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Coming up next on Passion Struck.
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And at the center of this vulnerability wheel, which is a series of concentric circles, is intention.
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And that is understanding why it is that you want to do or share whatever it is that you want to do or share.
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Welcome to Passion Struck.
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Hi, I m your host, Jon R. Miles.
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And on the show, we decipher the secrets, tips, and guidance of the world s most inspiring people and turn their wisdom into practical advice for you and those around you.
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Our mission is to help you unlock the power of intentionality so that you can become the best version of yourself.
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If you re new to the show, I offer advice and answer listener questions on Fridays.
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We have long form interviews the rest of the week with guests ranging from astronauts to authors, CEOs, creators, innovators, scientists, military leaders, visionaries, and athletes.
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Now, let s go out there and become passion struck.
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Hello everyone and welcome back to episode 350 of PassionStruck.
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Ranked by Apple as one of the top 10 most popular health podcasts and the number one alternative health podcast.
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And thank you to all of you who come back weekly to listen and learn how to live better, be better, and impact the world.
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Cash Instruct is also on syndicated radio on the Brushwood Media Network.
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Catch us Monday and Friday from 5 to 6 p.m.
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Eastern Time on your evening commute.
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Links will be in the show notes.
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If you re new to the show, thank you so much for being here.
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Or, you simply want to introduce this to a friend or a family member, we have episode starter packs, which are collections of our fans  favorite episodes that we organize.
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and to convenient topics that give any new listener a great way to get acclimated to everything we do here on the show.
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Either go to Spotify or passionstruck.com slash starter packs to get started.
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In case you missed it last week, I had two great interviews.
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The first was with Dr. Neha Singwan, CEO, physician, engineer, and communication specialist.
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She is the author of the new book, Powered by Me, where she uncovers the profound effects of unhealed trauma on burnout and empowers individuals to discover what truly energizes them and provides greater purpose in life.
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The second was with Arthur Smith, a trailblazer in non-fiction television.
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He s renowned for creating iconic shows like Hell s Kitchen and American Ninja Warrior, earning accolades like Producer of the Year and Induction into the Real Screen Awards Hall of Fame.
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His latest book, Reach, offers a thrilling peek behind the scenes of his extraordinary career journey.
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I also wanted to say thank you for your writings and reviews.
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If you loved today s episode, we would so appreciate you giving it a five-star review and sharing it with your friends and families.
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This allows us to bring more people into the PassionStruck community where we can share daily doses of inspiration, hope, and meaning.
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And I know we and our guests love to see comments from our listeners.
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In today s episode, I am absolutely thrilled to welcome friend and esteemed leadership thought leader, Jacob Morgan.
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Our conversation was so rich and insightful that we ve split it into two parts, both hearing back to back.
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In part one, Jacob shares a defining moment in his journey involving a simple cup of coffee that steered his career in a remarkable direction.
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We explore how his immigrant upbringing instilled values of hard work and resourcefulness, shaping his path.
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Our discussion delves into the future of work, the critical role of personal branding in the future of work, the changing dynamics between employers and employees, how to re-skill in a tech-driven world, and the critical need for employee well-being.
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Our conversation delves into the analogy of life as a hub and spoke, emphasizing the importance of balancing career, hobbies, and personal life to prevent emotional crisis.
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Lastly, we then dissect the profound impact of vulnerability in leadership and workplace dynamics.
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In part two, we ll delve deeper into Jacob s groundbreaking concept of the vulnerable leader equation from his upcoming book, Leading with Vulnerability, launching October 3rd.
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Stay tuned for this enlightening discussion on leadership and
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Thank you for choosing PassionStruck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life.
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Now, let that journey begin.
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I am absolutely stoked today to have Jacob Morgan on Passionstruck.
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Welcome, Jacob.
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Thank you for having me.
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As I told you before we got started, you are someone that I ve actually been following for years and I ve wanted to have on this podcast for a very long time.
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So I feel it s such an honor to have you here because I think you were one of the preeminent thinkers on what s going to transpire in the future in our work environments and with how employees
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are going to be impacted by a lot of the changes.
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So I know this is going to be an impactful episode for the listeners in many ways.
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So thank you again for joining us.
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Oh, yeah.
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I m looking forward to the discussion.
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I have no idea what you re going to ask me, but anything is fair game.
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Well, one of my favorite questions is about defining moments in our life, and some of them come to us in profound ways.
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And I understand that earlier in your career, a cup of coffee actually changed your career trajectory.
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Can you share for the audience the background behind that defining moment?
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Sure.
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So that was one.
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And then I have another one I can share with you too, if you want.
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So the cup of coffee story basically happened, and I should give a little bit of context on this.
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I come from an immigrant family.
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They came from the Republic of Georgia, which is a small country that used to be part of the former USSR.
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So growing up, I was always taught work hard.
