[0:08] Hey, it's Rusty Gaillard here with Do Something Different, a leadership podcast.

[0:12] This podcast is to encourage you to do something different today or this week. We are so much creatures of habit, 95% or more of the decisions and actions we take every day, even the thoughts we think every day, are repeats, things that we've done before. And so much of that is shaped by our assumptions about what it means to be successful in the workplace. And we keep repeating those same patterns and they ultimately get in our way. So this podcast is for you high achievers out there, you people who have done really well, you're successful, you're smart, you're ambitious, but it's time to do something different.

[0:52] So I'm going to do something different today in this podcast, which is I've been talking a lot about business situations, but I often draw

[0:59] inspiration from day-to-day occurrences. Earlier this week, in preparation for the holidays, this is mid-December at this point, I was getting my hair cut and I was chatting with my barber. It turns out he's got family connections in Italy and in Japan and in Chile. And we were talking about it. He has never been to any one of those three countries. I grew up in the kind of family that really valued travel. I personally value travel. I like to travel and get out and see the world. He has not done that. Not yet. anyway, but he wants to go to those countries. But I asked him about each one of those three. And he said the same thing for each of them. He said, yeah, I'm actually a little afraid to go there. I was like, oh, really? Why is that? Why are you afraid to go to Japan? He said, I'm afraid I might go there and like it so much. I'll never want to leave. And he said the same thing about Italy. And he said the same thing about Chile.

[1:56] And it was so curious to me because for me, When I heard that, I was like, oh my gosh, that's awesome. How cool is that? That you would go to a place and on seeing it for the first time, like it so much that you never want to leave. To me, that was inspiring. To him, it was scary.

[2:16] And the lesson I take from that is so much what my experience was when I chose to leave Apple. I'd worked at Apple for 14 years. And when I decided to leave Apple, I was the person who was feeling nervous about it because I was leaving a safe environment, a stable environment, a place where I was an expert and well-known. I had built up a large reputation and I was leaving that for something totally new and different. I was scared. but so many of the people around me were inspired. So you take a step back for a moment and you think, why is that? Why are we inspired by people doing something bold? And I believe it's because we love to see people taking a chance, betting on themselves. They're willing to move forward and do something that is following a sense of purpose or passion or interest. And sometimes as an observer, we ascribe passion, ascribe passion to them, which they may not even feel. So when I was leaving Apple, I didn't feel passionate for this coaching business. I knew I wanted to do it. I was excited about it, but I was not yet at the place of having passion for it because that takes some time to build.

[3:29] But when you're that person leaving, oftentimes you think, I'm not going to leave unless I'm really feeling passionate about something. I'm so sure that this is the thing that I'm willing to take a bet and do it. But when you set the bar so high, you never go for it. And so I just heard that story with my barber as I was talking to him. I was like, well, geez, why don't you go for it? And if you end up staying in one of those places, how cool is that? That you have all of a sudden taken a new direction and found yourself in a place that is so rewarding for you that you want to stay there.

[4:05] Now, why am I talking about my barber in this these decisions, because I believe these decisions, when you look at that kind of decision, it's the same thing that so many people face day to day when they're contemplating taking a new behavior at work.

[4:20] I'm going to go back to this example that I may have shared before, which is a colleague that I was talking to who was relaying a story to me about being up until two in the morning working. And the idea of not doing that, of letting that deliverable go and either holding the team accountable, letting the ball drop, letting something push out a day, letting the quality standards go down, any one of those things are possible. But those things were way more scary than the idea of staying up until 2 a.m. And delivering the work. This is the same dynamic that we're just talking about. One person feels afraid of that decision. On the other perspective, there's inspiration.

[5:03] So when you hear that story and you think of the manager who's willing to do something different, say, I'm not going to be up until 2 in the morning because it's not serving me, it's not serving my team, and in the long run, it's not in the best interest of the company. Because what's in the best interest of the company is elevating the rest of the team so that things are organized, planned in advance, delivered high quality the first time, so it's not all falling on this person's shoulders to be up until two in the morning addressing the issue at the last minute. So you look at someone from the outside and you can draw great inspiration for that. Wow, that person is courageous. They're willing to face the consequences of short-term difficulty in order to derive long-term benefit. But when you're that person making that decision, it's scary because you're doing something different. And anytime you're doing something different, you're outside your comfort zone. It's not familiar. You don't know for sure if it's going to work or not. You don't know what the repercussions are going to be. And so you're worried about doing it.

