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[0:00:02] Female Voice: Welcome to the Triple Bottom Line, where we reveal how today’s business leaders are reaching a new level of success with a people-planet-profit approach. And here is your host, Taylor Martin!
Taylor Martin: Welcome back to the Triple Bottom Line. Today, we’re going to be discussing visual leadership. No, not sign language or anything like that, but we will be discussing the many forms of visual leadership. I'd like to introduce you to Todd Cherches, a writer and businessman that literally wrote the book on visual leadership. He's written many books articles on the subject. He's taught at New York University and Columbia University and has also given a TED talk on the subject. Todd, I can't wait to dig into this. I've been thinking about this show all week, but before we do, can you tell our listeners a little bit more about yourself and your background?
Todd Cherches: Sure. Thanks for having me, Taylor. This is great. We have a lot in common. We have a lot of, if you picture a Venn diagram, which is one of my favorite visual frameworks, we have a lot of areas of overlaps that we're going to explore today, so that's great. In terms of my background, I actually started out… I talk about it in my TED talk how when people would ask me, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” My dream was to be Superman. But it's good to have a backup plan, so my backup plan was to be Batman, so…. But if I couldn't be Batman or Superman, then I needed to find something else to do. So, I was obsessed with reading the Hardy Boys mysteries and other things, comic books growing up. So, and I was a child of the sixties watching TV all the time- Superman, Batman. So, I grew up with, as many of us did, with storytelling and action, villains, victims, and heroes. And that became the foundation of so much of what I did. And I eventually became an English literature major, majoring in Shakespeare and poetry. So, what do you do with that? My father said, “What are you going to do- be a poet and just sit around rhyming all the time?” And so there had to be some way to use this, and everything I do now is around storytelling, metaphor, language. When I graduated from Albany, I went to the state University of New York and Albany with a Bachelor's degree in English and then I got my Master's degree in communication. But my dream was to work in television, so I worked in Ogilvy and made their advertising for a year when I first got out of college. Loved it, but I wanted to be on the creative side, and I was in the media side. And I realized that at that time, if you really wanted to work in the creative job and the TV industry, you had to be out in LA. So, I did one of the…
As an extreme introvert, one of the most dangerous, scary things I ever did, I packed my bags, and I moved out to Hollywood. I knew my two college roommates and some cousins and that was it. And I had a series of jobs out in the entertainment industry, out in LA. I worked for Michael Nesmith of The Monkeys. Those baby boomers may know his name. I worked for Aaron Spelling Productions in putting scripts together. I was in casting at Columbia pictures, comedy at Disney, and drama at CBS. So, those were my years in the TV industry. And then for a variety of reasons that I won't go into, I ended up as a project manager in the theme park business. And I worked for a theme park company, and we produced a series of audio animatronic, robotic figures for a cultural theme park in Shenzhen, China. So, I actually had to go over there to oversee the installation. I had never… I didn't have a passport. I had never been out of the country before and that was a very eye-opening experience.
Foreshadowing, eye-opening in terms of visual thinking and visual leadership. And I realized that to communicate across cultural lines when I didn't speak the language, we ended up drawing a lot. We ended up sketching, picking up. I couldn't really draw out more than a stick figure and yet if we needed a hammer or a screwdriver or whatever… and I talked about this in my TED talk… we had to physically draw and point. So, it turned it into a game of Pictionary and Charades. So, it was like two words, sounds like screwdriver, right? So, I realized that we don't just communicate in words, but we communicate in non-verbals as well. And visual communication can either be visual imagery or language, so that's the foundation of what I do.
And I moved back from LA after 10 years out there, got into the management leadership training business, and that's what I've been doing ever since. So, I do management leadership development, executive coaching, but I use my visual leadership methodology as the foundation of everything that I do.
Taylor Martin: So, how did you end up with visual leadership? And did you focus on that? How did that come about to be like the navigation point for you?
Todd Cherches: It was actually organic. It was, like, when you combine my background of growing up, watching… obsessed with television and movies… and the entertainment industry, combine that with literature and storytelling, and then you add the business world to that it… It all fits together. And it's kind of… It's the lens through which I always saw the world, right? So, one of my mottos is, “How do you get people to see what you're saying? How do you get an idea of Shakespeare calling the term to see something in your mind's eye?” When he saw the ghost of his father, he didn't know if it was a real ghost or an apparition, a figment of his imagination. And he said, I think I see my father. Where? In my mind's eye, right?
So, that became the foundation of a lot of my work because so much about communication and influencing is about getting someone to see things from your point of view. And one of the best ways to do that is through using visual language and pictures and drawing and metaphor, and some of the other techniques we'll be talking about today.
Taylor Martin: Yeah. You know, in your book, you talked about visual thinking, so where does that go? Can you explain that for us?
[0:4:59] Todd Cherches: Yeah. Visual thinking is basically thinking in pictures. I mean, it's the simplest way to explain it as opposed to words and text or as opposed to numbers, it's everything from visualizing. If you wake up from a dream and you remember your dream, that's visual thinking. You're picturing what you dreamed. If you're envisioning how your day is going to unfold, you’re using visual thinking. When we talk about leadership, the word vision comes up all the time in terms of so-and-so is a visionary leader- Martin Luther King, Jr. or Elon Musk or Steve Jobs. We talk about their vision. What does it mean as a leader to have a vision? It’s about seeing something in your mind's eye, a picture of the future, that's different from and other than the current reality? And it's all about, “How do I get that vision out of my mind's eye and into that of others.”