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Nobody cares about your problems.
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Don t be a victim.
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Be scrappy and resourceful.
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My dad came to the United States.
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He didn t speak any English.
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My parents had no money.
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They had no job, no possessions.
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And my dad had to learn how to speak English by watching the Johnny Carson and Merv Griffin shows with an English to Russian translation dictionary.
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And he would spend hours every day staring at himself in front of a mirror, trying to mouth out English words so that he could get the words out.
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So that s a little bit of context just on my upbringing, right?
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So it was always hard work.
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It was always putting your time.
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It was always no excuses.
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Try to be number one in everything that you do.
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I say that because pretty much throughout my entire life, I was always a bad student.
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So my GPA in high school was like a 2.7.
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I went to community college, it was like a 2.79.
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And so I was not doing well in school, which as you can imagine, knowing my background with my parents was not a good thing.
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Finally, when I got to college, I went to the University of California, Santa Cruz.
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Something clicked in my head and I realized that this is pretty much the last chance that I have to do well in school.
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And if I don t, I m not going to get a good job.
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I m not going to have a career.
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I m not going to be able to make a good salary to have a family.
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And I just had this scenario play out in my mind where if I didn t do well in school, my entire life would just crumble.
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And I did do well in school.
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I graduated with honors.
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I double majored in economics and psychology, and I was very excited to join the corporate world.
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And there was a company that I interviewed for in Los Angeles, which is where I m originally from.
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And I went to go interview for this company.
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And this was in downtown LA, which meant that I would have a three-hour daily commute to work and back from work.
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So hour and a half there, hour and a half back.
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And I ended up taking this job because when I interviewed there, I was told that I would be doing meaningful and impactful work.
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Traveling the country, meeting with entrepreneurs and executives, really making a difference.
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And in my mind, as a young recent college grad, I was sitting there thinking, well, this is great.
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This is exactly what I want.
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I want to make an impact.
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I want to make a difference.
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This is why I worked so hard.
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So I took the job.
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And a few months into my job, I m doing data entry and cold calling and PowerPoint presentations.
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And the pivotal moment for me came when the CEO came out of his beautiful corner office in downtown Los Angeles.
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And he screams across the entire office, Jacob, I got a really important project for you.
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And naturally I got excited.
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I thought, this is it.
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I paid my dues.
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Here comes the moment.
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And so I run over to the CEO and he puts his hand in his pocket.
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He takes out his wallet and he gives me a $10 bill.
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And he says, I m late for a meeting and I need you to go get me a coffee from Starbucks.
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And at that point, the wind in my sails just vanished.
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I felt like a deflated balloon.
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My body sunk.
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And I was just thinking, wow, this is why I went to college is to get you a cup of coffee.
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That was around 15, 16 years ago.
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And I remember at that moment, the only thought that I had in my mind
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was, can I do anything else to make money and not have to work for anybody else ever again?
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And that s what set me off on the current path that I m on now.
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I had a couple odd things that I was doing.
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I did search engine optimization and social media consulting.
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I tried to building my own websites.
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I tried affiliate marketing.
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I tried to do anything to make money on my own without having to report to anybody else.
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Long story short, 15, 16 years later, here we
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Yeah.
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I m glad you brought that whole thing up.
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And I want to get into your family background a little bit later in this episode when we talk about your book.
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But I think a couple of things that you said there are extremely important.
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One of them has to do with the fact that you decided to go out on your own.
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And I know that s something that a lot of our listeners think about.
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And it s a very difficult step because I know when I did it, it s as if you were stepping off the side of a cliff.
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And what worked for me eventually was not having a safety net and just going for it.
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Because I knew if I had the safety net, I m always going to have that in the back of my mind.
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But another very important thing that you mentioned was your branding.
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And as I think of the future, and I look at my own life and how many times I had to reinvent myself, I think leaders in the future are going to have to do this at a much more rapid pace.
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than I ever did.
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Why do you think personal branding is important in the future of work?
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It s huge.
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And we were talking about this a little bit earlier before we hit record, right?
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There used to be a time, and we know lots of stories like this, where a lot of employees who had full-time jobs who wanted to create personal brands for themselves, a lot of the companies try to shut them down.
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This happened to my wife.
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This happened to a couple of people I know.
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It sounds like it happened to you as well, where when you created your persona and your brand on social media, you started to get some followers on there.
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You started to create content.
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Maybe your HR team pulled you in and they re like, well,
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We noticed that you have opinions, and we noticed that you re sharing your opinions online.
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That s fine, but why don t you brand everything on behalf of the company, as if you work here?
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And so the organizations try to take control over that personal brand.
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Now, of course, years later, we recognize and appreciate that strategy doesn t work.
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It doesn t make any sense.
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And I think the reason why you need to have a personal brand now is, in a way, it s a type of currency for you.
