Douglas Conant || Authentic Leadership

Conant is the CEO and founder of Conant Leadership, a mission driven community of leaders and warners who are championing leadership that works. He served as the CEO of Campbellsuit for ten years and is also the former president of Nibisco and former chairman of Avon. He's a New York Times bestselling author and his new book is called The Blueprint, Six Practical Steps to Lift your Leader to New Heights. Doug,

so great to chat with you today. I'm so glad we could work so good we could work it out too. That's a reference to our listeners. We're having some difficulty getting the Skype chat to work, so we went we went through all sorts of different measures, and here we are, Well, this is actually kind of relevant because your own, your own journey has has not been such a straight path to where you are today, right. It's kind of like Skype problems early in life, so to speak. Yeah, well,

I think I think we all have. And then we see people who have kind of worked their way through those and we just assume it's always been that easy. In my case, it was quite the opposite. I can remember my first performance review in my company when I started right out of business school and entry level job at General Mills. Five months in, I had a performance review on my boss that I was doing a satisfactory job.

But my boss's boss just had to review the assessment and then wrote one sentence and and and that sentence he said, you should be looking for another job. And that was my first performance review, and it was a real wake up call. I slogged through that, and I was with the same company for nine years, General Mills, and then one day went into work at one of the subsidiaries and they sent me to the receptionist said could you go up and see the senior vice president

of marketing. At the time, I was the director of marketing and senior vice president said, Doug, your job's been eliminated. You need to be out of here by noon. And all of a sudden, you know, in a snap, my life had changed. I went home to my wife, my two small children, and my one very large mortgage, feeling every bit the victim, devastated, bitter, and what a wake

up call. And so that's sort of Those are just a few of the stories that of choppy seas that I encountered, and you know, we all encountered those choppycs and it's about how we navigate through them that sort of ultimately determines our legacy of contra I conpletely agree, and it's great that you can kind of see that from a personal perspective as well as a theoretical perspective. Now you argue that to unlock our potential in life, we often it's required a turn inward. What do you

mean by inward? Well, I really believe that you know, your life story is your leadership story, and I don't think most of us adequately reflect upon our life story and all that we've learned from it. When I was fired from my company, they sent me to an outplacement counselor named Neil McKenna. The first thing Neil did was had me handwright my life story and my family story.

And as I went through that exercise, I was overwhelmed by the things that I had not contemplated since I'd experienced them as a child and even a young adult. I was thirty two at the time, and as I captured everything I could think of with my life story and my family's story, I came to understand in a more deep and resonant way how I thought about my life and what I hoped to do with my life.

And quite frankly, had I not gone through this crucible moment and been challenged to really reflect on my life story, I personally think I would have missed the boat. And so what we do with our work is we encourage people to look within so that they can build a stronger foundation that's going to allow them to deal with the winds that are going to sweep across the landscape

even with greater force going forward. You know, Brene Brown has a great quote and I won't give it justice here, and Brene, as you know, is written extensively on vulnerability and daring, daring greatly and she has a great quote that says, you can either stand within your own story or you can stand outside your your own story, and and sort of oh, I'm going to drop the ball on this and chase your uh you know, I'm going to leave. I'm going to let it go. I can't.

I'm gonna point is. Our point is that you really need to get inside your own story before you can start influencing others with their story. And I've found that quote. It really spoke to me. And so as I've gotten into all this work, I find that all of us have the seeds of contribution already in us, and it's just a question of how do we tap into that. I don't know that we're all made to be CEOs, but we're all made to be doing more and contributing

more than we are contributing. And so this whole, whole book is written with an eye on helping people find their own seeds of greatness within them and start to nourish them and bring them to life. Yeah. I really

like that. And you talk a lot about you know, this idea of bringing your whole self to the table is something that you don't hear that often or frequently in the leadership field, and you know, we have all these different identities, different sides of ourselves, and you do make the case that we should merge our work self with our other selves, what you call real self, into

one cohesive identity. I'd love to get some of your thoughts on how people can merge those and and also I'm personally a bit skeptical there's any such thing as our real self, you know, I wanted to get your thoughts on how you've defined the real self. I don't know that there is an ultimate real self. I think you know, it's a spectrum. And I would say we only show a part of ourselves in our work. That's

your name, that's one's nature, not your nature. One's nature was my nature was I thought, here's how I'm expected to show up at work, okay, and I'm not going to cross that imaginary line wherever it is. And what I've discovered in the fullness of time is that in fact is an imaginary line, and I'm imagining it, and that I can bring more of myself in more in a more complete way to contributing in my workplace than I am. And so what we try and do is