So, there's two components to having a vision from a leadership perspective. One is formulating that vision. The other is communicating that vision and getting it out there into the world in a clear, compelling, and inspiring way. So, that's what visual leadership is all about; it’s foundation.
Taylor Martin: Yeah. I can't imagine somebody not being able to communicate it to others if you don't formulate it. So, formulating it first and then pushing it out to the world. But tell me this: Are there different styles of this visual thinking that turns into visual leadership by expressing it to others?
Todd Cherches: Yeah. I break it down into four categories. The four categories are first: using visual imagery and/ or drawing, so it's using pictures, PowerPoint slides. It's physically holding something up and showing it to a person. It’s information, taking them through the physical eye. A lot of people say… I call it ICD syndrome. I can't draw. So many people say they can't draw. You ask a group of kindergarteners, “How many of you can draw?” They all raise their hands, right? So, have we lost our ability or our confidence to draw?
In fact, I just had my first piece published in Ink Magazine two weeks ago called, Can You Draw What Your Company Does? I take executives through an exercise who actually have to pick up a pen and stand on the flip chart and actually draw out, using metaphor and picture, what your company does. What business are you in? What services do you provide? In fact, one of the stories I tell in that article is that through taking one of my clients through this exercise, by having them draw this out, they realize that a lot of their business development people were communicating a message incorrectly. They were using metaphors that weren't true and didn't resonate and didn't reflect what business they were in. And it wasn't until they drew it then discussed it, that they had that realization, and then they were able to align around the common vision and a common metaphor to use, to explain, what they did. So, that was a real-life example.
Taylor Martin: Yeah. That's really interesting because you think everybody's on the same page and then you find out they're not. That's crazy! What about the other three?
Todd Cherches: Yeah. So, the first one is visual imagery and drawing. Category two is using mental models and frameworks, so that's everything from mind- mapping, storyboarding, using process diagrams. It is a company's organizational chart, right? It’s a visual representation of who reports to whom, right? And the interrelationships. So, it's a way to take information and represent it in a framework. So, if you think about classic ones. Maslow's hierarchy of needs is a pyramid, SWOT analysis, time management matrix as a four-box matrix, right?
So, there's all kinds of ways to put things into boxes. One of the cliches in business is thinking outside the box, right? You can't think outside the box until you have something in the box. So, one of the things I talk about is how do you take the complexity and messiness of work and life, put it in some kind of box or framework, so you could see it more clearly. And then you could find solutions that maybe you hadn't envisioned before. And one of the metaphors I use to explain that is: let's say you were going to put together…. you want to put together eight table settings of knives, forks, and spoons. If you opened up the silverware drawer and all that silverware is just thrown in there, how long would it take you to put together those eight settings? If you opened up the next drawer and all the silverware was in their compartments- knives in one, spoons in one, forks in the other. How much quicker would you be able to see the solution and be able to solve that problem? So, that's a metaphor I use to explain the difference between the complexity and messiness of life and then putting things into a framework.
Now, we're not talking about putting people in boxes and labeling and stereotyping, but we do use categorization as the foundation of so much of what we do just to wrap our heads around reality. So, that's category two, is models and frameworks.
Taylor Martin: You know, you mentioned mind-mapping. If anyone who's unfamiliar with mind-mapping, you can always look at Wikipedia and do a search for mind- mapping. There's free software on there. There is probably free software other places, but I used that one time just to get all the ideas of one company's vision they had for a website they wanted to do. And by having them put everything down in all these different areas and mind map the whole thing, you could just see the easement of them afterwards because it was out of their head, on the paper for everyone to see. And everybody participated on putting the mind map together But just getting it out and by getting it out where everybody can see it together, that was really fruitful. I was really impressed with that exercise.
Todd Cherches: That's the key thing. It's, like, how do we get ideas out of our heads? And if we can get them into someone else's heads, if there's an intermediary way or a medium, whether it's post-it notes, index cards, flipcharts, whiteboards. One of my clients has a room where people could just go in and write on the wall. It's a big whiteboard wall, and they just write the ideas down. And other people go in and piggyback off other's ideas and say, “Oh, I had that idea” or “I need to speak to Joe about that; that sounds really interesting.” But if it wasn't up there for them to read and to see then it would just exist in someone's head, right?
So, it's like, how do we do that? It's a great collaboration tool. It’s a great way to find some structure and synergy. There's just so much power to using frameworks, models, and mind-mapping. T
[0:10:19] Taylor Martin: That's awesome. What about the third item?
Todd Cherches: The third is using metaphor and analogy, which we've kind of alluded to already. So, what are metaphors? It not just in the realm of poets and songwriters. We use metaphors all the time because metaphors take something familiar and use it to describe or explain the unfamiliar. It makes the intangible tangible. It makes the invisible visible. If you say, “My love is like a red, red rose, right?” We know what a red, red rose looks like, right? So, it's a visual representation. If you say, “That's just the tip of the iceberg.” It’s what we see versus what's beneath the surface that we don't see. So, metaphors… If you're aware of them, you realize that almost like a third of all communication is metaphorical. We use expressions and metaphors and analogies all the time, but with the awareness of it and being more strategic, we can be more effective at it, right?