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depending on the job, the career, and what you want to have going forward.
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Anybody can Google you.
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Anybody can search for you.
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Anybody can find things about you.
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And so it s important for you to control that narrative for yourself.
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Who you are, what you believe in, the content that you create, the thought leadership that you might have.
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And so I really think that s an important attribute when we think about the future of work, right?
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Because anybody is Googleable, anybody is findable and searchable.
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And so if we live in that kind of a world, don t you want to control the narrative about yourself so that you can
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put across your best foot forward so that you can control your reputation and your perception.
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So for me, I think the personal branding aspect, especially when we think about the future of work is huge.
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And we see this, right?
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And you see this happening with a lot of executives, with business leaders that are trying to use platforms like LinkedIn to create their following, where they share their ideas, where they share their impact.
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I ve certainly seen a huge impact from this.
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I know you have as well.
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And so I have many others.
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So I think it s a very important aspect when we think about the future of work.
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Yeah, it s interesting.
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When I look at five, 10 years out from now, and I m not sure if you re seeing this as well, I think the whole way that we re going to work is going to change.
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I know for me, I operate the majority of my business using freelancers.
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And I think there s an opportunity for people to
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Think of their future as being a freelancer where instead of going to work for one of these large companies, which they think is a safety haven, and what I found myself was they re actually not, you re much better positioned to put yourself in a position where you can control your destiny and work across multiple brands.
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And that way you can control where you work, how you work, when you want to do vacations, etc.
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But a lot of people don t think that way.
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What do you think gets in the way from them being willing to take that type of approach?
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Well, I think the message that I always try to give people is nobody s going to look out for you, but you.
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And sure, there used to be a time when if you were employed full time in an organization, the relationship was pretty straightforward.
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And that relationship was basically you stay here as long as you possibly can.
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We will pay you as long as we possibly can, and we ll take care of you.
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Your family can work here, right?
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This is the relationship that we had with a lot of organizations.
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And fast forward several decades, we went through the era of Jack Welch.
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We went through the era of people like Steve Ballmer.
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Jack Welch, I think, largely was one of the people who pioneered this concept of driving business success via the use of mass layoffs.
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That s why he earned the name Neutron Jack, because he would just get rid of people, leave the buildings intact, and just get everybody in the buildings to disappear.
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And so we live in a very different world now where this concept of at-will employment, especially in the United States, is the one that s most prevalent.
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And so there s not a lot of sense of loyalty between employees and the organization anymore.
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And to your point, I think having that personal brand for yourself is almost a type of a job security.
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It s almost a type of safety net for you because that not only are you building your personal brand on the side, your network, your thought leadership,
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But as you go to try to look for other jobs or work for other organizations, you re going to have that personal brand that you can bring with you to demonstrate who you are, what you believe in, and the skills that you might have.
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So as far as why people get a little bit nervous and scared to do this, I get it.
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It s overwhelming.
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When I first started, the main platforms I think at the time were really like
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Facebook and having a blog.
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There was just a handful of things that you could really leverage.
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And it was pretty easy and it was pretty straightforward.
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But if you look at the world that we re living in now, we have so much going on.
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Platforms are springing up all over the place.
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New laws are changing.
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New things are being enforced.
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Algorithms are being updated.
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It s overwhelming.
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It s overwhelming on how to know what to do, where to begin, the content to create.
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And that s just on the logistical side.
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There s also the comfort level for yourself, right?
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Turning on a camera and being able to speak into a camera, being able to share your thoughts online and being okay with being criticized or having people disagree with you.
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So it is uncomfortable.
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And I think that s ultimately what keeps people from doing it because it is uncomfortable.
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It is unknown.
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It can be intimidating and scary.
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And oftentimes we don t have that blueprint that is going to guide us in the direction that s going to tell us what we should be doing.
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It s like trying to pilot a ship at night in the middle of fog.
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Where am I going?
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Can somebody guide me and point me in the right direction?
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And a lot of the times you have to figure stuff out yourself.
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So I totally get the apprehension that so many people have.
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It s understandable.
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It s interesting for me because I have a 25 year old who s been in the workforce now for a few years.
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And I know he and my daughter, who s 19 and a sophomore in college are both asking me with the rise of automation, AI and robotics, there s going to be growing job displacement.
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What they want to know is how can individuals like themselves be intentional about upskilling themselves?
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And where do you see that some of the major skill sets in the future are going to evolve?
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And if you had a kid who was that age right now, what would you tell them to focus on?
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There s a ton that we could talk about when it comes to job displacement.
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So there s the angle that we could look at in terms of skills and what you should be learning.
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And there s also the angle in terms of this ongoing battle that we re seeing between employees and organizations, which we can touch on as well.
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But we can, let s get to the second point, which is specifically the skills.
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I have a seven-year-old girl, Naomi, she just turned seven fairly recently.
