The following is a conversation between Robert Glazer, the founder and chairman of Acceleration Partners and author of Elevate Your Team: Empower Your Team To Reach Their Full Potential and Build A Business That Builds Leaders, and Denver Frederick, the Host of The Business of Giving.
Denver: In a world where organizations grapple with a myriad of challenges ranging from talent retention to fostering innovation, the quest for high-performance teams is more important than ever. The answer to these dilemmas may lie in understanding the interplay between culture, purpose, and individual empowerment.
Elevate Your Team could be the beacon organizations have been searching for. It demonstrates how investing in people and aligning them with the purpose can catalyze unprecedented levels of performance.
And here to discuss it with us is Robert Glazer, the Founder and Chairman of Acceleration Partners and author of Elevate Your Team: Empower Your Team To Reach Their Full Potential and Build A Business That Builds Leaders.
Welcome to The Business of Giving, Bob.
Robert Glazer, the Founder and Chairman of Acceleration Partners and Author of Elevate Your Team: Empower Your Team To Reach Their Full Potential and Build A Business That Builds Leaders
Robert: Thanks for having me, Denver.
Denver: You know, before we get into the book, tell us a little something about Acceleration Partners.
Robert: Acceleration Partners is a global partner marketing firm. We help brands connect with hundreds or thousands of partners who work and send them sort of traffic and leads to their sites or to their stores on an outcome basis. So rather than a clicker impression, it’s more of a partnership where they get paid if someone buys something or signs up to do something.
So, we do that for some of the largest companies in the world, and we’ve been focused on that for almost 20 years now.
Denver: And you built a fantastic business and a fantastic culture in the process.
You know, your previous book, Elevate, was incredibly well-received, a bestseller. Did you have Elevate Your Team in mind from the start, or did it come to you, as if by magic, after that book was published?
Robert: Yeah, it’s a little bit of the story of the book. It came to me because I realized some of our business challenges. The solution was probably the same formula that I had sort of put together in Elevate, but it wasn’t as obvious as it should have been to me. But after sort of struggling with it, I figured out, “Haah, if this same capacity-building formula is how you make kind of an individual leader better, if you’re trying to do that institutionally within an organization, what would be the same and what would be different?” And that was sort of the genesis of Elevate Your Team.
Denver: Yeah, yeah, sort of that eureka moment in the shower that it all comes to you and you say, “Of course, I could have had a V8.”
Robert: It’s always the shower…
Denver: It is, you know, or we think it is. You know what I mean? Or we tell it as if it was.
Robert: It’s the only time we’re not focused. It’s sometimes when we’re not thinking too hard and we’re doing that daydreaming that we actually kind of come up with whatever. There’s definitely some science behind that.
Denver: No question about it. Well, you do enough showers, you get the whole process on automatic pilot and free up your mind.
Robert: Exactly.
Denver: Capacity building, you just mentioned it, and that’s of course at the core of Elevate and Elevate Your Team. Tell us how you view capacity building along with these four facets.
Robert: So, capacity building, I think, is just, there’s a long definition. I think the short definition is this is just the process for how we get better, and it goes across four different spectrums, which is spiritual, intellectual, physical, and emotional capacity.
And I think high-performing individuals and high-performing teams are kind of working on those things constantly and making sure they’re in sync. It’s kind of like four quadrants of a ball. If they’re growing together, it’ll get some momentum and it’ll roll downhill with speed. If one is super small, the other’s big, that thing’s going to kind of bounce all over the place. And so they kind of go through a logical order, and they show up a little differently for an individual or an organization, but they focus on the same thing. I’m happy to give a quick overview if that’s helpful.
Denver: Well, yeah, why don’t we run through them? Why don’t we take them one at a time?
Robert: Sure.
“I think if you’re looking to develop leaders at your organization, they are going to be leaders in service of their individual values, and if you can help them discover that, it will help them become the best version of themselves as a leader.”
