The Multiplier Effect: How Great Leaders Make Everyone Smarter

When you're new to something, like, you can either act like you know what you're doing, or you can just, like, depend on the people around you to guide you. A lot of times, people want to make changes and improve and grow as leaders in secret. And I just don't recommend people do things in secret.

All the amazing work you did to bring this to the world, what were some of your biggest aha moments? Whether they were confirming or whether they were surprises, you can't really earn a.

Win unless having a loss is a real possibility. I'm way more fearful of the insecure leader than I am in the overly secure leader.

Welcome back to another episode of the Athletics of Business podcast. I am your host and CEO of the Molotor Group, Ed Molotor. And we are beyond fortunate to welcome today's special guest, Liz Cooper Wiseman. And Liz is the author of the New York Times bestseller Multipliers. And we're going to really dive into that book today and all the incredible insight that it offers. Okay. And she's also the author of Wall Street Journal bestsellers Rookie Smarts and Impact Players. Liz is a researcher and executive advisor who teaches leadership to executives around the world. And she is the CEO of the Wiseman Group, a leadership research and development firm headquartered in Silicon Valley. Liz is a former executive at Oracle Corporation, where she worked as a vice president of Oracle University and as a global leader for human resource development.

She is a frequent guest lecturer at Brigham Young University and Stanford University. She has received the top Achievement Award for leadership from Thinkers50. And Liz has consistently been named one of the world's top 50 management thinkers. And as I mentioned, we're going to dive into multipliers. And in this conversation, really listen for the dynamics of leadership and personal development and the importance of recognizing and addressing something that we are all guilty of as leaders. And that's accidental diminisher tendencies that hinder team performance. Okay, I'm going to get out of the way here and let you enjoy this conversation with Liz Wiseman. Liz, thank you so much for joining us today on the Athletics of Business podcast. I am beyond thrilled to have you here with us.

Well, I am delighted to be here in conversation with you.

It's funny how it takes years sometimes for paths to cross when we're so aligned in our beliefs and what we do. But I have to tell you, we're going to jump into multipliers. I just love the book. First release, came out in 2010. You also have Rookie Smarts and impact Players. What was it like, what was it with your journey that led you down this path? Path to realizing the significance of leadership and your viewpoint on leadership?

Well, again, I don't know that anyone's asked me that in quite that way. I think what really led me down this path was being just smart enough, but not so smart. That's really what led me down this path. Because I joined Oracle out of college and they had this hiring profile that they hired these really, really smart, driven people, and they hired at these 17 schools. You could make the list. I wouldn't even have to tell you the list of the 17 schools. Anyone could make the list of the 17 schools that they hired at. And they hired top grads, top of their class at these top schools. I didn't go to one of those schools, but yet somehow I got hired and I felt like, so lucky to work around all these really, really smart, driven, achievement oriented people.

And I didn't feel like I belonged there, but I felt lucky that I belonged there. And that's what put me down this path of watching how people use their intelligence. Because I think I was fascinated by working around all these absolutely brilliant people. And some of these were like, you know, Mensa level genius kind of people. And I noticed that in the sea of really smart people that when people got put into management roles, that often their intelligence was a liability, not an asset. And that I watched these really smart people often use their intelligence as a weapon where it ended up like their need to have the answers to figure it out. I don't know. To be the star meant that nobody else really got the ball.

I guess, to use the athletics metaphor, that they were taking all the shots and everyone just sort of passed them the ball, or they very actively were a ball hog type leader. And I watched that and I'm like, that's interesting. They've got this team of really smart people, but those people don't get to be smart. And like, why would you work so hard to hire really smart people if you're not gonna let them be smart? And that's actually not the great job that was promised. And so I saw that kind of variety of leader, and then I noticed other leaders who were also brilliant, but people around them got to be brilliant and people were at their best around. Like, there were a lot of superstars on the team, not just kind of a superstar boss on the team.

And I watched this for years and it was this kind of sense that I snuck into this group of really smart people. And I don't want to make it sound dramatic, like there wasn't imposter syndrome. It wasn't like I felt I didn't belong there. I just felt lucky to be among this group of people. And add to that being young and thrown into management, really young, a little bit against my will, but that's kind of the casualty of a high growth company.

And I'm maybe a year and a half out of graduate school and suddenly I'm put in charge of training for the company and given the charter of making it work all around the world and we're now operating in a hundred countries and I've got to figure out how to build a university and a global university and I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing. I think the book Rookie Smarts was kind of part of my post Oracle therapy because I always felt like the underdog. I always felt like a rookie at everything I was doing. But trying to figure out how to lead and then watching leaders either shut down or in many ways amplify the intelligence of people around them, that's what got me curious as to what was going on. And I eventually left Oracle after 17 years.

I started doing coaching work, executive coaching. And I saw this dynamic playing out with a number of the executives that I was coaching. They were so smart, but their team had a way of suffering around them, holding back around them. And that's when I decided it needed some academic level research. It should be more than just me wondering or having musings or antidotes about it, anecdotes about it. And that's when I decided to do the research.

So going back to being young, a year and a half out of grad school and now you are have this massive responsibility, how much did you lean into vulnerability? In other words, like I don't have all the, I've never done this before, I don't have all the answers, but I'm going to lean into the right people to help me navigate this water. Or was it the kind of culture and environment that vulnerability wasn't very rampant?

