Ed Manfre – Leadership is an Inside Job – EP.241

Hood & Strong LLP – One of the nation’s premier full-service public accounting firms, Hood & Strong LLP provides buy- and sell-side quality of earnings, due diligence, assurance and tax services to search funds, private equity firms, and business owners and investors. The H&S Advisory team helps expedite a smooth, cost-effective transaction process that maximizes value and minimizes tax impacts for both buyers and sellers. To learn more about how Hood & Strong can support your M&A objectives, please contact Transaction Advisory Group Partner Jerry Zhou at [email protected].

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(00:00:00) – Intro

(00:03:07) – Ed’s background and career

(00:12:40) – What do the best leaders do to make the acquisition and integration process smoother?

(00:16:43) – Leadership as an inside job

(00:23:47) – How leaders can shine a light on behavior they want to see more of

(00:25:%7) – What are some good questions to ask yourself when trying to discover your own leadership style?

(00:33:25) – Maintaining stability during internal struggles

(00:43:04) – Building resilient leaders

(00:46:21) – Seeking out new challenges

(00:54:40) – Where do new CEOs tend to get off track?

(00:58:39) – How can a new CEO put their best foot forward?

Alex Bridgeman: Ed, good to see you. I’m glad we’re able to record a podcast together. It was fun having Dustin on the podcast to talk about some of the- his perspective on the book you both co-authored and some of the recruiting and coaching and all this other stuff. And I’m excited to have a similarly deep conversation with you about things you’ve learned about coaching leaders. And we talked about resilience and so many other things that go into becoming an effective leader. Before doing some of that, could you walk through your background to this point and some of the different coaching you’ve done and writing the book and everything else that you’ve kind of worked on to this point?

Ed Manfre: Sure, Alex. Awesome to be here. Thank you for having me. I know Dustin Seale is a tough act to follow, but him being one of my best friends and sort of a bigger brother figure, I’ll do my very best. So thank you for having me. I think the easiest way to start with me is to know that as an executive coach and an author and a researcher, focusing on leadership, I focus on the intersection of three main areas. And one is general leadership, and the second is around human psychology and all the lessons there that enable better leaders, and the third is around societal progress. So my focus for going on 20 years now has been what happens at the intersection of exceptional leadership, where the psychology is really working for successful leaders, and they’re also bringing about some interesting improvements in their organizations and the societies in which they live. And so, for me, the short thumbnail sketch is I did not nor do I know many people who get to focus on leadership for a living. I didn’t start right out of high school saying I want to be a leadership coach or a culture coach or anything like that. It happened to me, and part of what I share to people is it kind of crashed into my life because I had done a number of different things in the entertainment media field, including having won a Telly Award for a production that I produced and wrote and acted in many years ago. And I came out to Los Angeles and started working with a really cutting-edge, thriving boutique organization that was working with large studios around the business. And it was just an incredible place to be a part of. It was Emmy award winning, very forward thinking, and sort of arrested the love and passion of so many in the industry. And they were a privately held business, and they made the decision, it was in their judgment the best thing to do was, to allow it to grow, they sold to a large corporation. And unbeknownst to me, at that stage in my career, I didn’t know what was about to come. And I now know 20 years later, this coin toss can go a number of different ways when a large company buys a smaller company. In this particular instance, however, the dynamics just did not work too well. And suddenly, what was an external focused customer, kind of client focused, innovation driven organization became very inward focused. And the way that they went about bringing the organization on board turned things into we don’t know where we’re going as a business, am I going to have a job here? Rumor mills and kind of gossip and all that kind of stuff came up, and it was a very different place to be with just one thing having changed, which is the ownership. And at the time, I couldn’t have put words to it, but what it awakened me to is that this idea of leadership, communications, and the culture you’re building, this idea really matters. And I will tell you, and it’s no judgment of anybody in this because in business everyone’s doing the best they can. However, in this case, neither the large company who bought them or the small business I was a part of exist 20 plus years hence. And part of it is, as I’ve learned, because of these things called leadership and culture. And so, for me, that awakened to me that these are so important, and I got so fascinated in it because part of my interest in entertainment media was how do you make big movies, big television shows that get people thinking, that entertains them, yes, but it gives them new thoughts, new ideas to mingle with, possibilities, things to kind of crash into each other and talk about. And suddenly, I realized, wow, people spend 70% of their waking lives working for businesses of any different size, what if you could learn more about leadership and human psychology and help to benefit people from the inside of organizations? And at the time, I ended up very, very, very happenstance getting referred to a small company that focused exclusively on that. And I was given a book called Winning Teams – Winning Cultures, and that company was called Senn Delaney Leadership. The founder was Larry Senn, and I learned that that is what they did for a living. And so for me, that was my match to gasoline moment where suddenly I go from having a certain focus, but that awakening made me go, wow, there’s something more out there. And now I’m on this conveyor belt through the fun house of learning leadership and culture. And over my last 20 years, I’ve had the opportunity to not only get to help leaders at increasingly high levels, but also to be certified as an international accredited executive coach, to do executive top team facilitation, to help with large change programs in big organizations to help them achieve incredible things. I also got an MBA myself. And through that journey in professional services, I’ve served in various executive and commercial leadership roles while I’ve been serving clients. So part of what I like to share with folks that I work with is I’m not just someone that looks at this as a subject matter sort of research expert. I actually am a practitioner of what I preach and I understand the emotional side of being a leader who has to set up big goals and go after them, who needs to grow a business with an imperative to contribute to the bottom line, who unfortunately is going to go through the mini cycles of hiring and firing, and all the different things in between, reorganization, restructuring. So, I like to bring all of that together when I’m engaging with executives who I work with now at these increasingly big jobs in a world of constant and consistent disruption. 

Alex Bridgeman: The experience you had being in a small company selling to the large one, looking back, what things do you notice today were missing about that large company or not done well leadership-wise that led to that kind of culture that sounded messy and very internally focused and just not very productive? 

