645: The Counterintuitive Shift Successful Senior Leaders Make to Get Executive Presence Right

What if becoming a better senior leader is not about talking more, making faster decisions, or even becoming more extroverted, but rather learning when to listen, wait, and let others speak first. Welcome back to Speak Up, the number one rate business communication podcast for high-performing introvert leaders. Yes, social introverts that includes you. Here, we help you turn your brilliant ideas into influence and that influence into better business outcomes. Because being super smart does not automatically make you influential. I am your host, Laura Kamacho, your executive presence, the strategist, career accelerator, and when the occasion calls for it, your professional fairy godmother. In today's conversation with Chief Investment Officer Sebastian Page, you're going to discover how speaking last in meetings can help you make better decisions, empower your team, and avoid unintentionally influencing what others tell you. Why asking for feedback? Staying curious during disagreements and focusing on positive feedback can strengthen both your leadership, your team's performance, and of course your executive presence. Two practical habits that you can start right now to increase your visibility and demonstrate senior level leadership. Everyone, today is a great day. We are having a top finance professional who is actually not going to tell us the secrets of investing. It's Mr. Sebastian Page of Tearo Price. He is their Chief Investment Officer among other things, but he's going to talk to us about leadership and executive presence. And you're going to really get a kick out of some of his points of view. So welcome to the show, Sebastian. Thank you, Laura. I'm so excited for this. I've been listening to your podcast and I love your framework. I've been looking forward to talking with you. Some of the things you say remind me of the Peter principle. Isn't that the principle that everybody gets promoted to their level of incompetence because it seems like you have said that being a senior leader that your effectiveness can decrease the higher you go up in the organization. What's that about? You know, I think that's a little pessimistic, but the reality is that a lot of us rise through our technical capabilities and then all of a sudden we start managing teams, which is a completely different set of skills. And I know you've talked about this on your podcast before, but this transition maybe is what explain the Peter principle, but it's critical and the skills are different. You need to be a better listener than a talker. That's counter intuitive. But once you start managing a team, it's no longer about you, Laura. It's about, can you help people perform at their best? Think about this. This is a completely different set of skills than in my world, your money management skills or your technical skills. Yes. And then our audience is introvertish. We love doing the work because we're good at it. It's just like, well, let's just do more of that. And it is a different skill set to manage other people and to manage upwards. Okay. So one thing would be to think about how can you get the work done through other people and help them be successful. That would be one switch. What are other ways, like especially someone who wants to go from say director device president from like the top of middle management to the bottom of senior management. I think there's another really huge paradigm shift that nobody talks about, but if you don't know it, you don't make it. Right. What would you agree? I do think that leaders need to know the subject matter. You need a certain level of expertise. But when you get to a point in an organization or climbing the ladder, you cannot. Nobody, it's impossible. Claim that you can do anyone and everyone's job in your organization. And it's not about that. I love how you talk about a switch, right? A switch from being a talker to being more of a listener, which is very counterintuitive. Look, leaders do need to talk and inspire others. But it's the listening skill. That's the elite level leadership skill. The other one that's a switch is we're all wired to be decisive. And the size of this is prized. But you know what's really hard at elite levels of leadership, strategic patience. I'm not saying you need to slow down your decision making. What I'm saying is you need to be able to filter all the myriad decisions that come at you. And for some of them, believe it or not, the best decision is to wait. Other decisions are urgent. That's fine. But as a top level leader, you can't make all the decisions really fast. And in fact, you should not. So part of the switch, the transition, if you want to rise, understand when you need to exercise strategic patience. If you have to go look for a house and you have a month or two months or a year, use the time. You're most likely to end up with a better house, a better apartment. That is an example. There's even like a mathematical model behind strategic patience. That's another switch that's difficult. The other one that's very difficult that's counterintuitive as well. And I talk about it in my book, The Psychology of Leadership is the fact that if you think