Well, I don't know. This was before the term vulnerability was in vogue. I think I was just honest with myself and I was pretty clear that I didn't know how to do this. And I think what I did, and it's what we find in the research that when you put a, you know, an otherwise intelligent rookie into an important job is if they're aware that they're at the bottom of the learning curve and they're not maybe stuck in their own hubris of, look at me getting this like big promotion. What they tend to do is they tend to look outward and reach outward. And I just started reaching out to people. And I went on a, like a week long tour around the United States, going out to corporate universities.

Like I went out to Disney and I went out to, I think went to Pepsi. We went up to like Arthur Anderson, like all the premier universities. And I'm like, I gotta figure out what I' doing here. And I remember one of my first responsibilities, we wanted Oracle University. And I'm like, okay, well we need a university. Like, you can't really have a university without a, like a, a crest. You know, like I'm just envisioning we need sweatshirts with a crest and that crest needs to have swag. Absolutely, you gotta have swag and gotta have swag. And I'm like, and I know that you need like a logo like ou And I knew that it needed a Latin mantra, a slogan kind of thing. And I knew it needed to be in Latin. And we decided knowledge is power.

I know it sounded very like aggressive or something. And I didn't know any Latin. And this is before Google Translate, before all these tools that make that easy. And I'm like, well, you know, we're just a couple miles down from Stanford and you know, I had a bunch of Stanford people on the team and we had some partnerships with Stanford. I just called up the main switchboard and I'm like, hey, can you connect me to the classics department? And they connect me. And I'm like, hey, you know what would you connect me to? Like the Latin professor? And you know, he picked up his phone and I'm like, would you translate this for me? Knowledge is power. And he's like, oh, okay, sure. You know, he, I didn't offer to pay him. I barely introduced myself. And he said, oh, that's Saperi S Valeri.

Like, to know is to have value. And I'm like, great, thank you very much. And then I like, call up the T shirt vendor. I'm like, okay, so Parius Valeri, slap it on. We got swag. Let's build a university here. But everything was this act of reaching out to experts. I don't know, let me figure this out. And I think what I did well, because I didn't come into this role with this heightened sense of my own capabilities, my own insights. I'm like, I don't know how to do this. And what I did was not only reach out to a lot of outside Experts. I listened to our executives and I paid attention to what was going on in the company.

And I'm like, you know, I don't really know what we need to do, but what I can do is I can pay attention to where the business is going and figure out what kind of skills and capabilities do we need to serve that, and how do I get this workforce ready to go out and sell our new releases, install our new releases. And it kept me very connected to the needs of the. I went to all of their meetings and I listened and I built relationships and I stayed connected. And interestingly enough, I don't think I've written about this story. Maybe I've told it somewhere, but, you know, I'm now like a year or two into this. I'm very young to be doing this big job.

And a new boss comes along and decides that the company really deserves to have someone really experienced in this role. And he kind of sits me down and sort of tells me he's going to hire someone, like, above me. You know, essentially, I'm not really getting fired. I'm getting kind of demoted because, like, we need, like, a real leader for this.

Thanks for all your work, Liz. We appreciate what you've done.

Exactly. But, you know, you're going to get booted here, and we're going to get a real leader. And he said, you know, they had a search out and they were interviewing this candidate, and I'm like, oh, okay. And, you know, I've sort of given my heart and soul to this work. And he brought the candidate in. I met with that candidate interviewed with the other executives. And then maybe the next day or two days later, my boss came back to me, sat down, he's like, we're not going to hire that other candidate. Like, actually in the process of bringing that other candidate in, the executives that I had interview, said candidate said, like, what the heck are you doing? Why are you bringing someone in? Liz is doing a great job. She understands the business.

She's doing exactly what Ned kind of like slapped him up a little bit and said, you're off base. We want Liz, and we want Liz in this job. And it was a very humbling moment for him to come and say, like, I've made a mistake. I misread this situation. But when you're new to something, like, you can either act like you know what you're doing, or you can just, like, depend on the people around you to guide you. And I think I was humble enough. I don't know If I can claim I was vulnerable, I just was humble enough to say, like, okay, well, you.

Know, I do think terms come and go, right? Like, we are firm believer, foundation of our programs. Here is the authentic piece. And we break that into honesty, integrity and vulnerability. And we do that because those are, I believe, characteristics and traits that stand withstand the test of time. And even though it wasn't whole vulnerability back then, when you speak to the honesty piece of it and the recognition and the self awareness, right? Like, okay, I need some help with this, but is that where your fascination began or is that when you started to recognize the multipliers and the fact that the leaders that make others around them smarter are truly the ones that thrive and make the biggest impact?

I think it mostly started when I looked at the damage being done by diminishing leaders. And when I went and studied it, what I found was that the leaders that were considered diminishers were getting less than half of people's available intelligence. Less than half. And I think because I came to my work as a researcher, having spent a number of years as an operator, an executive at Oracle, I could see like, wow, this is an incredible waste of capital. This is an incredible waste of payroll $. And it also creates a work experience that has a downward spiral on a team. People describe experience is frustrating and exhausting. It actually leads to burnout. It leads to kind of the form of burnout the psychologist would call bored out. Where people are languishing. They're not burnt out because they have too much to do.

