The following is a conversation between Daniel Harkavy, Author of The 7 Perspectives of Effective Leaders, and Denver Frederick, the Host of The Business of Giving.
Daniel Harkavy, Founder of Building Champions and Author of The 7 Perspectives of Effective Leaders
Denver: In the midst of chaos, it is vital for leaders to have a framework, a playbook, a system that they can rely upon to guide them through the turbulent times. My next guest has provided just that. He is Daniel Harkavy, the Founder of Building Champions and the Author of a most timely new book titled The 7 Perspectives of Effective Leaders: A Proven Framework for Improving Decisions and Increasing Your Influence.
Welcome to The Business of Giving, Daniel.
Daniel: It is great to be with you, Denver. Thank you for allowing me to be your guest.
Denver: You say that leadership is determined by just two things, the ones you mentioned in the title of the book — decisions and influence. What makes that true?
Daniel: Yes. I’ve spent the last six years talking to executives, CEOs of many different businesses here, as well as internationally, just testing such an assumption. You sit there and you say, “Hey, decision-making and influence, that’s it. You get those two things right, you’re going to be an effective leader.” And in those conversations where we really test that, what we do is we try to put every leadership function into one of those two buckets. Planning strategy, succession planning, coaching development, alignment, execution, you name it. I mean, you name it.
All of those are going to excel if you make great decisions, and then you have the influence to mobilize the people around you on your team, whether they’re internal constituents, teammates, or external to get the job done. So, yes, I had one leader who said, “You know, there’s a third, and it’s character. It’s integrity.” And Denver, I said, “Well, no, no, no. That’s an assumed. That’s an assumed. If you don’t have integrity, if you don’t have character, well, then we shouldn’t be talking about leadership effectiveness. You shouldn’t be a leader.” So, I’m not going to that base level, but I do like to simplify leadership by just saying, you focus on your decision-making; you focus on your influence and your efficacy, and your effectiveness will improve.
Denver: Yes, that’s a good point. I sometimes I work with organizations, and one of their core values is integrity, and I’m like, “Really? No kidding!” So, let’s say I’m a leader, and I have one of those attributes, but I don’t have the other. What can I do to develop that skill set?
Daniel: So, in the very opening of the book, I talk about two very real scenarios. I changed the names, and I changed some of the details, but two executives that I had the privilege of coaching in past years. And one of them was the absolute sharpest that you could ever spend time with. This individual understood every aspect of the business, probably the highest IQ on the executive team, and he was one of four candidates being groomed to replace a very successful CEO. And the problem with this individual was influence. And he always had the answers, or she always had the answers to cover this up, right? But was not real good at mobilizing people around vision or mobilizing people to collaborate.
So what that individual needs to do, a person who’s super smart, probably has the majority of the right answers… they need to understand their role as a leader. Their job is not to have all the right answers. Their job is to bring out the best answers, the best thinking in those around them. Because if they’re the only one that has the ability to make the best decisions, well, then the organization’s bottlenecked.
Denver: Yes.
Daniel: So you need to push that down as low as you can, right? So that individual needs to understand their role. You have to do a little bit of belief work because you always focus on belief before behaviors. So what do they believe about their people? What do they believe about their role and themselves? And that’s always fun. I know you do some Executive Coaching as well, and it’s always interesting when you’re working with the leader who truly does believe he or she is the smartest one in the room. It’s not fun.
And so, then you move to the other side, right? And you’ve got the most charismatic, loving, kind, fun, jovial leader around. Everyone wants to spend time with him. But, when it comes to a crisis, or when it comes to serious pinch time and we need to put plans together– we need to align; we may need to make tough decisions; we need to know where we’re going, what we’re doing, how we’re getting there… that individual, if they’re not connected to the business, and if they don’t really understand it, then their decision-making suffers, and the team consciously and subconsciously will then start to disrespect or lose confidence in them. So their influence drops.
Denver: Yes.