[6:02] I had this exact same conversation with one of my very early day clients. We were talking about something that this person really felt compelled to do.

[6:12] And he needed to create time in his schedule to accommodate it. And the thing that he actually wanted to do was get involved in a nonprofit that he just had a real strong connection to. And I said, well, if you just look at a big picture of your life, there's three main places where you can take time out to invest in this nonprofit. it. You can take it out of your personal time, you can take it out of family time, or you could take it out of work time. He's like, well, okay, first of all, I don't have any personal time. So that's not an option. Secondly, I'm not willing to take time away from family. So it's got to come out of work.

[6:46] Now, if you're like me, your first inclination or your first response to that is no way. Like, how am I ever going to get time out of work? Because if anything, I need to put more time into work rather than less time into work, because there's so much to do. There's so much on my plate. The expectations are so high. I'm always behind. I'm not responding to everything I need to respond to. I don't have as much time as I want to, to do the detailed thinking and the attention to detail that I want to put into presentations and work product and so on. There's no way I can take time out of work. That's one perspective. So I just challenged him to say, okay, are you willing to be uncomfortable in the short term in order to facilitate your long-term growth? He said, yes. And so he said, okay, great. How much time do you need to get out of your next week? He said, five hours. Okay, let's get to work. Where are you going to take five hours out? Five hours out of his work week. And the way we did this is as an experiment. Now, if, you know, let's just say you're working 60 hours a week and that feels unsustainable to you, you want to get down to 50. In this case, let's just talk about five hours. How do you take five hours out of your work? And I said, don't make a permanent change. Don't feel like this is something that you have to do for the rest of your career, but try it once.

[8:02] Finish instead of working all day, stopping for dinner with your family, and then going back to work in the evening, pick one day and don't go back to work after dinner. Or go back to work for 30 minutes, but cap it at 30 minutes and say, I'm only going to spend 30 minutes, scan through, pick the most urgent things that need my attention, deal with those, and then after 30 minutes, shut it down, and then use the rest of the evening to invest in something that I want to. My client did this. And by investing in himself in this way, he was able to, over time, shrink the amount of time he put into work. But the thing is, most of us would expect when you shrink how much time you put into work, your performance suffers. For him, it was exactly the opposite. And I've seen this not just with this client, but with multiple clients. They find themselves putting fewer hours into their work and they're more successful. They have more impact. They're faster at making decisions. They empower and delegate more effectively with their teams. They get more done. Fewer hours, more impact. Now, isn't that a formula you would like to have? But here's the thing. It requires changing your habits. If you are in the corporate mindset, which is busy means successful, right? A lot of people have that correlation that if you're really busy, you're really important. So I want to be busy because that means I'm important.

[9:28] So that's one perspective or that's one mindset. You may need to break that. You may need to do something different in that area.

[9:35] Another thing is if you want something done right, do it yourself. You're going to have to break that belief as well. So there's a number of these beliefs that you're going to want to investigate and change. Now, a lot of these things, they're not explicit, conscious beliefs that you have thought about and chosen to abide by as the guiding principles of your career. For most people, these beliefs have built up over time. They're inherent,

[10:03] they're implicit, but they're not always even conscious. So it's worth talking to someone, exploring them, reflecting after this podcast, but stopping and writing down what are some of those beliefs that guide your operations at work, that guide the way you show up.

