#96 Randall Stutman: The Essence of Leadership
Randall Stutman, founder of the Admired Leadership Institute, discusses leadership from a behavioral perspective, focusing on actionable routines rather than psychology. He shares timeless behaviors used by admired leaders to drive results, inspire others, and improve relationships at work and home.
Deep Dive Analysis
17 Topic Outline
Behavioral vs. Psychological View of Leadership
Defining Leadership and Admired Leaders
Commonality and Timelessness of Leadership Behaviors
Functions of Leadership and Whole-Person Impact
The Challenge of Giving Effective Feedback
Technique vs. Routine in Leadership Behaviors
Feedback in Balance: Positive and Negative
Repairing Out-of-Balance Relationships
The Problem with Withholding Praise and Third-Party Compliments
Elevating Performance Through Priority Setting
Self-Awareness and Coaching Leaders
Impediments to Coachability and Organizational Change
Motivation vs. Inspiration in Leadership
The Universal Desire for 'Fan-ness' and Its Behaviors
Leading During a Crisis: The Importance of Response
Teaching Values and Transparency to Children
Introduction to the Admired Leadership Digital Course
7 Key Concepts
Psychological View of Leadership
This perspective focuses on individual differences, understanding who you are, and adapting to others' unique traits. While it helps people understand themselves better, it often doesn't lead to significant behavioral change in leadership.
Behavioral View of Leadership
In contrast to the psychological view, this perspective emphasizes the specific actions, routines, and habits that constitute effective leadership. It posits that leadership excellence is about what one *does*, and these behaviors can be learned and mastered.
Technique (in leadership)
A behavior or action performed for a specific, immediate effect or outcome, often not practiced consistently. When used as a technique, it can be perceived as inauthentic or manipulative, and the practitioner doesn't become skillful at it.
Routine (in leadership)
A behavior or action consistently practiced because one genuinely wants to embody that type of person or leader. It becomes a natural, ingrained part of one's style, leading to mastery and being perceived as authentic.
Negativity Effect
The inherent human tendency for negative information to carry significantly more impact and weight than positive information. This means that even a small amount of negative feedback can overshadow a larger amount of positive feedback if not balanced effectively.
Feedback in Balance
A method of delivering criticism where the positive remarks are as vivid, elaborate, and detailed as the negative remarks, and generally match in number. This approach helps the recipient accept the feedback more readily and feel less defensive, fostering a desire for improvement.
Fan-ness (in leadership)
The consistent behavioral demonstration by a leader that they are genuinely rooting for and would do anything for the success of the people they lead. It's about proving unwavering support in both good and bad times, which deeply inspires and motivates individuals.
10 Questions Answered
The psychological view focuses on individual differences and self-understanding, while the behavioral view emphasizes the specific actions and routines leaders *do* to improve situations and people, suggesting leadership is a set of learnable behaviors.
Leadership is defined as making situations and people better through strategic messages, decisions, actions, and routines. A 'best leader' is someone who consistently achieves both results and strong followership, earning admiration from those around them in all aspects of life.
Admired leaders apply core behaviors and routines consistently across work, family, and friendships. This consistency builds universal respect and admiration, making them more foundationally effective as a whole person, rather than just in specific roles.
The negativity effect means negative information carries more weight than positive. Leaders can counteract this by practicing 'feedback in balance,' ensuring positive remarks are as vivid and detailed as criticisms, and matching them in number to make feedback more palatable.
To repair an out-of-balance relationship, a leader should intentionally initiate more positive conversations that are not focused on performance or metrics. These interactions should focus on recognizing talent, personal well-being, or shared excitement to re-establish equilibrium.
Leaders may struggle to give praise because they don't personally need it or have very high standards. An effective routine is 'third-party compliments,' where a leader tells a third party about someone's excellent work, which is perceived as highly sincere and impactful when it eventually circles back.
The best leaders constantly calibrate and recalibrate people's short-term priorities, ensuring everyone knows their single highest focus for the week or day. By clarifying and refocusing on these immediate priorities, longer-term goals are more effectively achieved.
The universal principle is that everyone desires to have the people they respect and admire rooting for them, acting as their 'fan.' Leaders who consistently demonstrate this 'fan-ness' through their behaviors, even during challenges, profoundly inspire and motivate others.
During a crisis, it is not the incident itself but the leader's *response* that defines them. The response must exude competence, integrity, and sincerity, be transparent, and focus on providing a remedy, as people will forgive the incident but rarely a dishonest or incompetent reaction.
More than specific lessons, Randall emphasizes teaching children core values and consistently living by them as an example. He believes that transparency about these values helps children form principles that guide their own choices and actions.
53 Actionable Insights
1. Prioritize Crisis Response
In a crisis, understand that your response, not the incident itself, defines your credibility and will be remembered, so ensure it reeks of competence, integrity, and sincerity.
2. Be Truthful in Crisis Response
Ensure your crisis response is truthful and forthcoming from the outset, as any later revelation of withheld information will destroy trust permanently.
3. Live and Teach Core Values
Lead by example and consistently live the values you hold, ensuring your children understand what you truly stand for, as this is your most significant legacy.
