:32:00] kind of throwing in the towel, yeah, we're not going to be able to solve this problem because everything rises and falls on leadership.
If you've got anything, you need to have enough leaders. So that's part of the crisis. The other part of the crisis is the efficacy of existing leaders. And I'm not, this is not necessarily a reflection on the heart, or the intent, or the passion, but leaders aren't leading well, and I place that at the feet of the organizations.
They're not training men and women to lead well. And so you've got this downward spiral, which is compounded. Maybe you'd say, you know, it's good you don't have enough, because the ones you have aren't that good, you don't need more of those. I mean, you have to look no further than global engagement scores.
Engagement is a direct reflection of leadership, and those numbers have not improved according to Gallup in more than a decade. And they're tragically low. And some people in your audience will know the name [00:33:00] Marcus Buckingham. He used to be at Gallup. Gallup pioneered the global engagement. Workforce Engagement Survey.
Well, Marcus has now left and moved to an organization called ADP. He's continuing that research under this new banner, and he thinks global engagement is about half of what Gallup says it is. is saying less than 20 percent of the global workforce really cares about their, well, that's not a reflection on the worker.
That's a reflection on leadership. And so there's a crisis regarding the number of leaders and there's a crisis regarding the efficacy of those leaders. And we could look at more numbers, but it's just, it's obvious to the people listening to this. Most of the people listening to this aren't well led.
Ross Romano: right? Yeah. And I think the question that a lot of those people might ask is like, what's the evidence that I should care about this, right? What's the evidence that my organization is [00:34:00] prioritizing my development? What's the evidence that if I do great work, I will get. Greater opportunities from that.
What's the evidence that the work we do here is meaningful, right? Are we communicating? Do we have, you know, transparency here? Do we have a clear vision? All those things that would say, all right, yeah, I'm going to temper my engagement in it, particularly if I don't have any clear evidence to believe that the effort I put in, the care, the quality of my work, Is going to meaningfully change the course of my outcomes here.
And I'm going to need to go work somewhere else if I want to get a promotion, because that's not something that happens here, or I don't have a leader who is dialoguing with me about my own personal goals and development and how I can contribute. I feel like I can contribute a ton to this organization, but nobody is.
giving me an opportunity to do that. Well, [00:35:00] you know, it's not it's not about people, I think, being lazy or just not caring. It's about they would be, it wouldn't be smart for them to ignore the evidence and say, well, you know, clearly this organization doesn't do things this way, but. It's going to be different for me.
I mean, that we wouldn't consider that to be that smart. Right.
Mark Miller: So I thought my response again is twofold. One is everything you described is on the organization, right? So that's why when I say there's a crisis in leadership, the fact that scenario is so credible and so prevalent is evidence of the crisis. Now I will say this, I think as individuals we have a decision to make and then I don't want to trivialize this decision.
But the decision is should we fire our boss? Should we go work somewhere else? We've only got one life to live. We've only got one career to [00:36:00] invest. And, I know as hard as that sounds, and as hard as that is, there are men and women out there that are suffering, for lack of a better term, because they're in a place like you described. And, At some point, I think we have to be sure we've not forfeited our agency, and I'm not saying do anything crazy, but you might look back on it and think it was crazy that you stayed.
Ross Romano: Yeah. I mean, the data would indicate, I don't want to overgeneralize, but data would indicate that there's at least a significant percentage of people, if not a majority, who have never had the opportunity to work for an effective leader.
and right when that's been your experience, it's hard to.
It might be hard to envision what an alternative might look like, because it might just seem this is the way [00:37:00] things always are. It may be hard to, it can be hard to ascertain. How do I know if this is going to be an effective leader until I'm there but it's, you know, that, that's the real, that really stands out when we talk about this as a crisis, as, you know, How many people are going through their entire careers, not having some good leadership, some bad leadership, but having been exposed to nothing but poor leadership?
Mark Miller: Right. Yeah it's not only a crisis, it's a tragedy, and there's so much lost potential. Human potential. economic potential, just it's staggering. It's, yeah, you can't even calculate the impact of what you're describing. So what I encourage men and women to do is Again, not to trivialize any of this, I want to be sure these answers don't sound like 10 cent answers to million dollar questions, but I encourage leaders [00:38:00] to bloom where they're planted.