Denver: Let’s take spiritual, and how can leaders integrate spiritual elements to foster a greater sense of fulfillment and meaning into the work?
Robert: Yeah, and I know the word “spiritual” may cause some red flags for people as it did for me too. It is not religious at all, and it doesn’t have anything to do with that. What it has to do with is understanding the individual, what’s most important to them. For me, the most obvious manifestation of that is: What are your core values?
We all believe in things. We all have things that we do well… or strengths or otherwise. So, what is it that you value? What is it that you’re good at? What are the things that are sort of innately part of you and your personality? Because that is going to be the platform by which you do anything in your life, or leadership, kind of well. I think you can’t build a great house if it’s not built on a foundation of sort of understanding who you are and what your values are.
So, I think that’s a personal development strategy, but I think if you’re looking to develop leaders at your organization, they are going to be leaders in service of their individual values, and if you can help them discover that, it will help them become the best version of themselves as a leader.
There’s no cookie-cutter formula of a leader. I’ve seen a lot of, like, “Hey, here’s how we expect leaders to act and behave,” and that’s fine. Those are leadership standards, but that’s not, “Hey, here’s the genotype of what leadership at our organization looks like.”
Denver: In intellectual, I guess, a lot of that has to do with continuous learning and you know, I talk to a lot of people on this program, and I do some culture segments in nonprofits. Probably other than the manager, the number one reason people leave the organization is they have stopped learning.
Robert: Yeah.
Denver: How do you foster that continuous learning, that thirst to keep on learning within an organization?
Robert: Yeah, I think the data is totally correct on that, and, yeah, people, they leave their manager, or they just stopped learning.
A culture with high-intellectual capacity is one where it’s always learning. People are getting better. I think there’s a lot of ways to do that. Look, whatever you implicitly or explicitly support or reward is the behavior that people sort of institute. So if you reward people for starting a book club or doing a breakout group on a new topic, or taking time to learn something or going back to class…
I think cultures that have a high learning quotient are also really good on feedback. So, I think they’re very good at people-learning, how to give and get feedback, and they understand that feedback is really about improvement. It’s not about making the person giving it feel better or otherwise. It’s about constant, like, “Hey, I could do this better, and I’m getting the feedback on how to do that, and I’m not defensive around it.”
Denver: I love what you have to say about incentives too because I think most leaders really know they need to build strong teams.
Robert: Yeah.
Denver: Then all the incentives are around the individual performance, and there’s just this misalignment you see all the time, and they don’t even realize it.
Robert: Yeah. Look, it’s about getting better. If you’re a growing organization, you’re trying to get people ready for the jobs of tomorrow and the next job. It’s not necessarily about what you’re doing today, and it’s a lot easier to build those people from within, right?
Any person you hire from the outside, you have a 50% risk. There’s culture and aptitude. So, you’ve got a 50% risk that even if they can do the job, they might not be a fit for the culture.
So, anyone who’s a cultural fit internally has already sort of eliminated that risk, and then it’s like, “How can we coach them and develop them so that they have the aptitude and are able to take on those roles?”
Denver: Your third facet was promoting physical health. Has that been extremely or more difficult now that we have so many people remote and hybrid?
Robert: Yeah. physical capacity is sort of mental and physical wellbeing, and I’ve always said that we are not different people.
You can’t tell me that you have someone in your organization that oversleeps every day, is super unhealthy, jumps out of bed past the alarm clock, and then shows up at work, and they’re super energetic and ready to go, right?
Denver: Right.
Robert: We’re the same person, which is why these kinds of best of class habits, both inside and outside work, like getting sleep and a morning routine and stuff, these would seem beyond the purview of the organization, but they’re what leads to a healthier and more high-performing person.
And yeah now that a lot of us are just turning on our computer and working from home, those boundaries have gone away, and those boundaries are important. People need to be engaged at work. They need some rest; they need some engagement in other areas; they need to feel like at some point it’s turned off. And I think that’s become harder for people, both with remote work, and we’re still suffering a kind of general burnout… hangover since the pandemic.