So, for example: my NYU students. I teach in the HR Master's program. Many of my students are international students from China. So, using a baseball analogy. I'm a huge baseball fan- Yankees fan- but using a baseball analogy with a 25-year-old female from Beijing is not going to resonate. Maybe dance will be a better metaphor. Maybe it's nature, which is universal, right? If I'm communicating with someone from Australia, I may use a rugby analogy, or someone from India, I might use a cricket analogy. It's speaking the language of your listener and your stakeholder to help them understand. So, a good metaphor creates clarity. A bad or poorly chosen metaphor for that audience does the opposite and creates confusion and potentially chaos.
Taylor Martin: Yeah. I mean, I think we use metaphors all the freaking time. [Laughs] I always remember that silly Star Trek episode. This is really going to date me. But where they met some alien beings, and the alien beings spoke through metaphors. That's how their language was. So, they were talking to each other in metaphors of historic experiences. And of course, it took the Star Trek crew forever to figure it out until the very end of the episode. And I have no idea why I retain that information [Laughs] in my youth as a child, but I do remember that crazy episode. My grandparents loved Star Trek.
Todd Cherches: I’m going to have to track that one down because that sounds really interesting and right up my alley, which is a metaphor.
Taylor Martin: I think about it probably at least once or twice a year because something happens in my life that reminds me of that episode.
Todd Cherches: One Star Trek episode though, sticks with me is Frank Gorshin. Remember he had a face that was like half black and half white?
Taylor Martin: Yes!
Todd Cherches: The visual of that has always stayed with me. It’s so current and relevant now. And that one episode, just always… You know, again, it was the power of that visual. I could picture that in my mind's eye as if I'm looking at on the screen right now. And that's the power of visual thinking and action.
Taylor Martin: Yeah. I agree.
Todd Cherches: And even when I said it and you had that recognition, wde just share a visual image in our head without looking at something. So that's a real- life example. Mic drop! We’re done!
Taylor Martin: [Laughing] Ba-da-bing! Ba-da-boom! We just did it.
Todd Cherches: [Laughing] Yeah.
Taylor Martin: Okay. So, let's move on to the fourth item. What is the fourth one?
Todd Cherches: So, the fourth one is storytelling and if you can add humor, extra bonus points. So, what is it about stories? Stories are human. They are emotional. They are memorable. Stories have a beginning, middle, and end. Even Aristotle said that thousands of years ago. Stories have a victim, villain, and hero. There's an arc. There's a journey. There's transformation. Children love stories. Grandparents tell stories about the old country. You know, whatever it is, culture is passed down through stories. Every company or industry has its stories, right? So, what is it about stories? They're just memorable and they're human. They make us human. So that's, I think, a key thing. And if you can add humor, you get bonus points, but it’s gotta be appropriate and relevant to what you're talking about. It's not, “Two people walked into a bar… “It’s, “Here’s a humorous anecdote,” and humor makes people feel good. And if people feel good, they’re learning and they're bonding.
Taylor Martin: Yeah. Humor is always tough in business, you know? Because you don't want to be slight to any one person or type of person and you want it to be understood against all people, you know? So that everybody gets the joke.
I think nowadays storytelling is digging its heels in, at least from a marketing perspective, because I feel like if you can bring your story down to a digestible amount of content, depending on what avenue of media that you're using it through, I think a lot of people are really taking note to storytelling, especially like on websites for instance. People are really trying to figure out like, “Why do I even have this webpage?” And then they go through it and they realize, “Okay. We need to tell our service or tell the history of our company.” But it's usually a service or something that they're trying to sell. A product. But they tell a little bit about the story of the product, why it exists in the world, how it's going to be beneficial to you, how it's gonna, help you, and then go through all the process of the product and selling pitches and call-to-action statements. But the base of it is storytelling.
[0:14:57] Todd Cherches: Yeah. Every brand has a story. I do workshops around storytelling where I have people share their success stories but also their failure stories, right? A cautionary tale. You can learn just as much. In fact, many of the stories in my books are about… My book is dedicated first to my wife, secondly to my parents, and third to all the horrible managers I've had in my life without whom this book could never have been written, right? So, all of those stories.
When I tell my students about the time that I was at a TV network that has a C, a B, and an S in its title. I was sitting at my desk, and I felt something whipped by my head, and my boss had thrown a box of pens at me because they were not the ones she wanted. She wanted the fine point. These were the medium point.
So, it was like… I say to my students when we're talking about feedback, “I don't know. Can you think of any other way to have given that feedback?” Like, Todd, you ordered the wrong pens other than… No. That's the only thing I can think of. Throwing it at the person’s head. But that story… You live it, right? You follow along with it. It’s like with empathy. We'll talk more about empathy later. But when you hear a story of someone's experience, you bond and you connect with them because you just imagine… you put yourself in their shoes… and say, “Wow. What would… how would I have handled that situation? What would I do in that situation?” So again, that's the power of story. You almost see it in your mind's eye as if you're watching a movie and seeing it unfold. And, again, there's emotion involved in that as well.