I have learned from and grown a lot from serving under leaders that weren't great. So I think you can learn a lot that way. And by the way, if you become that great leader, despite your circumstances and despite your surroundings, one of a couple things could happen. One is you could be recognized because most organizations do honor and recognize performance.
So that'd be one. And two, it might bolster your confidence to the point that you're ready, willing, and able to make that change that you need to make. Because you feel like you've increased your street value at that point, when you actually can point to tangible results and experience as a leader, you might feel ready to step into the market.
Ross Romano: Yeah. I love that. It's actually part of what I love to give as an answer. When somebody asks me, what's your leadership style or what are the things you feel like you [00:39:00] do well as a leader is to contextualize it with. Earlier on in my career, I was not good at this thing. I learned from experience and going through it, how to do it differently.
Or I learned that when I was working for somebody else, or even going through the interview process with a company, things that I really thought were wrong. And I decided when I'm in that position, I'm not going to do it that way. And. It's important for me that I contextualize like that to say, this is something that this is a firm earned belief, right?
This is not just giving out the answer because I read it in a book and this is what you're supposed to do. This is something that I've seen both sides of it. I know exactly why this part doesn't work, even though sometimes it seems like it's working right, and then you realize that it's for long term growth right it.
Oh, I feel like I am [00:40:00] conscientious about my role as a leader. And so I want to make sure we're successful so. I have a tendency to take over projects to make sure that they succeed versus letting other people flourish. And a couple of times you might get results you want and think, okay, and maybe your heart's in the right place even, right?
But you find out long term, okay, I'm stifling growth. This is not scalable, right? This is not, and it's not teaching anybody that they have autonomy. It's teaching them, eh, if I mess up, somebody else will take care of it for me. So it's not, but anyhow so we, you know, we're, we don't have a ton of time, but I did want to touch back to.
This book is based around these five fundamentals, right, which I included, and we won't go into all of them, but I'll read them out quickly. I don't want to expect you to, you probably haven't memorized, I'm sure, but you also write a lot of books. So it's see the future, engage and develop others, reinvent continuously, value results and relationships, embody a leader's [00:41:00] heart.
I guess the question I want to ask to help put that in perspective is, How did you identify like that? These are the five fundamentals. How did they come to stand out?
Mark Miller: Okay. You got to go back about 25 years, just this a little bit of backstory. We, I mentioned earlier, when you have problems to solve and opportunities to seize, Most organizations give them to leaders. 25 years ago, Chick fil A had problems to solve and opportunities to seize, and we didn't have a sufficient leadership bench.
Well, what do you do in the short run? You give those problems and opportunities to existing leaders. However, to credit our executive committee, they knew that was not a long term play for success, right? You'll just burn out the existing leaders. They said, we've got to accelerate leadership develop. They asked me to figure it out.
I put together a team of really smart people. We've already talked about it. That's the way I do work, but real smart people together. And we went out and said, let's figure out what the best leaders. have in common. [00:42:00] Now this work was a couple of years in the making, in part because we didn't know what we were doing.
I mean, we all had day jobs. This was kind of a side project for us, but we worked diligently for a couple of years and a couple hundred books on leadership. We did some global benchmarking. We interviewed a lot of people and we kind of cobbled together this list and again, Chick fil a and it's because Ken Blanchard and I wrote a book about it.
It's in 25 translations around the world, and this is out there. Okay, fast forward, almost 25 years. That first book was a parable, which is, was Ken Blanchard's signature style. And so, since I was co authoring with him, we, we did as, as a parable. And a couple of years back, Chick fil A asked me to update that book and to do a traditional leadership book, as opposed to a parable, which is what Uncommon Greatness is.
And [00:43:00] so, in the spirit of due diligence, and we always want to reserve the right to be smarter, I said, hey, all of the work we did, the 25 years ago, was all qualitative. Now, we think we got it right. Again, that's one reason the thing has kind of gone around the world, not because it was a great book, but because it actually is based on truth and it works, but I said, Hey, we got a fresh shit thought.