They're burnt out because they're not having a big enough impact, working hard, but not really making that kind of impact. And I think I saw that first. And then I saw, well, wait a minute, there seems to be a, an alternative path of leadership. And I think it was my own newness to leadership, my own struggle, me getting it wrong. That same boss who was trying to fire me, he also gave me the worst management advice I had ever been given. But I was so young and impressionable, but that I took it. He said like, okay, you're the manager of this team. And he says, as the leader of the team, your job is to do everything that is new, important and hard. That's what you do. I was young, I didn't know any better. I'm like, okay.

And so I do everything that's new, important and hard. And I'm kind of like a superstar. And I'm there at night when it's dark out. Everyone else has gone home. My to do list has Gotten bigger through the day. I'm wondering, like, why am I the only one here? And I realized I had it exactly backward. I was doing the heavy lifting, and other people had it easy. I'm like, oh, no. Other people aren't failing to do their job. Like, I'm not doing a good job as a leader. My job is to give hard, challenging work to other people and then to help them be successful at it. But, like, I was robbing the team of learning, of visibility, of growth by following kind of what's maybe seen as traditionally good leadership advice.

But, like, all of those things kind of culminate in me seeing, you know what? I think there's a better way to do this, and there is a way where you could have really intelligent people, where everyone gets to be intelligent. And I think that's what I've learned, is people want to come to work and be intelligent and be impactful and do challenging, meaningful work. People want to be difference makers, not position holders in organizations.

Absolutely. Let's talk about the five disciplines of multipliers, and then we'll circle back to the accidental diminisher if we have some time. But the five disciplines of multipliers are so. When you read them, they seem so obvious, but they're not to so many folks. Right. Talk to me about how you got to those five disciplines in how they operate, how they work.

Well, I'm so glad you noticed that they're obvious, because I feel like it's when I know I've done good work is when you synthesize a lot of complexity down to something where people go, well, of course that's how it is.

But like, I feel bad saying that because I'm not trying to diminish the work that you've done. Right. But to your point, you're brilliant because you were able to do that and able to put. Make it so succinct and so understandable and the ability for anybody to grow, grasp.

Well, it is kind of at the core of the work I do. How do you take the complexity out and create a simple structure that actually is like an extensible model and way of thinking about things? So here are the five things we found that multipliers do differently than diminishing leaders. The first is how they manage talent. The diminishers tend to be empire builders in that they acquire talent. They love to hire people, they love to hire talented people. But then those people tend to get underutilized. I always think of it like knickknacks in a Curio cabinet, sort of on display, but not used. The good china sometimes for some folks. Whereas the multipliers, they don't just acquire talent, they utilize talent. And it starts with how they see people.

They see people not for their resumes, the schools they went to, the job description that would limit their contribution. They see people's natural capabilities, what I call their native or natural genius, and then they put it to work. Like, for example, one of the things that I'm pretty good at, like, if I'd pick like what's my native genius, it's probably like taking a lot of complexity and boiling it down to the simple, the obvious. And the leader finds that in people and then puts it to work, often outside of the realm of their job. And it creates an environment that people love to work in, where your unique intelligence is seen and used and challenged and grown and appreciated.

Like, it's a pretty good gig when you get to kind of have, I don't know, a team where everyone's unique brilliance is recognized and used. And you think about the best sports teams, they work that way, you know, they understand everyone's kind of got game in a different way. The second difference is the work climate. They create the culture around them where the diminisher, they tend to be a bit of a tyrant. They create an environment of stress. It's a climate that is tense. And we know what happens to our ability to think and reason and solve hard problems and be at our best when we're under stress. It's compromised.

Yeah, pretty much.

Which is sort of a euphemism for we get dumb around those kind of environments. Whereas the multiplier creates an environment that's not tense, it's intense. I called this discipline the liberator because they give people space to think, to experiment, to speak up, to speak uncomfortable truths. But it's not just a free for all. It's I'm gonna give you space, but in exchange, I want your best thinking. That's why it's an intense environment.

Right? We talk a lot about psychological safety. It's one of the things that we measure here. And psychological safety is so significant. But it doesn't mean soft. Liberator. Intense doesn't mean soft. Right? I mean, it doesn't. Not tense doesn't mean this is a soft culture or a soft environment. It allows people to take risk and to kind of be curious and test those thoughts and those hypothesis out and. And I love that now. How do you. How do you see when someone's liberated, when you first started making these recognitions and you saw the switch go off and the people and they all sudden, they access their intelligence. What did that do to their performance?

Well, we find in general that while the diminishing leaders are getting less than half of people's available intelligence, the multipliers are getting virtually all of it. And you see in some ways, when these leaders recognize their own diminishing tendencies and their own accidental diminishing tendencies and when they can remove those barriers, you get a range of reactions. Sometimes it's instant, which is like, oh wow, my boss just asked me what do I think? Thank you. I've been trying to tell you what I think for a while. Like, okay, here are the risks and here's what I think we should do. And you see that people respond. I love this response when people are like, man, I try to few of those practices and like, wow, my team came alive and it was so good.