help people show up more fully. I don't know that you ever get to the ultimate real self. You know that you'd have to You're going to have to bring Freud in to complete that conversation, and maybe you can do that, but I can't. But I do know that the leaders that I've been exposed to now over forty years, the best leaders were more fully integrated than not, and so they were showing more of themselves at work and in collaboration with other people than some of the other

leaders I experienced. Many of the other leaders I experienced who were very narrow and very controlled and how they presented themselves. So we just encourage people. The more comfortable you can get in bringing more of your true identity, however you define it, into your work life, the more

fulfilling it will be. You know, all of my work in this leadership space with both when I was working, which was for forty years, but in study, which has been for thirty years, I have come to believe that we have the potential to connect better with people if we reveal more of ourselves to them, and it tends to inspire better collaboration and more trust. Ultimately, I think there are three things leaders Hunger, for today. And this is just my observation from teaching, and from coaching and

from life. You know, they hunger to be more effective at meeting the needs and wants of an enterprise. They also tend to want to show up in a way that speaks to them, which feels more The word today is authentic, and they hunger for a fulfilling journey, and they're beginning to feel like that's a pipe dream. And so what we try and do is help them be more effective, do it in a way that feels more authentic than the way they have been doing it, and do it in a way that, in the fullness of time,

promises to be more fulfilling. We don't ever get all the way to brite. That would be a fool. They aren't trying to. In fact, we very carefully say forget perfection. What we're hoping to do with the blueprint is to promote enlightened iteration as you reflect on these things and you learn from your experiences, and you continue to learn and grow. So I don't think there's a real self, but I think there's a more real self than the

self you have today. The other thing I try and do with it is to do it in real time, as you and I both know most of the leadership work that's done. You read the book, And then how am I going to act on this and how am I going to bring this to life in the middle of my kakamami life which I have no time to do anything. Everybody I work with is swamped, you know.

They get up, they check their emails in the morning, they feed their kids breakfast, they get them off to school, they go to work all day, They come home, they have maybe a quick dinner, and if they have kids still at home, they maybe spend an hour together. Then the kids go off and do their work and the adults go back and do their emails or watch a basketball game and go to bed and do it all over again. Who has time to lift their leadership profile

to new heights? Who are you kidding? And so what we've done with this, and this is because I've lived it as a practitioner for forty years. We've endeavored to do this so that to create a model that you can approach, which is elegantly simple, and you can pursue this. It nests, It's designed to nest perfectly in your kakamemi life. The way it is right now. So we've tried to be very realistic with it and to the point of where it could be argued that it's too simple. But

life is so complex. If you introduce more complexity into this equation, it goes nowhere. So we've opted to keep it simple. We have six what we call practical steps, very intentionally to lift your leadership to new heights in a way that nests perfectly in the Kakamemi life that we all live today. And it's a tall order. But now I've now been doing this for in earnest for about fifteen years and we found our way to a better place. I'm excited to see where it goes because

it'll be even better fifteen years from now. So so can we go through the sixth? Is that okay? Can we? Yeah? I can do a quick sure, yeah, yeah, we it's it again. It's intentionally, very straightforward, and the notion is the concept of the blueprint is drawn from architecture, where an architect creates a blueprint of the building and intentionally builds a very strong foundation so that building can withstand

the forces of mother nature. Our blueprint is a blueprint for leaders who want to have a magnificent career of contribution and we help them. We're helping them build a very strong foundation for that career to build upon. And so we have six steps in the process. The first one is to we call it envision, and that's all about trying to create a deeper understanding about what is your boldest dream of leadership success, What is your purpose? Why are you choosing to do this. We have some

quick exercises that get you started on the journey. That's the first step. The next two steps are reflect and study. You've identified your purpose, Now, what life experiences have influenced my leadership beliefs. We're starting to dive deep into leadership now, and what have you learned from your own personal life experiences. All of us have been affected by people who have had a profound influence on our life, and we're asking people to reflect on that and draw conclusions from it.

After you've sort of harvested the learnings from the reflection phase, which again it's an hour or of work and you're done, we move to step three, which is, Okay, I understand sort of my life experience is now I'm going to lift my head up and look at the world around me and what leadership leffons beyond my own experiences can I learn from the world around me? And we challenge people to look at places of interest that intrigue them and to begin to draw conclusions from that. So and

then we move into step four. Steps two and three help you codify your core beliefs about leadership. What have I learned from my personal experience and from my study? And typically people have five to ten core beliefs around leadership, so they've defined their purpose in the envision phase. They get their core beliefs from reflect and study. And then the next step is, I'm going to build a plan.