4. Be Transparent About Values
Explicitly discuss and transparently live your values, especially with children, to ensure they clearly understand what you and your family stand for.
5. Establish Family Values Early
While children are young and impressionable, establish a common understanding of core family values like ‘family comes first,’ solidarity, and unconditional love.
6. Be a Consistent ‘Fan’
Consistently act as a ‘fan’ for everyone you lead, in both good and bad times, demonstrating unwavering support regardless of their performance or the difficulty of the conversation.
7. Sustain Positive Recognition
Extend the life of positive news or accolades by documenting, celebrating, or sharing them over a longer period, allowing individuals to benefit and bask in their achievements.
8. Use Creative Praise Extension
Employ creative methods like documenting, framing, writing letters, or temporary naming conventions to extend the impact and longevity of positive recognition.
9. Inspire Even Those You Dislike
As a leader, it’s your job to inspire and motivate everyone, even those whose personalities or styles you find challenging, by finding different behaviors and things to celebrate about them.
10. Choose to Lead Everyone
Make a conscious choice to lead and show ‘fan-ness’ to everyone, even those you find uncomfortable, as it is a fundamental aspect of effective leadership.
11. Develop Routines, Not Techniques
Commit to practicing behaviors as routines until they become second nature and part of your consistent style, rather than using them as one-off techniques for specific effects.
12. Master Universal Leadership Routines
Focus on mastering universal leadership routines, as these will make you foundationally more effective in all aspects of your life before adapting to specific situations.
13. Balance Vivid Feedback
When giving criticism, start with positive feedback that is as vivid, elaborate, and detailed as the negative points, aiming to match the number of positive remarks to negative ones.
14. Match Feedback Detail
Ensure that the positive feedback you provide is as detailed and vivid as the criticisms, and if you have fewer positive points, reduce the number of criticisms to maintain balance.
15. Adjust Criticism to Positive
If you can only find a few vivid positive points, limit your criticisms to a number that allows for a balanced conversation, as people are only ready to hear what you can balance.
16. Strive for Overall Relationship Balance
Actively work to achieve a better balance of positive and negative interactions in all your relationships, and specifically when giving critical feedback, ensure positive remarks are as vivid and detailed as the negative ones.
17. Assess and Prepare Balanced Feedback
Regularly assess the balance of positive and negative feedback in your relationships and prepare for critical feedback by identifying vivid positives to match your negatives.
18. Avoid Overly Negative Relationships
Recognize that consistently negative feedback in a relationship leads to withdrawal, defensiveness, and people stopping listening, so strive for balance.
19. Maintain Balanced Relationship Feedback
Strive for a healthy balance of positive and negative feedback in relationships to prevent defensiveness from too much criticism or alarm from too much praise.
20. Address Evaluative Climate Signs
If someone asks ‘Do I do anything right?’ or ‘Is it ever good enough?’, recognize this as a critical sign of an overly evaluative relationship that needs immediate rebalancing to avoid long-term damage.
21. Be Patient Repairing Relationships
Understand that rebalancing a relationship that has become too negative or positive will take time and consistent effort.
22. Initiate Positive, Non-Work Conversations
To rebalance a negative relationship, proactively engage in positive conversations about personal interests, team talent, or exciting topics, rather than always focusing on results or metrics.
23. Practice Third-Party Praise
When you observe excellence, tell the person directly if possible, but always make it a routine to tell a third party, as this enhances sincerity and impact.
24. Make Third-Party Praise a Rule
Adopt a personal rule to always share praise about someone’s excellence with a third party, even if you’ve already told the person directly, to amplify its effect.
25. Ensure Clear Priorities for All
As a leader, ensure every individual you lead has a clear, short-term priority, and if they don’t, it’s your responsibility to help them establish one.
26. Share and Calibrate Priorities
Start by sharing your own current priority, then ask others for theirs, and be ready to discuss and recalibrate if their focus seems misaligned with what’s most important.
27. Constantly Recalibrate Priorities
Recognize that priorities are short-lived (usually a couple of weeks) and require constant recalibration and discussion to maintain focus.
28. Integrate Priority Calibration
Regularly incorporate discussions about current priorities into staff meetings, round robins, and one-on-one conversations, sharing your own and helping others refocus their efforts.
29. Re-evaluate Success Drivers
Critically examine the true drivers of your success, ensuring you don’t misattribute positive outcomes to ineffective or counterproductive behaviors.
30. Identify Dysfunction’s Hidden Benefits
When faced with resistance to change, investigate whether individuals or groups are benefiting from the existing problem or dysfunction, as this often impedes progress.
31. Expose Benefits of Current Problems
To facilitate change, openly discuss and expose the hidden benefits or advantages that individuals or groups gain from maintaining existing problems or dysfunctions.
32. Cultivate Openness to Change
To be coachable, cultivate an openness to change and avoid excessive self-satisfaction with current outcomes, even if successful, as this can impede growth.
33. Reflect on Whole-Person Strengths
Reflect on your signature strengths and weaknesses not just as a leader, but as a human being, recognizing that these traits apply across all aspects of your life.