Ed Manfre: Yeah, some of it is strategic, so it’s about the strategy, and why they did it is important to look at. So I can talk about that a little bit. And then the second more important one is how they handled it from a people and culture and leadership standpoint. The thing I want to say is that strategically, the large company was really struggling, and they were looking for any way to get into the digital era. And as some companies find, an acquisition can help you do that. However, when you’re the much larger organization with thousands and thousands of people marshaled in a different direction, sometimes these little acquisitions you make aren’t as transformative as you might anticipate. So, in other words, a company with 50,000 employees that thinks, oh, we’re going to do our next strategy page by buying a company that has 500 people, well, just the weights on the scale, it’s really tough to get there in that regard. And so, for them, it was a later stage where they were already having a hard time in their industry, and they made this acquisition sort of as a, can we save this thing? Can we go in a new direction? That kind of already puts you on your back foot. They still tried; they made an effort. But on the people side, what I now preach very, very consistently is leaders need to know the story that they’re living into for their own growth. What’s the story of your own journey? And when you’re buying an organization, you better be thinking very clearly about how does this fit together? What are the simple one to four line messages that you can deliver to a leader to get people in that business excited about being part of the larger organization, how you’re going to add value to their lives, almost like- but keep it simple, and also what’s in it for them, so that they feel from day one, or even in some cases, before day one with those who are privileged to be involved, they already feel like they are part of something bigger right off from the jump. And that is a miss in a lot of these acquisitions where they want them to become part of the whole, but they don’t actually tell a story and get them excited about feeling part of it. The second thing is the speed at which you move through understanding how that business works and things that you couldn’t learn before you bought them, how you move through understanding the roles and responsibilities and helping people feel like, you know what, we’re not just coming in here to just start making massive moves right away. We want to learn and understand what has been working about making you successful before we start to make any kind of significant moves. That alone, you might still put some space in between what you eventually do and the acquisition, but just that alone helps to create a feeling of they really do care about understanding us, and then of course, they’re going to do what businesspeople do, which is work with us to make the right decisions. But the third one is just beyond the vision for this, feeling part of something larger and understanding the business. It’s actually making sure you understand the customer focus, the client focus of the company that you are buying. Because very often, it makes sense up here on paper why when we buy this company, this is what happens to our ledger and both sides of the ledger, but you don’t actually go like, what do the people who they serve and they served quite successfully for many years value about that business? So we make sure we focus our people and the roles that we need and our culture around making sure that does not lose continuity of care. That’s a phrase in psychology and therapy, continuity of care. And when you lose that and you sever that, it happens like what would happen with me, which is you see customers and clients start to go elsewhere because they just go, I don’t feel like I’m connected to you anymore. 

Alex Bridgeman: This is just a fascinating rabbit hole into acquisition and then integrating a new acquisition. Can you touch a little more on that on maybe as an example, what are the best CEOs or leaders you’ve worked with who are really, really good at M&A, what are some things that you notice that they do really well that makes the process more effective and perhaps smoother? 

Ed Manfre: The one thing it depends on, it depends on several things, but the main thing it depends on is what is their organization’s strategy to grow and create value for their people and their vision, the people they serve and their vision. And so I say that because sometimes there’s upstream challenges and there’s downstream challenges when it comes to acquisitions. So downstream challenges are more about what happens after we’ve made a decision to acquire and what we’re then going to do after that. The upstream challenges are why are we even looking to be acquisitive in the first place? Where are we choosing to look at making acquisitions? What’s really important to us in our vision that we want to make sure we hold true to? And how do we want to manage these organizations? Because there’s lots of different strategies from they call it a tuck-in strategy where you buy a company and just bring it in to the fold right away. There’s a buy and hold where you buy them and you decide I’m going to let them operate as a standalone for a period of time before we would begin to make any shifts or look to integrate them. There’s lots of different ways to go about that, but these upstream thoughts, sometimes it’s just the focus is on being acquisitive, just to accrete to the top and bottom lines, and yet they’re not as thoughtful as they could be about how does this fit in the overall picture and story that we’re telling about our organization. And so that is an area that I advise any leader to be crystal clear on, not just with him or herself, but also the entire team around them, the diligence teams and everybody, so that you can make a decision that’s going to be really informed in that level. And I would say, by the way, high volume of acquisitions, it can be great for some organizations, but usually, fewer is better, especially if you find a way to make a handful of moves that are really going to put more weight on the scale in a good way. Making a few moves is better than making lots and lots of moves, so being very thoughtful. It is just like bringing employees into an organization. Once you’ve brought an employee into the company, you’re working with what you have, so why would you not be a little bit more scrutinous and diligent up front about understanding people, the organization, and all those things before you pull the trigger? So, I think on those upstream challenges, it really has to do with knowing the story and also understanding like what actually constitutes the few and the proud that we would want to bring into the fold. And then when you think about the downstream challenges, it’s got to be, you’ve spent many, many years as a larger organization at this point, assuming you’re going to acquire somebody who’s smaller than you, you’ve spent many years thinking about your mission, your purpose, your values, what culture makes your team and your people really hum and align, and yet, are you thinking at all about what’s going on in this organization and how you ensure you don’t disrupt them and make them feel, as I said earlier, part of something bigger. So the communications around it are important, but then from an operator standpoint, do you really understand that business from the top down all the way to the front lines and understand really why value is created and captured by them with their clients and the people that they serve? Why do people love them? Are there things to learn? Is there any kind of loop you can create a feedback of going in and first understanding, seeking to understand what makes them hum, and then really going, wow, can we learn from this as a larger organization? Because sometimes on paper you say, well, this organization is one tenth our size, we’re the big kahuna, we know all. Not so. In fact, what we write about in our book, Lead Through Anything, is the notion of having a growth mindset and demonstrating the agile mental nature to be looking for new and better ideas that can improve you. That is a testament, that’s a hallmark of a leader who’s going to go further and faster and longer than others. 

Alex Bridgeman: Yeah. You talk about leadership being an inside job. Can you expand on that thought and that idea? It’s kind of an interesting place to start for understanding how do you understand your own leadership style and then stepping into a new role, a new leadership position. That inside job piece seems like a good primer on moving into these other topics. 