Denver: No question about it. And emotional intelligence, maybe we can take a look at Acceleration Partners there and ask you how you leveraged emotional intelligence to build and strengthen relationships and create a more empathic and inclusive work environment.
Robert: Yeah, emotional capacity… big two parts of that, I think, in an organizational context are psychological safety and sort of vulnerability: Do people feel comfortable showing up as themselves saying anything, speaking truth to power? Are leaders vulnerable? Are they approachable? Again, could someone in a room say, “This is a really dumb idea, and I think we’re gonna lose all our money” and feel comfortable doing that?
Denver: And that’s not the last thing they said.
Robert: Yeah, exactly.
So, a lot of the way that you do that in an organization is, again, make sure that you are getting the feedback so you don’t have blind spots, and that you’re also kind of being vulnerable and sharing… this concept of the Johari window around sort of expanding to the open window of: What is it that people know about you? And what is it that you know about others? That’s what a really healthy, psychologically-safe organization looks like, and I think those organizations are more prone to innovation because people can try things. They’re less prone to mistakes; they’re more likely to have honest discussions.
This is the type of organization where someone would come to you and say, “Denver, you know, I’m just not feeling like this is what I want to do for the long term. Can we talk about what else I could do?” and not telling you, “I’m leaving tomorrow because I already have a new job,” right?
We’ve done a lot around that. We’ve done an exercise called One Last Talk where people give like employee TED Talks and things that are vulnerable and just kind of modeling, feeling that it’s safe to show up in the workplace. Companies can do this, just small pieces of this on calls… like you just start a call and say: “What was your highlight and your lowlight from last week?” Even something like that… and with a manager going first and, “What was your professional highlight or your personal lowlight?” It just starts to kind of humanize people and even clients like, “Hey, how’s it going?” And they’re like, “Not good. My mom’s sick,” right?
Denver: Yeah.
Robert: And suddenly you understand why they’re frustrated today, and it has nothing to do with the work that your company’s delivering.
Denver: Yeah. It’s almost a follow-up question to, “How are you?” Because we all just sort of give that superficial answer, a “Fine.”
Robert: Yeah.
Denver: But if someone doesn’t look right, it’s like, “No, you look a little concerned about something. How are you really doing?”
Robert: Yeah. Look, I asked that question to someone…I’m going to check in on my team last month, and they’re going through some situation with an ex and kids, and that’s what they wanted to talk about for 10 minutes. And so we talked about it, and because that’s where their headspace was, and I’ll go back and check on that a week later.
So, I think one of the things that people need to understand is like: Look, we have a very high-performance culture. You can have a high-performance culture, but you can also be personal and care about things and talk to people. In fact, sometimes it actually gives you the opportunity to have a more honest discussion and say, “Denver, this is the third month in a row that you haven’t met quota and are way off. What’s going on?”
And you might be like, “You know what? I really don’t want to do this job.” “Okay, well, let’s talk about how we can find you something different or how we can support you elsewhere?” But unfortunately, I think a lot of times when someone’s struggling, people tend to make them less human in their eyes because they have a feeling they’re going to have to do something difficult, and it makes it easier to make Denver a bad person if he’s also underperforming, versus being able to hold this dissonance of like, “Denver is a really good guy, but Denver is not doing well in this job, and we need to attack both of those things separately.”
“I think it’s a balance. If you’re always focused on tomorrow, you can be out of business today. And if you’re always focused on today, you’re going to keep repeating the same mistakes over and over again because you don’t jump off the hamster wheel.”
Denver: Yeah. You know: Build a business that builds leaders. I mean, that’s important. That’s a subtitle of your book, and it’s probably, I guess relatively speaking, easier to do in good times and more difficult to do in hard times, and the climate seems to be worsening all the time these days in business. How do you advise, Bob, business leaders strike a balance between focusing on long-term people development, but achieving their short-term business objectives?