about what we expect of a leader beyond decisiveness and being a better listener is this idea that leaders need to control everything. The ability to delegate is a key aspect of what's going to make you more effective as a leader, Laura. So in the psychology of leadership, we're talking really about leadership, which is also related to power structures. There is a personality type that really enjoys having power and influence. And those people are really good at talking and being charismatic. But those are not the people listening to this. That's not us. But those are the people that we feel like we're competing with. I guess there's several types. You don't have to be like that. You don't have to have a single personality type to be a successful leader. Right? Interverts can be great leaders. But that personality, even though that's just one aspect of a personality, that's not what determines whether you're going to be successful. What would you say if you're going to hire a senior leader, what do you look at? There are so many myths about personality and leadership effectiveness. And that's why I've immediately fallen in love with your show because you dispel those myths. Interverts, especially in the job, it's harder for them to get the job because they tend to be left self-promotional. But in the job, going back to listening, going back to preparation. And by the way, huge myth, introverts are not worse presenters than extroverts. There is some research in personality. And I talked about it in the psychology of leadership that shows that the most you can get in terms of statistical correlation between a personality trait and over a large sample of people leadership effectiveness. The strongest relationship is about a correlation of 30%. Which means those factors are huge. And they're not the same for all the personality traits. In the book, I go over extroversion, conscientiousness. Are you typically a disciplined person? Are you always on time? Openness, open-mindedness to experience to others' ideas. Naroticism, do you tend to get anxious? I can score pretty high on Naroticism. By the way, generally I score high on introversion versus extroversion. Agreeableness. Are you someone who tends to agree with others to a piece? Are you kind of a people-pleaser person? They looked at all these different traits. And they found that only three traits had about 30% correlation with leadership ascension, mainly getting the job and also effectiveness. And yes, extroversion is one of them. It does help statistically. But again, because it's just 30% it contributes to the myth. There are things extroverts do really well. Laura, let's not bash on extroverts. We all have diversity up style. But the other trait that's positively correlated is conscientiousness. That one, it's hard to get away with a low conscientiousness score at work. By the way, it might mean you're better at improvising and more creative if you're low in conscientiousness, but it is positively correlated with leadership's success. And the other one is openness. Are you open to ideas? Because the job of the leaders to imagine the future and to be open to experiencing and to new ideas and new technologies and trends. So ECO extroversion consciousness, openness, but it's only a little part of it. There's so much more. And that's why I love how you're teaching all these skills that go beyond basic personality traits. And by the way, your personality traits can change over time. And you can adjust your personality as well. What is the relationship with openness and creativity? Is that, are they synonyms or overlap? How do they relate to each other? So interestingly, the empirically, like in the data, the strongest correlation with creativity is neuroticism. So if you're kind of an anxious person, yeah, you're more likely to score higher in creativity. And if you think about it, I was doing some research on this, looking at celebrities who self describe as high in neuroticism. And it turns out, they all are an artist. It's a generalization. It's a generalization, but there's some data behind us. But I also strongly believe that openness and the way it's described in the psychology issues, openness to experience, but I also lump this together with openness to new ideas. And that is a key leadership skill. You have all these archetypes, right? In your model, Laura, and one of them is a creator, creative kind of archetype. I don't remember exactly the nomenclature you use. But that is the idea is that this openness, you know, ask yourself how you can, you can go online and take a personality test score. They're all free. They're kind of fun to take. I took my own and published it in the cycle. It's you have leadership. I published it in my own book. I'm very open about it. But the openness, you know, ask if you're in the audience right now listening to this, right? You want to figure out if you score higher, lower openness. Do you like to try new foods, new restaurants? If I'm talking with my wife about where to go personally, I like to go to a place that I know is good and that I've been before and I probably know what I'm going to order on the menu. So that's a low openness attitude. She's opposite. If we've been there one time, we got to go try another