Ed Manfre: Yeah, so I say always now, leadership is an inside job. And leadership is an inside job first. And where I’m going with this is right now out there, you could pick up a newspaper if you still do that, but digitally you can pick up any article on leadership and culture, and you see lots of great advice of things to do, things to say, things to focus on, and that’s all kind of outside of you. That assumes you’ve got the inside job handled. And so you can go through that and kind of make yourself crazy with all the different tactics and practical things they give you, and you go, wow, how does this all fit together? That’s why you go upstream, as I was just saying, go upstream inside to the inside job first and decide what kind of leader am I, who do I want to develop into, and what is my own path for improving my leadership? And the reason is not because I just want people to just sit down and not do anything and just reflect. It’s certainly not that because there’s action to it. The reason is because what we found through our research for many, many years is a very simple idea, that organizations over time tend to become shadows of their leaders. And that doesn’t just mean shadows of that leader’s capability to know finance or to know IT or to know their customers. What it means is who that leader is and how they show up, their attitude, their mindset, the energy that they bring, the focus that they bring, how they talk about purpose and importance of culture. All those things, as much as we want to say organizations are super flat today, what we find is no matter how flat an organization is, when in doubt about how to do something or a decision to make, most everybody tends to look up as high as they can. Therefore, the shadow that you cast as a leader at the top of an organization, of a function, of a business unit, or of any team, how you think, your attitude, your mindset, everything, that matters more than just about anything else that you’re bringing. Now, this assumes that you have a table stakes kind of experience of the basic capabilities. So if you’re a finance leader, you can’t not know finance and how to do those things. So I’m not getting into how you make yourself a master of all things finance, for instance, or operations. You need to have a table stake of I’m competent, and I’m always growing in those things. But this is about the leadership dimension of an individual. So coming back to this notion of leadership as an inside job, the higher up you go, the fewer kind of practical and tactical activities you engage in. You are leading people to engage with those and take those on. So the higher up you move in a promotion track up to the C-suite and beyond, you’re now on the hook to deliver results and growth through people, in many cases through people that you are never going to talk to on a day-to-day basis once you get to a larger state in terms of your business. So how are you bringing your leadership shadow and your emphasis and the imprint on the entire business in a way that it runs itself according to those values and those principles that you espouse are important. And so, all of that starts for me and for people I get to partner with on thinking through what kind of leader am I, who do I want to be, what’s the gap there, and what are the experiences and the activities I can undertake to improve my own state of leadership so that I can enable more growth in myself, but also in the teams and organizations that I lead. 

Alex Bridgeman: I relate to this a lot because I’m starting to create more of a list of random little tactics that other CEOs do that I find really interesting. Like David Neeleman at JetBlue wrote a weekly email every Sunday, and he always referenced some employee’s experience going above and beyond for a customer and like named the employee and where they are and their team and that public praise and recognition was super valuable. And then there’s other examples like Peter Thiel paying folks more if they live within like half a mile of the office or something like that. But it’s easy to read through a whole bunch of tactics and ideas in different books and not have a very consistent sense of what is my leadership style using these tactics, because all those tactics come from different people with different leadership styles, and they don’t always work together in a way that’s authentic. And so, I feel like I hear that very strongly from you. 

Ed Manfre: Yes. So, first of all, people can smell inauthenticity in leadership from not only a mile, probably like a hundred miles away. And when the experience- I mean, think of, anybody who’s listening, think of yourself as an employee if you ever been one, but think of yourself as a business owner. You know what it feels like to take an action that feels very far afield from who you know you are or who you believe others know you to be. And so that’s why it’s so important for you to understand better what’s in my sphere of influence, what do I truly consider to be important. Now there are ways that you’re going to grow and change over time, so I’m not saying you’re static. But you know what it feels like when you’re taking an action that’s so far away. And that gap is part of what enables people to either engage with you and feel connected to you as a leader or not. And so that’s why this idea of taking stock of leadership being an inside job first is for you to get clear on that and clear on your own evolution as a leader through various habits or practices or things you’re learning so that as you move through, you can be aligned and as authentic as possible in the way that you want to do leadership and the way you want the organization to grow most effectively. By the way, what I would say about those examples that you’re speaking to is that you as a leader, that shadow comes with a spotlight, so to speak. And anything that you choose to highlight, underscore, talk about, reward, incentivize, that is you as a leader shining a spotlight on that, saying more of this, please, everybody, more of this, please. So the things that you choose to promote and put a spotlight on and emphasize are the things that other people around you, even if they will never meet you, those are the things that they identify with being important to you and therefore to the business. So that’s why those actions, it’s much wiser to be thoughtful about some of those one-off actions and behaviors so that you know that you can get people connected to them in a way that helps them be more connected to the business.

Alex Bridgeman:  Diving into that a little bit more, what are some other ways you’ve seen folks or what are some other ways you’ve seen leaders shine a spotlight on behavior that they want to encourage and see more of? What are some unique ways you’ve seen that done? 

Ed Manfre: Well, first of all, it is unique to the business, I just want to say this, and it has to do with how the business creates and owns value with their clients. The biggest one is client and customer-centric activities and victories. Because in no better place are you able to put a spotlight on something and say to somebody, hey, this is great, we would like more of this than when it comes to serving your customers and your clients. So that’s a great one that you brought up that, frankly, a lot of leaders do and they should just steal if they don’t do. What are the great examples that bubble up from the front lines around ways that we’re going above and beyond to serve and deliver for the people who pay us and people who expect value from us? Same can be said for exceptional project teams or work teams that are on either a special assignment or they’re doing something new and different in the business, like creating a new product or a new service line, and you’re seeing them or a small team work together in a way that you believe should be really reflective of how you want the whole organization to work. So, anything culturally like that, when you see an example of, wow, how that team worked together, I want to tell people about that because I want them to learn more about that and be as inspired by it as I was. It’s giving us sort of these future thumbprints of how we can operate together. So frankly, provided that you know who you are as a business, what you stand for, and what you want to deliver, any kind of conversation piece where you’re saying this is how to do those better, those are all worthy of sharing and putting a spotlight on. So it’s really up to what you’re trying to achieve in your business, but there’s almost nothing as powerful as a CEO specifically, even in a small business, saying, wow, this is great, this is very important to us. How can we do this more often and better? And I want to learn with you. I mean, that message is, it’s hard to not be moved by that. 