Like, and it was easy for them to let go of some of their diminishing patterns and move this. But you also see cases where sometimes a leader has had such a diminishing tendency that you get no real response. Like, my boss just asked me what do I think? I'm not sure I trust that question. And I've actually seen cases where hardened diminishers have really aspired to better leaders who have made massive changes to the way they lead. And I've seen those changes be unaccepted by the people they lead.

If you're an accidental diminisher, and I see this in the work that I do, how do you overcome that? Like, how do you regain that trust back? Right? Like, how do you get them to open up to you even though you're, you're a hardened diminisher right now you want to turn, I mean, you want to change, you want to improve. Your self awareness has gone up. How do you get your folks to not shut down on you, to not, you know, avoid you asking them for their feedback? Where does a switch happen?

I think some of it is, you know, you use the vulnerability term. And I usually in my mind don't think of it as being vulnerable. I think about it as just being honest, being transparent. And a lot of times people want to make changes and improve and grow as leaders in secret. And I just don't recommend people do things in secret. Your surprise party should be done in secret. But you know, I think hard changes should be done in public. And there's something about telling people like that you got this New recognition. And you're working on it. Like accidental diminisher tendencies. Well, I should probably back up and explain what accidental diminisher tendencies are. And I never really got through the rest of the differences in Diminishers vs Multipliers, but there's three more.

But what we found is that most of the diminishing that was happening was not coming from the tyrannical, narcissistic, know it all, bully, micromanaging decision making of leader. Most of the diminishing was coming from the accidental diminisher, which is the well intended leader, has the best intentions, loves their people, cares about the team, trying to be a good leader, reading management books, writing management books, with all the best intentions we can have a diminishing effect. For example, caring so much about the people that you lead that you don't like to see them struggle. So when people are in the hard part of the work, you step in and you help thinking, oh well, camaraderie, collaboration. But you've just signaled to them, I don't think you can do this and I don't think you can do it without me.

Or the leaders bring so much energy. Woo. Like they think they're motivating their team. Like we're done.

Yep.

And like no one else. Like they're actually enervating, not energizing. Or the leader who's so full of ideas that nobody else has to come up with ideas. Or the leader who is protecting people, the protector who's doing the hard work so that other people can kind of work with ease and comfort, which is what I started out doing as a boss. Like do everything that's new, important and hard. Like protect your team from that difficult stuff. But I was also starving them of learning and visibility and growth. There's about nine or 10 ways that we see people accidentally diminish.

What about the optimist too? Right? Because the next characteristic we're going to talk about in terms of the multipliers was the challenger. But then that optimist, like, it's all going to be okay. You know, I always go back to the Stockdale paradox in Good to Great by Jim Collins, a great phenomenal book. What does the optimist do in terms of accidentally diminishing?

Yeah, this is one of my accidental diminisher tendencies. The optimist is the positive, can do leader. Like, we got this, we can do this. And you think, wow, you want leaders who are optimistic. But what happens is when the leader takes the role of optimist, sees the possibilities, sees the victory we got this. What they don't tend to see is the struggle it takes to get there. And when people feel like their struggle isn't recognized, seen, and appreciated, people stop struggling. Or when the leader is so convinced it's going to go right that people feel like there's no room for this to go wrong. Like, you can't really earn a win unless having a loss is a real possibility. Yeah. One of the greatest coaches out there, Larry Gelwicks, is a phenomenal high school rugby coach.

I think at a time he was the most winning coach in America. You know, ended his career with like, 410 wins to, like, nine losses. Nine or 10 losses. And part of what made him a great coach was that he won. But the other part of what made him a great coach is that he allowed the team to lose a few times. Like those losses, you know, of those 10 losses, he would probably tell you probably half of them were losses. He chose. He's like, you know what? The team deserves to lose this one. And we could probably pull it out of the fire. But you know what? We're gonna take the L on this and get the real value of that loss, which is the learning and building the, like, the mindsets and the strength of a true champion.

Team leaders have to recognize that, yeah, no failure is an option when the leader is just purely optimistic without recognizing the struggle, people usually aren't willing to take on challenges. They back away. And that is what we find when it comes to setting direction. This is really the third discipline is the diminisher. Tends to be a know it all. They tell people what to do, which means that, you know, it usually follows a safe course or the strategy follows a historically successful course. Meaning, oh, yeah, that worked for the boss five years ago. How is that boss going to navigate people through terra incognito? How are they going to navigate through uncertainty, through this new digital world of AI? Like, no leader has led their team through that. They've got to figure it out together.

And the best leaders tend to be challengers, not know it alls.

So talk about that because we just talked the Liberator, right? So removing the obstacles and freeing them up. And then there's that challenger part, like pushing them outside their comfort zone, putting a little complexity, introducing a new idea, a new thought, a new obstacle or opportunity, we should say, in their world, how do you do that? How do you do that dance? Like, how do you navigate that from Liberator then to Challenger?

The way I look at them is that the Liberator is about creating an environment where people are willing to do hard things and to be willing to do hard things, you need psychological safety, but you also need stretch. And we find that people tend to do their best work when these two conditions coexist. Safety, stretch. It took me a few years ed to figure this out, but it was years after the book had come out, multipliers, that I was able to step back and go, I think I can sum this all up in two words. Took me 90,000 words, you know, at the first go. But, yeah, you get better at it after a while. I'm like, two words, safety and stretch. And you think about, like, that's what really good leaders do. So understanding people's native genius, that's creating safety.