It started this. Let's do some quantitative work to validate or to get smarter. We always want to reserve the right to get smarter. And I'd be willing to say 25 years later, we didn't, we missed it. Or we can enhance it. Well, we pretty much validated those are the things that the best leaders do based on a sample of over 4, 000 leaders from six countries.
And so we have both the qualitative, quantitative, and 25 years of experience of Implementing and deploying these [00:44:00] competencies, we feel really good that these are the fundamentals is what we call them. They're the fundamental. They're the blocking and tackling of leadership.
Ross Romano: Yeah. And so many of them, even though we didn't call them out explicitly throughout the conversation, we've certainly touched on a lot of this and what it really means. And you know, the fifth one, maybe we didn't call out as specifically, but that embody a leader's heart. That's kind of. You know, that's what the book is all about, right?
Is that uncommon greatness is about the skill and the heart of leadership and this is being a leader people want to follow. And, you know, not just the leader that has maybe the competencies of leadership, which. may or may not manifest in results because leaders are sort of democratically elected, right?
You know, you may be placed in a position, but ultimately whether or not you're actually leading anybody is whether or not they [00:45:00] choose to follow you. And is there anything else worth saying about that part that really elevates that piece? Because I think that's what's That's the unique piece here that is not going to be in every leadership book that goes through take these actions, do these things, or, you know, this is what you have to know, but that there's more to it that is.
It may be intangible, but it's what it means to, to --be a full leader.
Mark Miller: Yeah that's really insightful. So it goes back 25 years ago. We ended up deciding that we needed an image or a picture to help us, you know, convey what we believed about leadership and we chose the iceberg and most folks remember vaguely fifth grade and you learned that about 10 percent of the iceberg is above the waterline and about 90 percent is below.
We think that's a great picture of leadership and those first four fundamentals are above the waterline and they're what [00:46:00] 99 percent of the leadership books in the world are but 90 percent of our efficacy as a leader we believe is determined by leadership. Heart for the reasons you just said. If your heart's not right, nobody cares about your skills, and we can all think of someone, more than likely we can think of someone that we've encountered in our career who demonstrated the competencies, but we chose not to follow them.
Well, why wouldn't you follow someone with the competencies? My answer is because you don't trust their heart. And so you you're right it's the ball game, really, because you can Google the stuff above the line, you can figure out the stuff above the line, what a lot of leaders never figure out is that leader's heart, and so in the book, we won't go into it today, but we talk about five heart habits that you can cultivate so that you can embody a leader's heart, and it's a choice nobody can make you do it, but every leader can do it if they choose. (ad here)
Ross Romano: Yeah it's [00:47:00] critical. I would guess that the reason that it doesn't show up frequently in books, part of it is because there's not one way to do it. And somebody can't just tell you, well, here's how to have a good heart, the heart for leadership. But also because It's not present enough, and that's where I think the leadership crisis is coming from.
There's not, there's no lack of people who have been trained in leadership. There's no lack of people who have MBAs or whatever, right? But there's a lack of actual effective leadership in organizations and I would identify that a lot of that has to come from this piece. And that's so much of, I, you know, when we think about leaders again in different roles and in different places and organizations that It's how leaders interact.
It's how leaders recognize leadership potential in one another. It's how organizations have a [00:48:00] clear understanding of what they want to be, what they want to be uncommonly great about their organization, and who are the people that are the right ones. to get there and I can find, you can find any number of people who have certain things on their resume that are going to indicate that they have the knowledge for it, but who's the person who is going to have the impact here for what we want to do and you need people whose heart is in it for, you know, whatever your mission is, your vision.
Part of that is just the mission of being a leader. I always love the question, why do you want to be a leader? Because I think that can, I think that can, you know, separate a lot of People who you might say have the heart for leadership and those who don't. Because there's all these reasons why somebody may want to be a leader that has nothing to do with status or salary or et cetera.
And that's [00:49:00] really about that. They feel that other people deserve to have a leader who pays attention to their development, who invests in them, who cares about them. When we talk about that, so many people have never had a leader like that. And you know, you can do that in any role, right? You don't have to, you don't have to have a certain title to be able to demonstrate that.