Daniel: So, that individual needs to really do some hard work in understanding the business and understanding who’s responsible for what and who’s the smartest in the room. Who’s got the most expertise? How does this thing really work? And that’s really where the seven perspectives come in.
I say, if you see each of these seven, then you’re looking at the right things. You’ll make better decisions, and you’ll have more influence.
Denver: Yes. I’ve seen leaders that have all the answers. Even if they’re the right answers, nobody on the staff is engaged. As a matter of fact, they may be impressed that they have the right answer, but they sit there and say, “He doesn’t need me” or “She doesn’t need me, so how can I be engaged?” And they don’t understand that.
Well, the acronym VUCA, now that’s something you’ve been using for a number of years, Daniel. It is more relevant today than it has ever been. What does VUCA stand for, and how has it been amped up in this past year?
Daniel: Yes. So VUCA, a military term from back in the ‘80s when the Cold War came to an end. Our military said that the strategy they had been focusing on for the decades prior was no longer effective. They were now living in a state of VUCA because they were no longer in a one enemy game. Now they didn’t know who their enemy was. V – Volatility. U – Uncertainty. C – Complexity and A – Ambiguity. Within the last decade or so, that term has been used in business.
Denver: Yes.
Daniel: Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity — as a result of the pace of change with technology and how do leaders keep up with that. Globalization and the impact on things happening with our supply chains being so connected internationally, you can have something take place over in China, and it really rocks your ability to serve the customer here in the states. So, you have Globalization as a factor.
And then I’ve thrown this third one in, which is the ability to shift people’s thinking, belief, and behavior through social platforms. This is insane. Like, where do we go to get real news now? And that’s being amplified this year.
But let’s take VUCA – volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. And let’s say that most leaders were dealing with it. Let’s identify the emotions that those adjectives bring out in us humans– volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. Well, that brings out anxiety. That brings out fear. That brings out confusion. None of those are the leader’s friends.
Now come into 2020. The pandemic, global. Are we going to die? Are our family members going to die? What’s going to happen?
Denver: Late for work again.
Daniel: Yes. Well, then you throw shutdown in, right?
Denver: Yes. Oh, yes.
Daniel: You look at the measures. Now, we’ve broken routine. We’ve lost freedom. We no longer understand how to function. All of that, it’s taking its toll on our limbic system, our ability to think.
Denver: Yes.
Daniel: Then comes May. Social injustice, front and center. That is like gasoline on a fire. Now, we humans are even more amplified. There’s more emotion. And now we have probably one of the most, we’ll just say, hostile political situations that we’ve seen in our adult years, where you just can’t watch a debate and not want to throw gloves out so they can just fight. Right? So you throw all of this in, and what this does for us humans, this takes VUCA. And I say, it just cranks it and puts it on steroids. So, “Hey leaders, you have fun because your people are amped up, and your job is to help them to think well. So good luck!”
We all need to have our feet firmly planted in current reality, which means we understand leading and lagging indicators.
Denver: Well, one way to help along those lines is to put the “seven perspectives” to work and address VUCA on steroids. So, why don’t you just give us an overview of what those seven perspectives are?
Daniel: Sure. Thank you. All right. So perspective one: current reality. Leaders need to have both feet firmly planted in current reality; you need to understand the business. You have got to… this is not something you can delegate. The term ivory tower, right? The leaders sit in their ivory tower is a direct result of leaders no longer understanding how the business operates. That’s why that term was coined. And we all know that ivory tower leaders don’t have influence in their organizations. Teammates walk around, sweeping up the messes that ivory tower leaders create, and they never engage the heads and the hearts of their people.
So CEOs, executive team members, we all need to have our feet firmly planted in current reality, which means we understand leading and lagging indicators. We understand what’s taking place on the competitive landscape, the economic landscape, legislative political health. We know what got us here, and we’re really clear on the plans for the year ahead. Right?
Current reality. Perspective one. If you’ve got that, you’ve got your starting point on your GPS needed for decision-making. And if you have that, your team can respect you because they know you understand the business, the opposite if you don’t, well, now you see influence start to suffer because your decision-making is going to suffer.