Taylor Martin: Talking about those four different ways of thinking and communicating more visually, I had to give thought to infographics. Infographics do a lot. And sometimes they might even be a lot of things of those four components in one, which is incredibly complex and not easy to do, especially because infographics are typically trying to distill things down to such a snackable, quick moment, understanding of data and message and importance and sometimes the volume or amount of something. Can you speak a little bit about that in terms of how you see us in business using those four different things and how, when you look through your lens, what do you see out there in the world of busines when, you know, people are trying to communicate?
Todd Cherches: I love that you used the metaphor of seeing things through my lens. And, actually, we met through Andi Simon, who you had in your podcast recently. She's a corporate anthropologist, and her whole thing… Everything she does is around seeing things through the lens of anthropology, right? So, we all look through things. We have a paradigm- the lens through which we see the world. And so, I just want to give a shout out and a thank you to Andi for introducing me to you, Taylor.
But, yeah, the lens. One of the things to think about in terms of how you see the world and those four categories is those four types or four ways do not exist in isolation. They work most powerfully in combination. You could use an image that’s literal or an image that is metaphorical, right? You can use a framework and tell a story about it. So, any of those categories… You can use all four at once. So, I just wanted to say that they don't exist in silos but, in combination, they're really powerful.
Here's an example: I don't wanna get into politics, but if you've been watching the election maps… I mean, we haven't talked about color yet, but color coding of red and blue sates, looking at bar charts and graphs. I mean, think about the complexity of the information that they're delivering in their snapshot through the visual, through the use of color coding. It's just… that's the living example that we don't even think about. But I'm always… Because I'm so attuned to it, I know that that's the first image that jumps out at me is the use of visuals to communicate. And when you're talking about the infographics, if there's too much complexity to them, they're actually more confusing, right? There's an art and a science and a magic to communicating clearly and effectively. And I know that’s one of your areas of specialty.
What are your thoughts in terms of what makes for a good infographic that in a way that communicates your message visually, simply, and clearly?
Taylor Martin: I can tell you right now. The very most important thing is less copy. You got to have a big message, whatever that is. If you're trying to communicate something, make sure it's one message. And sometimes clients have so much to say, it's sometimes best to break it down into maybe two or three different infographics, which is usually better for them to use on different social media platforms. They could have three different infographics that they could put on different platforms at different times, different colors, different ways. And that way they get more traction out of it because when you do things on social media, it's so digestible, so quickly come and goes, right? But the main thing is less copy. Less, copy. One message. Make it clean. Make it simple.
You talked about too many options. If it has too many things. I totally agree with that. One of the things that you made me think about was whenever you're trying to sell a product, and let's say you're selling a product in 20 colors, right? Whatever that is. Maybe it's a, shirt or something. That's not good because when people come in and they have 20 options of colors that they have to think about, they get overwhelmed with all the different color options, and they don't buy. But if you give them five, maybe six color options, and of course, you, know, you’ve reached out and found out your best five or six, the ones that are most sellers, biggest sellers. Make it just those, and target those for your audience and then you get more of a sale.
Todd Cherches: Yeah. One of my favorite TED talks is… Have you ever seen Barry Schwartz’s The Paradox of Choice? He talks exactly about that. He says, “When you give people too many options, they get paralyzed by indecision and don't choose anything.” Right?
[0:19:54] So, let's say you walk into a liquor store. If there's a cheap bottle, a medium price and an expensive one, it’s 90% of people buy the medium price. The one right in the middle. It's like… So, like you said, if you give people three or five, they will, like 80% of the time, go for that middle one. Or if you have five choices, you might go with number four because you don’t want look cheap, right.? So, what's interesting is you're getting into the whole psychology of how people process information and make decisions based on visual data and options that they have available to them.
Taylor Martin: One of the things that really stuck out to me in your book. And it really kind of helped me in my tracks. We've talked about a lot of different types of visuals and in my business, we do a lot of visual language. I call it “visual language” when a brand has to communicate on its behalf. And, again, I'm going to use a metaphor here- a lens. We have to communicate through their brand lens so that all the things we do for them match up and align up with all the other efforts that they have so it's one cohesive marketing effort as a whole. But you talked in your book about flipping the eye onto oneself. Can we drill down into that? Can you talk about that?
Todd Cherches: Sure. On the cover of my book is an eye, an eyeball, representing visual thinking, and it's a rainbow-colored eye. No one in the world I've ever seen has a rainbow-colored eye. And the reason I chose the rainbow is because it represents diversity and inclusion in all its forms. I's diversity of culture, diversity of thought, perspective, seeing things through the prism of the kaleidoscope of the rainbow. The other aspect of the rainbow eye is it represents innovation and creativity, adding color to the world, and I know color is a big part of your business. When we flip the eye, the metaphors, we take the eye instead of looking outwardly and saying, “Aright. Here's my vision. How do I make my vision a reality?” Flipping the eye is basically holding a mirror up to yourself and looking internally at your biases, your belief systems, your assumptions, your paradigms. And you become more self-aware in the foundation of emotional intelligence as Daniel Goleman writes about. It all starts with self-awareness. Socrates said, “Know thyself,” right? So, flipping the eye is about looking inwardly at yourself.