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And I have a son who s going to be turning four next year.
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And obviously your kids are much older, they re thinking about their employment, they re thinking about their career trajectory and things of that nature.
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And it s true, right?
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AI is playing a significant role in how we think about work.
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Especially when we look at things like generative AI, things like chat GPT, something I m sure you use, I use on a regular basis, and a lot of people are starting to use it on a regular basis.
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So in that kind of a world, what is it that is most useful and most valuable?
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I think you can take a couple of different paths.
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Obviously, technological fluency is important, right?
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If you have that tech mindset going into the realm of programming, development, coding, AI, understanding all of those things is tremendously useful and tremendously valuable.
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There s also the element though of, look at something like ChatGPT.
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Part of being able to know how to use a lot of these AI platforms is knowing the right prompts to give it.
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So I don t know if you ve experimented with the chat GPT or mid-journey or your listeners have experimented with that.
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I have.
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And sometimes you feed it a prompt and it just gives you something that you re like, this is not usable at all.
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And then you go online and the other people who are using it and they re getting these amazing results.
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And it s because there is an element of not just using AI but knowing how to use it well knowing what prompts to give something like chat GPT so that it gives you the content that you want, knowing how to feed
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in the right information into something like MidJourney so that it gives you a really cool image that you can use.
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So there s a gap between actually using these tools versus knowing how to use these tools, right?
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Everybody creates accounts with ChatGPT and MidJourney, but very few people actually know how to give the right prompts.
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So I think there s going to be a huge area in terms of, I don t know what we could call it, but AI or technology coaching or guidance or mentoring, teaching people how to use those platforms.
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And a third area actually is looking at the human skills inside of organizations.
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When I talk about the human skills, this idea of being able to unlock the potential of those around you.
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We always talk about the skill of the coach.
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And the skill of the coach for a lot of us means you help make other people more successful.
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But I always encourage people to add two words to the end of that.
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Help make other people more successful than you, because that s what requires more time, attention, and focus, and resources, and energy on your behalf.
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So if you think about a technology-driven world that we re all going to be a part of, if you have the ability to unlock the potential of those around you, if you have the ability to engage, and motivate, and push people so that they can do things that even they didn t know they could do,
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Now, all of a sudden, you become indispensable inside of your organization.
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Now, all of a sudden, your value increases 10x inside of your organization.
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That I think is a very unique skill and set of attributes and mindsets that we re not going to see technology impact in the near and foreseeable future.
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So I think those are the different paths that you can take.
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Again, one is specifically the programming and coding aspect when it comes to technology.
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Another one is helping people make sense of technology, which means that you need to be able to bridge the technology side and the human side, right?
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With prompts, with giving people guidance on how to use those platforms.
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And the third aspect is really the leadership side inside of organizations focused on the human aspects of work.
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Either of those three paths, I think are going to be pretty fruitful for whoever decides to take them.
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Okay, and I m going to flip that then.
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What do you think organizations can do about re-skilling their workforce to ensure that jobs in the future are not just preserved, but evolve in meaningful ways?
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There s two parts to that as well.
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The first is the assumption that it s always up to the organization to do this on behalf of employees, which I don t think is necessarily true.
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The organization can offer the tools, the resources, the guidance, the courses, the opportunities for employees to take advantage of things.
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But ultimately, it s up to the employee as an individual to take advantage of those things.
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Actually, remember, I think this was a few years ago, the CEO of AT&T went in front of his entire organization and he gave everybody the message.
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And he said, look, the world is changing.
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Technology is making an impact inside of organizations.
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We need to create a culture where you re going to take more accountability over your learning and your development.
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We AT&T are going to help give you the tools and the resources, but you as an employee here also need to acknowledge that you have to take accountability over your own learning and growth and development.
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That means that sometimes you might need to invest your own time or your own resources into figuring something out.
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You might need to take classes to be able to figure something out in your area of expertise.
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And if you re not willing to do that as a part of this organization, then this is not the right company for you.
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So it s a two-pronged approach, right?
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On the organization standpoint, I think we need to do a very good job of giving employees the tools, the resources, the guidance, the opportunities, help them understand how their roles can potentially change in the future, what their roles might look like.
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And on the other hand, we need to give employees that message of, hey, again, no one s going to look out for you, but you, if you want to remain employed here,
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You re going to have to take advantage of some of these resources.
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You re going to have to take classes or read up on things or try to chart your own career path inside of this organization.
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I think if we can go down both of those paths.
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will start to see a lot more reskilling and upskilling inside of organizations.
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A fairly recent example of this came from Accenture.
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Again, this is over the past few years, where they as an organization replaced or automated, pardon me, I think it was around 17,000 jobs.
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SPEAKER_01
Now, what s unique about that is they automated 17,000 jobs, but they didn t lose any employees.