Perspective two is a big one, Denver, and that’s vision. You’ve got to see a better tomorrow. Leaders, we need to breathe hope into our teammates if we’re going to engage the best thinking. We need to stretch ourselves and them with what we see for the future. Nobody wants to join an organization that’s mission is to just maintain or to not drive off into a ditch. No one wants to live to play defense, right?
So vision is about engaging the heads and the hearts of the best people. It’s about making, as my friend, Dr. Henry Cloud says, “It’s about making the invisible visible, and we paint a picture for a better tomorrow. And we need to be communicating that all the time. That’s the second part of the GPS.
So we have current reality that we’re grounded in. Then we cast an anchor way out into vision, and our thinking and our communication is birthed and grounded in this current reality anchored to that vision, and that creates what I call the opportunity gap.
Perspective three: strategic bets. You make these strategic bets that are grounded in current reality. You have the resources. You have the capacity. You understand the business today. You see where it’s going in the future, that destination point. You place strategic bets, not guarantees, to move the organization from current reality to that future state.
The reason that 75% of all strategic execution fails in businesses is because they’ve not done the work to truly ground them in current reality or anchor them in long-term vision. They’re more reactive or they’re not resourced because they’re not understood. All right. Those first three all have to do with planning, with understanding the mechanics of the business, with leadership.
The fourth perspective is one where leaders right now, there’s opportunity for you as well. This is the team. This doesn’t mean you’re telling the team where we’re going, telling the team what to do, telling the team what’s expected. This is where you deploy intentional curiosity to truly understand what the team sees, thinks, and needs.
What do they think about current reality? What do they think about the vision? Do they see themselves playing a role in it? What do they think about the strategic bets? What do they think about the next perspective, the perspective of the customer?
When your teammates are heard, when they know they have a voice, then they can buy-in because they matter. Right? And when you understand what they think and how they’re doing, well, now you have the ability to resource them. That’s our job. Our job is to give them what they need in order for them to succeed in their roles. That’s our job as leaders. That’s it. Like the GPS says, we’re going here. Now I’m going to help you to do everything you can in your role and together so that we get there when we want to get there. That’s our job.
Okay. The next perspective is the perspective of the customer and many of the folks listening to you, and I right now, they’ve got a really complicated business because they have the beneficiary; they have the one receiving the service or the product, but they also have the donor.
In my book, I interview Caryl Stern. When Caryl and I first met, she was the Executive Director, CEO, I believe, of UNICEF… probably your neighbor.
Denver: Yes. She’s been on the show a couple of times, just the other day as a matter of fact.
Daniel: Yes. She’s fabulous. So Caryl’s in the book, and Caryl does a great job unpacking the need to serve the customer, whether that be the donor and being donor-centric, as I’m sure she shared with you, but also delivering the product.
So, leaders, we need to be connecting with our customers to find out how we help them to win. What’s it like to do business with us today? Where are they going? How can we adjust to best serve them tomorrow? And, we have these real conversations. We don’t just trust surveys.
Denver: Yes. That’s a great point. And that customer, the point about listening to the customer, I wish more nonprofit organizations would listen to their beneficiaries. So often when they want to improve their service, they go to their board; they speak to their staff; they hire experts.
Daniel: Yes.
Denver: Go to the people you’re serving. They’re the ones who know best. And very often, they’re overlooked.
Daniel: Absolutely. And Denver, when I… so Building Champions is an executive coaching company. There’s 20 plus coaches on the team, and we coach leaders everywhere. Right? Well, we also had a not-for-profit that we started in ’99, and whether it was on the not-for-profit side or on the corporate side, I always watched how these executives, the best CEOs, invested their time– not spent their time… invested their time.
The best of the best always carved out a significant amount of their days and weeks to sit down with the end-user, the beneficiary, the recipient. And they knew that if their product or service was so good that the recipient would say, “Thank you” every time they paid you, then you know you had it.
