Download the Are You Awesome Today? – Transformational Leadership with Jason Scott – Part 1 Transcript

Podcast Transcript

Stephen Shaner:

Welcome to the Are You Awesome Today podcast. I am your host, Steven Shaer, and you are invited to join US Weekly as we talk with successful people who will share with us their personal and professional experiences that have taken them from great to awesome. Hi everyone. Welcome to the Are You Awesome Today podcast. I am your host, Steven Shaer, the Attitude Chiropractor. Our guest today is Jason Scott. Jason is the most sought after expert and speaker on Transformational Leadership. He is the founder and CEO of 120VC, which is a project, product and change leadership consultancy. He is also the author of two Amazon bestseller books. The First, it’s never Just Business, it’s about People. And the second, the Irreverent Guide to Project Management. Jason, welcome to the podcast. Are you awesome today?

Scott:

Thanks for having me. It’s, it’s hard to say no when asked if you’re awesome. So I’m gonna go with absolutely.

Stephen Shaner:

All right, great answer. I love it. Let’s start off, tell us a little bit about your background and how you developed this, this passion that you have for this unique leadership style that you teach.

Scott:

That’s a, that’s a background. My mind starts reeling, but when focused in on like how I got into transformational leadership. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, you know, I, I I was in the Navy and I worked really hard to make rank because I wanted to make more money and I, I think I probably thought I also wanted more responsibility. I left the Navy, I was able to get a job right away at Universal Studios, and very quickly I was managing large IT projects, managed some of their large projects, and I just realized there was this niche in helping organizations get large global projects done. So I started 120VC, which is real, frankly ridiculous that a 27 year old would start a company helping Fortune five hundreds deliver their large global projects. But it, you know, it worked out pretty good. I had no idea how lucky I was that I was able to get a customer.

Scott:

But somewhere along the way I did develop a passion for leadership because it’s not the thing that I was doing originally. The thing that I was doing originally was sort of pushing people into doing the things that they needed to do. It was pretty much brute force. It was pretty much like charming command and control. The, the way that I saw it done in the military, and it was effective, but it wasn’t really any fun. And so somewhere along the way, you know, I’d have real collaboration as an outsider coming in as a vendor. It’s not like I had any authority to wield, even though at the time I didn’t realize that

Scott:

I didn’t have the authority to wield. And, and so I just balancing between where I was trying to shove pegs and holes to make things happen versus where I was having, where I was collaborating with people to get things done, it just, I realized over a short period of time that one just felt way better. And two, it was easier to get the results. Like I didn’t have to follow up as much. Like I could trust that they were gonna get it done. And that’s where I learned that leadership isn’t motivating outcomes with authority. You know, that’s what bosses do, but leadership is motivating outcomes with influencing influence. Servant leadership is leadership in service of those that you’re leading, right? So a servant leader’s job, which I consider part of my practice is to enable our stakeholders to define and deliver the necessary and expected results.

Scott:

Put that in a transformational leadership frame. And that’s, leadership is really about driving change. Nobody hires a leader because they want their organization to be the same in a month, six months or a year. They hire leaders to take their organization on a journey. And that journey isn’t about the stuff. There’s so much emphasis on the stuff. You know, we hear people process and tools when it comes to large global projects. Sure, the organization wants to get different results. So we’re gonna launch a large global initiative, and we need to focus on people, process, and tools. The most interesting thing about that is that if you were to go out and analyze a thousand statements of work from the, the large management consulting firms, what you would see is these large statements of work for process and tools.

Stephen Shaner:

Mm-Hmm. 

Scott:

The people part is completely left out, which is why the statistics on large global projects is kind of a disaster. ’cause at the end of the day, the only reason we’re deploying the stuff is to enable the humans in the organization to do their jobs differently and in doing their jobs differently, get different results. So transformational leadership, really, it’s, it’s about identifying and planning and leading the stuff. But bigger picture, it’s about getting the human beings excited about experimenting and performing their jobs differently and then helping them do that. Because if that doesn’t happen along the journey, you end up with stuff, but not different results. I’ve taken over like more than two hands full of turnaround projects in my career where these large global projects were struggling to finish, get across the finish line. And when I started, everybody was stressed out. There was a huge lack of trust.