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And the reason why they didn t lose any employees is because the jobs that they automated, the 17,000 jobs, were in accounting and finance.
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These were employees who were just considered to be number crunchers.
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And so what these employees would be doing all day is calculating data and numbers and putting spreadsheets and charts together.
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And so Accenture, the leadership team, came to their employees and they said, look,
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We don t need you to do that anymore.
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We have algorithms and bots that can do the work of all 17,000 of you in a couple seconds.
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But we don t want to fire you.
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Instead, what we want you to do is to help our clients understand what these numbers mean.
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Help our clients understand what actions, what strategic business decisions they should be taking based on the data that we are providing to them.
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And so that s a very good example of how Accenture took an area that was primarily focused on data and numbers, upskilled and retrained those employees to focus more on the human aspect of creating those relationships with clients and helping them figure out what to do with the data.
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And there was lots of different stories like that as well.
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But I think a lot of them come down to this human aspect of work that is so crucial when we think about the future.
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Well, I love what you just said, and it reminds me of something that my friend Rory Vaden told me, which is that people don t pay for information, they pay for the application of information.
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And that s exactly what Accenture is doing, is they re training their employees to take all this great information they have and to teach their clients how to actually use it to improve their businesses, which
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is really a genius way of doing it because you re right.
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There are all kinds of platforms out there that can spit out all these measurements, but it s figuring out how to apply those measurements and then how to learn from them and how to improve efficiency, performance, what have you.
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That s really the key differentiator.
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So I love that you share that.
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So one thing I ve seen, Jacob, and I try to talk about this on the show a lot because it s something that s impacting so many people, is we have a rise in all mental health disorders, everything from anxiety to more complex issues.
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We also have a rise in employees feeling that their well-being is being deprived.
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And all this is leading to more people feeling lonely and helpless or hopeless.
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And this is starting to gain more attention.
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We ve seen it through the Surgeon General.
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And on these lines of employee well-being and mental health, what intentional strategies do you think organizations should start to adopt to create workplaces that genuinely support their employees to thrive both professionally and personally?
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Yeah, great question.
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And this is something that of course we ve seen, especially post pandemic.
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I ve experienced this and I can share some stories on that as well.
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So my family and I, we actually used to live in Northern California.
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So we used to live in the Bay area.
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During the pandemic, what ended up happening, I had some friends that got laid off from their jobs.
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We had some friends who moved out of the Bay area.
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And basically we were left with no community.
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Everybody disappeared.
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my family and my wife s family were also living in LA.
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And so my wife and I were talking about it and we re like, why are we here?
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Like, we re lonely.
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We have no community.
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We have no connection.
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Everybody moved, everybody left.
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Why are we still living in the Bay Area?
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And so we ended up relocating back to Los Angeles.
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And now we have community, we have friends, my family s nearby, my wife s family s nearby.
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And it was probably one of the best just life decisions that we could have made.
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And there are a lot of studies now that are coming out which show that one of the most important aspects for our health and our wellbeing is friendship, is community.
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And so it is so important for us to be paying attention to these things.
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Now, as I ve alluded to in the past, I do believe that it s, again, a multi-prong approach, right?
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So on the standpoint of organizations, I think there s a lot that they can do in terms of offering
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mental health and wellbeing programs for their employees.
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And I think we re starting to see much more of this being infused inside of organizations, right?
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Just general health, exercising, eating healthy, whether it s meditation, whether it s being able to have somebody to talk to, even more importantly, having leaders who you can connect with on a human level, which is one of the aspects of my book, which I m sure we ll get to as well.
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But at the same time, individuals also need to take accountability too, right?
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When we moved to Los Angeles, my wife and I both made a very concerted effort to make friends, to create community, to go out and meet people, to not just be stuck at home, to not just feel isolated.
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And especially with kids, obviously much younger kids, it s important for them too.
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So organizations can certainly play a role there, but we as individuals also need to play a more active role there too, regardless
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regardless of whether you re joining a church or a temple, whether you re doing dad meetups or mom meetups, whatever it is, but you have to play a more active role in that as well.
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And we ve been trying very hard to do that.
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And it s been paying off, creating more community and more friends.
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Companies can do things, but we as individuals can do things as well.
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SPEAKER_00
Well, I love that you emphasize that point because oftentimes, and I remember hearing it all the time when I was in the big companies, people cry wolf all the time, the company s not doing this for me, the company s not doing that for me.
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And ultimately, there s only so much that those companies can do.
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And it really is upon the individual to make the choices on how they want to align their aspirations, their ambitions and their actions to take them where they want in life.
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And so
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It s something that I emphasize all the time on this show because it really is power of intentionality and making those choices daily that align with where you want to take yourself, your career, your relationships, what have you.
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So I m glad that you re echoing that.
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I think that s a huge aspect, right?
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We do spend the majority of our adult working life as a part of organizations.