The other aspect of flipping the eye is can you turn the eye around and look at the world and your products and your services and everything through the eye, through the lens, through the perspective of other people who are different from you, right? And that makes you more empathetic. It makes you more compassionate. It shows that you don't have all the answers. You may say, “There are things that I don't like of some of the products I offer, some of the models are tools, but other people love it. So, I have to do it.” It's like playing your greatest hits. It's like, you know, asking Paul McCartney to sing Yesterday for the 8 billionth time, right? So, people want your greatest hits. So, you need to look at it with a fresh lens from their point of view. And actually, I was just talking about…
I belong to a thought leaders’ group, and we were talking about our thoughts, because we're so immersed in it, we only see it from our perspective. And sometimes we get tired of our same stories or our same approaches but to someone else it’s fresh and new. And it's like, wow, visual thinking! I never even thought of that before. I never even heard that before. And I used the quote from Joe DiMaggio when he was asked why he busts his butt out there on the field every single day, or did when he played, even in the dog days of summer, and he said, “Because some kid out there, this is his first game. And I want them to remember his first game. I want to put my best out there on the field every single day.” Because he was seeing the game through the lens of that eight-year-old kid who is seeing a game for the first time. I think that's what we need to do. Look at things from a childlike perspective in some ways. And there's a saying from Zen philosophy that in the expert's mind, there are a few solutions; in the beginner's mind, there are many. So, if we take a beginner's mind approach to things, we start to notice things from other's perspectives as opposed to just our own.
One of the things I do, I'm a tour guide in New York. I'm a Big Apple greeter, and I show people around the world. Not now during the pandemic but during normal situations. And I love doing it because I see the New York I live in through the eyes of people who've never been here before, and it's unbelievable. Just the empathy, that connection you form. It's like looking at things from the eyes of a child or I… We just got a puppy, and everything is new to her. When she goes… you know, every blade of grass or leaf is fascinating because it's new, right. So, how do we do that? How do we make what we do fascinating and new to our customers, to our clients, and to the world?
Taylor Martin: I think that's really interesting. But when you're reversing, you're flipping the eye on yourself. I'm always fearful that people don't have the ability to do it in a way that's effective. What are some exercises one could do- techniques- to flip their eye onto themselves and to find some solutions to problems that they may not know exist or ones that they do know exist, how can they define them better to be able to go after them?
Todd Cherches: Yeah. I mean, to me, the best way is just to expose yourself to other things, new things, and see things from other lenses. And talk to people, have conversations with people. We tend to gravitate towards and surround ourselves with people who are like us. We have things in common. We see things from the same lens, and we get along. So, hey, that's why we love each other. We both love softball. We both loved the Yankees. We both, you know, have all this in common. But talk to someone who… Here is a real-life example, using a baseball metaphor. You can dislike someone, or I could dislike someone because they're a Red Sox fan or I can like them because they're a baseball fan, right? You can either bond over what you have in common or you can have a disagreement over the fact that you take opposing sides. One of my books in college was called Bridges Not Wall in one of my communication classes and the concept, the metaphor, was you could take a brick and, with that brick, you can build a bridge which connects us, or a wall, which divides us, right? You can take that very same brick metaphorically and that brick could be a word, it could be an idea. And are you connecting people? Are you dividing people? So, that's what I would say, just the long answer to your question is open yourself up to new…. leave your ego at the door, which is a sign that Quincy Jones put up on the wall when they did, “We Are the World” many years ago, and be open to new perspectives.
[0:25:32] Taylor Martin: I cannot agree with you more. My wife and I always talk about, you know, we traveled a lot, pre-pandemic of course, but we can't live without traveling because it breathes new life into us in ways that we just cannot explain. If we don't go traveling after a while, we just get a little stir crazy ‘cause we're just itching for something new. Because when you go out, and I'm talking about international travel, you go out into the world and you see a different culture, experience new foods, new music, new sounds, new, everything. It forces you to look through that different lens, like you mentioned.
And I think one of the things, at least for me, I'm really high on empathy. Empathy to me is a very high aspect of my business. I am a high empathy reader. I've always been that way since I can remember. When people are flipping the eye on to themselves and they're being empathetic and allowing others in to help them critique themselves, I see there might be a little struggle. Some people may not want to allow people to lower their guard to let people in to critique them. I often wonder, what are some things we can tell people to think about or to do to weather that storm, if you will, of emotions that they might be going through to allow them to be critiqued into think of it as a positive and to be open-minded to learn.
Todd Cherches: Yeah. A few things that were triggered by what you just said. I loved that you used the term ‘weather that storm’ because one of the metaphors that's really hot right now, and I forgot the person who originated is. Someone said, “Oh, with the pandemic, we're all in the same boat.” And he said, “We're not all in the same boat, we're all in the same storm but we're in different boats.” Some people are in the yacht and other people are in a sinking rowboat, right? So, I love that metaphor. I think about how powerful that is because if you think everyone has a yacht, what's the problem? We'll just ride this out, right? So, I think that's a great example of using empathy and saying, “You know what?” And it's again, looking at your products, your services, looking at everything you do but through the lens of your customer, through other people who are different from you and it's so, for lack of a better word, eye opening,
Taylor Martin: Well, that is a perfect metaphor! I have not heard that one before, but I am glad that you said that because a lot of listeners are going to hear that. That's great. That is on the mark!
Todd Cherches: I wish I remembered the person who originated. He just… if you just Google, “same storm, different boats,” you'll find the original article and the guy who said it.