The liberator's creating psychological safety. But now that you've got that condition where people feel like they belong, that they're seen and appreciated, all of that is to create that safety. And now what the best leaders do is they then stretch. Just a couple days ago, I saw an article come out on Harvard Business Review by Amy Edmondson and one of her colleagues. And I have forgotten her colleague's name, but it was looking at some of the misconceptions of psychological safety. And I think, you know, having become, you know, friends with Amy over the years, I do know that's a frustration for her that some people think psychological safety is just about like, hey, let's be okay with each other. You can say anything, you can be vulnerable, and that is the furthest from the truth. It's about the conditions.

People need to be able to tell the truth and to do hard things. And the best leaders don't just create safety. They also ask people to do hard things. They hold people accountable. They have high expectations. It's why you need that foundation of safety.

That's it. Right? And it goes back to what I said a little bit ago. People sometimes view psych. Safety is like, it's all okay. It's all gonna be okay. To me, when you start to get stagnated. We have growth rings here. Stagnation is one of them. People think, oh, you're just standing still when actually you're retreating. You're going backwards, right? You're not growing, you're diminishing. And so then you go from the challenger now to the debate maker. I'm so curious about this one. How do you, like, how does this one work?

Well, this is about how the leader makes not just decisions, but vital decisions. That is the nuance in this. And what we Find is when it comes to making the kinds of decisions that are going to affect the course of the organization, you know, decisions of consequence, the diminisher tends to retreat inward. They become the decision maker or they turn to an inner circle of one or two trusted people to make those decisions. But those decisions tend to leave other people in the dark and debating like, well, did they think about this? Like did anyone talk about these risks? Like what are we going to do about that? Like how do we move forward? And people want to move forward but they spin and they're stuck.

Whereas the multipliers on the small decisions, they might be dictators or just delegators, like, I don't know, do whatever, doesn't matter, your choice. But on the decisions of consequence, that's where they become the debate maker rather than the debater or the decision maker. And that means they bring people together, they frame the issue like here's the decision we need to make, here are our choices, like are we gonna go pursue this market or that market, are we gonna hire this person or that person? And they then kind of set up the parameters of how that decision's gonna be made. And then they let people weigh in and they don't just. I love some of the debate makers that I was able to study and write about. They don't just kind of open it up to team.

It's not about who they open it up to, it's how that process goes. Like what Lutzia, one of my favorite general manager at Microsoft who would say, okay, I expect this debate to be hard hitting and it wasn't just like, well gee, which market should we pursue, A or B? It's like he would give that guidance out in advance and he'd say we're going to hold the meeting next week and I want you to come prepared with evidence and with an opinion. And what we find is that the decisions where people come in open minded actually end up weaker than the decisions where people come in already sort of not locked into, but based in a point of view. Because that's what it takes to have a hard hitting debate is not just, well, I don't know, what should we do?

Well, maybe we could do this. That sounds great, let's go for it. Shallow decision. But where someone comes in, I think we should pursue market A and here's why. And someone else says, I think we should pursue market B and here's why. And then let's would do the switch. And this was one of my favorite Things to watch is he would say, okay, Sunir, you've been arguing for market A. You now convince us we should do market B. Or, you know what, Ed, you've been looking at this from a talent point of view. I want you to now look at it from a revenue point of view. And it was always unsettling to people at first, but the team became trained in this way of arguing and debating. And so people came in prepared and they weren't upset.

When they're like, wait a minute, I just made a case for A and now I have to argue for B. Like, what is wrong with you? It was kind of.

I love it.

Yeah, it's like, love it. It's kind of like back to middle school where it's like you had to like, maybe argue against something that you actually believed in. And it builds intellectual muscle and it builds what it does. And here's what it does so brilliantly. If you're mixing it up and Ed's now arguing for something he just argued against. And like, Liz is now having to look at it from a sales point of view when she was looking at it from a product point of view earlier. In the end, you make a decision and it's very unclear who won that debate. It churns up and confuses, obfuscates all the things that don't really matter and puts clarity on what does matter, which is here is the collective decision and this is what we're going to rally ourselves behind.

I mean, it speaks a little bit to the reframing piece, but what it really does, it allows you to almost admit to yourself when you go from A to B and you speak it out loud and you own your thought on why B might make more sense than A, I have to think it makes it a little bit more empowering for you to accept if you go with market B, I just made the case. I started making the case for market A. That's what I brought to the debate. But then I sat here and I supported Market B and I emphasized why I think that would work better. You know what? This makes sense. I spoke it out loud. I own that now. There's no going back.

And you're taking your ego out of it and you're warming yourself up to it.

Roaching Effects Summit is not just any leadership conference. It is annual event where high performing leaders come to grow through research, relationships, and real coaching work. It's all happening June 11th and 12th at the beautiful Union Station in Kansas City. And it's packed with dynamic keynotes interactive sessions and one of a kind networking opportunities including a night at the Royals Yankees game. This year's theme, a new Track Forward is powered by data. Now get this from over a half a million coaching interactions showing what high impact leaders are doing to drive performance. Here's what you can expect the latest coaching and leadership research, formal and informal learning opportunities, a supportive community and networking and absolutely just a ton of fun. Now our keynote speakers are not to be missed.