For the leaders listening to us, when you look at 2021, and you look at the pandemic world where we’re living in this virtual Zoom space and not sure if we can break bread together, I’m going to tell you: Do everything you can to take risk, to sit outside with your people. You need to see them. And if you have to wear a mask, wear a clear mask. Do what you need to be doing to be human with humans. And that’s going to be a big difference maker in 2021.
Denver: You got something!
Daniel: And the chairman of Daimler in there says that. He’s in my book. He’s so wonderful. But, I think you’re spot on. For the leaders listening to us, when you look at 2021, and you look at the pandemic world where we’re living in this virtual Zoom space and not sure if we can break bread together, I’m going to tell you: Do everything you can to take risk, to sit outside with your people. You need to see them. And if you have to wear a mask, wear a clear mask. Do what you need to be doing to be human with humans. And that’s going to be a big difference-maker in 2021. It really is.
We’ll see what happens with the weather that we’re dealing with right now. And you’re starting to see hospitalizations increase…
Denver: No, I know.
Daniel: …and that’s not why you and I are here. But the leaders that I think who are going to win in 2021, they’re going to push the envelope. They’re going to be safe, but they’re actually going to trade in their sweats and put on nice dress pants and skirts. And they’re going to go meet with people again.
Denver: See if they fit into them, that would be the first thing!
Daniel: Yes, exactly. Exactly. We put shoes on. I’m not wearing any right now. So anyways…
Denver: Number six then, we’ll go onto that number so you can pick up, number six. What’s number six?
Daniel: All right. So you’ve got these first five perspectives: current reality, vision, strategic bets, the team, and the customer. All of this input, all of this intentional curiosity, you’re spending your days with intentional curiosity around these five. And these five inform your sixth, which is your role.
Oftentimes, leaders don’t see their role right. They don’t see how they should be investing their time to make the most significant difference in the business today, as well as how to be the leader of the business is going to need them to be when these strategic bets pay off or fail as they move towards long-term vision.
So they need to continue to do the hallmark, wonderful things that got them to where they are, but they need to change some things because if they continue to behave like they behaved five years ago, they’ll be the limiter.
Denver: Right.
Daniel: So how do you see your role? And what is it that you’re adjusting or changing so that you’re pushing more decision-making and influence down? You’re coming under and supporting even more, and you’re keenly aware of what it is that you do, and only you can do, to move the needle in the business. It’s really what the shareholders or the owners or what the donors are truly expecting of you. And don’t think that because you had it last year, you’ve got it this year. It changes.
Denver: Well, you know what, it’s almost in some ways, an ethical decision as to how you’re spending your time. And if you’re spending your time on something that somebody else could do, or even do better, ethically that’s wrong. You should be doing the things that only you and you alone can do. And that is really, I think, a big, big framework in terms of making that decision.
Daniel: It is. You look at the…I always say it’s stewardship. We’re responsible for stewarding the hours and the dollars that are being paid to us to serve the organization. And we’ve got to remember the best leaders… In the book, Denver, I used the quote… it’s another military quote and it’s “Mission first; people always.” You don’t get those two confused.
It’s not: People first; mission always. If we try to put the mission of people and we try to serve all of these people, we know that we can never serve a group of 10 people because they all have different expectations and needs. But if we leaders put the mission first, and we align the people and best serve the people to accomplish the mission, well, then we’re going to win.
Now, the same is true for us in our role. What is the mission required of us and only us? And when you’re clear on that, and you’re always adjusting it, you’re editing it, which is where perspective seven comes in. Perspective seven is the game-changer. Perspective seven is the outsider. It’s the outsider. I just said it was the game-changer, but what I mean is that the outsider is the game-changer, and you and I have the good fortune of getting to play this role in organizations.
The best leaders know that those first five perspectives can be so challenging. that oftentimes they need somebody to help them with the sixth perspective, their role, how they’re thinking, what they’re believing, how they’re behaving, how they’re executing so that they can be the best they can be, so that their teams can be the best they can be, so that the strategic bets can be the best they can be.