[10:20] All of this is context and all of this is background to think about three things that you can do differently to become more of a leader and less of a manager. Now, most high achieving, ambitious, successful people that I talk to, and these are the people that I network with. These are the people I work with. These are my clients. These are my friends. You know, I mean, geez, I went to Stanford Business School. I went to Princeton. So I'm in this high achiever world. I'm surrounded by a lot of people like this, and I'm this way myself. And we have this mindset of more, better, bigger, faster. And that mindset is what leads you down this path. And it brings you to this place of saying, if I want to do something different, I feel nervous about it. Others on the outside may be inspired by your courage, but you feel nervous. Totally normal. The question again, are you willing to tolerate the discomfort in the short term in the interest of your long-term growth? So if you are, I'm going to give you three things that you can focus on now and do something different in these areas to help yourself grow as a leader.

[11:31] Number one is to better leverage your team. Delegate.

[11:36] I was inspired to do this after reading the four-hour work week. And so this was written, Tim Ferriss wrote the book and he wrote it, I don't know, years ago. But when I read that, I was most inspired, not necessarily by his business model, which was to go off and strike off on your own, do your own, kind of build your own business. But I was inspired by this concept of leveraging the team because he got to the point where he automated as much as possible. He outsourced as much as possible to others. So very little came back to him. There wasn't much that he personally had to do. He had built this team around him to run the business. Now I worked in the corporate environment. I was at Apple at the time. And most of the people that I talk to and listen and who listen to me also are in the corporate environment, but you can apply this same principle in the corporate environment because the more you delegate to your team, the more you empower your team to really own something. Not only will they be happier, but your life gets better because your team is now doing things that used to come to you. You empower them to make decisions that they used to come consult with you on. You empower them to build work product and deliverable and to own it and present it. And if it doesn't go well, does that reflect on you? Well, somewhat, but it also gives you an opportunity.

[12:58] This is the example I was giving earlier with my client that was up until two in the morning. If you're that kind of person that, and I've had clients like this too, when the work product's not up to par, they stay up until two in the morning to fix it.

[13:11] Now, some people will look at that and say, oh man, that's a disaster. Like, why are you fixing the things from your team that aren't good enough? You should be holding them accountable. Others people will look at that and say, wow, that's a really good work ethic. There's no right or wrong way to look at this. I don't believe that. But there are certain perspectives that keep you repeating the same behavior patterns, and there are other perspectives that help you to shift your viewpoint so you can move forward and do something different. So in this example, when we're talking about delegating and empowering your team, if something is not up to standard, rather than that being a problem and something you have to fix and a mistake and a disaster and something you cannot tolerate, because a lot of high achievers have that perspective that it has to be right. You cannot make a mistake. That is a very high achiever mindset. So that's one perspective. But another perspective is that is a learning opportunity. It's a learning opportunity, not only for your team member, but for you as a

[14:11] leader, it's a learning opportunity. What do you do when someone on your team delivers work that is subpar? And it's not up to standard. How do you work with that person? How do you coach them? How do you set expectations while doing it in an empowering way?

[14:26] One of the most powerful concepts that I've heard around this is tied to the idea of growth mindset versus fixed mindset. Now, some of you may have heard about this. It's from Carol Dweck. She's a psychologist at Stanford. She wrote this book called Mindset years ago, and it's really one of the foundational pieces around mindset based in research. And the idea is this. If you are of a fixed mindset, it means you are capable of what you're capable of, and there's not a lot for growth. And when you're in a fixed mindset, mistakes are the worst thing that can happen because mistakes mean you're not good enough.

[15:02] I grew up with a lot of this. I grew up with a very fixed mindset thinking any kind of mistake is a black mark against me. And it just lowers my ranking, if you will, or the way other people see me, even the way I see myself. That's a very growth mindset way of looking at things. Sorry, excuse me. That's a very fixed mindset way of looking at things. The growth mindset is exactly the opposite, which is challenges, problems, mistakes. They're all opportunities to learn and grow. And the value here is on improvement. So in this situation that I described where an employee, one of your team members comes to you with a work product that is not up to par, if you have a fixed mindset, you're going to think of this as a problem. You're going to go to work to try to fix it. You want to make it look pretty before it sees the light of day. If you come from a growth mindset, you're gonna take a different approach. You're gonna say, wow, this is an opportunity for that person to learn and grow and for me to coach them and to raise the bar. One of the best ways you can do that is to say, I believe in you and I have really high expectations of you, but I know that you can achieve those. And so I wanna give you some feedback to help you improve your performance and get to the level that I know you can get to. Because I believe in you.