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I guess it was a little before I was writing the book I had I'm a mom, I've got four children and I've always been a working mom. And so I was looking for an easy volunteer assignment at the kids school. And an easy assignment turned out to be a complicated assignment. I signed up to be a discussion leader for the Junior Great Books program in my daughter's third grade class. And I thought, oh, okay, I'm gonna show up, lead a few discussions about books and literature. Like easy peasy. Well, I got sent off to a day of training on how to do this. I assured them I didn't need a day of training. Burgers for third grade. Yeah. And I tried to talk my way out of it, but they're like, no, off to training you go.

So I went to this class and I learned this little technique for leading this discussion. And it's a three part technique and it is absolutely brilliant. What they said is as the dis. So here's how this thing worked. The kids would read a story and these were stories that were deemed as like junior great pieces of literature. So it's warming them up to this art of doing literary analysis. The kids would read a story and then they would come together in a story circle. And as a discussion leader you had Three jobs. Number one, you were to ask the question but not answer it. Two, you were to ask for evidence. And three, you were to ask everyone. So I remember one of the first stories was like, Jack and the Beanstalk.

So you'd be like, why did Jack go up the beanstalk the third time? Well, I think it was because he was greedy. And then you would say, okay, prove it. Like, and I remember at first how fun this was because the kids were kind of terrified. Cause I'm like, prove it. Where do you. Like, where do you have evidence for that? And they're like. And they learned, like, you don't get an opinion without having evidence. And so they would learn to say, well, you know, on page 12, do you see that paragraph where it said Jack's, like, eyes lit up at the idea of gold? Like, that's what makes me think that Jack was greedy. And you're like, good. And then they said, ask everyone.

And they said, you know, make a chart, draw a circle, put everyone's names on it, and then put check marks every time someone speaks. And I'm like, I don't need to do that. I can keep track of that in my head. They really encourage people to do it. And I found that, you know what? There were some kids that weren't speaking up at all, and I needed to call them. And there were some kids who were saying two or three things. And I found that these three simple little techniques for leading debate work. The leader asks a question, but they're not allowed to give the answer. Two, ask for evidence. Nobody gets away with just an opinion without some sort of data, whether it's quantitative or anecdotal data. And three, ask everyone.

And if you do those three simple things, the quality of the debates you have on your team will go up. And, of course, there's an implied technique in this as well, is you don't have the debates spontaneously. You kind of assign the reading. Like, let people read the story and then come in ready with an opinion. Like, don't say, okay, great. What should we do? Market A or market B? Give people time to study that, to develop a point of view. But I learned a lot from that. Easy, not so easy volunteer assignment.

It's so fascinating how you go into, you know, thinking you have a walk. You're able to pull out lesson that is so. I mean, so applicable in every walk of life, every industry, every. See if I can weave this into my marriage. We'll see how that goes. The asking for evidence part might be bad. You know, the More I think about it, but it is just. It's so fascinating. Now, I want to get to the last characteristic because it's so significant, but I have a question for that. I can't wait to ask you. But let's talk about the investor. That characteristic, right. Of the multiplier. Just when you started to realize how significant this was, what stood out to you?

The difference is how they drive for results, execute, get things done. And we find that the diminisher tends to be the micromanager. It was the number one behavior in the research. The diminishing leaders were micromanagers. They get it done, but they get it done themselves, which puts a natural limit on how much a team can get done. And it causes leaders to burn out. I know every time I find myself in micromanaging mode, I'm bitter. Yeah, I'm bitter about something like, oh, I can't believe I'm having to do this, and why aren't people doing it? And I realize it is my failure, not other people's failure. Or when I find myself micromanaging. What we find is that the multipliers, I call it, they're investors because they're giving ownership to other people.

You know, leadership is all about power, really, and it's about how you use power. And what we find is the multipliers. They understand that people can't do their best work without having control and ownership and power. And they're giving that to other people. They're giving other people like John Chambers, when he became the CEO of Cisco, he was hiring a vice president of customer support. And he hires this man named Doug, and he says, doug, when it comes to this part of the business, you get 51% of the vote and 100% of the accountability. And I love this simple practice. Like, it's one thing to say, oh, you own it. We all look to you. But leaders are very quick to take aback when something's going wrong. But what he's saying is like, Doug, you get 51% of the vote, meaning, we trust you.

You own it. You don't get 100%, meaning, take my ideas into consideration, keep us informed, counsel with other people, collaborate, but in the end, we're going to back you on this. And you get 100% of the accountability that comes with it. But this is. People tend to do their best work when they have control and accountability for their work, both on the downside and on the upside. I don't think people can really own the success of their work and their successes unless they Also own their failures.

Thing is accountability, it's an honor. Like, it's not a cuss word. It's not a curse word. It's not. I can't believe we're talking about accountability. To me, it is. And it's beyond an obligation. Like, it's a sense. To me, it's a sense like, I'm doing good work. When you said accountability, the first thing, 51% input, 100% accountability, which also means we back you, we support you, and you will get absolutely 100% of the credit it if in fact, that this is it. But also know you're going to own it if it doesn't work out right as it should be.