place. I want to talk now. I love these ocean, these top psychological traits. And one of you got to help us. So agreeableness. Like that's something that's the people pleasing and a lot of us listening lean on that. But then a lot of us are not big people, pleasers. And we both sides are afraid that there are two people pleasing and those of us are lower in agreeableness. They, oh, I need to be nicer to people. What helps us be better leaders? I think the way you phrase the question is important. It's in the extremes, whether you're ultra high agreeable, total people pleaser or ultra low, you're impossible to work with. The extremes tend to create problems. But there's no formula. This is why I think your mission with your podcast is important. There's no formula. There's different style, different leadership styles. As I said, 30% correlation between certain personality traits and leadership success. That means there's a lot of other things going on. But watch for the extremes. And by the way, we're talking about conscientiousness. Extreme conscientiousness means you're not flexible enough, right? So always think about staying away from the extremes and find the style or to use your model, the archetype that fits you the best as a leader. Now, I will say I thought at scored high on agreeableness, but I've made a career in an intellectual field where we debate ideas and we get the best out of each other by disagreeing with each other and stress testing our ideas. We've learned to do that in our business with trust and mutual respect. But I'm kind of wired professionally in a job where disagreeing is part of the creative process. So I went online and I started taking the test. Everybody thinks they're agreeable, right? It's like a sense of humor. We all think we have a sense of humor. We all think we agreeable. And the test results came out. And because it's not just how you answer the questions, it's also about how you score yourself relative to a large population of people that have taken the same tests. That's why those are interesting. Why scored low on agreeableness? And Laura, of course, when I saw that, I disagreed with the test results. Yeah, I also scored low-ish agreeable. But I think I like what you're saying. I mean, it's comforting. As long as you're not extremely one way or the other, it's fine. But it's good to be aware that I need to be nice to people and agreeable because it's the right thing to do. And it also makes your life easier, but you don't want to be afraid of displeasing someone all the time. And one thing you've mentioned on the periphery about disagreeing respectfully, and I would like for you to help me reinforce that point with our listeners, that the point is not to always win getting the green light for your proposal every single time. It's more important to, I think, to present your point of view and your proposals and suggestions and ideas to defend them well, but in service to a better solution, right? That we don't want just binary, yes, no, but we want to hash things out, right? It's super important. In your prior show, you had an executive in the sports business. She said she was being disagreed with often, and she had to learn to just not let it affect her. I talked about this in the psychology of leadership because it's super important. We work together to do better work together. That's why you have companies. That's why you have teams. So the sum of the parts is bigger than just the individual contributions. So it's no joke. Well, I've learned over my career that when the IQ is involved, when there's a scientific, mathematical, fact-based discussion, the IQ kind of goes by the wayside. It's fascinating, but if you start debating something technical between engineers, for example, it quickly for some reason, when we disagree on an intellectual level, we get this fighter flight response and the EQ. Maybe it's the way the brain works. The EQ just kind of goes into a small corner and we forget our emotional intelligence. Don't let it get to you. Adam Grant has done fantastic job, a fantastic job on this and his recent books think again where he says, "This is the reaction you need to have." So someone disagrees with you. Let's roll back the clock to when I was saying personality traits at best explain 30% of leadership success. It's really not a lot. What if you'd said, Laura? Well, I've seen another research that's 50%. That's an intellectual debate we could have had, right? Right. About facts. And it's pretty technical. I could have had two reactions. Fighter flight and get the shot of adrenaline. Like, "Oh my gosh, she's disagreeing with me in front of her audience." Or, what Adam Grant would argue is the best reaction, curiosity. Wait a minute. This is interesting. He says, "You have to think as a scientist. Wait, someone's disagreeing with me on a mathematical concept or on a correlation analysis." That's interesting. I'm going to learn something and then the reaction is to genuinely ask questions to understand why the difference of opinion. And there, the sum of the discussion, the sum of the contribution becomes much bigger. And think about it, Laura, if you love your idea, but you're not willing to put it on the chopping block, you're never going to know how