688: Dr. Henry Cloud - The Difference Between a Dream & a Vision, Why Revenue Is Not a Goal, the 5-Step Model for Achieving Any Goal, and Why the Highest Performers Seek the Most Coaching

In the meantime, I have sent it to a few authors who I deeply admire and look up to.

“One of them is Jack Carr, the incredible Navy SEAL who's also written a number of New”

York Times best sellers, and this is what Jack said about the price of becoming. The price of becoming is a clear eyed look at transformation and the cost that comes with it. No hype, no shortcuts, just the truth about change and the discipline required to sustain it. This is a must-read if you are serious about doing work, that matters. Buy it, read it, then go forth and crush. Again, that's from Jack Carr. United States Navy SEAL

a number one New York Times best selling author. I would love if you would pre-order the price of becoming right now. You can do it at learningliter.com or go straight to Amazon in order the price of becoming. Well, the learningliter show presented by Insight Global, I am your host Ryan Hawke. Thank you so much for being here. Go to learningliter.com for show notes of this and all podcast episode. Let's go to learningliter.com. Now, onto the night's featured leader, it's Dr. Henry Cloud,

a clinical psychologist and bestselling author of Boundaries. This is Harry Endings, integrity and trust his newest is called your desired future. Henry has spent the past few decades in the room with some of the most demanding CEOs and leadership teams in the world. During our conversation, we discussed why most leaders are operating, like Henry's dog, thinly. They're working hard,

doing what they've always done, never stopping to ask though if any of it is actually getting them

to where they want to be. Then he shares the difference between a dream and a vision, and why a revenue target is one of the worst vision statements a leader can have. And then Henry shares what the best leaders he's worked with all have in common and why the highest performers are always the ones most eager to seek out coaching. So good, ladies and gentlemen, please enjoy my conversation with Dr. Henry Cloud. Let's start with your daughter Lucy.

You think through the acknowledgement section of your new book for her early adoption of the model to publish her song Crash and Learn? Can you tell me that story as well as what

“the model is and then I think we're going to dive a little bit deeper? Well, the model itself,”

a long time ago, you know, working with high performers in a lot of fields and leaders and executive teams, I'd go to an executive team and say, okay, you guys are leading this company, you're the leaders, what is leadership? I give my three by five card now asking right down, what is leadership? And I would get eight different answers. And all of them would be true, but what I started to feel the real need for a number of years ago was to be able to have a

simple model that kind of factor-analyze the essence of what leaders have to do to move something from here to there, that would be helpful, have a little GPS for that. And so did a factor analysis of best circuit, all the leadership stuff and on and on and on and on and on and along with the short of it is developed this model and have been using it with leaders and companies for a long time. Lucy, our youngest, who, you know, I mean, she's been a singer such as three

years old, you know, and she would always start writing, have a little book, she was writing

writing songs. Then one morning, she comes into the kitchen and she'd be about 16 at this time. And she said, "Dad, how do people become singer-songwriters?" I said, "Oh!" I said, "What you want to do?" I mean, I kind of knew it, but she never had stated it like.

“She said, "Yeah, that's what I want to do." I said, "Well, Lucy, I got the path for you. I went out,”

the garage, I brought him my whiteboard and she rolls her eyes and goes, "Here's another psychology, just the lifeless." I said, "All right, I'm going to give you the way it happens." First thing I put up there, you got to know what you want, you got to know it clearly, and we call that a vision, what's your vision? I mean, it was unbelievable. It was so clear and compelling that we did not spend any time on that. I mean, she even named her for people who

are doing exactly what she wanted to do. I said, "All right, so the second thing is,

engaging the talent that you're going to need to get you there, and she looks at me, and she goes,

I'm talking about the talent that you've got to bring around you to become a singer-songwriter.

“'Cause no one had a saying and write songs, it's not all you're going to need to get you there.”

And she said, "Oh, and she instantly got it." She said, "Oh, I need a new guitar teacher." I said, "Why?" She said, "Because I've gone as far as I can go with that. I mean, I have to look up stuff on YouTube, learn chords, we just keep doing the same thing over and over and I said, "You got it." And so did we start talking about that. I said, "What do you think you need?" She said, "Well, I need to do some auditions." I said, "All right, well, let's find some people,

know how to get you and play houses and all that." And she says, "And I don't know how to record. I mean, really, or produce." And this is where she got fortunate. Kevin Jonas, senior producer, Jonas Brothers, who's sons, heard her saying, and he said, "Oh, my gosh, haven't heard that since Tim Hill and Mom, I want to manage her." And so she brought those to the point being that she put her

team together with the right talent. All right, well, the third thing is how you get there,

how are you going to win? That's the strategy piece and the strategy has a plan. So we developed the strategy in the plan. And then next thing you're going to notice, how do you know you're working the plan and you're getting there? It's called measurement and accountability. So what are we going to measure and how are we going to hold everybody in you accountable to that? And then when you find things, when you measure things and they're not right, you got to quickly fix and adapt them. So

that's kind of the model Ryan and long story short. There was only a couple of years later that she published a song called Crash and Learn that got bought by CBS Television and the CW Network and featured Spotify and Apple Music and new artists to watch. And she's kind of on the path. But the lesson in there is the lesson that I find for all of us really. We tend to do things in the way that we're wired and we'll put our best efforts and do everything we know to do.