And it's part of the brilliance of holding back that 49% because it means that, okay, yeah, you had 51% of the vote. Let's say it goes wrong. Well, there's. There were other people who had input into that. We're part of the 49. I'm your boss, I'm part of that 49, which means we are going to accept some of that blame and learning that, like, it's not like we're putting you out there by yourself, like, you get a hundred percent of the vote, like, I don't care. It's saying, we're in this with you, but you are in the lead position. And so that kind of ownership on the downside is shared, but the credit really goes to the person with 51% of the vote.

I think it's a really wonderful way of staying in it together, but letting people know, this is yours, you own it, we're here to support you, but it's yours.

All the amazing work you did to bring this to the world. What were some of your biggest aha moments, whether they were confirming or whether they were surprises?

Well, I was very surprised that how much more multiplying leaders were getting than diminishers. I was surprised by that. I was surprised that somebody could be a diminisher to one person, but a multiplier to another. I was surprised by that, almost upset by it.

Paul, can you talk about that a little bit?

I first saw this when I was down doing the interviews. This one happened to be at Apple, and I was down at Apple, which is not too far from my home, and drove down there, had a great interview. Someone talked about one of their diminishing leaders. I kind of even knew the person. I'm like, okay, yeah, that makes sense. And then, like, three days later, I'm down doing another interview in a kind of a related organization. And they pointed to that very same person as their multiplier, like, the person around whom they did their best work. And I'm like, well, I guess this research is good for nothing. Like, but it took me a while to figure out how that dynamic plays out. Like, how somebody could have a diminishing effect one person, but a multiplying effect on another.

Yeah, like, how is that? I have my guesses, but I'm fascinated by that.

Well, having a multiplying effect comes most easily with people who are like us, who think like us, who work like us. And sometimes when there are really different cognitive styles, sometimes it's hard. Like, for case in point, Myers Briggs, I'm a pretty big J on the, you know, the Myers Briggs scale, the judging, like, I like deadlines and organized. And when I work with people who are of the perceiving side of that spectrum, it's pretty easy for me to go, okay, yeah, you're kind of lovely and you're fun and you're living in the moment, but, like, are you gonna get this done by Friday at 2 o'? Clock? Cause it doesn't look to me like you are. It doesn't look to me like you are concerned about our deadline at Friday at 2 o'. Clock. I'm starting to think you don't get it.

But people who are like me, who are like, oh, Liz, like, I'm gonna have this to Friday at 1 o'. Clock. I'm like, I like working with you. And sometimes the differences in how we approach work, how we think, can end up causing us to be a multiplier to one and a diminisher to another. Sometimes it's like our own personal history. Like, let's say you've kind of were raised in a really, like, uber critical environment, and a boss gives you a little bit of coaching, a little bit of, like, criticism, and it can be wounding for one person, where for others they're like, oh, yeah, I know what to do with that. Or I've been raised in sort of like a safer environment. And I mean raised not just in our homes, but how we're raised professionally.

And so that can cause the same leader's action to be perceived as more diminishing to one person.

Does ego come into play at all? And here's what I mean by this. I'm thinking about some very specific things. I know I can help this person, and they want to be helped. And this person I'm leading. Our career has been a little bit parallel. I Just happen not to be. I feel threatened. These are maybe some things that they're actually better. So I'm going to pull the reins in a little bit. Maybe not intentionally, maybe not intentionally, but I am going to diminish what they are doing. Does ego come into play at all?

I think so. We see kind of a thread and a theme of ego going throughout many of the diminishing leaders and tendencies. And sometimes it's like an over inflated ego. Sometimes it's like true narcissism, clinical narcissism, Sometimes it's insecurity. I actually, I'm way more fearful of the insecure leader than I am in the overly secure leader. I'm loathe to work for someone who's not sure that they deserve to be in that role or that they're not sure that they can trust people. Like, I want to work for someone who's like, I'm smart, I'm talented, I get it, I deserve to be here and I'm now over it. And so I can spend my time and energy thinking about how to utilize other people's intelligence. So yeah, ego can certainly play into it. And sometimes it's one of the things. One of the.

Here's another surprise I had in this research. The structure of the research was I asked people to identify leaders who had two, you know, different effects on them. And then I asked them about the behavior of those leaders, the presumed mindset of those leaders, what they seem to think and assume about other people and situations. And then the effect that those leaders had. And I thought that people would very quickly rattle off, oh yeah, I could tell you about that leader's behavior. Like even people that they worked for years ago, oh, they did this, this and this. And then I thought people would struggle to describe the mindsets of their diminishing leaders or their multiplying leaders. That was my theory. Turned out I was exactly wrong about that. People struggled to remember the behavior of their leaders.

They're like, well, let me see, what did they do? Well, they talked a lot or they were critical. But when I asked them what did they believe to be true, like get inside their head like this, Boom. People, people knew. And here's the thing I learned. We think the assumptions we have about other people, this person's talented, this person's going to let me down. You know, we think that there's secret thoughts in our mind. But what I learned is that people can. People know what you're thinking about them. And you can have two people on your Team, let's say you give the same assignment to two different people, and with one person you're like, okay, they're going to nail it. Let me give them some basic instructions. And then let's give them some space.