So the best leaders are really curious and humble and disciplined with meeting with outsiders. They go, ready to learn, to absorb. They haven’t been there, done that, and think that they don’t need that because they’ve got it all figured out. They benefit from those two, three outsiders that are just switched on and really could help them to flourish.
Denver: Right. Because those outsiders have been outside the building, and often leaders are spending too much time inside the building, and they don’t know what is going on in the environment that outsiders can provide. As an outsider, Daniel, how has your role changed since the pandemic and the lockdown?
Daniel: Crazy. I mean, crazy. It’s crazy! Okay. So I’m a CEO; I’ve got 37 teammates and I do that a fair amount of time. I CEO. I do some writing, do some speaking. That’s changed, but I am also a CEO mentor and I’m an executive coach. And I have clients here in the states, as well as in Asia and in Europe.
So you want to know how my world has changed? I’ve not sat in a Delta plane since the country got shut down. I was in Germany…
Denver: Right. You were in Germany when it happened, and you almost didn’t get home. I know.
Daniel: Oh, what a night that was! Talk about stress, My gosh! So now, this little space here, oftentimes at about 11:30 at night, I come in with a cup of coffee, and I start Zoom and I’ll lead an executive retreat from 11:30 at night until 8:30 the next morning over in Europe.
And it’s crazy. I can’t believe that we’re doing this, but a lot of our workshops, we’re doing virtual. We’re doing these overall wellness workshops with hundreds of people in businesses every single week. Every single week. We’re helping them to make sure their thinking, their belief, and their alignment are as well as they can be. We’re doing a lot of coaching leadership workshops and retreats virtually. We’re not in the airports much, but we are actually traveling. We are meeting with clients now, and we’re back out there. I’ve got a teammate that’s leading an executive retreat in Utah today.
Denver: Yes. We’re talking about 2021 being the time where people need to be aggressive and get out, and you’ve already jump-started that a little bit. Let me ask you about perspective to the vision, because I noticed quite frequently leaders try to come up with a vision and come up with something that isn’t really very inspiring, or is completely impractical. How do you help them or guide them in that process?
Daniel: Yes, so years ago, I created a model for vision crafting, a tool. And I say that every vision needs to answer three Bs. I call it 3B Vision. Your vision must answer these three Bs. What do we belong to? Who are we going to become? And what are we going to build? If you in your vision can answer those three questions. And then if your vision is both clear and compelling, clear enough to build plans to strategic bets for, and compelling enough to cause you to want to wake up and risk.
It’s got to make your palms sweat as the leader. If it doesn’t make you excited, if it doesn’t cause you to be a bit nervous, well, then it’s not going to do anything for anybody else. It needs to be deep in you as the leader. So Denver, if people want to go to our website at buildingchampions.com under Resources, they can download the 3B Vision tool for free.
Denver: Great.
Daniel: And any of your listeners who want that, we’ll give them 3B Vision gratis. It is a step-by-step walkthrough. Once you spend a day or two writing it, you share it with your executive team. You have them chime in; you get it to about 80%. They help to bring it home with the additional 20%. Then, what you do is you figure out how you’re going to communicate it and how you’re going to use it for planning. And it’s got to be all the time. I do it every Monday morning at 7:30 with my entire team, and I have for 25 years. And before this business, I did it in my last business.
Denver: Yes. Yes. Good habit to be in. Perspective three, strategic bets.
Daniel: Sure.
Denver: How should leaders be thinking about strategic bets in a time when people are making no bets at all?
Daniel: Yes. So, really good question. When we all found ourselves kind of deer in headlights in March, wondering what the heck was going to happen, we came out, and we said that you needed to look at your strategic bets because your current reality has so radically shifted. All of our current realities have shifted.
Now, as we know, there have been some businesses that have had wonderful tailwinds, and they’re having a wonderful year. Others, extreme headwinds, and they’re fighting for their lives. Since we know that’s true: What you do as a leader is you look at your strategic bets, the bets that you placed in 2019 or 2018, because usually bets take 18 months to 36 months to fully execute.