to make it better potentially or whether you're wrong. And it could be not that good an idea. In any case, it wasn't worth it. So, everybody listening puts your ideas on the chopping block, but don't forget that disagreement can occur with trust mutual respect. And as Adam Grant would say, "curiosity." Yes. And the goal is to come up with a better product, a better decision, the best possible. It's not to win or lose. It's not a binary export like that. I think curiosity is a great quality. And you can use that to not get defensive and related to disagreeing. Let's talk about feedback because that's in your book. And you mentioned David Rock's research on Ask for Feedback, which I do David Rock's research about motivators, the scarf, the status, and autonomy and all that. So, I didn't know. I'm not familiar with this research. Tell us what you've learned about. Feedback in your studies. - I've studied sports psychology and how to apply it to the world of business leadership and leadership in life. A big difference between athletes and executives is that athletes love feedback. They crave it as far as their process and the top people in sports all have coaches. But somehow in business as we climb the ladder, we become less interested in feedback. It's a bit of an ego thing. It's more difficult to receive feedback. Most people in business at all levels hate the feedback. This is why David Rocks' work is important. He showed that the stress response, either with giving or receiving feedback, decreased by about 50% with one little tweak, as you said, Laura, if the person asked for the feedback. - Such a small thing to do differently at work. If you're a leader, go around and say, "Hey, how did I do in the meeting?" What should I do next time? How did I do in this presentation? You start doing it because you're the leader. People take their cues from you. They're gonna start doing it too. And there's this wonderful thing that happens with the feedback where it becomes part of the process and it removes all the pressure behind it. I also think self-evaluations are super important. If someone has an honest self-evaluation, then you can have a feedback conversation that's much easier. But let's face it, at work, people just hate feedback. And it's not perfect. There's research. There's a famous paper titled The Feedback fallacy that shows that most of the feedback people give on you reflects their attitudes and emotions rather than your performance at work. - A projection. We've all experienced that. That's true. But if you ask for it, you think it's more authentic or more helpful. And I think I'm just gonna, on the topic of asking for feedback folks, listening, I love what Sebastian is suggesting. Like you asking your team for feedback on how you're doing a specific thing will encourage them because they are, they're watching what you do, not what you say, just like kids and parents. But in your one-on-ones with your leader and asking for feedback, maybe not everyone on one, but now and then asking that that gives your leader permission and also lets them know that you're interested in it. So they may not have been thinking, "Oh, what can I tell Laura "to improve?" But if you start saying, "Hey, what's one thing I can do "to be more successful at work?" You're gonna get free coaching from someone who is more successful than you at the company, right? Guided towards you and it's gonna be helpful and easier to accept, right? - It makes a huge difference. And one more thing on feedback, Laura, we underestimate the power of positive feedback. We've been talking about feedback. I wonder how many people listening to this immediately thought receiving advice on something I did wrong and how to improve. - Oh, yeah. - But there's so much power in positive feedback and the negative feedback can be somewhat damaging if not handled right. There's research that shows that you need five pieces of positive feedback to offset one piece of negative feedback and keeping that ratio in mind, you can actually help people perform better by pointing out what they do well. There's a famous example with Tom Landry who is the coach for the Dallas Cowboys in the '70s. The tradition in NFL football was to get the players in the video room and play their mistakes. And he was doing that like the other coaches. Look, you dropped the ball here. Here's why how are you gonna get better at not dropping the ball? He realized though that this basically created anxiety for the players and subconsciously, all they were doing was rehearsing their mistakes. - Yes, focusing on that. - Yeah, he famously flipped the script, started showing highlights and say, how can you do more of this good move right here? And the Dallas Cowboys won the Super Bowl. It's a famous example of the power of the positive side of feedback, which I think we all underestimate. - Sebastian, what would you say to people who they want to be senior leaders? They're not. They're good, hyperforming directors, senior directors. It's a pyramid, so the higher up you go, the more competitive it is. And there's a difference between being good at getting the job and good at doing the job. So what advice do you have just on getting the right kind of visibility? Or what does it take to stand