And the other person, you're explaining it the same way, and you're like, I think they're going to screw this up. Oh, I don't think. I think they're going to procrastinate it. I think they're going to misunderstand and, like, those assumptions kind of spill out. They may not come out in our words, but they come out in. I don't know if it's body language, but I think people know when we think they're going to disappoint us. And it creates a diminishing cycle. And I think that's why one of the reasons why someone can be a multiplier to one and a diminisher to another, it might have something to do with the assumptions being held by the leader about those two different people.

A lot about being the face and voice that your team needs to see and hear. When you feel like as a leader that you're about to let someone down or that you're. You're quite going to deliver what you just explained, it just talks into that so much. So. So right now there's a listener sitting there saying, gosh, I see where I'm at. I know how I identify as a diminisher, that's on me. But I want to make the shift. I want to become a multiplier. I want to become. I want to be a difference maker. How do they do that? How do they change courses from where they're at now to becoming a multiplier, one who makes others around them smarter?

Well, I think there's the hard way and then there's the easy way. The hard way is to really get in touch with your diminishing tendencies. Understand your accidental diminishing tendencies. There's a little quiz you can take on the websites thewisemangroup.com and if you go over to multipliers, there's a place you can look at that little quiz. And then there's a whole set of multiplier practices. And that quiz will say, hey, based on these diminishing tendencies, try A, B and C. Well, you can do that, and it works pretty well. But that's the hard way. I'm gonna give you the easy way. This is the way to cheat some of your own development as a leader. Accelerate that. And that is to just talk so openly about your accidental diminisher tendencies that people will correct it in real time. Here's what I mean by that.

If everyone knows that I'm a rescuer, that I'm kind of like this big hearted rescuer and somebody is struggling with a deadline or it's the 11th hour and I step in and I'm like, hey, can I help? It doesn't require any big conversations, it doesn't require a lot of coaching. It doesn't require a lot of radical candor. All allows someone to do who's about to be rescued by an overbearing, well intended boss. It just allows them to say, I've got it, don't worry, like, I'm gonna get this done. Like, thank you, but no thank you. Like, the help I need right now is a little less help, actually. And what we find is like, you know, I'm an idea fountain. It's one of my accidental diminisher tendencies. Everyone on my team knows this. They all tease me about it.

And when I call up someone and I'm all buzzed up about a new idea for a new program or a new research project and I'm like pitching it, they listen and they're kind of play with me and excited and then they say, liz, do you want us to stop the other things we're doing and work on this or are you having one of your idea parties right now? It's an idea party and like, they'll have fun with me and then they'll go back to doing what they're supposed to be doing. And so it doesn't require massive levels of self awareness and behavior change. It just creates the honesty and openness that the people who care the most about how good of a leader you are can help you be a good leader because they will help you.

Now, before I ask you the last question, I want to be respectful of your time. You've been so gracious. Where. And you just mentioned it and we'll put it in the show notes and we'll put it on social media. Where can folks inside of the athletics of business community make Liz Wiseman part of the world? Where can they find you? What website can they go to? Where can they get the books? Just tell us everything and we again, we'll have everything in the show notes as well.

Thewisemangroup.com is a good starting place. And in there you can learn a little bit about what our research and development firm does. But there's the pointers to the books. So there's a place where you can go to the Multipliers book and get a bunch of tools and discussion guides and quizzes and such. There's places you can find me on social media. I'm pretty easy to find on LinkedIn. You could follow me there. I'm on Instagram. I'm by Liz Wiseman really focuses on the work of the books. I think there's a Facebook group, but I'm not really hard to find on social media. But I think those are. And the books are available kind of anywhere.

And we'll put links for the books, we'll put links for the website. Just wanted to put that out there. So, speaking of books, what is the most recent book that you have read that you enjoyed thoroughly, that we can share with everybody? Or what's a book? Or I'll give you an out on this one. Right. What's a book that's made a huge impact on you?

Oh, well, I've just almost Done with Everything is Tuberculosis by John Green. And that's his newest book, and it's so delightful. I love everything he writes. But let me see, One that probably is more in the range of what we're talking about here would be what happened to you? This is a book by Oprah Winfrey and Dr. Bruce Perry, if I think I've got that right. And they look at the effects of childhood trauma. And it's not an area where I have expertise. But, ma', am, was it a really insightful way to understand, like, how traumatic experiences and even small traumatic experiences that people have in their youth affect how they show up later in life? And I love the book because it takes this perspective of rather than what's wrong with you, what happened to you?

And it's one of the things that has really helped me. I read the book recently, but this mindset has helped me for years. Whereas when I encounter diminishing leaders, including people who are diminishing me, like bosses I have or clients that are a little too tightly wound on something, instead of saying like, ugh, what is wrong with you? Or an exclamation point, not a question mark after that, I tend to ask myself, like, who did this to you? Like, where did you learn how to lead this way and work this way and what happened in your career that made this the norm for you? And it gives me more empathy and helps me to be a better coach when I really understand that a lot of this is a function of our circumstance.

Thank you so much for sharing it, Liz. Thank you for being so gracious with your time today. This was just a ton of fun.

Well, it's good talking to you. And I love the work that you're doing. And keep coaching.

People appreciate you. We're gonna have to have you back soon, okay? Thank you for listening to the athletics of business. Be sure to give us a rating and review so we know how we're doing. For more information about the show, visit theathleticsofbusiness. Com. Now get out there. Think, act and execute at the highest level to unleash your greatness.