34. Seek External Self-Perception
Ask those who know you best (partner, spouse) about your perceived strengths and weaknesses to gain external perspective and enhance self-awareness.
35. Understand Leader Perception
Consider how your leaders perceive your strengths and weaknesses, noting any gaps with your self-perception and your ability to articulate negatives as clearly as positives.
36. Reflect on First Impressions
Develop self-awareness by reflecting on what people commonly misperceive, overestimate, or underestimate about you when they first meet you.
37. Overcome Praise-Withholding
Be aware that high standards or a desire for influence can lead to withholding praise, and actively work to counteract this tendency.
38. Provide Constructive Feedback
Utilize criticism, feedback, evaluation, judgment, advice, and counsel as essential tools to help people improve and become better.
39. Learn Timeless Feedback Methods
Invest in learning specific, effective ways to give feedback that are universally applicable and timeless, transcending cultural or technological changes.
40. Differentiate Motivation, Inspiration
Understand that motivation compels action, while inspiration lights an internal fire to want to do better, and aim to provide both.
41. Recognize Individual Motivation
Be aware that what motivates or inspires one person may not work for another, requiring a nuanced approach to individual needs.
42. Seek Universal Inspiration Methods
While individual adaptation is ideal, recognize its difficulty in emergent daily interactions and seek universal methods of inspiration that apply broadly.
43. Focus on Actions, Not Words
To be an effective leader, concentrate on what you do rather than what you say, as leadership is defined by actions, not just words.
44. Understand and Adapt to Differences
To improve as a leader or person, first understand yourself and the differences in others (team, spouse, friends), then adapt and flex your approach accordingly.
45. Study Unique Leader Behaviors
To identify effective leadership, focus on observing and understanding the specific actions and routines that exceptional leaders perform, which others might not.
46. Make Situations and People Better
Approach leadership with the fundamental intention to make situations and people better through strategic decisions, actions, and messages.
47. Choose to Lead Anywhere
Recognize that leadership is not tied to authority or title; anyone can lead at any time by making the choice to improve a situation or person.
48. Cultivate a Team of Leaders
Aim to build a team where multiple individuals lead in different ways at different times, rather than relying on a single leader.
49. Practice Foundational Leadership
Consistently keep promises, admit mistakes, show humanity, and be present during crises, as these are basic, essential leadership behaviors.
50. Build Team Coherence and Alignment
Develop an understanding of team dynamics to effectively create coherence and alignment within your team.
51. Prioritize Daily Inspiration
Recognize motivation and inspiration as critical, though challenging, daily functions of leadership that require consistent effort.
52. Prioritize Talent and Culture
Recognize that talent is foundational and organizational culture significantly impacts strategy execution, so prioritize both for success.
53. Frame Truth-Telling as Choice
When confronting dishonesty, frame the situation as a choice where telling the truth now will lead to a better outcome than continuing to lie, which will only worsen the situation.
6 Key Quotes
What leaders do is they make situations and people better.
Randall Stutman
It's your response that defines who you really are in other people's eyes. It's not the incident.
Randall Stutman
Culture eats strategy for lunch. I would tell you that talent sets the table.
Randall Stutman
My fan-ness, and that's the term I want to use, that my fan-ness, which is really what the idea is, has to be consistent. And it has to be with everybody that I lead directly. And I have to prove it in my ongoing behaviors.
Randall Stutman
Don't try to hide behind anything or anybody. They're going to find you anyway.
Randall Stutman
Leadership is about what we do, not what we say.
Shane Parrish
5 Protocols
Giving Feedback in Balance
Randall Stutman- Start with positive remarks.
- Ensure the positive remarks are as vivid, elaborate, and detailed as the negative remarks will be.
- Aim to match the number of positive points with the number of criticisms.
- Deliver the criticisms.
Repairing an Out-of-Balance Relationship
Randall Stutman- Start having other conversations that are not negative or focused on results/metrics.
- Focus these new conversations on the other person's talent, personal life, or things you're excited about.
- Consistently engage in these positive, non-evaluative interactions over time to create equilibrium.
Practicing Third-Party Compliments
Randall Stutman- When you see someone do something excellent, tell them directly if you are comfortable doing so.
- Always make it a rule to tell a third party about the excellence you observed.
- Choose a third party who is likely to relay the compliment back to the person being praised.
Elevating Performance Through Priority Setting
Randall Stutman- Start by sharing your own highest priority.
- Ask each person you lead: 'What's your focus right now? What are you really spending your time on? What's the most important thing this week or even today?'
- Listen to their response and help calibrate their priorities, questioning if a stated priority is truly the highest use of their time or if something else is more important.
- Recalibrate priorities constantly, as most priorities don't last more than a couple of weeks.
Leading During a Crisis (Response Strategy)
Randall Stutman- Do not respond in little pieces or change your mind frequently.
- Wait until you have gathered all the facts.
- Respond as quickly as possible once facts are gathered.
- Respond in a transparent way.
- Respond from a place of values and character.
- Ensure the response produces a remedy, not just an apology.
- Be completely truthful from the outset, as the truth always comes out.