Alex Bridgeman: Yeah, I agree. When trying to figure out your own inside job leadership style, what are some good questions to ask yourself to try to figure out what that is? 

Ed Manfre: Yeah. So, there’s a whole- what I try to do typically is avoid the lengthy laundry list of stuff that I think is guaranteed to work for everybody or that I’ve heard or that I’ve gathered through my research because there’s frankly a lot of individual things. But there are themes that cut across. And so I’ll talk a little bit about the high-level themes that then lead into some of the tactics. And so, number one with this is a leader, we all, like whether it’s our phones, our computers, everything we’re doing, we operate with some kind of software. And we usually call that an operating system. And so one of the firms I was a part of pioneered this idea of thinking about what they call a human operating system, which I now call a leader’s operating system, that you think about how you’re wired and what some of your natural instincts are around a few areas. And so, here’s a few of the areas to look at. So, around energy, your own personal energy, how are you wired? What gives you energy? What drains you of energy? What does it feel like to be in a more slightly positive or optimistic place energetically? What does it feel like for you to be stuck, maybe in the basement for a couple of days? How does your mood and your presence impact other people? So this idea around energy, this inside job of understanding what moves your energy, how does your energy impact other people? An easy story to relate to on this one is I think it’s fair to say, let me say it this way first, in large audiences I will say, and I’ll say show of hands, how many people have been in a room where a certain individual walks into this room with other people and it just feels like it lights up? Like it’s just so much more positive. They may not even say anything, but somebody enters and you go, whoa, and it’s like, hey, how are you doing? I mean, almost everybody puts their hand up. The contra to that is how many of you have been in a room or in a meeting room where another person enters, doesn’t even have to be a leader, and suddenly the energy and the feeling of the room just like is sucked out, just like it suddenly just tanks. Maybe they say something, maybe they don’t, maybe it’s just their mood, maybe it’s just their presence. And a lot of people can identify with that. So, what is the difference between those leaders that can come in a room and light it up, even by not saying anything, versus those who might come in a room, and just through the nature of their state, their tough day, it just tanks everything. So part of it is beginning to observe and become more aware of how your energy defines your performance and the performance of others. So that’s one. The second one, as you think about this, is what are some of my unique filters in my operating system, like all computers have certain things that they’ll highlight certain things and they’ll sort of de-highlight other things or they’ll de-emphasize certain things. What are some of the ways when I’m in a room and I think everybody in that room hears the same outcome of that meeting? And if you ever walked out of that room and you go, yeah, I’m really clear on what we talked about there. It’s this, that, and the other, and here are the three things we’re going to do. And somebody looks at you and they go, what? Like I totally didn’t hear that. I heard the other, the third thing and the fifth thing. And you’re just like, what? So how many times have you been in a room where everyone heard what was supposed to be the same message, but each person in there or maybe several people took away different things? That’s a key back to understanding what are some of your unique filters, what are some of the unique sort of selective perceptions that you have as a leader? And the reason this is important is because when it comes time to solve problems, make big decisions, it can’t always just be an N of one driving that. So, how do you understand how you process information and the filters you apply to things, so that when the rubber meets the road, you’re engaging other people to get alternative perspectives or to learn other things that otherwise may have just blown in one ear and out the other. And then the third one is, how do you as a leader think about your own learning and your capacity to reflect? And so, when I- just about anything that I do, whether I’m coaching, whether I’m speaking to groups, whether I’m working and advising leaders, I’m going to find time to create some reflection for them with just some fundamental questions that just gets them thinking. Because what I hear from people every day, nowadays, when I’m coaching, is I just don’t have time for this, for that, for the other. The days just completely blow by, and I just look up and go, oh my gosh, I’ve got so much to do and I couldn’t get any of it done. That to me is a screaming symptom that someone has not been planful around the idea of reflection as an activity. It is not just a nice to have. It is a core business activity. And there’s lots of different ways to do this, but one of the ways, I just say, hey, if you really are so strapped for time that you’re not able to reflect on what has been and what you can learn from it, just try this thing I call the 3-2-1 performance reflection. So, literally, and I’ll say this when I speak to groups, is go on your calendar right now, find time on a Friday or a Monday, 15 minutes. If you don’t have 15 minutes, you don’t have a life, first of all. Just find 15 minutes, and put a block on there and just put 3-2-1 performance reflection. And here’s what I want you to do. The first thing is three things of that week that went well. What are three things that week that went well? And that could be you delivered a successful P&L strategy, you won a big customer, you made one good change that’s going to save you some money, whatever, give me three things that went well. Search for them, find them, just write them down real quick, bullets. The second thing is, what are two things that you learned that week? What are just two, and I don’t care if it’s large or small, just give me two things you learned. It could be, I learned that so-and-so just shifted to this new piece of software and he saw big gains from that, I’m going to check that out. Okay, great. Or it could be as simple as, hey, I heard so-and-so is getting ready to run a marathon. That’s really interesting. I’m kind of interested in learning more about that. Fine, whatever, put down the bullets. And then the third thing, which is just one thing, is what’s one thing next week, given an opportunity, you can improve? And how are you going to improve it? So the 3-2-1 performance reflection is just something simple and easy anybody can do. 15 minutes, three things that went well, two things you learned, and one thing that you can make better in the next week. Even doing something as simple as that is applying reflection as a business activity. It’s coming from the inside out based on you taking time to take stock. And that is what I believe is the cause of and the perpetuation of a lot of ongoing business challenges is leaders not finding time to just process what happened, learn about their place in it and what they can take away, and then applying those lessons learned for the future. 

Alex Bridgeman: I love that, especially the energy one, the first section you talked about, especially the need for consistency. If you come in, you’re like three different people throughout the week based on mood, that can be really challenging as an employee to be around. What are some ways you’ve seen leaders maintain stability even if things like internally aren’t doing well or there’s something that didn’t go well but nobody else knows about it or should know about it and you’re trying to keep a consistent outward view for the rest of your team? Which maybe goes back to authenticity, like if you’re not authentic, people will smell that. But what’s your kind of sense for that stability? 