Scott:

And so pulling them to get all these people from different organizations and vendors together into one single unified team, and then transitioning from not getting the results to getting the results, you just watch them brighten, you know, like morale’s terrible when they’re not getting the results that they need as they start winning, as they start succeeding, there’s no team building exercise necessary. Like their morale increases, they’re enjoying their work, they’re succeeding with others, and therefore they start seeing, they start respecting and trusting each other. And so the coolest thing about transformational leadership, meaning helping humans advance through change and succeeding, really is helping people have a better quality of life. Because people on winning teams, people that are succeeding aren’t working nights or weekends. They’re not worrying about where the next paycheck is gonna come from. They’re just happier

Stephen Shaner:

And change, I, I agree, is so important, but so many people are resistant to change. Two things I’ve discovered with change is, number one, change brings new opportunities that would not have existed without the change. And number two, when the change happens, guess what? It’s going to happen whether you like it or not. And you can either embrace the change, learn about it, and get involved in it and help make the change of success or you’re gonna get left behind. Can you expand on those a little bit?

Scott:

Oh yeah. Yeah. I would say that’s all true and unmotivating to the people that we want to change, right? 

Stephen Shaner:

Mm-Hmm.

Scott:

And I, and I remember presenting that like, Hey, this is gonna happen with or without you, like <laugh>, it’ll be less painful if you get on board. Yep. Uh, so I’ve, you know, I’ve done a couple of reps with that one. What I’ve, I’ve come to realize is that fundamentally human beings want to be successful. And I’ve proven this anecdotally thousands and thousands of times because when I get in front of a large audience, I’ll ask this question, I’ll ask the audience to remember a time they signed up to do something, something that was within their area of expertise, something they were excited to do. The manager said, asked them, do you have everything you need? They said, yes. They said, do you know how to do it? They said, yes. They went away, they worked three days, they came back, they dropped it on the desk and the manager looked at it, looked at them, looked at it, looked at them and said, this is not what I asked for. <laugh>. Do you remember the last time that happened to you, Steven?

Stephen Shaner:

Yes, I do. <laugh>

Scott:

Blurred out a one word emotion for how you felt in that moment.

Stephen Shaner:

Frustration.

Scott:

Frustration. It’s either, and it’s, I get two, I I’ve done this, two as audiences large as like 800 people and they just popcorn it out. It’s two themes, frustration or shame. Right? Nobody ever says, I didn’t care. Nobody ever says that was a great day. It’s never positive. And what that tells me is that human beings fundamentally want to be successful. So when you go to somebody who’s successful, they’re in their job, they’re successful, you know, they’re loving their, they’re doing their job, they’re loving their weekends, they’re collecting their paycheck. They’re, they’ve got their work-life balance. They’ve got their hobbies. They’re just, they’re humming along. They’ve got it all dialed. It’s not like the first couple months on the job we’re trying to figure it out. The vast majority of people are in their jobs. They know what they’re doing. And then we come to them and we say, Hey, the numbers are down.

Scott:

You know, this thing is happening. We’ve gotta digitally transform. Like we’ve gotta do all of these things to drive different outcomes for the business. And by the way, that means that you’re gonna have to learn how to do your job differently. Now, what they don’t know or cannot necessarily express the way that I’m about to express it, but that, that feeling inside of them, that dread that they’re feeling isn’t a resistance to change. It’s a, I don’t know how to be successful doing my job differently. Realization. Right? They, they start to get stressed out. They start to panic because somebody just told them that they have to figure out how to be successful doing something they don’t know how to do or be successful doing. The other thing that I know is that learning something is very, very simple. Somebody shares an idea, somebody receives that idea and understands that idea. You’ve learned something. Mastering something requires practice. And the very first stage of mastery is incompetence.

Stephen Shaner:

I like it. Yeah.

Scott:

And nobody likes to feel incompetent. Yeah. So recognizing, like you’d said earlier, the title of my book, it’s never just business, it’s about people recognizing the widget’s not gonna fight me. Right? Whatever the thing is that I’ve gotta get deployed, you know, the infrastructure, the system, the process that’s, you know, that’s predominantly gonna work just fine. All of the challenges are gonna be helping these human beings feel safe to experiment and slay new ways of working. Otherwise, they won’t. They’ll just resist. And, and to your point, they’ll fight, fight, fight, fight thinking that they have a chance. They don’t, you’re right, it’s gonna happen. However, it will definitely create a painful experience for everyone involved. It will take substantially longer and cost more than it would’ve if we had approached this understanding that that’s really the problem that we’re there to solve. We’re really there as transformational leaders to help the human beings feel safe to experiment and conquer new ways of working.