Denver: Right.
Daniel: They’re not just standard, they’re new additives to the business or to the organization. And you look at them and you ask: Which of these do you need to pause? Pause. It doesn’t mean kill them. It just means current reality is so murky, so opaque, we know that continuing to add fuel right now wouldn’t be wise, so we’re going to hit pause on it.
The second thing we need to do is we need to say: Which of these, based upon our current reality and our customers, do we need to pursue? We need to actually add more fuel because these are really going to pay off. The current reality and the customer shifted so much that they need what we have now more than they did in February. So we’re going to hyper-focus, double down, and try to execute even faster.
The third thing we need to do is pivot. Where do we now, because of our expertise and our competence, where do we need to place a new bet? And then, and it’s one that we can execute on really quickly. Because if we do, we’ll be better serving our client base. We can better serve our customers. If we just took one thing that we used to do, if we took our knowledge bank, if we took our competence here, and we created this new service or offering, and we had it out by January, how would that move the needle for those that benefit from what we do?
Denver: Yes. Yes.
Daniel: And that’s just a really good framework. It’s pause, it’s pursue, and it’s pivot. And again, if anyone wants this, go to the 7perspectives.com, and I don’t know if it’s still there, Denver. I want to give everybody, I want to give your listeners an eBook on The Seven Perspectives in Crisis that my CEO mentors and I wrote in April.
Denver: They’ll go there, and they’ll find out, you know what I mean? And maybe in the notes, we’ll be able to put something in along those lines.
Daniel: Let’s do that.
Denver: If I got seven perspectives and let’s say I’m acting and living six of them, am I six/sevenths of the way there? Or does the whole thing collapse like a house of cards?
Daniel: That’s a great question. I don’t know. I don’t know. I see it as they’re all interlinked. It’s a working framework. I think I don’t think the whole thing collapses. What I think is that you’re not as good as you could be.
Denver: Yes.
Daniel: I think that’s what it is because I could see that you don’t have the outsider. All right? But you’re amazingly gifted. And you’ve just been on a real good journey. You’re doing well. You’ve got a great leadership team. I think you can win without the outsider, but I don’t believe you could be as good as you could be. Right?
Denver: Right. You don’t optimize.
Daniel: Yes. You don’t optimize. So I think, Denver, that it’s an optimization issue. And it’s kind of like you’re a vehicle, and you’ve got 12 cylinders and you’re limping along at 8 or 10 cylinders, and you can still go from point A to point B. But is the ride as nice? And are you getting there as quickly? Don’t know.
We’re no longer living on the creative side; we’re more on the reactive side. The best leaders are going to create an environment where their people can think and perform really well. So what this framework is going to do is it’s going to take the confusion of leadership. It’s going to help you to connect the leadership dots. And it’s going to give you a sense of calm, which is really important right now.
Denver: Yes. I’ll take 8 or 10 cylinders anytime. I mean, I think I got 4 or whatever, you know what I mean? It would be a step up.
So, what do you think this framework does for somebody? Let’s say I’m living, I’m adopting all seven frameworks. In this VUCA steroid time, what will this do for me as a leader?
Daniel: Well, that’s a great question, and I think that’s what the listeners need to really hear because our world right now is, as we all know, a bit untethered. Right? And we’re emotional beings. And when we’re emotionally charged for long periods of time, what suffers is our ability to think. Emotions are right under the surface.
We’re no longer living on the creative side; we’re more on the reactive side. The best leaders are going to create an environment where their people can think and perform really well. So what this framework is going to do is it’s going to take the confusion of leadership. It’s going to help you to connect the leadership dots. And it’s going to give you a sense of calm, which is really important right now. You need to show up calm as a leader who is understanding of what’s taking place, hopeful in the future. So that calm state is contagious.
The second thing it’s going to do for you is it’s going to give you clarity. If you see the business from each of these perspectives, you’ll have clarity on what matters most. Then it can give you confidence to move forward.