Ed Manfre: Yeah, and the stability and the consistency are key, by the way, I’m glad you’re drawing that out. In the book, we talk about one of the key principles of the consistent long-term high performers is what we call vitality. Which is basically just energy but bigger and more expansive. And it has to do with how you manage your own energy, but also how you help to connect dots and bring people together to solve big problems. So, I’m going to use that word vitality for a moment just to kind of put an exponent on energy. And so part of what we learn with this is that vitality is, a good chunk of it is you doing what you just asked, which is how can I create practices in my life that provide me stability, so when I get a body blow from some kind of major unexpected disruption, I can maintain stability. And another part of it, outside of what I can do for myself, is who are the people around me, and who are my teams that I connect with to gain energy from, and who am I helping to feed energy to, and how does that energy help them do bigger things? So some of it is the inside job, but then there are activities outside of you that you might think about that help you kind of stoke your own flames and grow other people. So I’ll focus on the inside job for a moment because that is where I go first, but I want to say that this idea of vitality, what you’re getting at here is resilience. So how do I maintain resilience in order to make consistent energy? And in resilience, resilience of your own vitality, you need to honor a number of different systems that, frankly, a lot of content out there, well-meaning content, it just sort of dances over when it talks about some of these things. And people consider stuff like your personal health, your routines around various things, self-care practices, they just sort of hear that and they go, do more of this, do more of that. Well, what I’m actually focused on personally right now is helping leaders understand what are the core consistent routines that can maintain high levels of vitality and help them be more resilient. So, I want to just put a few of these out there because this is, it’s a personal exploration for every leader to just give some thought to and to put a little bit more to, more than beyond what I’ve heard other people talk about. But I’m going to go around the wheel here of some basics that help you with resilience. So one is your sleep. And I’m not going to do a dissertation on sleep here. I am not a sleep scientist or an expert. But suffice it to say that it’s becoming near unanimous that everybody from psychologists to therapists to executive coaches to big leaders out there are starting to understand that sleep is way more than just something that you have to do because you’re finally collapsing and you need two hours of a brain break. It’s actually as vital of an activity to manage and plan around as any other major life activity. And so sleep is a cornerstone. I now know and I’m friends with people who are in the therapy field and psychology field, when they encounter a leader or an individual who’s having problems with even their own mental health, the first question they’ll ask is, how are you sleeping right now? And it’s great to be thinking about that when someone’s encountering a lot of turbulence and challenge with their own mental health. But I want leaders to be proactive and think about how improving on and staying consistent with their own sleep is going to enable greater levels of performance even when they’re not in crisis. So, I want everyone to hear me loud and clear, when it comes to your own stability of energy, vitality, and mood, sleep is basically job one. And it sounds so passive, but I know that there are other people that as more and more research comes to the fore, you’re going to find out, sleep is a cornerstone activity. Another one is nutrition. And this is like, no duh. You hear somebody go like, what nutrition patterns do I need to lean into to live better? You need to understand that for yourself. And the reason I say this is because anybody I’m coaching, the first two things that always go to the wayside when they encounter significant life turbulence or professional turbulence are sleep and how they eat. You can just hear this again and again. I’m not here as a nutrition expert or a personal trainer to tell you how to eat, but I am here to tell you to honor, as we were just talking about, understand your own energy patterns, your own body patterns, and your health patterns. What are the things that when you eat them and you bring them in your body, you have better, more consistent, sustained energy? How do you plan for a day, for even when the bottom drops out or you are traveling or you are with a client for nine-tenths of the day, that you’re ensuring you’re sustaining yourself with the right nutrition that you uniquely need? So, I’m not here to get into macros and get into calories and all that, but you have to figure that out for you. So, sleep and nutrition, two big ones. The third one is the level of activity and exercise, and I’m not just talking about going on a treadmill and running 10 miles every morning or whatever extreme behavior you might hear about, which those are all good, but I am talking about what’s the level of personal physical activity that you need to engage in to sustain and be consistent with your energy levels. For some people, it’s get a pedometer and I need to do 8,000 to 12,000 steps a day, just moving around throughout the day, a standing desk, I need to make sure I’m not sitting for hours on end. For some people, it is I want to lift weights three or four days a week, or I’m going to engage in longer form running or anything outside, pickleball, I don’t care, insert idea here. But have you actually thought about in your adult life, what are the physical activities that I can engage in on a frequent basis because managing my energy is important? And I know, Alex, that even these three things, it’s either a no duh or of course, but what happens is we say no duh and of course, and then we go on to, what are the four ways I can influence people to do more and make more money for me in my business? And I go, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, that will come. How stable are you as a leader? How consistent are you with these personal resilience routines that make sure that you’re showing up with the right attitude, mindset, behavior on a day-to-day basis, and that you minimize the down days, and you give yourself better, more often up days. So those are three areas that I would advise people to look at. There’s of course a few more, but I want to stop there for a moment and just kind of see how this is landing with you. 

Alex Bridgeman: Yeah, it makes a ton of sense. Like when I think of when I have down days, most often like one of those things is coming into play in some way. Have you noticed the same about yourself too? 