Mark Miller: I agree 100%.
Ross Romano: So Mark, as we're getting close to the end of our conversation here I think it makes sense before we wrap up that to intentionally inject a little bit of friction into
Mark Miller: Oh, please. I'd love some friction.
Ross Romano: I'm going to let you inject the friction, but I say this because I think one of the risks with these conversations is. It sounds great if I'm listening, if I'm, I could be passively listening, I could be actively listening, but I'm not necessarily interrogating my own practice, my own beliefs, my own [00:50:00] relationships while I'm listening. So it all sounds great. But I think before we wrap up, we need to challenge listeners to really take what we're talking about here.
And really look at themselves and say, look, you know, whether from your perspective, there's one or two things in particular that are clearly identified here as best practices and are clearly not happening in most places, or, you know, a question or two that people should be asking themselves to say, look, if you think this all sounds like the type of leader you want to be, now's the time to really look at yourself and see.
what, you know, what you need to be doing differently.
Mark Miller: Okay. So I will, I think we can help with that. We've created a free assessment. It's brief, but it covers all of the fundamentals. And all you have to do is text. [00:51:00] Uncommon to 66866. And what's a little bit unique about this, I give full credit to the team that built it. Based on your individual responses, it will provide some behavioral prescriptions on things you might consider doing. So text UNCOMMON to 66866 and that'll help you look in the mirror. I think it's less than 40 questions but again, designed to help you think, huh, maybe I need to work on this fundamental or that fundamental, or maybe there's a blind spot, something you have not seen or not heard, particularly if you're in an organization that's not doing performance management well, you may not even know you've got a blind spot.
So I think tools and resources like this could be helpful.
Ross Romano: Excellent. Even better answer than I expected. And, but, you know, listeners be, it requires being open to that. Right. And then so much of this indicates that the piece about reinventing continuously, if you want to stay in the lead, [00:52:00] you have to, you know, you have to do the things that keep you in the lead.
If you want to influence people. And pull teams together. You have to be willing to see where the areas for improvement are and what are the things that even in our minds where we totally agree this is the right thing to do. We need to take the time. Am I effectively doing it? Is this actually happening?
And Do the people on my team, do they understand that, perceive that, is it having the impact we want it to have? If not where are the areas to shore that up? I'm a big believer in, you know, the importance of the communication piece of saying we need to be better at communicating The things that we're working toward and doing and giving people the whole picture that allows them to understand the heart.
I think that's behind it. It allows them to learn how to make better decisions in their own work because they know how it fits into the whole and to really have that ownership. So there's all those [00:53:00] opportunities. Awesome. So we've mentioned many times that you're working on other projects and we have your website Lead Every Day.
com, which we'll put here. Anything else in particular that you'd like to point listeners to they should check out on the website or elsewhere.
Mark Miller: Let me just give you my cell number and in case you want to reach out, I'll be happy to serve you. My number is 678 612 8441. And Ross, if you'd please put that in the show notes for those that are driving, I don't want them to try and write that down. But yeah, if I can serve you just reach out and I'd be delighted to have a conversation.
Ross Romano: Excellent. Well, listeners, yes, as always, we will put all this information in the show notes. We'll put the info where you can text Uncommon to 6 6 8 6 6. To get that resource, Mark's number, his website, where you can buy the book, you can get that at leadeveryday. com or wherever you get your books.
So make that really easy for you. You can pop onto the website when you have a moment. We know that everybody's probably, yeah, doing multiple [00:54:00] things right now, but we'll share these resources, make it really easy for you to follow through to get the advantage from this if you want to read the book or and, or.
dig into any further resources. So please do that. Please also do subscribe to The Authority. If you have not already, we will continue to bring you great author interviews like this one, new episodes coming your way every week, or you can visit thepodcast. network to learn all about our 40 plus shows. And we, if you like this show, you'll like some of our others as well.
So feel free to go over there, browse through and see what suits you. Mark, thanks so much again for being here.
Mark Miller: It was my pleasure.
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