Robert: Yeah, I don’t think they’re mutually exclusive particularly, I think sometimes now there’s more time to work on when you’re running on the hamster wheel… there’s a hard time to do that. I think there’s more time to look at people development and who are your top. If you don’t know who the top five up-andcomers are in your organization and how you’re supporting them, that’s a big miss.
So, I think it’s a balance. If you’re always focused on tomorrow, you can be out of business today. And if you’re always focused on today, you’re going to keep repeating the same mistakes over and over again because you don’t jump off the hamster wheel. So, if you’re constantly having to look outside for talent and making mistakes, and this is a really expensive thing for your organization, maybe if you slowed down a little bit and worked on your talent development, you could alleviate that problem.
Denver: Yeah, yeah. Let me pick up what you just said about top performers because you mentioned in the book that sometimes top performers actually can’t continue to grow in their roles and scale with the company. Dig a little bit deeper into that.
Robert: Yeah. There’s an old adage, people have probably seen the meme online like, the CFO says, “Well, what if we train the people, and they leave?” And the CEO says, “Well, what if we don’t, and they stay?”
So, I think you should always be focused on developing people for that next level, and sometimes you have to realize, like I heard something recently… I think it was actually on Ted Lasso, it said, “If you’re a good mentor, you’ll hope people will leave you, and if you’re a great mentor, they will.” And I thought that was an interesting comment.
And so, look, I don’t think you want to be a development shop for your competitors and building people for other companies, but if you have someone that you’ve developed and has done a great job, and you just don’t have the role for them, I think good leaders support them and help them go find that elsewhere.
Or, sometimes, there’s two candidates, and one’s going to get the role. Like you have two senior finance leaders, the famous GE, well now, its not so famous, Jeff Immelt, it was well known that whoever won the GE thing, the other two were going to be CEOs of other companies.
Denver: The Office of the Chairman, I guess, and the other two were gone, right?
Robert: Now, they all failed as CEOs, and that’s a different discussion. But, yeah, if you have two senior leaders in finance, and you have one CFO role and they’re both CFO-qualified, like you’d help that other one do that.
So, again, you don’t want to be constantly kind of grooming and developing people and having them leave, but at the same time, I don’t think you want to clip people’s wings either.
Denver: Yeah, yeah, and I actually think that in developing them in that way, they’re more likely to stay because they recognize you actually care more about them than their productivity and what they’re doing for the company. And when something like that happens, there can be a real fidelity that is built from that.
Robert: Yeah, exactly.
Denver: How do you connect, elevate, and elevate the team? How do you take that personal and somehow imbue it into an organizational culture?
Robert: That’s really what the book leans into. I think there are different practices from the individual, and there’s a lot of actual tactics in the book. I’m going to answer that question in the whole book, so I won’t be able to answer it in 60 seconds.
Denver: I know that.
Robert: But what are the practices about putting that stuff into the DNA of the team or the organization rather than focusing on the individual? And there’s some similarities, but I think there’s some differences as well and specific tactics on how to do that. Again, like, emotional capacity as an example for oneself, it really focuses on getting out of your comfort zone or otherwise, and the relationships that you have in the company, it’s like, “Here are things that promote psychological safety. Here are ways to mix people up at meetings and cadences and otherwise that get different people talking to each other.
Denver: Let me ask you a little bit about creating sustainable growth culture because growth has, I think, become almost sort of a negative word in a lot of ways; it means you just beat the hell out of me until I can’t walk. So, we hit some goals that are sort of arbitrary out there and don’t really have a lot to do with me. How do you go about trying to build a sustainable growth culture, getting everybody thriving at the same time while achieving your objectives?
Robert: Yeah, look, it’s an interesting point. Growth used to be a great, exciting term.
Denver: Yeah.