Taylor Martin: What are some other ways to look inward to find your strength and weaknesses for oneself to improve oneself so that this visual leadership can then be better defined and then they know how to push it out there in the world?
Todd Cherches: Yeah. I mean, there's a lot different ways, like I said, exposure to other people, seeing things from different lenses, seeking feedback, you know, being brave enough. Brene Brown is like the guru now of the word vulnerability, right? So, her book Dare to Lead and her TED talk has been viewed millions of times. Be vulnerable. Be willing to make mistakes.
I attended a leadership conference last summer. I attend this leadership conference every year. And the theme last year was failure. Every session had to do with failure. And I facilitated the session on creating a failure resume. It was a Princeton professor who originated this concept, and it's just exploded. Basically, when we look at our resume, it's all the best of everything. Here's what I did. Here's what I accomplished. This has created a resume of the jobs you didn't get. The mistakes you made. The times you lost your company money. The times that you lost the client. Document those. First of all, you have to create an environment of psychological safety. Amy Edmondson out of Harvard, I don't know if she coined the term, but she popularized the term of psychological safety. You, as a leader, need to create a climate, a culture, and environment where people can share their worst selves, not just their best selves. And when we did that in the session, and everyone had to get up and tell a five-minute story about the worst boss they ever had, the worst mistake they ever made, the regrets they have. And it was amazing. People were literally in tears, both telling their story and hearing other people's stories. And when you were willing, you know, this is where stories come in, right? If you as a boss say that your employee, “I expect you to be perfect and do everything right.” That's one approach. If you say, “When I had your job, let me tell you about the biggest mistake I made. Let me tell you about the time I really screwed up.” Right? Did your boss throw a box of pens at you or were they nurturing and understanding and say, “Hey…” You know, the classic story, I forget if it's real or not, but someone once made a million dollar or $10 million trading mistake, and he thought he was gonna be fired. He started packing his stuff up, and his boss said, “You know, where are you going?” He said, “Well, I figured you were gonna fire me because of this mistake.” He said, “Why would I fire you? It cost me $10 million just to train you.” So, it's like, what's your mindset as a boss? Is it, like, you know, let's learn from failure or is it like one strike and you're out?
So, a lot of this goes back to empathy, compassion, storytelling. I mean, this ties together. So many of the things we're talking about.
[0:29:58] Taylor Martin: Yeah. The fail forward idea concept came about, what, 10 plus years ago and that's evolved into a way where now people talk about… I forget who created this concept. I can't remember where he even got it, but it was about if you have a hundred million dollars and two people to give it to. One CEO that has had five companies and failed or one brand new CEO with a really good idea. Who are you going to give the money to?
Todd Cherches: Yeah. The failure one.
Taylor Martin: The failure one! Because he’s already… He's been out there. He's seen it. He's made mistakes. He knows what not to do. The new guy may have a great idea, but the chances of him being successful are much lower than the CEO that's been out there and has made mistakes and is going to learn from them and then be successful.
Todd Cherches: You just remind me of, going back to my poetry roots, Emily Dickinson had a first line of a poem that says, “Success is counted sweetest by those who never succeed.” Right? If you haven't succeeded, yet you learn so much from your failures and you're hungry, right? For success. Marshall Goldsmith, one of my favorite books of his is What Got You Here Won't Get You There. And one of the things he says is a lot of executives are successful, not because of how they are, but in spite of how they are. And when you have success after success, until you've failed, you don't really learn how resilient you are. And a lot of times you can succeed based on luck in a lot of situations, or if you're not self-reflective and thinking about why were we successful, right? It's the teams that lost in the world series that come back hungry the next year. They say they tasted it, came so close to victory, or lost the Super Bowl, right? Those are the people who know like what like to be at that you know, one step from the finish line, you know? I’m mixing my sports metaphors, but I think that's what it is. It's looking at everything as a learning opportunity. Nelson Mandela famously said, “I never lose. I either win or I learn.” I think we need to learn from our wins as well, right? But I love that quote. That's a classic.
Taylor Martin: That's a great quote. I want to have that on a T-shirt. [Both laughing] That's wonderful. If people go through some processes and they turn on their mind’s eye and they turn on themselves and they figure out things that they're good at, maybe their weaknesses, I could see them being more effective by maybe delegating some of their weaknesses out to others to handle, because they're really good at this other part. Maybe they're really good at rainmaking, you know, bringing in new clients, if you will. And this other part of the job requirements, they may not be as good as about, and in the end, you could probably delegate that work. And I'm just using this as an example, but what that person would end doing is spending more time on what they're really excelling at, what they're really good at, and delegating some of the other work to that would then provide more work to create more time to do what you excel at and what you’re really good at. It's kind of a win-win. You learn more about yourself, whatever that may be, and then hopefully your job or your outcome, your product, your company, whatever it is, is more fruitful because of that.