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But at the same time, we also need to remember that our entire life is not based on the organization.
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We also have a life outside of work and it s important for us to cultivate that life outside of work as well.
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Because if work is the only thing
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that takes up your life, you have to imagine what s going to happen when something happens at work.
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Your life is going to crumble.
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And so I remember I was talking to, I think it was the CEO of Panera Bread and Panera Brands.
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And I think he s since stepped down and now he s the chairman.
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And we were having this conversation about it and he gave me this fantastic visual, which I love, because I was asking him something similar.
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And he said, I view my life as a hub and spoke.
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And he said that there used to be a part of his life where he only really had one major spoke, which was work.
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And over time, he added more spokes to this wheel.
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One was work, like who he is as a leader, who he is as a father, who he is as a son, who he is a husband to his wife, a learner, a guitar player.
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So he had all these different spokes in his life.
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And he said, what happens is, let s say I go to work and I have a really bad day.
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Maybe that work spoke is a little bit lower for the day, but my spoke is higher on all the other elements.
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If that s true, then I still feel fulfilled.
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I still feel like I m having a good day.
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And so you have to imagine the more of those different spokes that you can identify for yourself, the easier it becomes for you to cope, to deal, to look at the positive and optimistic things that you have in your life when you have those different buckets that you can look at.
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Whereas opposed to if you only have one or two,
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If something happens in one of those, that s already either your entire life or the majority of your life feels like it s crumbling and crashing down on you.
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So I think it s a very helpful visual for a lot of people to think of.
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Identify all those different roles that you play, those different spokes in your life, and try to focus on those each day.
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Like today, for example, what can I do to be a great dad?
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What can I do to be a great husband to my wife?
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What can I learn today?
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What can I do to inspire my team?
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And I try to think about that every single day and it actually makes a tremendous difference on how I lead and how I live.
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Thank you for bringing that up.
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There s actually a whole scientific area called life crafting, which delves into this even further.
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But in a similar way, earlier in my career, I found the same thing as that CEO from Panera, that I was overemphasizing my career over everything else.
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And I went to see a career coach and it turned out to be one of the best things I ever did because
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He didn t use the hub and spoke analogy.
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He used the analogy of a kitchen stool, but that mine had one support and I needed to start living life in a way that had multiple supports.
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And I think what s important for the listeners to understand is there s no right or wrong in what those supports are.
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For me, it got into spiritual health and emotional health, relationship health, those types of things.
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But what you just said about the CEO works as well.
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as could other things.
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I think it s important to balance your hobbies, your passions, your relationships, your career, and make this as well-rounded as possible.
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Because a lot of us, where we get into these deep emotional crises that we re going to be talking about here in a second, when one of those things topples and it s not aligned with the rest of them, and then you start toppling over.
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SPEAKER_00
I had that happen to me.
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I did too.
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SPEAKER_00
I now want to jump into your new book, Leading with Vulnerability, which I have to tell the audience is a great book.
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It s one that I highly recommend you to order.
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This episode is going to be coming out the day that this book releases.
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Please go out there and buy it, especially during its launch week, but
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I saw at the beginning that our mutual friend Marshall Goldsmith wrote your foreword, and Marshall also wrote a great blurb for my upcoming book as well, and he is such a giving person, which I love.
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But he writes that vulnerability should not be a replacement for good leadership, nor
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Should it be an excuse for poor decision-making?
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It should be balanced with good judgment, thoughtful communication, and a clear understanding of what information is appropriate to share with your team.
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And I thought that is a good lead-in to ask you if you could discuss the difference between what vulnerability is versus what is leading with vulnerability.
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So first, thank you for mentioning the book.
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I appreciate that.
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We made a special URL.
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SPEAKER_01
Am I allowed to mention it?
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Just so people don t need to go type it into Amazon.
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So we made a special URL called leadwithvulnerability.com.
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So if people go there, they ll just be able to see where they can grab the book.
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And Marshall s great.
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He s written the foreword to one of my previous books as well.
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And he s, to your point, a very giving and generous person.
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So I m grateful.
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for his contributions to my books over the years.
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So the difference is, and I think to answer that, we first need to take a little bit of a step back and just look at what the relationship is between an employee and an organization.
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And so the typical relationship has always been that an organization has a job that it needs to fill.
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It has a vacancy, it s trying to do something, and it doesn t have anybody to do it.
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Hence the organization leaders, they put up the job posting online and then employees apply for the job.
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And the way that it works is that employees basically say, Liam Neeson in the movie Taken, right?
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I have a particular set of skills that I can bring to this job.
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I can do what you need me to do.
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And so the match is made.
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Company has the job that it s posting.
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The employee comes in there and then they say, I can do this.
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Perfect.
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So imagine that this match is made and now all of a sudden you hire somebody and this employee is showing up to work and they re being vulnerable all the time.