But we tend to create departments and companies and businesses in our own image. So what that means is, of the components that must be present, we're going to be good at two, maybe three of them, but we still have to make sure the others are happening. And that's a lot of when you get in the depth of how this works. And everybody has heard those components before. There's nothing new about the components, but what the book does is I go into the neuroscience

and the anatomy and the physiology and the model of the human body of how it's wired to get anything from here to there. And when you start looking at that and what your brain actually does to accomplish a goal, it is unbelievably instructive. And that's kind of where the book goes.

“We all know this component, but why does some of them fail and why does some of them not fail?”

Another family member that you talk about, you said, you provided the perfect metaphorical guide for this book, keep doing what you do so well. And that is Spindley. Who's Spindley?

Yeah. So, I've always loved big working breeds of at five German chepers and

raw wilder. And now we have Finley, our doberman, what I love about them, you know, I love training them. I've got trained to train them, right? So, I love dark training. And there are lot easier in people, by the way. But the thing that Finley showed me was, you know, Finley, the great thing about these big working breeds, first of all, they're lovers. We call Finley Velcro. I mean, she's just gotta be like that. I'll love you. But they're wired

to do work and they're wired to do a mission and they're wired to do a task. So, the FedEx guy or somebody comes up front door and I'm telling you, run, you don't want to be that guy and unless I do her a secure because she does her job. She runs her hat. And then we go up and if it's friend, we say, okay, Finley or a year's go back, she'll lick your face off. But if it's a stranger,

“she'll stay there and sit. But here's the thing. I've never seen her run to the front door and”

bark and then stop and say to herself, I wonder if that was helpful. Did I bark the right amount? Did I bark at the right time? And here's the bigger question that applies to what all this is about.

I've never heard Finley say, I wonder if that barking will help me get to where I want to be on

Thursday. That capacity is reserved for the human species. You know, governments do it with their wire to do and trying to do and they run on that wiring, well, we run on that wiring as well

a colored desired future state that does not exist. And then organize the chain of activities and expenditure of effort and energy in order to bring that result to about. And so that's the

difference between us and Finley. It's great as she is. She will never sit in the living room and

go, you know, Thursday. I'd really like to go to a butcher shop, you know, and get some of that steak before anybody else has chewed on it. And so that's my vision. I'm going to figure out how to get that shit into that. She just goes like she's wired. But we can do that. Did you see that video recently

“of Mark Andreessen talking about reflection and being a reflective person by chance?”

I think I did see a clip of that. So, I mean, without getting into all of it, essentially he's stating that the people who are leaving a dent in the world are just kind of plowing forward. They're getting after it. They're doing work. They rarely look back. They don't reflect. They just go. And

I may be butchering part of it. But that's essentially the gist of it. He got a ton of push back. And I

think he even kind of fought back against the push back. And it's like, just go, they're busy thinking we're busy doing that type of thing. In like most things in life, I'm guessing the ones who leave a dent. It's a combination of both. They're both reflective and their doers. But since you are a thoughtful dude and you've written this about vision and you've left a very positive dent in the

“world and you're still kind of in the in the prime of your career. What do you think about that?”

That reflection and doing and impacting others in a positive way and his kind of mindset of just go and do, just go and do, forget about the past, just move forward. What do you think? Well, I think it's one of the hallmarks of the greatest performers. Had the opportunity to do an interview with Tony Blair when he was a prime minister. And he told me that while he was prime minister, a half a day, a week, a half a day.

He would go by himself and sit next to a pond and just think half a day a week. This dude's having a little busy. Warren Buffett, I think said that an hour and a half a day he sits at his desk and stares out the window. Now, we can get into the science of that. I'll give it another example. One of my golfing heroes and as is everybody's, our heart goes out to right now. He's got some strongest, but when Tiger hit the tour, I mean, he was what 20 years old, maybe 21, his first effort

as a professional to play in a major. He plays in the masters. Nobody ever even qualifies that earlier. He did. Nobody ever makes the cut if they do. They're not there on the weekend. Not only does he qualify, make the cut. He wins the masters and not only did he win any one about like 14 shots. All right. The very next week, I think it was the next week, he calls a coach.

Swing coach and he says, I will never achieve my goal. If I know correct some things that we're

going on all week, if I don't get better in a certain area. Really, I think it had to do his hip speed or something like that. And he said a gustor was for giving with his life airways. But the point is the capacity to sit and observe one's ways. Sit and observe the way that one's ways are or not giving us to where we want to go. That's the essence of what psychologists call an observing ego. I mean, you know, you look at all the emotional intelligence stuff and what's number one,

awareness of self and awareness of other. That's not doing, that's for flexion. And we have to look back for two reasons. There's some stuff we want to take forward. I mean, some stuff worked, but getting to the essence of what was it in that context that worked that applies here. And there was some stuff that didn't work or maybe some stuff that doesn't apply here. And that reflective process, what we want to take forward is DNA and we don't want to let the mutations go forward.