And then the final thing, and these are all Cs. I like to, I like to take complicated things and make them simple. The last thing is courage. And leaders, we need courage to lead forward. I mean, our teammates, they’re counting on us. And our customers are counting on us. Your donors are counting on you. You’ve got to figure it out. And if what you used to do isn’t working so well in 2020, and you’re not all that optimistic in 2021, ask for help. This is the perspective of the outsider. Get new outsiders; really get curious with your teammates. So often our teammates see the answers, but we don’t give them the opportunity to truly share. Right?
And like you and I discussed, meet with the customer. Meet with those receiving your products or services; ask them what they need. And I remember in March, Denver, March or April, our CEO mentors and I, we were all saying, Every leader needs to see their business, whether it’s a hundred-year-old business or a five-year-old business, you need, you need to see your business as a startup.
Denver: Yes. Yes, that’s a great way to look at it. And if I could add one C to your Cs…?
Daniel: Please.
Denver: It would be “contagious” because a leader’s behavior is contagious, and the team is going to take their cue from the way you behave.
Daniel: Absolutely. Absolutely.
Denver: Let me close with this, Daniel. People often read a book like yours, and they agree with everything that’s in it, and they’re nodding their heads as they read along. But despite their good intentions, and you know this, when they return to the field of action, It’s all pushed aside. So the question is: How do you advise leaders to keep these perspectives at top of mind and in front of them?
Daniel: So, another perk that I’m going to give to your listeners, and you and I can talk offline, we’ll put it in your show notes, I’m going to give everybody the retreat guide. Complimentary, there’s a retreat guide.
I was on yesterday via email and will now be on Zoom later this week with the CEO of a very large grocery store chain out in your neck of the woods, on the Eastern side of the country.
Denver: Yes.
Daniel: And he read the book, and what he said was, he had taken all sorts of notes and was going to go unpack it so that his executive team would begin communicating, thinking, and looking at the business this way.
Denver: Fantastic.
Daniel: Right before the pandemic hit, I was in Tokyo working with an executive team where for a day and a half, we structured a day and a half retreat around the seven perspectives. So every leader, whether it was finance, technology, supply chain engineering, it didn’t matter, we’re all going to make sure we really understand the current reality.
We’re all going to make sure that we believe buy-in and are living vision. We all understand and have weighed in on strategic bets, and we know our role. We know how to win. We know it’s going to get… we’ve done a pre-mortem, we know it could cause us to fail. So we have all of that discussion. We do a deep dive team review because we know that our job is always to elevate leadership.
So we understand the teammates’ perspective and what we need to find out in order to be even more effective. Took a look at the customer, customer trends, customer changes; reviewed the last 60, 90 days-worth of customer interviews that they’d done. Then we focused on their role for the quarter ahead and myself, and a CEO mentor and I were there playing the role of the outsider.
The way this thing works… This framework, you organize your days, weeks, meetings, months, quarters around it, and it will help everybody to think better and then to perform better. This is one to be shared, and start speaking it. You start speaking at our clients, whether it’s Daimler out of Germany or whether it’s Blue Cross, Blue Shield, I can name drop, name drop, name drop, or whether it’s the small businesses, you’ll hear their executive teams saying, “Well, what’s the perspective of the customer on this?” All right? “Well, what are our strategic bets?” You hear that language repeated, and you and I both know, when you can infuse a framework and a language into a chaotic organization, it helps them to think better. They then speak it, and that begins to infect. As you said, contagious, that creates a culture that’s contagious because we all speak the same language.
Denver: Right, right. They provide touchstones for everybody. The title of the book again is The 7 Perspectives of Effective Leaders, A Proven Framework for Improving Decisions and Increasing Your Influence. And give us, one more time, that website.
Daniel: It’s 7perspectives.com.
Denver: Fantastic. Well, thanks, Daniel. It was such a pleasure to have you on the program.
Daniel: Denver. It is truly a pleasure to be with you. I love what you’re doing.
Denver: Thank you.
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