Robert: Again, after the pandemic, after burnout, I think now, people are like, “Ooh” and because we had this sort of era of steroid growth, the analogy I would use is saying, I think the last 10 years: if NASA were to announce that, “We’re going to put a spaceship on Mars.” That space shuttle arrived on Mars, and all the astronauts were dead; I don’t think mission control would be jumping up and down and doing all this stuff.
Denver: Don’t see the clapping.
Robert: This has been a little bit like, we’ve been celebrating these hollow growth milestones that have destroyed all the people who are on the mission along the way.
Denver: Getting to General Electric, it was called Neutron Jack. Remember that?
Robert: Yeah, exactly.
Denver: They have destroyed the people and kept the buildings.
Robert: Yeah, so look, this is like, if growth is a wave, how do people ride on that wave and lift with it and not kind of drown under it? And I think it’s going to have to be where people see that they’re part of that growth, that their growth is the organization’s growth, and that’s the focus, not these kind of arbitrary numeric goals.
Look, I’m a big fan of goals. I have a ton of goals, all this stuff. I have been part of plenty of organizations and particularly nonprofits for whom just this numeric goal that didn’t have a reason behind it, like actually really put the organization in jeopardy, right? Like, “We want 10,000 matches,” and it’s like, “Well, why?” And, is it just ‘bigger is better”? And what’s the quality around that?
So, I think when you see some of the companies that are really purposeful and stuff, it’s about ending heart disease or getting the world off of carbon or whatever. It’s not selling 10 million cars, right? I mean, there’s a goal that’s sort of bigger that people are moving towards, and it’s not just a number for numbers’ sake.
Denver: Yeah. I think that’s one of the challenges they have in the nonprofit sector is that the organizations believe the funders want to see those numbers.
So, if I am leading an organization that’s trying to eradicate hunger, I’m going to do whatever I can to feed more people next month than I did this month. But when you stop and think about it, that ain’t going to eradicate hunger except for maybe that day during the month, and therefore: How do you balance those short-term objectives?
And so often, they do that so they get re-upped in the grants as opposed to the long term.
Robert: I think there’s some nuance. What you might find out is maybe that food bank was really feeding and taking care of a thousand people and meeting all, and then it moved to 2000, and it was a lower level of support and actually it was helping people less. So, ideally, yeah, more impact is great, but there’s some qualitative stuff.
Again, I was part of a nonprofit which set one of these things, and in fact, the quality of their product went down dramatically as the quantity increased because the quantity was the focus. So, you need to find a way to make the quantity and the quality both part of that.
If you were really ending hunger, it wouldn’t be, “I got a grain of bread to a million people.” It was like, “I got a million people off of food stamps,” and that would be a very different goal.
Denver: Right, and I think often, too, that the smarter nonprofit organizations are beginning to count down and not count up. So, they don’t look to see how many people they helped or served. They look to see how big the problem is, and “Are we beginning to eliminate the problem?” And if the problem is getting bigger despite us serving more people, we got to actually rethink our theory of change because that’s not where we want to be.”
Robert: Yeah, absolutely. So, again, goals are great. It’s good to have goals, but also, what does that look like on the people? What does that look like for the organization to move from supporting a thousand to 10,000 people? Is it having a worse effect on the people in the organization? That to me is sort of that Mars example that I gave before.
Denver: Yeah, yeah. Sticking with growth, what’s your 50% rule?
Robert: Yeah. So, this I heard a lot as we were building the organization from coaches, and it kind of turned out to be true and it said, “Every time you double your organization, you break 50% of your people and 50% of your processes,” and I think a lot of people have seen something similar to this.
And look, if you understand the rule of 72, if your team or your company is growing like 30% a year, it’ll be every two and a half years that you double, which means a lot of the people won’t work. And, again, I think that’s if they’re doing the same things that they were doing and not improving and getting better along the way, and a lot of your processes won’t work.
And so, a lot of this book, in our work, in our organization, was: How do we beat that rule? How do we not break 50% of our people because that’s not very fun? Again, I want to get on the spaceship and get off the spaceship with everyone alive that I went on the trip with.