And so the observing ego, the eye above the eyes, I would do that. It's very, very, very important. There's not, you know, about doers, doers, doers, doers. I don't know what the pushback was about.

“I didn't hear it. But the worst thing you can do is hit the accelerator harder when you're going”

down the wrong road and you don't even know where you're going. Your brain doesn't do that. Your brain hosts where it's going and it's able to guide that. The pushback was from the, the statement is just false. I mean, that to say that history's greatest entrepreneurs or leaders or people who who've left the dent in the world,

And that just is a, it's just false. So I mean, rightfully, there's pushback, because it wasn't really an opinion. It was someone claiming to state of fact. And that fact is sometimes people make things up, I guess. There's a reason we have a phrase ready, aim, fire. Yeah. And people that are

“fire ready, aim, drive everybody crazy and impulsive. Sometimes that works though, doesn't it?”

Well, of course it works sometimes. But I tell you what, when it works, it's because of deeply ingrained pattern recognition, it has become intuitive. It feels like to you. And it's automatic. But there was a past that created that. Yeah. Okay. I want to get into vision. An example you write about the book, what you call the single worst vision statement you ever heard a CEO who said the vision was to hit. Yeah. I've actually worked with the leader like this. It wasn't about

the leader. But this was very, this is going to later as he could be. Well, yes, that's for sure. You said this specific CEO, they set a vision to hit a specific revenue number. And there are other leaders who do this, where they're like, this is what we're going to do at

by this point. We're going to be a 10 billion or whatever. Well, there's another wrong with a goal.

“Yeah. There's another wrong with a metric. Yeah. Yeah. So why is that a bad vision statement?”

Well, I asked the whole team. I said, what's your vision for the company? They said, we want to be a $50 million company. And I said, that may be one of the worst vision statements I've ever heard because it provides no clarity of what that company is going to be doing as important as that, it provides no clarity of what's going to be different for whom. And that's a big deal in a vision. And Martin Luther King said, I see a day

when a man has judged by the quality of character and not the color of this skin. I mean, that tells us where to go. And what's going to look like? And it starts and when your body says, I'm here and I want to be over the air, there's a lot of clarity to what that means. But what your brain actually does is as soon as the vision is clear, it goes to work and activating these other systems of the path that are going to help you get there. A vision

just doesn't sit by itself. It starts working right then. And another thing it does,

$50 million company, is that compelling enough to for some I give their life to?

Changing civil rights, that's compelling enough to suffer for to get up in the morning, to delay gratification and a result that is so rich, that's very different than $50 billion.

“I mean, for some people, you know, in the ones that see life is all about money,”

they're going to get into the ladders when it gets their own building. But it doesn't get the brain and the organization and the people beginning to get organized to get where you want to go. Nor does it provide the fuel. So let's say you're working with a leader and their Henry my vision is filling the blank and it's a dollar amount, a revenue target. What do you say? What questions do you ask? How do you help them get to a more compelling vision statement? I would want to get

them to a place where whatever they came up with, it clearly defined a desired future state that did something specific, it was going to make something different for whoever they're trying to make a different floor. And I would begin to get them into a compelling kind of nature of that

and begin or what what compels you about $50 million and does that compel the guy on the factory

floor? Does that compel your customers? Is that compel your investors? And there's a whole section of the book on what desire actually begins to do to the system. And even the neurobiological of activation of learning modes and a bunch of other things that simply the constructed desire does. And we got to get to how desirable this really is. And that can be positive or negative. We got a great desire to end something negative or a great desire for something impulsive. So

it would go on. Now the thing about the $50 million box, I go, you know what, that may be a great metric to tell us if we're getting there or not in one dimension. I'm not against smart goals. I mean, that's sort of like a smart goal, right? But having a thermometer or, you know, a tackometer, doesn't tell you whether or not you're going to be the Olympian that you want to be

in the US. And they're the ones that go fix the big box stores when they break, you know,

if you're in Oklahoma and August and your air conditioner goes down, that's a bad day because

“customers even people can't work. So that's what they do. So we're doing an off-site with their service”

people. And I gave them the question, when you go on a service call, what's your vision for that call? And they say, "Well, we're going to get it up at running." And I said, "Come on, guys. We do better than that." And all the stuff we just talked about. By the end of our work, their vision for a service call was, "When we get done, Home Depot or Target or wherever it is, they are going to be glad their air conditioner broke down. So they got to deal with us." And that's a little different path.

Certainly it includes the things that are going to be working, but it's way more than that. What that led to was, he's talking about customer retention. Well, the managers of stores, when they move over to the other brand or the competitor, they don't move into x-rizee company and call their air conditioner guy. They go back and call the one that they love and move them to a new company. I mean, you're getting into a lot of really, really stuff that matters.