You know, it's amazing to me. All of us in academia, nonprofits, for profits, federal government, we have plans for every thing. You can't run an enterprise without a plan, right, Well, we run our leadership development by the seat of our pants. And my observation is we need to do better, and so we have you craft a leadership plan. And the centerpiece of this plan is actually developing your own personal leadership model. Now I'm sitting in my office here in

Philadelphia with hundreds of books. You've been here and there are hundreds of leadership models. Here's how you ought to do it, Here's how you ought to do it, how about this way? And yet, interestingly, for me, none of them speak to me, and I say, why is that? Well, that's because they're not informed by who I am, where I come from, and what I aspire to do. So we have people draw conclusions from their core beliefs and design their own leadership models, their own personal leadership model.

This is how I want to walk in the world, based on my purpose, my core beliefs about leadership. We give them prompts and help them work through this. They design their own leadership model, usually with five to eight elements, and interestingly, we've done hundreds of these. No two of them are the same because all people are unique. They all have different needs, wants, and aspirations, and this is the way they're viewing leadership. So they develop their own

leadership model. And then we say the fifth step is, Okay, how are you going to bring that leadership model to life on Monday? And we have them identify signature practices that they can use to bring that model to life, those elements of the model to life that will start to impact the world around them. In the way that

they actually want to impact the world around them. The sixth step is building a continuous improvement framework, which includes basically, at this point, I've done this model a zillion times. I can go through in ten minutes and say, Okay, how am I doing? Is my purpose still right? Have I envisioned this right? Yeah? Okay? Is there anything more to get from the reflect step that I missed? No? Is there something more to study? Yeah? I want to.

I want to study Stuart Freeman Friedman's work at Warden on leading a more purposeful life. So I'm going to go do that. And then how does that influence my model? Do I want to tweak my model? Is it working? And then what other practices can I use to bring that model to life? And you iterate through it constantly making it better and better and better in a flywheel

sense of way. One other thing you will do in this process you develop your own model, but that in and of itself is not necessarily sufficient because you're going back into the real world wherever you work, they have their own leadership expectations of you. So what we help you do is design a re entry plan that helps you bring your model to life within the expectations of the enterprise you're returning to because the real world is not necessarily enamored with your model, but they don't need

to be. This is what works for you, and so we help you harmonize your approach so that it can actually be effective in the real world. We go through these prompts takes there's about nine to twelve hours worth of work in this in total, and then you can start bringing it to life and within a week you can start acting on your learnings, and then you can do it in the middle of your kakamemy life. So

that's the model, and that's the blueprint process. The first guest in the Psychology podcast to use the word kakami. So I like it. I like it so well. Gosh, there's there's so many places to go from there. There's one thing I didn't want to talk about. I thought it was really interesting in your book. Was this declaring yourself practice? How can people declare themselves more, you know, to build productive relationships? Oh? Yeah, very important. This is

all my opinion, Scott, This is all my opinion. I have found. This is not rocket. I'm an introvert. It may sound like I'm not, but I am. Trust me. I've been tested five times and every time I've become an introvert. Myers Briggs, you know, all of us introverts, just one time. I want to test and be an extrovert. I really want that, but it's just not going to happen. But us introverts, why do you want to be an extrovert? Well, I just want to know what it's like, you know.

You know, they seem to be the life of the party and they enjoy being with all these people, and I find it exhausting. But at any rate, us introverts, you know, we don't naturally express ourselves well well maybe as well as we could, and the world isn't built to hear us. So I've come up with this understanding that people in this world are not mind readers, and unless I tell them where I'm coming from, they will

not know. And we've all had these experiences of working with people, and especially for people who we don't quite know where they're coming from. And what is he really asking me to do? What does she want? How am I? What am I missing here? And I have found there's a better way, both with the people that work for me and the people I work with and the people I work for. In the first hour or the first day, I just tell them not call it declaring myself. I

tell them what I'm trying to do. I'm coming from what I believe, and then I invite them to share with me their perspective. Now you know everything there is to know about me. If I do what I say I'm going to do, I guess you can trust me. If I don't, I guess you can't, and you'll know that. But since I've declared myself, I'm telling you I intend