Denver: Yeah, yeah. But I think it’s a great point because you need to be conscious about it, and as your organization doubles and triples in size, your communication has to change. Your culture, the way you approach it has to change; you have to scale for it, and I don’t think a lot of leaders really think about that. They just keep on doing until the thing collapses. And this I really thought to be a really good part of the book… to just be aware that we just can’t go with the same way that we got started and really do have to change those processes along the way.
Robert: Yeah, like Marshall Goldsmith: “What got you here won’t get you there.” The only constant is change, and so you need to take a look at: What is going to change? And how do you sort of embrace that change?
Denver: What are your thoughts on the evolving role of leadership? My gosh, I’ve talked to so many leaders on this program, mostly of nonprofit organizations, and they’re saying the leaders they were in 2019, they can’t be anymore. And I was just wondering what your thoughts on that were and where you see it going.
Robert: Yeah, this might not sound overly optimistic, but I think we are going to have shorter leadership tenures.
Denver: We are already, right?
Robert: Yeah, until we change the expectations of our leaders and our companies.
So, I think, today’s leader is expected to do a range of things, and I think expected may be at all levels. Whereas, like I think the CEO of Nike probably needs different expectations than the CEO of a hundred-person B2B firm. But you have to have a great product and service that customers like and stay innovative and stay ahead of that. You need a great culture and people want to stay in a world with this.
And then there are these new facets of diversity, equity, inclusion, which is really important. And then this aspect of sort of: How does the organization relate to the outside world? And I think there’s a lot of people and expectations on: What are our opinions on this? Or how are we showing up on this? And this is all like, to me, a problem of…not that that’s a problem, but of focus.
And just like the organization has too many products or too many priorities, it will not get anything done. I think there’s an expectation that just the organization leaders… to tackle way too many things and boil the ocean. I think that’s leading to a lot of exhaustion and people being like, “I’m not sure I want all of these roles. I was here to build a better tool for whatever, not comment on everything that’s going on in the world.” And I don’t mean that to be political, but I think it’s really important.
And even when people have said to us, like let’s just say you’re very philanthropic, let’s say you’re REI or something like that. Well, REI is focused on a very specific type of philanthropy that ties to their business, right? They’re talking about outdoor and preservation and alignment. There are probably a hundred other really important things, but they can’t tackle those and those.
Denver: Right.
Robert: And so I think it’s going to be interesting. I think we are going to see shorter and shorter leadership tenures unless we start— this sounds horrible but I don’t mean it— expecting a little less of our leaders, but I mean less holistically, like as the company can’t solve our personal problems and the world’s problems and all of these things, particularly when most businesses are small and medium-sized businesses without a level of resources. Look, if you’re a Nike, if you’re an Apple, you have whole departments that can work on all of these things. It’s a very different situation.
Denver: Yeah, yeah. Now, I think you really hit on something there because I think there’s a lot of leaders who are just getting worn out having to respond to everything, and a lot of it is coming from the employees, who insist they make a statement. Now, I could see REI, as you suggest, maybe making a statement about the environment, but I mean, if the Dobbs decision comes down, do they have to make a statement on every single decision people in their organization feel strongly about? It can wear you out.
Robert: Well, I’ve written about this. I wrote an article sort of tongue-in-cheek around, “Hey, Gen Z, what you want in the workplace really won’t make you happy, From a Gen X-er.” And it was about the study I saw around what Gen Z wanted. One of the things you hear a lot is, “I want an organization that sort of mimics my values and the things that I believe about.” Actually, the “things I believe in.” They don’t usually say “values” because I one hundred percent agree on being aligned with an organization’s values, but so you want leaders and everyone to agree with the things that you believe in.
Well, what about the things you don’t believe in? Because if we’re talking about diversity, equity, inclusion, by the nature of it, that would mean that you have a non-homogeneous organization with different people and different insights and otherwise. So, when I see these things like, “I want the organization to kind of agree with all the things that are important to me,” to me, that’s like incongruous with the concept of inclusion.