[16:21] That is a really positive message and is a nice framing for giving feedback for holding people accountable we could have a whole additional podcast episode just about accountability and maybe i will do that in the future but i think that's enough to cover for now this key concept of delegation empowering your team that is the first thing you really need to do to go from being a manager to more of a leader number two second thing you're going to do to move from going from a manager to being a leader, is to focus on relationships.

[16:55] And not relationships just with your team, but relationships with your peers and relationships with people above you in the organizational hierarchy.

[17:04] One of the pieces of advice that one of my early managers at Apple gave me, which I thought was fantastic, is he said to me, Rusty, if you want to be successful, if you want to get to the next level of the organization, you need to build relationships with my peers. This is my boss telling me this. So go off and build relationships with the people, not just your boss, but the peers of your boss. So people above you in the level of the organization, but not in your direct reporting line. Because those people have a big say in your success. They have a big say in, because oftentimes they're business partners. They have a say in whether or not your projects are successful. And they ultimately have a say in your career progression, because they're going to have a vote in whether or not you're able to move forward. So build relationships with those people, your business partners, your boss's peers, your boss, all of those people, you want to build relationships with those people.

[17:57] The third thing that you want to do to move from being a manager to a leader is focus on influence. And I'm going to share with you a model of this that I love that Apple had. And it was a very simple model because they talked about the kind of work you do and they divided it into three simple categories. Category one, category two, category three. Three types of work. Category one work, that's what you were hired to do. You've got to do a good job with that. It's table stakes. If you don't do a good job at that, that's the kind of thing that gets you fired. That's your core expectations, category one work. Category two work is work that you were not hired to do, but it's where you can be influential and help drive progress in the company. And that is really the sweet spot for you to excel and make an impact. Category three work is the, yeah, stay away from that. It's not really your business. It's not something you should get involved in. And you're probably not welcome in that area.

[18:54] That would be, for example, you know, me, I was working in finance. It would be like going over to the graphic designers and giving them advice about how what they should be doing from a graphic design standpoint. Not really my place, not my expertise, not the kind of thing they would be looking for or expecting. That would be more category three. So category one is pretty straightforward. That's what you're hired to do. Category three is pretty straightforward. Not really an area of expertise, not a place you're welcome. Category two is your sweet spot. So when you think about influence, this is very much tied to the second point I said, which is relationship. But when you think about influence, think about category two. What are those areas where you can influence the company, not just to get your priorities done, but you can share your insights, you can share your expertise, you can share your opinion to help shape and influence efforts that are going on in the company that are important, that will deliver results.

[19:47] That is something that is starting to differentiate you as a leader. Because you're not just demonstrating expertise in your core competency, but you're starting to demonstrate your ability to think more broadly than that, to see the company perspective, to understand other people and other divisions, to work with them and be influential in those areas. So these three simple things are things that you can do this week to become

[20:13] more of a leader rather than just a manager. Number one, delegate, empower your team. Number two, build relationships with people above you in the organization, key business partners and peers of your boss. And number three, focus on influence, specifically in this category two kind of work, not your core competency, but outside of that, where you still have a perspective that can add value.

[20:38] Now, doing these things, you think about them for a moment. They're not complicated. You know how to do them. The question is, will you do them?

[20:47] Other people might look at you if you're doing those things and say, wow, look at that person. I have a lot of respect for them because they're stepping out of their comfort zone to go do something different. But just as someone on the outside is going to have that perspective, when you're in those shoes doing those things, it can make you feel nervous. You might be worried about what the outcome will be, how it will be received, whether you're going to drop the ball on a short-term deliverable. Here's the key question once again. Are you willing to tolerate the short-term discomfort in order to grow in the long term? If you're willing to invest in yourself in that way, take an action this week. Do something different to move from being a manager toward being a leader. Empower your team. Delegate more to them. Give them real feedback. Build relationships. and have an opinion, influence people beyond just your work.

[21:49] Take that, put it into action and do something different this week.