Man, that reminds me of Joe Gerard. Have you ever heard of Joe Gerard? Probably not. Do you know who Joe Gerard is? The car sales guy? Okay, okay. Maybe he said again in a spoke of world records for like most car sold in a day, a week, a year,

whatever. And here's what made him good. It's exactly what you just talked about.

Joe will get down selling a car and he'll say, "Hey, I hope you get a lemon." And they go, "What?" He goes, "I hope you get a lemon." And it lemons a bad car, right? Card doesn't work. And they go, "What, Joe, what are you talking about? Why would you up? I get a bad car?" And he goes, "Because then I get a chance to show off." I'm going to go so above and beyond for you if the thing doesn't go right. And after I go so above

and beyond for you to fix it and to make it right and to get you in the right car, you're going to tell all your friends and then they're going to tell all their friends and they're

“going to tell all their friends and that's why I'm the greatest car salesman who ever lived.”

And so again, that there's a lot more of that story, but my point is you like working with him got to them to an actual real vision as opposed to just saying, "Well, when it breaks, we fix it." Right? Like there's so much more compelling to that. And so I'm curious, what's that process like for, if you're going to work with any leader of something that's basic of, well, we just fix the air conditioner when it's broken to something that's a grander, bigger vision. Like how do we

get there? What are the steps we can take so all of us could implement a vision statement like that for whatever it is that we do for work? Well, one of them is to get deep in your own heart. Why are you doing this? Because one of the things we notice, you know, all the research is shown is purpose really loads on not only thriving but on performance. And if people aren't sensing a higher purpose for what they're doing, that their actual work loads on and moves the need

long, then the vision is less than optimal. In the book I tell a story about a researcher that went in to visit a friend who was in a coma and the love of a clock at night and I see you and obviously he's in a coma, he just won't sit there and pray for him and just kind of, you know, be there. And when he was there, the night janitor comes in and he's got this big bag with him.

First of all, he kind of sweeps up but then he goes this bag and he pulls out a painting,

you know, a print and puts it over here on the wall and he pulls out a vase with some

“flowers and they straighten up and they're all this and the research goes, what are you doing?”

Because he's a janitor and he's doing all the stuff. He said, what are you doing? He said, oh, what I do here is very important. I'm helping Mr. Jones get well. He said, oh, how are you doing that? And he said, well, what the scientist tells is, when he wakes up, if he notices a bright and inviting and warm and clean and beautiful environment, it stimulates his body to heal faster. And when the doctors and nurses are in here working and making decisions, the environment around

them really makes their brains work better. See what I do here is very important. I'm helping Mr. Jones get well. That's bigger than my vision is to have a clean hospital. That's so cool, man. Or look at our buddy, Will Guderra. Yeah, what about him? Well, you know, he had

don't know what number they're going to be. You know, he started with the last and he gets called

first, which was last. And he's sitting there going, I'm in the top 50 restaurants in the world.

But how do you get to number one? And then he had a realization. Now, this is where vision comes in to play. He knew that every one of those 50, their food is not going to be a big differentiator. I mean, every one of those, their food is the best in the world. How do you get one micro calorie better than, and who's going to notice that? So he said, how can we win? He came up with something is everybody knows if you've read the book. And if you hadn't read it,

“you should. We're going to have unreasonable hospitality. And so then it's, you go through the”

sale. You know, there was a strategy and a team and all that to get there. So what he did was he created a strategy and a position. I think called the Dreammaker and the Dreammaker a few people would be in the restaurant. This is love and Madison. I think it was name of it in New York. And the Dreammaker was on call. Okay. The servers, when they're around the table, they would listen to conversation. And if they heard something from the guests, that they could

ladder a loft to the Dreammaker to go turn into an unforgettable moment, emotionally for them. The Dreammaker would go do it. Here's an example. This couple was eating there and they said, I can't believe the flag got canceled. We're not going to, and they started talking to it. What

“happened? Well, but we were going to the heatier somewhere, the Caribbean saved up at its beach”

vacation and you know, it's our anniversary around another particular spot. But they're headed to this beach. Passes it off to the Dreammaker. The Dreammaker goes out, gets bags of sand. They got a special room over here. They're when being used. Makes the whole thing into a beach, brought in some palm trees, blew up air swimming pool, a couple of beach shares, took them in there, it served in their dinner.

They're never going to forget that. That's a different vision than, you know, we want to have

great fit. Yeah. How would you apply that for, let's say somebody Henry is a SVP of whatever at a huge company in America. And they got really aggressive goals in a very demanding CEO. And they're really money focused. Hit the goal, hit the goal, man. We got to grow x percent, whatever. No, they're wrong with that. Right. Right. A degree. I've been in an environment for that person who's facing that pressure and thinking about that and trying to hit that and hire good people.