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And they re showing up one day and they re saying, hey, I need help with this.
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I can t really figure it out.
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Then they show up the next day and they say, Oh, you know what?
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I m so sorry.
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I made this mistake.
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I really screwed up.
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Then they show up the next day and they say, I m having a really tough day.
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I m having a hard time.
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Then they show up the next day and right.
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And it goes on and on.
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Eventually what s going to happen is that you, your leadership team, the employees who work there are going to look at this employee and say, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
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SPEAKER_01
I m confused here.
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SPEAKER_01
We brought you in so that you can do a particular job and now all of a sudden you re using vulnerability as a way to justify why you don t have the competence to do that job that you re supposed to be doing.
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SPEAKER_01
Vulnerability, right?
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Obviously, Brene Brown pioneered a lot of this work, and she looks at vulnerability as risk, uncertainty, and emotional exposure.
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To simplify that, it s basically this idea of doing or saying something where somebody else can use what you said or did to harm you in an emotional way.
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Sometimes physically as well, but for most people listening and watching this, it deals with emotional harm.
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So doing or saying something where somebody else can use that against you to harm you in an emotional way.
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That s really what vulnerability is.
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It could be a mistake, a challenge, talking about family, whatever it might be, right?
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It s that kind of ammunition.
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And I really started to wonder, we understand why vulnerability is important in our personal lives.
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It s important to create connection with friends, with family members.
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It builds trust and creates those powerful relationships.
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But as I was interviewing these hundred CEOs for the book, it became apparent that inside of organizations, we have a different dynamic.
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We have hierarchy, we have bosses, we have salaries, we have deadlines, we have customers.
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It s a very different environment.
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And so I started to wonder, is vulnerability in our personal lives really the same as it is inside of our organizations?
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And then taking it one step further, what if you re a leader?
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You re actually responsible for the lives of other people.
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You re responsible for the fiscal aspect of a business, the dollars and cents.
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Is vulnerability for you really the same as it is for everybody else?
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And the answer became very apparent, and that is no.
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So let me give you a couple examples of what I m referring to.
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So Hollis Harris, he used to be the CEO of Continental Airlines, struggling airline.
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We all know that the path of Continental Airlines eventually acquired by United Airlines.
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What happened is in the nineties, the company was going through a really hard time and Hollis was asked to send out a memo to his entire workforce to kind of address the situation and what was happening.
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So he sends out a memo to his around 40,000 employees at the time, and he
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He acknowledges that the company is going through a tough time.
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He acknowledges that the economic environment is uncertain.
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He talks about how he s not sure what the right path going forward is.
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And he ends his memo by telling his employees to pray for the future of the company.
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The next day he was fired.
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This story was told to me by Doug Parker, who just retired as the chairman and CEO of American Airlines.
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And what Doug Parker told me is that what Hollis Harris did was vulnerable, but there was no leadership.
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Now contrast this to another CEO that I interviewed, named Fleetwood Grobbler.
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And Fleetwood is the CEO of a company called SASL, South African Energy Company.
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They have around 30,000 employees.
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When he became CEO of the company, they were $13 billion in debt.
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And this was even before the pandemic.
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And then the pandemic happened.
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The company completely nosedived.
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The banks were about to come in and repossess everything.
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And in that situation, he too was asked to address his entire workforce and talk about what s happening.
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And he gave a very different message.
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So he started out the same way that Hollis did.
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And he said, I acknowledge that we re going through a tough time.
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I acknowledge that the economic conditions are not in our favor.
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I acknowledge that I don t know the exact steps that we need to take to get out of this.
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But then he added the leadership piece.
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And he said, but I have a vision and an idea of what we can do.
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I have a picture in my mind of what our business can become.
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We have an amazing group of employees, and I know that we can rebuild trust in the eyes of our customers.
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I know that we could rebuild trust in the eyes of our employees.
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And if you come with me on this journey to reinvent who we are as a business, I m sure that we will be able to succeed and pull ourselves out of this mess.
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And that s exactly what they did.
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The message there was vulnerability plus
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Leadership.
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And this is, I think, the big mistake that we make.
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I don t think that if you are in a current or aspiring leadership role, you should just be vulnerable.
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You should add the leadership piece to it.
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I call this the vulnerable leader equation.
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Vulnerability plus leadership equals vulnerable leadership.
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Competence plus connection.
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So a very simple and typical example that we see all the time.
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Somebody signs a project to you and you make a mistake.
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Being vulnerable means you show up to work and you say, oh, you know what?
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SPEAKER_02
I m so sorry, John.
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I screwed this up.
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I made a mistake.
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That s vulnerable, right?
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OK.
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Leading with vulnerability is taking that exact same scenario and saying, I m sorry, John.
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I really made a mistake on this project.
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But here s what I learned.
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Here s what I m going to do going forward to make sure that I don t make this mistake again.