Ed Manfre: Yes. Yes, in fact, that’s part of my, the research I’m doing, I’ve said this phrase a few times, but I’m looking at myself as an N of one as I’m also looking at the literature and the research out there on these different areas because I’m putting together my own formula. I’m by no means an expert on these things, but I’m seeing that their impact is so high, that even as I have worked over the last 90 days to improve my own quality of sleep, I found my outputs improved, the things I focus on more naturally are coming to life. And in general, I just feel better about stuff. And it’s just funny because some of this leadership stuff, it doesn’t have to be highfalutin. It’s like, even in your worst day, do you feel like there’s a way out? Do you feel like you can see some light at the end of the tunnel? Because if you can’t see it, your people won’t see it either. If you can’t find in yourself the energy to say we’re going to get through this setback and we’re going to get on to the next great thing, if you can’t find the energy, your people won’t. So, the reason why, if you look at any one of these things, the bottom will drop out when someone encounters a major period of turbulence. By the way, the other two, just for the sake of adding them, one is just basic self-care routines around the boring stuff. But this is yet another one where you go, oh no, I was on a period where I did a 10-day travel through Southeast Asia, and I forgot to, something as simple as I forgot to brush my teeth for two days. I mean, honestly, you hear the most outlandish, crazy stories. But do you have a set of routines just to make sure your self-care is on point, whatever that means for you. And last and the biggest really is around mindfulness and mindset. What is your frame? What do you feel like your purpose is today in what you’re engaging with? How is your energy directed towards something that keeps you forward looking? Because we know not only in life, in elections, in organizations, most of what you’re trying to help marshal people toward is the future and not about the past. So how are you feeling from a mindfulness standpoint around the future and around where you are now, how to get to that future? So with those areas, you can imagine, even if that’s all I was doing with somebody, you could spend a lot of time focused on many of those areas and just helping them to get that stable base. And without that, though, without that, what happens is I feel like it’s like popcorn and it’s like you’re grasping for a lot of straws of stuff outside of that. So now I’ve been trained that if I feel like somebody is really trying to push and they keep encountering some different kinds of resistance or they can’t sort of reach for a new way to try something, I’m going to ask them, talk to me about some of these basic resilience routines. 

Alex Bridgeman: So, within resilience, what else comes to mind as practices and things that have been helpful at making more resilient leaders? 

Ed Manfre: So, one of the big ones we write about in our book, it’s not controversial, but it’s akin to something that people don’t naturally want to embrace. And what it is we call seeking crucibles or seeking crucible experiences. And so just in case people don’t know, the idea of a crucible experience is a lofty life challenge that either happens to you or it’s something you decide to go after, a big challenge that’s really going to stretch you and grow you. And oftentimes what happens is, how people identify with a personal crucible, it may be, unfortunately, as I’ve experienced and my family’s experienced recently and many have is some kind of a death or major health setback. That’s a crucible that kind of happens to you. And within that is an opportunity for you to be present with it, to engage with it, to do what’s required, and also to help others through it, and to grow, and maybe even to get better through the experience of that setback. And that’s a personal one. But the idea of your thinking of challenges and both that you want to move into or that hit you from the outside that you can’t control, you’re looking at these crucible experiences as opportunity to be your best within it, to learn more about what it means to be a human and a leader, and then to grow and improve on the other side. And so, there’s nothing in life that comes from just treading water, nothing great let’s say that comes from just treading water in a steady state. We have to be seeking out opportunities that are going to affect us and help us learn and grow. And so that’s why we say if the world’s going to be permanently disrupted anyway and it’s going to be unrelenting and changing constantly, then we have to learn how to be better in the face of these constant challenges. And so that alone, if you didn’t listen to anything else that I said around resilience, just you seeking out challenges and making a decision that if this is the right challenge for me, for my business to go into X market, to grow our revenue by Y, whatever, this is the one I want all of our energy to get marshaled toward right now. That is going to help you almost naturally begin to learn, wow, how do I maintain my stability heading toward this high city on a hill? Because it’s tough right now. Life is going to help you calibrate to the difficulty level, almost like in a game, it’s like you’re playing a casual, sort of hard mode or extremely hard, depending on what game you’re playing, or just like insane mode or something. Life calibrates across those different levels, just like a video game. And a lot of times, crucible experiences may actually start on insane mode, but you’re learning how to bring it hard, and maybe one day you’ll get to easy or casual and say, wow, look at everything that I’ve grown as a result, and the ways I’ve grown as a result of that challenge. But this notion of seeking out crucibles, looking at challenges that occur to you as opportunities for growth or seeking out new challenges as ways to make sure that you continue to grow. 

Alex Bridgeman: In the seeking out new challenges piece, that’s kind of interesting. What challenges do you find the most successful leaders chasing? Like what defines a good challenge versus something that maybe adds value, but it’s kind of hard to tell? 

Ed Manfre: Well, this begins to veer into what we’ve talked about a bit around goal setting. And if you think of a goal as really going to be a challenge because it’s something you haven’t done yet you want to move into, goal setting. And so, the way that I like to talk about this is that too many leaders have too many goals that they haven’t thought enough about, so they actually don’t know what’s important to them. Let me say that again. Too many leaders have too many goals that they haven’t thought enough about, so they don’t know what’s important to them. So when it comes down to building on what we’re talking about, seeking out a crucible goal, a big challenge, whatever it is, oftentimes these turn into checklists for leaders. We had the opportunity in the book to write about a leader that said, oh yeah, yeah, here are my priorities right now – 129 items on a list. And you go, wow, this is a big organization, I kind of get that, but how do you begin to even manage through what these different lists are and what the sub-lists are out of those? And it’s like basically, we can’t, and we’re just throwing lots of things at a wall, and it’s hard for us to differentiate. So for me, part of a first step around considering goals and considering what crucible you want to step into is of all of that huge list like you’ve made, what are the two to maybe four things that are so meaningful to you that if you make progress against them, not even if you achieve them, but if you make progress against them, they either move the others or they make the others irrelevant or less relevant. And very often this goes back to the notion I talked about earlier, that leaders are not reflecting. What they’re doing is they’re doing, and they’re acting, and they’re documenting, and they’re kind of perpetually lunging themselves forward without being thoughtful about what’s happening. And they think that being thoughtful and pausing for a moment to consider which of my 129 priorities is key, that somehow comes across as either a waste of time or as a weakness. And I’m here to say, when it comes time for you to really grow, look back at your own career, look back at any kind of major growth that you’ve encountered. I bet you, over your entire career, you’ve got maybe a handful or two of experiences that you see as the most growth oriented for you. So, when you look forward, don’t give me your list of a hundred things. Give some thought and reflection to what are those two to four things that you really are betting on because you can’t always know, but that you’re willing to bet on for a period of time are the things, if you focus on them, you’re going to get a lot of gains. And so that’s part of where I begin with this conversation, is getting people to be more thoughtful and internal, as I’ve said, leadership is that inside job, so that you make big bets and you make a big play, as opposed to let’s do 50 plays and figure out which one gives us half a percent of improvement. 