How would you help them cast a vision, create a vision that's inspiring for their people to help exceed their goals at or being set by the the CEO of the company? One of the things that I would

want them to do is I wrote a book called Trust. Now trust fuels investment. And the first

big dynamic in trust is we trust somebody and we engage and we invest in people that we feel like understand us. Oh, my VP gets me. We're in this circumstance. We got to hit these goals all this. He understands what that's like for me and what I got to deliver and the pressures I'm

“under and all this. So the first thing, first thing I would say to that person is I think you need”

to really work on the your team who's got to deliver all this stuff for you and for them for the CEO who's demanding. You got to develop deep trust because you're taking them into a war and they got to follow the platoon leader into that war and they've got to have deep trust with you and they will follow you. So the first thing I would do with that person is say, you know, we get this vision and goal or whatever it is. But his micro vision for that team is I'm going to develop a deep deep

sense of trust and let them know and have them experience that I am here to help them thrive in reaching this goal. And they facto you're already serving the big goal when you do that. So you know, vision can die without without without the plan or without people. But it is so important. And a lot of times a vision statement is just a placard on a wall. It has nothing to do with the real stuff that's going to make it happen. One of the other elements of it is accountability,

which is a part of this to keep the playing going. You write about Alan Milali's weekly 7 a.m.

worked from an accountability perspective? You know, I go through a lot of the science of how your your brain works and how people's brains work and how we get from here to there. Leaders have to lead people in a way in which their brains can follow them. And that's a big deal. So when you talk about measurement and accountability, the human brain, if I say, I'm going to, you know, I'm sitting here and I want to go over there. It's already begun to figure out the strategy and the plan to get there.

But it's also developed a measurement and accountability system. You don't even realize this, but if something you've done before like that or your brain knows how to do, it's already said,

you know, that should take about 15 steps and a step every second and on this direction and you

start to walk. Well, what if you're distracted and your phone rings and you stop for a say and you really got to get over there by a certain time and you stop at some point your brains are going,

“hey, dude, you got to get moving and you get your back on try. Think of an airline pilot, okay?”

They have a vision and we're going to fly from LA to New York. The next thing they do is they engage the talent that's going to help them get there. So they've got the copilot and the fuel people in all that. And then they got the strategy and the plan. They have a flight plan. How are you going to get there? We're going to find airplane, but what's the plan? Well, certain heading, certain speed,

certain altitude. Then you get to the measurement and accountability. A pilot would never

take off without their measurement and accountability relationships. Because the wrong view of accountability is looking back to spank somebody for what they didn't do. The right view of accountability is a tool to make sure we reach our destination. So that pilot takes off and the first thing that happens in that is her first accountability relationships are instrument panels. What's we at 40,000 feet? She gives it beep beep. You're at 38,000. And she knows I'm burning too much fuel.

I've got to get up to 40,000. And she quickly fixes what the measurement and accountability systems told her. So if you go back to Malawi, what he did was he had all of the beepies and the people they had the different components of what they're doing on a red yellow green system every week they had to go around the table and they talked about specific project and they would have to give it a red yellow or green. And if it's green, we're on track, every next time. If it's yellow,

okay, so what are the issues? And what he did in accountability is a big, you know, it sits on some stuff. And part of that is real psychological safety that it is an environment where we want you to tell us the problems. And we're here to help you solve them, not shame me, thank you fire you or whatever it is. It's like in an operating room, you know, if a nurse notices a reading that's all for an instrument's off, to hold the team account, oh, we didn't do this or we're doing

this or that's wrong. That's to get to the goal. It's not to make anybody feel bad. And so what

“he did was he developed that system. I think the way he tells the story is we first went in there,”

you know, they're imaging money and everything's bad and all this. He goes around and they tell everybody's holding up green. He's going, how can you be holding up green when here's the reality of here. He said basically, I need some reality in here. And I think one guy came out and said, "I was probably red." And he asked the guy to sit next to him to move and brought the guy and said, "We got problems." He said, "You said next to me." And it's a great model of your brain's

accountability is not afraid of data and it's not going to flip into an autoimmune disease where it starts eating the body because it doesn't like what the body is doing. Your accountability system is the immune function of your body. And this is why the body is a model for this is so unbelievable. Right, if I've got an infection, what happens? Well, the immune system first sends out what's called a marker cell and it names that infection and it gives the genetic coding of it

in the construction of it. So the rest of the body knows what the problem is. And then it says the

“T-cells to contain it. We're going to let this spread. That's what accountability does but”

an autoimmune disease is the body. We don't want your accountability systems to be eating people. We want your accountability systems to be eating people. Thank you for the help.

You told me last time we talked years ago. I've probably repeated a thousand times

“so it's a little years since then. You get what you create or what you allow.”

I just love to go back to that again, because it's such a useful phrase. As a leader, you're going to get what you create or what you allow, especially when it comes to accountability. And I found that average to decent leaders, they allow things that then lowers their standards.