Todd Cherches: As you're talking, I'm visualizing in my mind’s eye one of the models for my book, which is the passion skill matrix. Basically, the two axes go from “I hate it” to “I love it” and from “I’m terrible at it” to “I’m great at it.” So, in the upper right quadrant, and I’m just describing this visually/mentally from recall from my head, the upper right quadrant, if you do things that you're good at and you love to do, that's your sweet spot. That's where you fly. That's where you’re in that that state of flow. I always ask people, “What do you want to be known as the guru of or the go-to person for?” That's your box. You live in that box. You thrive in that box. The upper left quadrant is “I’m not good at it yet,” and when you add the word yet, that opens up the world of possibility. But if you have an interest or curiosity about something, you're going to work at it and work towards getting better at it. The lower right quadrant is your default zone. You're good at it, but maybe you're burnt out. You're over it. That's when you delegate things. That's what you're talking about. And then the lower left quadrant is your failure zone where it's, “I'm not good at it. I don't like it and I'm not going to learn to get better and I'm not going to learn to love it. So, I need to get out of this box.”
And years ago, I took a job that was a bad fit for me. Earlier in my career, I was Vice-President of Business Development for a company, and I immediately… I took the job because of the title, the salary, and I love the CEO and the company, but I thrust myself into a role that was not within my skillset. So, within 60 days, I knew I put myself in that failure zone box. I then needed to learn to get good at it or learn to love it, and that wasn't going to happen. And we decided that this just wasn't the right fit, and we ended as friends and everything was fine. But sometimes we do that. We want to spend as much time as we can, at least 70 to 80% of our time, above that line in either our growth zone or our sweet spot because, again, by definition, we're doing things that we enjoy. I always take the two P’s- passion and purpose- right? If you have a passion for something and the sense of the purpose, you're going to be, feel motivated and aspire to get things done. If you're below the line and you default on their failure zone, we need to try to get out of those boxes.
And not to go into to teach the whole passion skill matrix workshop but, for me, public speaking was something that was in my failure zone. I was terrible at it and terrified of it, and little by little over the years, I got better at it. It became a growth zone and now I do it for a living. I couldn't have done a TED talk, teach at two universities, and do public speaking for a living if I still was in that failure zone. So, just that conceptual model helps us to say, “I need to inch my way up and then over in the cross.” And if they hit that sweet spot, can drop into the default zone if we don't keep our skills fresh and if we don't keep motivated. So, then you go on autopilot and you become defeated and deflated and then you end up in the failure zone. So, it's a fluid model but that's the framework I was visualizing in my head as you were talking and you were describing that, Taylor.
[0:35:16] Taylor Martin: This conversation is so interesting because first of all, I didn't realize how many metaphors we use just on a basic communication level. We're just always using them. And then visual thinking, when you're saying something, I'm visualizing something because, you know, I'm a very creative person, visual person. [Laughs] I just think that way. And here we are going back and forth. You talked about teaching. I think it was your book. You talked about an experience you had when a student gave you criticism. Do you want to talk about that? This is the one where they gave feedback on your presentation.
Todd Cherches: Oh, yeah. I actually wrote about that in my article that was published in the American Diversity Report a couple of months ago. Basically, long story short, I had a series of like 12 of my favorite leadership quotes with some of the keywords left out of, and my students… The exercise was to fill in the blanks. Great exercise. Students loved it. And I decided, “Oh, I'm going to create a visual version of this exercise and when I reveal the answers, I'm going to put up the slides with the faces of all the speakers.” Doing that, revealed that they were all middle-age, white males. From the quote itself, even though it had the name under it, you didn't see the trends and patterns, but when you saw the pictures of the speakers, it became glaringly obvious. And I noticed, and I made a mental note that, “Oh, I need to change that.” And then one of my students called me out on it and said, “Hey, that's a little white.” And what was really nice… This guy, I know, I just got to be friends with him, Chester Elton, wrote a book called Leading with Gratitude, one of my new favorite books that just came out, one of his concepts is assume positive intent. You can either criticize someone because they're clueless or not woke or use bad judgment, or you can assume positive intent that it just wasn't on their radar, using a metaphor. And it really wasn't. I had that realization. I made a mental note, which is a metaphor, and she appreciated the fact that I was open to that feedback.
So, you are asked earlier, how do we change our lens, right? She flipped the lens on me and held the mirror up and said, “Hey.” So, I went home that night. I got rid of more than half of those examples, replaced them with more diverse ones, people like Ken Chenault of American Express and Indra Nooyi from India Pepsi and Ursula Burns up Xerox. I had a lot more diversity, and I went back the next class. I said, “Let's redo the exercise with the new quotes, with the new images” And they were so appreciative of that. They were appreciative of my responsiveness. I was happy because I learned and I grew, so it's like a love fest. So, here was something that couldn’t been planned for that. Instead, we made it a teachable moment and the learning experience. So, I love that story. And, again, I was on the receiving end, but part of my awareness is to not be defensive when I get feedback like that, but to be open-minded about it and allow people to flip the eye on me so I could learn, and I could grow.
Taylor Martin: Positive intent. We need so much more of that these days. Do you do things like that, working with companies or businesses? What are some of the exercises you do with them?