Alex Bridgeman: Are there any examples that come to mind of conversations you’ve had or specific goals of the 129, like which ones got cut, which ones got emphasized? What are some of the examples that you’ve seen fall into each group? 

Ed Manfre: Yeah, so I can do a set of personal examples, and I can do a professional example. So, a personal example is working with a leader who, again, I’m not a therapist and I’m not a personal trainer, but had a leader who was making- was on a rocket ship in terms of his growth and the level that he had ascended to in a pretty short period of time. And I often work with leaders that get into huge roles a little bit early, and that’s good because they have high potential, but they have to sort of get their mind right for the next big step. And as we were thinking through, as I was thinking through with this leader and helping him understand what are the areas that are going to give me big gains, he had a list of some professional ones, and they’re important, and yet for him, his own personal health, mostly his weight, was suffering as a result of his meteoric rise. His nutrition and his activity levels had gotten out of sorts because he was traveling a ton, and with all of that and the business meals and all those things, it just gets off course. So, this happens often where a leader may just ignore that because, well, that’s not business. Well, the challenge is when something gets big like that, it causes a lot of emotion and a lot of kind of drag energy against your professional goals. You have to honor that and bring it forward. So part of what his bet was in setting his own plan was if I begin to put on autopilot much better actions and behaviors that improve my personal health, my own leadership performance will improve. And so again, that came through a habit of reflection. He had his list of, here’s my list I gave to the board of the eight things I need to accomplish in my company. And then, because I encourage leaders to also think about their personal lives, he ended up identifying his own personal health as worthy of a lot of focus and time and effort because it’s going to improve his leadership performance. So that’s an example of finding that one thing. Oftentimes, it has to do with where do you feel a lot of pent up energy either in yourself or on a team or in an organization. And so, on the professional front, there are many organizations, I mean, in many cases, small or large business at the end of the day, you’re working with a customer or a client who’s willing to pay you money for a product or a service. It’s very fundamental. And oftentimes, what’ll happen is the organization hits a certain stage of growth and it becomes so internally consumed with creating better processes, creating better practices, scaling, being more efficient and doing all the things you need to do with that spotlight inside your company to be better. And it loses sight of what actually got it to that privileged position, was being maniacally focused on the people that they serve with their product or their service. So oftentimes, I don’t want to say it’s a 100% theme, but very often, there’s a theme of getting back to the basics of the people that we serve. And what they find is when you get maniacally focused on how do we serve the people who love us better and more often with new ways of adding value, being more efficient with all that, the internal stuff inside the business tends to orient itself around that. So that’s a good example of a leader who decided, we’re doing so well at setting our structure up to go after the next 100 million in top line or whatever it was, there’s multiple stories like this. That’s great, but if we just keep our inward focus, we’re losing client satisfaction, we’re losing client outcomes. How can I make sure that I and my team are now maniacally focused on improving and ratcheting up the value we’re creating in that customer experience? Because then I know our business has to orient itself to it. So Alex, with this, what I would say is, very oftentimes, in that list of 129, it’s not that all those things are not important to do, but what you’re asking is, what’s the thing or things such that by putting all of my energy and focus on them, it actually can take care of a lot of those things on that 129 list? Or it makes some of them just not matter as much. And this notion of companies going back to basics and focusing maniacally on the customer, that is one of the things that just by nature, it’s going to cause a lot of other things in your business to have to be looked at and realigned. So that’s an example of, it’s not like we’re cheating the system, I’m saying you’re going to get 50 for one, but there are some wins like that where you decide one of those goals is so big and meaty, it’s worthy of pursuing, it’s going to bring a lot of the others with you. 

Alex Bridgeman: It’s a similar kind of train of thought you hear from new CEOs, so if a CEO’s a new public company CEO replacing a CEO of a- when the company wasn’t doing very well, a lot of the like return to basics, fundamentals, even like head coaches talk about that, like when they join a new team, like return to basics, return to fundamentals. Can you talk about why that is such a consistent message and then why does it get off track? Why does it get messy? 

Ed Manfre: Great question. First, I would say that Aristotle quote, excellence is not just an act, but it’s a habit. And part of the habit is something I repeat often and I write about it very often – know the basics, do the basics, do them well, do them every day. Repeat. Know the basics, do the basics, do them every day, do them very well. And part of the reason why you go back into this again and again and again is because organizations as they grow, you start to get a lot of interesting ideas and attractive ideas that lots of different people want to pursue. And if you’re not thoughtful and really protective of what you choose to put effort and resources behind, what happens is you start to throw a lot of effort into a lot of different things, and you lose the consistency of the story of your company, the purpose of it, the people that you serve, and your efficiency of resource use. So put simply, your eyes get a lot bigger than your stomachs the more you grow as an organization. And this idea of back to basic, you might even stop doing some of the basics. You might even stop paying attention to your customer satisfaction score or it just may become one of many metrics on the dashboard that everybody loves with the 50 million things that are impossible to track. And so, this idea of I want to have a strong, thriving, lean business that is generating great outcomes for the people I serve, it’s generating profits so we can reinvest and grow, but I don’t want to get so far away from what got us here with our new ideas and our expansions that we lose sight of these basics. So, part of the reason why you see leader after leader coming in, and in these kinds of instances to go to the basics, is because the organization has complexified itself by virtue of its growth. It’s almost like the bigger you get, the more you think you have a right to do more and more things. And it’s not a judgment; it just happens to all of us. And so, the number one thing a leader can do is say, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, let’s shed some of this non-essential activity. First, let’s figure out what is essential, but then let’s shed some of the non-essentials and get back to doing the basics, doing them well, doing them every day, go back, know the basics, do them every… that’s the mantra. And so, a story we talk about in the book is Bob Iger who came in originally, he’s now in a second tour with Disney, and he’s going through a very similar path in his second tour. But in his first tour, he was coached as he was pitching himself for the CEO job back in I think it was ’04, ’05, around there. He had a long list. He told the nominating chair that was looking at all the CEO candidates, here’s my list of 10 things, and the guy said, no, no. You get three things, you get three. So, make it three because three’s easy to remember, you can fit a lot into them, you can create a story around it, you can sort of get people enrolled in this idea that we’re doing three big things. And that served him and the organization, Disney, very, very well. And that’s also what he did when he came back in, in his second, it’ll be a shorter tour of duty, but in his second tour, it’s very similar. We need to cut back in to the basics and what are the three big areas of focus. So I think, Alex, part of it is your destiny as a leader and you’ve earned the right to grow and to think expansively about what all you can do in the world. That’s great. You earned that right. I’m guaranteeing you that the shorter you make the cycle of being intoxicated with all those great ideas, going back to the basics, the better off your business will be in the long term. You do need to do some exploration. You should do some research. You should think about how to expand the value you add. But don’t allow those to go on so long and become so bloated that you’ve lost sight of what the basics are. And then learn what they are. Do them every day. Do them well. 