And then their eventual results follow, right? We'll talk about leading and lagging in a second

because that you also write about that in this book. But can you just go more back on that classic line I learned from you a long time ago as a leader, you're going to get what you create or what you allow? Yeah, it came from a conversation. I was having the CEO of a global entity that everyone would know. And there were some issues in his team and sort of the culture

“of the team in the morale and some division in Baba Baba. And so I said, why is that? And he said,”

well, you know, because I brought in so and so from another company and, you know, he had some I said, why is that? And he said, well, you know, then he started to net sort of spread and they

created, you know, the meeting after me. I said, why is that? And every time he would give me a reason,

I'd say, well, why is that? He probably looks at me and he said the best line. He goes, I guess I am ridiculously in charge, aren't I? I said, yeah, if what's going on in your team in the morale, either you're creating it or you're allowing it to exist. When you talk about leadership, if you're the one who's actually in charge, you're ridiculously in charge. And this gets back to when I saw him at the whole model here. And I said, none of us are good at all

five. You know, the strength movement showed us that. But that doesn't mean that all five aren't necessary. Your lungs can't pump blood. I mean, the body has different gifts. But your prefrontal cortex has a system to make sure they're all doing their job and they're all present. So if you go back to the accountability, and you said, people allowed things to go in one. And I've seen this many times, you know, great visionaries, and they're great in engaging talent, or they may be great strategies.

But what if they're conflict avoid it? What happens to the accountability system? They avoid it. Or what if they're overly jealous about accountability? Maybe they should have been an attorney and not a CEO. You know, they want to litigate everything. And they're rushing there and, you know, blow everything up. That accountability system is broken. They're not good at it. And so it's very important. If we would just look at these five things, am I every day? Is it clear why we're here

and what we're doing? Even about a sub-goal, clear and compelling desired future. What's going to look like by when? Have I brought the right talent to what it is I'm trying to do? Are we clear about the strategy? And the plan that has who does what by when the activities that drive the strategy and move the needle on that? And are we measuring those activities? To answer the question, am I doing what I said I was going to do? Are we doing what we said we're

going to do? Are you doing what you said you were going to do? If not, then why not? Let's do a root cause analysis and figure out why not? And then fix it. Because what accountability

“does is it answers two really important questions. Did we do what we said we were going to do?”

That's what measurement does. And you've got to be measuring activities probably more so than even goals. The goal is a lagging indicator. It's after it's over, you know, it's too late. measuring activities, did we do this week? What we said we're going to do in the

activities and move the needle. If the answer is no, what most leaders do is, okay, guys, you

got to do better. You got to go do that, you know, they never asked the question, why not? A lot of times. Because what you might find, they don't have the tools I need, or you've given them competing goals or competing activities, or, or, or, or, or, you know, this could be a leadership, probably. That's a root cause analysis. Or it may be a performance from. You may, you may have some, they need it here, you know, get them do better next week and we'll let you do that, but if we don't,

you know, we're going to present some I can. But you got to know why didn't happen.

then you got to ask a second question. If we did, did we get the result that we expected?

“If the answer to that is yes, pour on the gas, baby. I mean, this is working. If you're in a”

three to one return on ad spend, let's spend more money, right? It's working.

But if the answer is, we executed perfectly and we didn't get the result, you know,

Drucker said, nothing's worse than perfectly executing the wrong things. And a lot of people do that because they feel good about how well I did it doing this, but it's not getting anywhere. And so, if the answer is, no, we didn't get the results, then you go back up the model and you got to look at maybe we need a strategy adjustment. Talking about leading and lagging, you actually write about this when it comes to your own weight loss

“story. Can you get into the eating and lagging and how all that worked with you personally?”

Yeah, now you've gone from preaching to Medellin, as I say. So it's been a few years now, but I went to a rough patch with two total neighbor placements and spine surgery.

And I was basically in a wheelchair for three years. I had to travel with a wheelchair,

you know, in a set for three years, like in his lot of reasons. But I got fat. I mean, I got fat. That's the nice way to say it. And at the sort of when I was getting mobile again, I got gosh, I got, I got to do some of that there's because I'm a competitive golfer and I mean, I got my swing speed, but I think you got to get that body around. And I was carrying you know, you're so much of a six back I had a gig and I just couldn't move like I was supposed to.

So I said, all right, well, how do you lose weight? Well, you eat less and move more. So that's my plan. I'm going to eat less and move more. And I was. I thought, I mean, it really was. I was eating less and moving more. And I really thought that. And I was really trying. Well, I'm not getting the result. I should be getting. So then I say, well, I must have a thyroid problem or something, because I know I'm not exceeding, you know, my calorie count. And I know I'm doing all my movement

I need to do. And so I said, well, you know, I'm going to look at this, so I got an app that measures all this. And I found one of the great psychological truths to be true. We overestimate. Oh, well, we're actually doing it. And when I would count out this stuff and look at, oh, oh, that little grab into the snack bin, that was that much, you know. And so the scales are the lagging indicator. But the leading indicators are the activities that move the needle. And what

this gets to the essence of in leadership and goal achievement is this. And I working on the factors that actually make a difference. The great see is that I've worked with. I've got one that is one of the greatest I've ever worked with and it's great multi billions in valuation from a one office

company. And I actually coined a term. I never heard the term. Maybe others have said it.

