Randall Stutman – Giving Feedback, Followership, and Admired Leadership (EP.497)

Why do we call something feedback to begin with? The reason we do it comes from a place of power, comes from expertise, comes from experience, comes from knowledge, comes from legitimate status. In other words, I have the position, right, the role to give you information that will improve your performance and or change your behavior. When I give you feedback, I call it feedback. The expectation that both of us have, especially that I have as a leader, is you're supposed to take it seriously, you're supposed to yield to it. In other words, at least pretend you're going to engage this.

Why? Because of power. That power has a consequence.

It creates resistance. People naturally become a little bit reluctant, if not totally defensive, to things that come at them from power. So if I say to you, Listen, you've been late to meetings a lot. Team really needs you to be here on time because they want to hear what you have to say. I can say, I have some feedback for you. As soon as I say, I have some feedback for you, you may not dig in, but you're going to get a little bit defensive. That's the nature of power. All power produces that. Well, what happens if I take the same message, but I lower its power? The next piece below feedback

I'm Ted Seides, and this is Capital Allocators. My guest on today's show is Randall Stuttman, the founder of Admired Leadership and one of the most sought after executive coaches in the world. He's known across Wall Street, the hedge fund community, professional sports, the Olympics, and the White House entirely by word-of-mouth. Randall was a past guest on the show six years ago in a rare public appearance, and that conversation is replayed in the feed. Our conversation covers the framework for uncovering the behaviors and best practices of admired leaders and then dives into examples around

on the

tarmac. None of that was anyone's fault. But after a long flight, an equally long day, you can imagine everyone was ready to go home. All the passengers queued up to depart one by one in an orderly fashion. It's actually uncanny how respectful people are when getting off planes. But there's a moment when it's your turn to get moving. And on this particular flight, after eight and a half hours, the person in the row in front of me seemed oblivious to the cadence of the queue. When it was his turn, he arose, seemingly clueless, and forced everyone behind him to wait. Of course, this wasn't just

We come at this thing behaviorally, best practice, which is fairly rare in the marketplace. My belief is most leaders want to be better, but they don't know how. You have to give them the tools, the specific things to do to make them better. The philosophy, which is so imbued in everything that we do, is that if I can show you best practice behaviors, especially ones that are tremendously impactful and that you haven't done before, don't know about, never heard before, and then I can get you to make somewhat of a habit of them, then it changes things. I don't need to get you to change dozens o

How do you go about uncovering what works?

I have my own methodology in terms of studying leaders. I've studied over 3,500 admired leaders, people that we believe have results and followership at the same time. Most good leaders, iconic leaders, are results based leaders. That's wonderful, you have to get results to lead. The really special people are able to get those results and then create followership where people would do anything for them. They feel as if they have a deep connection with them. They feel as if that connection is reciprocally