Todd Cherches: Yeah. I mean, one of them, I mentioned earlier from the Inc. article where I have people drawing exercises. What's interesting is now that everything is online through Zoom, I've had to modify what I do to the online world, right? So, I have to come up with exercises. Everything I do is experiential, whether it's my NYU or Columbia classes or my corporate workshops, and basically, you know, using breakout rooms. People can still draw and hold something up in front of the screen or… I was actually in the workshop recently, and I loved the icebreaker they did. They said, “Look. We're all at home, right? Look around your room or your house, grab three objects. One thing that makes you smile. One thing you're proud of. I forgot what the third thing was, but anyway, we brought them back, and we did a show and tell. It was like Kindergarten, but it was so great. And think about what you learn about someone when they hold up… And it wasn't like, everyone was like, “Oh, I'm going to bring, show pictures of my family.” It's like, “No. Come up with an object that is something that is different.” And it was great. It was such an amazing exercise. We bonded. We learned.
One of my models when I do team building workshops is that team bonding needs to come before team building, and we need to connect to each other if we want to work better with each other, right? So, that's one of the things I talk about. How do you help people to bond and connect, especially now virtually over Zoom? I know this guy… He has switched jobs twice in the last eight months, and he hasn't left his apartment or put-on pants.
Taylor Martin: [Laughing]
Todd Cherches: So, it's like, he's literally still working from home. How do you meet your coworkers? How do you bond and connect? What does corporate culture mean? You know, so much of corporate culture is the look and feel of when you're in the place. The culture is how we do things around here. How do we convey that and onboard people when the way we do things on here is we're all at home in our living room? I mean, it's like…. How do you… I mean, what are you seeing from your end in terms of that?
Taylor Martin: That's a good question because we have one of our clients, they're thick in their company culture, and they're moving it into social media. So, they'll have like ‘Thankful Thursdays, ‘Throwback Thursdays,’ or Thankful Tuesdays’ or something like that. And all the employees get to throw in their images, kind of like the image of sharing, around one subject. And they throw it up there, and they basically are sharing it with each other but with each other in the world of social media. So, everybody else gets to kind of partake and what they came up with. Their favorite restaurants, their favorite sports games or sports athletes, Things like that, just to create the conversation and bring people together and having them talk and communicating, like they do regularly when they're in the office, just kind of taking that out and then sharing it with the rest of the world and bringing them into the conversation.
[0:40:11] Todd Cherches: You know, one of my companies, they give out a pair of orange Converse to all their new employees. For some reason, orange is their color and the sneakers represent being athletic. And I just met her the other day, and she told me about this. I thought that was such a great idea. So, people, you know, you can wear whatever you want on the Zoom call but wear your orange. You feel like you’re part of the team if you're wearing your orange Converse, even if you can't see them. They're under the desk or people… everyone will hold their sneakers up to the screen, right? Or you can do A Bring Your Dog to Workday on Zoom, holding up their puppy or whatever, right? So, there are things that we could do.
I was actually the guest speaker two weeks ago for the American Cancer Society. They were doing their quarterly meeting of all their executive directors. And one of their issues is they live and die with, I hate to use that analogy, but with the funding they get right? Now, cancer funding is way down because everyone's so consumed with COVID right now, right? Just because COVID is the number one thing doesn't mean cancer goes away. So, they need that money. They need that attention. And People are working from home and maybe feeling disconnected from the mission of what they're doing. They're saving lives. So, I took out the American Cancer Society logo. I held it up for them, and we did an analysis of it. It's a flag. It’s red, white, and blue. A number of people said, “I've been working here 20 years. I've seen our logo a million times. I've seen it, but I've never looked at it.” This is what someone said, right? So, they saw it with new eyes and they said, “Well, how can we use this conversation?” One, they're going to make up little flags and send it out to all their employees so they could keep it on their desk because it's a flag because we're fighting a battle against cancer. So, we want to wave that flag. So, it's out of sight, out of mind, which is one of the expressions we all use. But imagine if every employee had that little flag on their desk, and the second they turn on their computer and log in in the morning, it's right there. That reminds them of their mission. That reminds them of what they're doing. Because you know the story about the two brick layers? One person you asked, “What are you doing” And he says, “I'm laying bricks.” And the other person says, “I'm building a hospital. I'm building a school. I’m building a cathedral.” They're both doing the same task, laying bricks, you know? Why does the second person have a sense of purpose and a sense of passion? Because they’re doing something that has meaning. And people need that meaning. So that's one of the things that came out of that workshop we did. So, it's turned into an analysis of their flag and turned into, “Hey. This is the way that we can plant that flag on people's desks so that they start each day motivated and inspired to say, hey, we're saving lives, regardless of what your role is.’
Taylor Martin: That's a wonderful example of visual leadership. I think with that, we're going to end this episode. That was a great note to end it on. Very positive. Very uplifting. Todd, thank you so much for being on the show today. How can our listeners follow you online or connect with you professionally?
Todd Cherches: Thank you, Taylor. I always enjoy listening to your show, so it's an honor and a privilege to be here with you, and I had a great time talking to you.
The best ways are: My new website just launched a few weeks ago. It's toddcherches.com. If you go to toddcherches.com/subscribe, you can get a free download on my top 52 book recommendations that will help you be a better visual leader.
Connect with me on LinkedIn. I live on LinkedIn. I'm there all the time, so I'm happy to connect with you and share and comment.
And also check out my book Visual Leadership. It's available on Amazon and wherever books are sold. And if you read it, let me know what you think. I love having dialogue and conversations about how people become better visual leaders from just thinking more visually.
Taylor Martin: It's amazing how much we've covered in just an hour of talking today. So, Todd, thank you again for being on our podcast today on The Triple Bottom Line.
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