But I said, dude, you are the best I've ever seen at when I'm going to call micro drivers. And he said, what's a micro drummer? And what he does, which he's doing, he just didn't have a turn forward. What he does was he knew the specific activities at each level of the business that actually moved the needle. It's sort of like an atomic compression of the 8020 rule. And he made those micro drivers objects of extreme awareness, focus, training, deliberate practice.

“And that's what's going to move the scales at the end of the day or the scoreboard at the end of”

the Super Bowl. If our measurement is the goal, we're not measuring. We're related to game film on Monday. Yeah. So how do you do it? You look great. How do you do it? Oh, almost 40 pounds. Wow. Thank you. I'm not a great but I look different. You do. Seriously, golf games probably as a lagging indicator. What you do, did you just the tracking of it? Is that what was key? Well, you got to, you got me measuring the right things. Yeah. Okay. And you got to track it.

do I have the internal structure and resources to do all of that? Or do I need to engage some outside talent to help me do that? Now, in my case, I need to get some outside talent. I mean, this is why this is why a lot of people, I mean, there are guys that go to the gym every day.

And they would never go to work. They love it so much. You can't get out of there. And they work on the

right things. I'm not one of those guys. I know I do that in golf. You know, if you go to that, when I was I was going to a playing competitive golf, I tracked my activities. You know, I'd hit a few hundred balls early in the morning. I'd play 18 holes. I'd count the greens I hit. He rings on this. I'm 83 pots or whatever. And then you know what to go work on. And at the end of the day, I go to the range again. But then I'd hit after going on the range I go to the

to the chipping green and I had a system where for an hour I practiced my shipping. And I would not let myself leave and go home until I'd made three from off the green. And that was pressure on you. So I can't go home any dinner. So I'm making another one, right? But the point is that you're

“working on the activities that you know move the needle. That's what's important. And”

sometimes for the accountability piece of that is so big, you know, I could do it in golf, but I couldn't do it in the food thing. I needed external structure. And so I needed accountability, if I had an appointment at the gym or the trainer, well, it's not as easy to sleep in. And we know this for me, sir. Another strong and then peer accountability as opposed to the boss. One of the comma, I'm going to ask you for others. But one of the comma, he's Henry I've seen

over the past 11 years, 680 plus of these conversations are those people have done an amazing job with surrounding themselves with other high standards, get after it, truth tellers. People that are unafraid to tell them the truth out of love by out of care for them. And they do the same

for them. And they also have those equally high standards. And they're always pushing on those

standards to increase them. That's one of the commonalities. I'm curious you spent decades with some of the most impactful CEOs, senior leaders and all different industries. They've loved your work. They've called you. They want you in their life. What have you found to be some of the commonalities among those leaders who have sustained excellence over an extended period of time? In a short word, character. Here's the problem with that word. Everybody's eyes glides over.

Because they think, "Well, I have good character." And what their meaning is moral and ethical character. When I say character, what I'm talking about is you're make up as a person, how you're

“glued together. That is what matters. And good character, I wrote a book called integrity,”

which comes from an old thing was about integrity is more than somebody doesn't lie to your steel. Or you can believe the numbers, or they're the same person in the light they are in the dark, a public or private. Now that's duplicity. That's not character or integrity. Integrity comes from the word that means "holness." An integer is a whole number to be integrated. And so the great performers are not just drivers of task and results, which they are. They're also drivers

of relationships. And what I mean by drivers, not mowing over everybody, but they're able to do the things that relational competency that loads home performance are able to do. And so they're not

getting there and killing people in the process, which is always going to be short-term success

and not long-term, or they're not really everybody loves them, but we're not getting anywhere. That's going to be short-term and not long-term because the company's got to go somewhere. But they leave a wake behind them of the balancing act of having the relational abilities to drive performance, which is more than being nice, and the aggressive capabilities, which is

“moving something forward, those capacities together. And that's why the great performers always have”

coaches. They don't usually need to know more about markets. They know what they're doing when they get to that level, but they gotta work on themselves. And the greatest boards require that kind of

for their top leaders. And so that gets to, when you said, "What are some of the things you see

in commonly these people?" Another way of looking at that is that they reversed the second law of

thermodynamics. It be minus physics. That's the law of entropy, which means things get worse over time. You leave your kids at home and don't go there for two weeks. It's not going to be more cleaned up when you get home, right? But that only is true for our closed system. In physics, the second law, if you open the system to two factors, new energy source from the outside and

“intelligence to organize that energy, you can reverse entropy. So that's what coaches do, that's”

what mentors do, that's what advisors do, that leaders of closed system. When the only one that only voices there, I'll listen to them when they're here. They're opening up and they've got support and energy. And they've got intelligence to organize that new energy. They assimilate it. They accommodated. They get to a higher level. That's one of the big things. And another one is that they embrace negative realities. That's one of the great, you know, you say, what do you see in common? They move

towards problems, not to nuke them, but to either resolve them or transform them into something better. Now, if you're conflict-avoidant or you're going to a black hole, if there's a bad number that comes across your dance, or you start to think I'm a failure, or somebody else's an idiot or or whatever it is, if you attack negative realities, instead of resolve them and transform them, then it's going to be a rocky road. So that's another, another thing I see in great leaders.