to honor my commitments to you. And then I invite them to share with me what they feel comfortable sharing, and our relationship just gets going at a much faster and deeper and more meaningful rate right off the bat. And I do share with them things that you know, my private self would not normally have shared at work, of my beliefs, my commitment to family and my faith and my colleagues, and how I think about things and

my values. I share with them my favorite quotes, as well as all some of my business philosophy, and so they have a pretty full picture of me in half hours of forty five minutes. I also do the same thing with organizations I'm associated with. With anybody who's willing to listen, I tell them where I'm coming from. I

invite them to tell me where they're coming from. And I find that kind of transparency is incredibly liberating and stimulating, and as long as you don't do it in a heavy handed, pontificating way, it can it can catapult the relationship to a place that wouldn't normally get to in short order. So that's what I believe. I believe that

people aren't mind readers. If you want them to know where you're coming from, you know, there's no substitute for telling them, and also for being open to hearing where they're coming from and then trying to find the win win in the relationship. I love that. Do you ever Can you ever run a risk though, of alienating relationships if you're too honest or you bring too much of yourself? Are there some size of yourself you shouldn't bring to the table. Well, I guess so. I think you know.

We all have to monitor ourselves. What I have found is the more I lean in and the more transparent I become, the I haven't crossed the line yet. I may have gotten close at times, but there were things I might have been worried about ten years ago that I'm just not worried about anymore. And the reason is because they were fine. So, you know, I encourage most people to be as candid as they can be comfortable, because it's probably not enough. You can probably go farther.

I think we all sort of self regulate, but more candor is better than less. You know, all of our work environments sort of require a degree of candor. These days, we talk, you know, Jim Collins talks about confront the brutal facts. All kinds of leadership gurus talk about having candid conversations, and I think candor is important. I think it has to be genuine, and I think you have to create a foundation for it by doing something like

what I call declaring yourself cool. And related to that, you have this quote you say, your life story is your leadership story. Can you unpack that a bit? Yeah, Look, all of us who have now I've spent a lot of time actually practicing leadership forty years, but also studying it for almost the entire forty You know, we can make this incredibly complicated easily, and it doesn't need to be.

When I talk to people, I say, think about someone in your life who has had a profound influence on you, you know, and everybody we close our eyes and we think about that person. And then anybody in an audience will think about a person, and then I'll have them turn them turn to the next person next to them

and describe that person. Typically it's a grandparent, mother, an aunt, a coach, a teacher, may be very rarely a boss, and they describe that person, and that person, it turns out, has had a profound impact on them and their life in some way, and they carry the message that that person was conveying to them with them to this day and it influences them. And invariably, when we get into this conversation, we observe two things. One that was that

this person had very high standards. They were tough minded on standards. At the same time, they cared deeply about the people that they were dealing with, and they were tenderhearted with people. And that leads me to a conversation that I think the best leaders are tough minded on standards and tenderhearted with people. And then we get to a point where I say, you know, we can make

leadership complicated. But all I'm really asking you to do is be more like the people who have had a profound influence on you, who said just the right thing and just the right way at just the right time, and had a profound impact on you. I'm inviting you to be more like them with the people with whom you live and work. You have experienced brilliant leadership. I'lbe it episodically, but you've experienced it, and if nothing else, I encourage you to be more like them with the

people with whom you live and work. And I think you get to that point when you when you carefully examine your life story and we have them go through an exercise where we call it their their entourage of excellence. They think about the people who have had they capture those thoughts. And that's what examining your life story is all about, because I believe it is your leadership story. You are all those people incarnate when you show up. I'll tell you I talk to leaders all the time.

I mean the world class. You know, best leaders in the world. They invariably have a story. And it's never about a coach like me or a CEO or a or a professor. Even I have one about Ram Scharan, who is my professor, but he's an exception. But they all have a story about a grandparent or an uncle or an aunt who had this incredible influence on them.

And that's where I'm going with this life story piece is if you really mind your life story, you will find nuggets of just incredible brilliance that you know what that's like, and you can bring that experience to other people. What a great perspective that you just don't hear that often in these discussions. I mean, you're quite right. You know, these so many leadership books out there, I can see

why they wouldn't resonate with you. After this conversation today, I think maybe I'll just end this whole interview with one of my favorite quotes of yours. The key to unlocking better leadership is found through a clear eye exploration of you, the real full you. Well, thanks so much for bringing your full self to this conversation today, Doug, and I wish you all the best. Okay, I'm happy to do it, and I look forward to having a more fulsome conversation with you next time. Thanks for listening

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