out? - Laura, instead of making it theoretical, I'll give two very precise action steps, people who want to rise in their leadership career need to take. Number one, if you're not doing it, I've done this for 25 years in my career. Every Friday, spend an hour or two, writing a summary of what you did that week and other important communication related aspects of your role, things that people around you need to know. Be careful with the distribution list. Focus on your stakeholders, your boss, your peers, your top employees. Do that every week without missing a week. Do not brag, just be fact-based. Some of you will feel like, oh my God, this is so self-promotional, not at all. It's communication on a cadence that's repeatable. People get to expect it. Don't make it boring, keep it short. Don't make it wordy. But just update your stakeholders on your work. It's so easy. It's the best investment you could make one hour and hour and a half a week, just start doing it. Number two, when I want everybody to try over the next couple of weeks, if you're listening to this. With your team, if you're managing a team, because the way you set it up, Laura, this is someone who's already got management responsibility. Yeah, if you're not doing this yet, speak last. Take a decision that the team has to make and make sure that you're the absolute last person to speak in the meeting. If you speak first, you're going to tilt the room. They're going to know what you want to hear, your reveal your cards, and it's not going to be as wise as if you took the time to listen to everybody's point of view. Try to do that. Try to speak last in meetings. Weekly update by email to your key stakeholders, not bragging, just fact-based, but what people need to know. And speak last in your decision-making meetings for the next few weeks. And notice how better your thinking is once you've genuinely listened for input from your entire team. Very simple stuff, but these are elite level kind of actions you can take. I, you're, thank you. Folks, there you go. This is from the CIO, so you're getting those from the C-suite of the leading company. And you know what, that weekly email, okay, yeah, let's people know what you've done. But think what that does for other people, 'cause you're sending it to key stakeholders, you're not sending it to random. People with the company, think about how we forget how our minds are like sieves now. We just forget so easily because we're outsourcing our brains. And so it's like, oh yeah, that project. Sebastian got that done. Oh, I should probably do this other thing that I'm supposed to do. Or it say, I don't have to send him an email now. Ask him about it, 'cause he already let me know. So that saves me work. That is like a service to your community. Well, also, Laura, the other advantage of the weekly email is that you will follow up on your commitments. You look back at your week, you jotted notes in your notepad all week long, and you'll be reminded of certain commitments you've made to certain people. And otherwise, most of us won't look back at our notes. So it actually makes you more reliable with whatever commitments you made during the week. There's so many advantages to doing this. It's so underrated. Wow, this is so great. Sebastian, I'll let you have the last word. This has been an incredible, rich interview. People, you should be taking notes furiously. As I have been, I've written all over my questions. Of course, not if you're driving. What do you want to close with? - Thank you. I'm just thinking about our audience and Laura. I think you described your audience as introvert-ish. What I want to say as takeaway is that be proud of your introversion, be comfortable with it, love your introversion. And you know what? Just embrace it. It has so many positive aspects that are very powerful for leadership. And then just go for it, get after it. That's my last piece of advice. - That's awesome. So I forgot to tell you they're also highly attractive, but that's a topic for another podcast. Thank you so much. - One big takeaway was that the transition to executive leadership is fundamentally a leverage shift. I mean at the end of the day that's what it boils down to like it's technical expertise that gets you promoted up into a certain point but you get to a point where you cannot and should not know or know how to do or do everyone's job so your value increasingly comes from getting results through other people improving collective decision-making and creating conditions in which others perform well and you know his practical tool of the weekly Friday email I've been suggesting that to a lot of my executive presence. Mastery clients is just sending a concise fact-based summary of what you've accomplished or what your team's accomplished is a way of getting visibility without self-promotion. So I strongly suggest you try that and if you would like to know what your executive presence is looking like in the here and now I have a complimentary executive presence scorecard which is a self-assessment you can take it's lead to the show notes kind of gives you a look across four different scenarios of how you're doing. Have a fantastic and glorious day and I'll catch everyone in the next episode. [BLANK_AUDIO]