This is an interesting, I found this in our work that we do with my team is the ones who are reaching out for help, for coaching, for guidance, for assistance with their leadership teams. They are almost all already absolutely crushing it. I mean, they're like the best of the best in their industries in any industry. They're doing really, really well beating goals. And yet, they still want coaching. They still want feedback. They still want you to there to work with

them and their teams. I would bet you see the same thing. But isn't that interesting that the ones who probably need it the most that are struggling are doing well? They don't reach out for help, but the ones who are doing really, really well, they want it. Okay, you hit something right on the nail that I've said. And when I, when I first went into this whole space, as a psychologist,

so I'm always having a mix of clients. So you got the ones that are crushing it.

You got the ones that and want to get better. You got the ones that there's some identified

“problem and that's what I call human success. And then you got the disasters where the whole”

things about to just go to help, right? And so there is kind of these three places. I always thought it would be the disasters that I'd be here from all the time, right? It was exact opposite. The highest performers were the ones that utilize input in the coaching the most. It's exactly what you said. And you go on, you go to a PGA tournament. You guys do not own the range by himself. You got a couple of people saying around them. You got their

swing coach. You got the caddy. Probably got somebody else. And it is a team. You know, if you're

this guy, Chefler, he always says, we, we were fortunate this week. He's someone's team

and he talks about that lot. I grew up in Nicholas as the tiger. In Nicholas was my idol.

“And I remember I was a kid. I read something that he wouldn't play well. And he said he”

took some time off and went back to Ohio to spend some time with his teacher, his coach. And I remember thinking, what? Nicholas has a coach. Why? Well, later I got to meet Jack Smith sometime with him. And I was written about him in one of my books. And he said me a letter and very, very nice. But anyway, I was talking to him. And I asked him about that. He said, well, I went to a period where, you know, just one plan as well. And I called the same as Jack

Teach me the stance and the grip first. Because we can get off of the ride hitting on the very fundamentals because we can't see ourselves. Yeah. First day of John Wood and what did he teach his team every day of the first day of practice? This is how you put on your socks. It's like the fundamentals getting back to it. But we all need a coach. And the highest performers, that's also, like you said, the company that spends $100 million. I found that to be true as well. The ones that

“are doing really well. They know how I mean, serene Williams had her coach her entire career, right?”

They all have a coach. It's one of the commonalities. Henry, man, this is so great. The books

called your desired future, the five essential steps that take you where you want to go.

Appreciate your team. Send me a copy, man. I'm excited for you. And I would love to continue this dialogue as we both progress, man. Well, anytime, you obviously, you know, we're in a fine mean. It's good to sit down. I always enjoy it. You make it easy. You know, more than I do about this stuff. Well, appreciate it. Next thing we need to do is to go out to dinner. You mean,

“we'll get there. I want to, I want to experience that conversation about leadership and to see”

the way people fall all over themselves when we'll walks in the door. Be so much fun, man. When we'll show up in a restaurant, it's like, Chad neckless went to a public driving race. It's like,

yeah, Elvis is in the building. So good, man. Love it, man. Thank you so much. Again, always look forward

to the next one, Henry. Right. Thank you. Appreciate it. It is the end of the podcast club. Thank you for being a member of the end of the podcast club. If you are, send me a note, Ryan at learning leader.com. Let me know what you learned from this great conversation with Dr. Henry Cloud. A few takeaways from my notes, the best leaders. Henry has worked with for 30 years. All share one thing. They seek coaching. They reverse the law of entropy by bringing in outside intelligence and support.

Even when, and especially when they're already winning, I found this too. We seem to always work

with eight and nines who want to be tens. The fours and fives are not attracted to our work. And then a revenue number is not a vision. A vision is a compelling picture of a future state that makes people want to sacrifice for it. If your vision wouldn't inspire anyone to get out of bed early, it is a metric, not a vision. And then I loved how Henry opened the conversation talking about his doberman Finley. It's a dog who races to the front door. Barks and does it again tomorrow. Never

once asking whether the barking is working. The question is a simple one. And how many areas of your life are you just barking at the door? Once again, I would say thank you so much for

“continuing this read the message and telling a friend or two. Hey, you should listen to this”

episode of the learning leader show with Dr. Henry Cloud. I think it will help you become a more effective leader because you continue to do that. And you also go to Spotify and Apple podcast. You subscribe to the show. You rate it. Hopefully five stars. You write a thoughtful review so important by doing all of that. You are continually giving me the opportunity to do what I love on a daily basis and for that. I will forever be grateful. Thank you so so much talk to you too.

Hey, wait.