Alex Bridgeman: I love that. Can you talk to more- can you talk more about how a new CEO should approach a new company? Like if they’re joining the company for the first time, either they were hired to replace a previous CEO or they acquired that company and they’re now leading it. What are kind of the fundamentals, like to your point around know the fundamentals, do them every day, what are some of those for a new leader? 

Ed Manfre: Yeah. So, it may go without saying on this, but I think that all, in my research and in what we write about, all successful leaders who’ve come into organizations that they did not found, who have ended up taking them on a new and better path in the second, third season of their life, they all are very good students of history. And what I mean by that, first, they’re a good student of history, they understand the business inside and out, the story of how it originated. If the founders are still present, they’re very well connected to them, understand what’s important to them. But they know how the business became wired as it is. And they know why so much of those things occurred, some of them good, some of them not so good. The reason why being first and foremost a good student of history when you come into a CEO role is important is because anything you are about to do, chances are there are plenty of people in this organization who have been there a lot longer than you and they see the reasons and the value for all the things that exist, processes, focuses, products, whatever it is. And when you come in and you’re asked to do a turnaround or a next phase of growth or a transformation, just anything. I mean, you’re going to bring a new CEO in to make changes. That is nine times out of ten, that’s part of the trajectory. It’s just are these changes we’re growing into, or are these changes to help save our business? So, when you’re coming in, and you need to bring people with you to wherever you’re going, not understanding the history, I’ll tell you this, one of the most common complaints that I will hear when I do interviews around a leader who is stepping into a new team or a new business is they haven’t taken the time to understand why things are the way they are. That is like probably the top three in terms of other people’s complaints around them. They come in going, I know enough from the outside, I did what I needed to do, I made my plan, let’s just come in and deliver the plan. They haven’t been good students of history. That does not mean that they’re going to fail just because it’s earlier in their tenure that occurred. They can adjust. But what it does mean is you haven’t found a way to learn enough and communicate to others that you know and honor what has worked for that organization. And you’re also being very candid about what you believe and have a mandate to lead the business toward in the future. And so being a good student of history, got to be, number one. Number two is also understanding the company’s culture, and by that, I don’t just mean the values on a wall, because nine times out of ten, you’ll redo those and people may not know what they are for a period of time. But understand how this business is wired, how people work together to get things done. If it’s a professional services organization, understand what are some of the key cultural habits and behaviors that have helped them to be successful with clients. If it’s a product-centric business, what are some of the habits and behaviors that other people would remark have helped them to be successful in creating new and better and more innovative products? What are those things? And part of that is because in the new world that you’re going to be leading, you need to build on the best of some of those practical habits and behaviors and mindsets in order to help the company get to where you feel and hopefully others feel it needs to go. So, knowing the culture, being a good student of history, knowing the key cultural practices, and by the way, this all assumes you understand the business fundamentals because that’s not what- I don’t think we’re here to talk about knowing business fundamentals, you better. If you got the CEO job, you know the business fundamentals. So, history, culture, and then the third thing is, what is the vision that you are able to ascertain by engaging all those people that you can paint for people with hopefully not too many words of where you are going? Create that vision. And some of the more successful examples of these things are, you think about any organization who has survived some of the craziness on the outside and come away to thrive and be even better, one of the examples we write about in the book, and by the way, this happens to organizations in phases. So any of the names I bring up, when someone listens to this, this organization may not be in the best place when they listen to this, this happens. But one of the examples we bring up is the idea of Airbnb both during and right before the pandemic ensued, the COVID-19 pandemic, because what they had done, and Brian Chesky writes about this or spoke about it eloquently in an interview, he talked about how they started to expand, and they were really going to be going gangbusters and they were thinking about all these new and different services they were going to provide. Boom, COVID happens. I think we all know the short story, the short version of the story after that, their business is under threat. So what did they do? They decided to get back to basics, and they created a vision that was rooted in the fundamental ways that they create value for their customers. And he decided to recast the narrative to this is now what I believe and see and can see Airbnb can become in the next three to five years given the new limitations and challenges we experience. And so, it’s very often, especially in a CEO coming into a business that’s in challenge, is that they feel like everybody should just know why it’s under challenge and everybody should just kind of get that we need to go to a new place. I wish. I wish it was that simple. You cannot just sort of telepathically do this. You have to work on the story and the vision that you’re going to help other people buy into. And it’s based in the history, which is why history is first. It’s based in the culture, because that’s why culture is second. But then all of those things help you pull through, this is where we are going, let’s go. So to make it simple for people, understanding the history, understanding the culture that makes it work, and then creating a clear and compelling vision that you can enroll other people in so that they will do what it takes along with you to create the new future. 

Alex Bridgeman: Wonderful. Ed, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. If folks want to meet you, work with you, what are some ways that they can get ahold of you? 

Ed Manfre: I’m fortunate to be in a case where LinkedIn is my primary landing page. And so please, come visit me, say hi, connect with me on LinkedIn. I’ll be happy to engage with you and see how I might be able to help you. Alex, thank you so much for this time.