So, I think you want an organization that shares your values, but again, what about the thing you don’t agree with? Not every organization can agree on everything, and nor should you expect them to, but that expectation has some false promises in itself, I think.
Denver: Yeah, that is very well stated. I mean, mathematically, it just doesn’t work.
Robert: Right, and look, a lot of the people that would advocate for that are really advocating for a lot of the inclusion stuff. You can’t have inclusion if you expect everyone to agree. That is antithetical.
Denver: You got Einstein stumped with that one. It just doesn’t fit.
Finally, Bob, you know, you talk about living a legacy versus living for a paycheck. I guess it would be your eulogy versus your W-2. How can embracing that philosophy really turn the tides on a work culture?
Robert: Yeah. Well, I think there’s a different way of thinking of it. If you want to think about a work culture and not the W-2, versus the sort of: What is the meaningfulness? I mean the thing that kind of gets people is to think about where you would want your kids or your grandkids to work, or the type of environment you would want your family to go work at and feel comfortable and supported and challenged and otherwise. And to me, that would be the ultimate sort of legacy thing, is to build a team or organization where you would be proud for anyone that you knew to come work there and feel like you wouldn’t be discouraging them from going there.
I mean, when you ask people that question sometimes, I think it really kind of gets them thinking like, “I would never want my kids to come work at this team or organization.” “Well, why not? You’re creating it and that is someone’s kid.”
Denver: Yeah, yeah. Look, I’ve been a consultant for a lot of years, and there are times when you’re leaving the building… you’re going down to the elevator saying, “Oh my gosh, I don’t know what I would do if I had to show up here every day.” You know what I mean? It can be really tough.
Tell us about Friday Forward.
Robert: Friday Forward was a note that I started to my team, probably seven or eight years ago, about improvement or getting better or just something around … outside the workplace that it was something kind of became a habit of mine, people started sharing it. Outside the organization, I eventually opened it up so other people could sign up for it, and today, there’s almost 200,000 people in 60 countries get to read that every Friday. So, it’s a quick couple-minute read every Friday morning. You can search Friday Forward and you should find it, no problem.
“I don’t think that anyone knows totally what they are thinking or their opinion until they start writing. In fact, I sit down with a topic, and this is one of the problems with AI and a lot of these things, is because I think writing is how you think, and if we don’t think anymore and if we just turn over our thinking, then it’s kind of a muscle that we’re not going to have.”
Denver: It’s fantastic. Hey, how has that process of actually writing this helped your thinking?
Robert: Look, I don’t think that anyone knows totally what they are thinking or their opinion until they start writing. In fact, I sit down with a topic, and this is one of the problems with AI and a lot of these things, is because I think writing is how you think, and if we don’t think anymore and if we just turn over our thinking, then it’s kind of a muscle that we’re not going to have.
So, I usually have sort of a general, “Hey, this is an interesting topic, I want to dive into it, but I don’t have it all the way constructed,” and by the time I’m done with the article or whatever, my thinking is very evolved.
Denver: Yeah, yeah. Well, you’re absolutely right about AI and ChatGTP because I sometimes look at what’s happened to my sense of direction since I’ve had GPS…
Robert: Yeah.
Denver: It’s easy…You know how to get to everywhere. Now, I can’t get to the gas station. It’s just amazing.
Well, this is a great book, and for people who really care about their organizational culture, which is just about everybody listening, I urge you to pick up Elevate Your Team: Empower Your Team To Reach Their Full Potential and Build A Business That Builds Leaders.
I want to thank you so much, Bob, for being here today. It was a real delight to have you on the show.
Robert: Thank you for having me.
Denver Frederick, Host of The Business of Giving serves as a Trusted Advisor and Executive Coach to Nonprofit Leaders. His Book, The Business of Giving: New Best Practices for Nonprofit and Philanthropic Leaders in an Uncertain World, is available now on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.