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So the concept of leading with vulnerability doesn t mean that vulnerability is bad.
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It means that you should always try to demonstrate what you re doing to learn, to grow, to become more competent, to get better along with vulnerability.
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And we surveyed 14,000 employees.
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And it s funny because one of the questions that we asked them is, what is keeping you from being vulnerable at work?
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And the number one response was, I don t want to be perceived as being weak or incompetent.
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Therefore, I m never going to be vulnerable.
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And the reason why that is such a fear is because we re only vulnerable.
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We forget that whenever we re being vulnerable, when possible, to try to demonstrate what we learned, how we re growing, what we re trying to do better.
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And let me give you just one more typical example that we see.
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Let s say you re a first-time leader, right?
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You ve been at the company for a while.
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You just got promoted.
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You re leading a team for the first time and you want to talk to your team.
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What do we see happen so often?
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First-time leaders will go in front of their team and they ll say, Hey, my name s Jacob.
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I m a first-time leader.
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I ve never done this before, but I m super excited to be leading this team.
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And I m sure we re going to figure things out and have a great relationship.
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Go team!
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That s very vulnerable.
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But if you give that kind of a message, your employees are going to take a step back and they re going to say, Whoa, wait a minute.
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You re going to be leading us?
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You just told us that you don t know what you re doing.
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Instead, take that same scenario and lead with vulnerability.
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Add the competence piece, the leadership piece.
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And so now what you could say is, Hey, my name s Jacob.
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I m a first time leader here.
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I m so excited to be leading this team.
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SPEAKER_02
I know I haven t done this kind of work before.
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So here s what I m going to do.
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I ve hired an executive coach who s going to guide me.
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I have one of the top leaders inside of this organization who s going to be mentoring me and guiding me so that I can be the best leader that I can be.
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I m also taking a couple of courses, and here are some books that I m going to be reading.
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And I m going to have this policy where if you have constructive feedback that you want to give me to help me become a better leader, my door is always going to be open to you.
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Now all of a sudden you take a step back and you say, okay, right now this person s trying to get better.
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Like they re trying to close the gap.
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They re trying to learn and grow and become competent.
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And that is a very different message to have.
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So you have to remember that especially if you aren t in a leadership role, you always have to bring together these two components when you can.
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vulnerability, and leadership, connection, and competence.
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Let me stop there.
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There s a couple other things that I can build on that, but I just want to make sure that that all makes sense.
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No, I think that makes perfect sense.
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And I was going to ask you about that survey and what prompted you to do it.
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So I m glad that you shared that.
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Well, that concludes part one of my interview with Jacob Morgan.
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And if you want to tune in for part two, it will be episode 351 and it ll come out tomorrow.
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And in it, we do a further deep dive of his new book leading with vulnerability.
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And we re going to go into the fundamental question is vulnerability the same for leaders as it is for everyone else.
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Links to all things Jacob will be in the show notes at passionstruck.com.
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Please use our website links if you purchase any of the books from the guests that we feature here on the show.
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All proceeds go to supporting the show.
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Videos are on YouTube at our two stations, John R. Miles and Passionstruck Clips.
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Advertiser deals and discount codes are in one convenient place at PassionStruck.com slash deals.
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You can now pre-order my upcoming book, Passion Struck, where I detail 12 powerful principles that you can unlock to create an intentional life that you ve always wanted.
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Links will also be in the show notes.
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You can catch me on all the different social platforms at Jon R. Miles, where I post daily bits of motivation and inspiration.
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You can sign up for our weekly newsletter at both JonRMiles.com and PassionStruck.com.
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If you want to know how I book amazing guests like Jacob Morgan, it s because of my network.
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Go out there and build yours before you need it.
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You re about to hear a preview of the Passion Struck Podcast interview that I did with Laura Numeroff, who for over four decades has captivated young readers and captivated countless imaginations with her beloved If You Give series, as well as other enchanting tales.
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But Laura s impact goes far beyond her enchanting stories.
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She has become
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a beacon of inspiration through her philanthropic endeavors and her unwavering commitment to make a difference in the lives of others.
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When I was eight years old, I did want to become a children s author.
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I didn t really pay attention to my gut because I wanted to be like my sister.
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which wasn t authentic.
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I hate that word, but it s true.
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Everybody talks about your true self, your authentic self.
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And obviously that s what it came back to is what was in my heart, what was in my gut that I wanted to do.
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It s so true that if you have a passion and you love it, I m very lucky to be one of the
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few people who get to make a living as an author.
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The fee for the show is that you share it with family or friends when you find something useful or interesting.
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If you know someone who needs to understand how to lead with vulnerability, then please share Jacob s episode today with those that you love and care about.
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The greatest compliment that you can give us is to share the show.
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In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so that you can live what you listen now.
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Go out there and become passion struck.