Scott:

And the first step in doing that is actually creating demand for the new ways of working. I, I love how people think of, uh, getting alignment, right? We’ve gotta go get alignment, right? We’ve gotta go get buy-in. Yeah. All these terms that we hear watch people getting buy-in, it’s, they’re trying to convince they’re trying to sell. That’s not how you create demand. The way you create demand is you throw out a vision that solves a problem, that think people think that they have. Okay? And now here’s how you know if you were successful or not. If you, if you say, Hey, we’re gonna solve this problem, do any of you think you have it? And they say no, well, you need another narrative. ’cause they’re not gonna get on board with that. So I always tell people like, pause, don’t just go launch your project.

Scott:

Don’t just go tell everybody in your organization what you’re gonna do to them. Okay? You are, you’re smart. You and your leadership team of six, eight people, you, you know, if I was to add up the iq, it’s phenomenal, but you’re not as smart as the majority of the people together in your organization. And if you’re familiar with the law of the fusion of innovation, you know, we’ve got the innovators, which is the first 3%, and then the, uh, the next are the early adopters, which is another 15%. You get the innovators, the early adopters, you reach the tipping point and you reach the early majority, which is the next 35%. After that, you get the late majority, which is the next 35%. And that’s basically where I stop with 70% of the people here in the early majority, in the late majority, they’re skeptical, they’re waiting, they’re not gonna try something until they know that somebody else has, has tried it first.

Scott:

And no amount of convincing is gonna work. But if you go to them and you say, Hey, we’re thinking about doing this thing, here’s why. Here’s the problem we’re solving for the organization. Here’s how we’re gonna help you solve this problem for the organization. Does this thing that we’re throwing out there solve any problems that you think that you have and get them to share back with you stories about times where they either had a problem that could be solved by what you’re proposing, or they work somewhere else and they saw something work similar to what you’re proposing. You know, you’re onto something, right? You’ve gone out there, you’ve generated demand, you’ve crowdsourced a vision that solves a problem that people think that they have. Then go launch your project and ask who wants to participate? This thing that I just said ask, who wants to participate causes my first time customers the cringe <laugh>, because they’re like, what if they don’t wanna participate?

Scott:

I’m always like, then they’re not gonna, let’s just, and then I stay silent for a second and let ’em feel really uncomfortable. And then they wanna argue. And I’m like, well, name a time where you had a group of people that didn’t wanna participate and they did <laugh>. I, I said, so first, let’s, let’s not rush into this, right? We’ll go slow to go fast. Because if we talk to them and we listen to them, right, the answer’s gonna be in the majority of the people, you know, they’re, the answer’s gonna be in the crowd. And we listen to them and we come back and we say, okay, we’ve, we’ve listened instead of convincing, we’ve listened and we think this is the thing we wanna do. And this is the problem that it solves. Who wants to join? You’re gonna get the vast majority of them.

Scott:

And I’ve been on projects where we literally got everybody that we, that my executive sponsors thought we needed, except for like one person. I’d say, how do you feel? And they’d say, well, God, we didn’t get this one person. And I, I’d say, so, you know, don’t they have a day job? And they’d say, yeah. And I’d, I’d say, well, let them do their day job and we’ll find somebody from the outside that actually wants to do this. Because if we build a team that wants to do this right, and we, we gather people that wanna adopt this, then we’ll have a project that doesn’t feel like Game of Thrones and we’ll defy all of the statistics for large global transformational projects that exist today.

Stephen Shaner:

I really like how you expanded on, on my two points and why is such a great question. I’m, I’m so glad you you brought that up as well. It’s, it’s so important. I worked in it, I have two Oracle certifications. I was a programmer for years, then I managed an IT office for about 14 years. Oh wow. And it was in, in the healthcare industry. So, so it changes by the minute and healthcare is changing by the minute. So change was constant. And um, those examples you gave, I’ve seen that so many times over and over and over again.

Scott:

That’s a tough, healthcare’s a very tough environment. So you’re coupling technology, which is tough with healthcare. I can only imagine.

Speaker 5:

Join in next week

Stephen Shaner:

Join in next week as we continue our discussion with Jason Scott on Transformational Leadership. Thanks for joining us today. For more information about our podcasts and speakers and for additional educational resources, connect with us at awesomeattitude.net. Until next time, be you and to be awesome.