优秀领导者如何传达他们的愿景The Four Knows to Success

Complete Transcript of Episode 850

Priscilla:
Hello, everybody, and welcome back to the official BNI Podcast. I’m Priscilla rice, and I’m coming to you from Live Oak Recording Studio in Berkeley, California. And I’m joined on the phone today by the Founder and the Chief Visionary officer of BNI, Dr. Ivan Misner. Hello Ivan, how are you and where are you?

Ivan:
I am back in Austin, Texas, talking to everyone from my home office. And this week, I’m doing a live Founder’s Education series online. And hopefully, members from around the world can participate.

Priscilla:
That sounds great.

Ivan:
So today, you know, I promised that I would be talking about parts of my latest book, The 3rd Paradigm, the subtitle is “A Radical Shift to Greater Success.” And there’s an important section in there about how great leaders communicate their vision. And so that’s what I’m gonna talk about today. It’s… the material is right out of the book. And I think, you know, we’re all leaders in some way; most of us have employees. But you know, you’re a leader; you can be a leader in your business, certainly with your clients, with customers. So, to expand your leadership capacity, it’s important to have buy-in and consensus and to move projects forward, despite challenges that might arise.

And the book is about co-creation and co-creation involves knowing how to collaborate in a way that gets the best out of your partners and yourself. And to get buy-in and consensus as a leader and to move projects forward despite the challenges that may arise. And I said in a previous podcast, you know, hold the vision, not the obstacles. And that’s an important theme in the book because there are always obstacles. There were obstacles when I started BNI, there were obstacles when we became international, there were obstacles during COVID, there’s obstacles today, there will be obstacles tomorrow. But the key to be a really great leader is to hold the vision and not the obstacles. That means that the leader is basically a vision champion.

So the real-world application of any concept is critical if you want to truly impact people and the people who work for you and the people who work with you. So it takes a special type of leader to execute on this idea of co-creation. And again, an example of co-creation, if you haven’t heard the previous podcast, crowdsourcing is a great example, think-tank work. And I talk about many different types of co-creation.

So leading a co-creative process has to begin really by displaying a quiet confidence in your ability and in everyone else’s ability. Co-creative leaders are somewhat like conductors of the symphony. Their role is to unify the performers, set the tempo, keep the orchestra playing in time, and in sync. And this is where they are the vision champions. They maintain the big picture of the overriding objective while allowing everyone to add their own unique contributions to the crowdsourced result.

You know, as the world becomes ever more complex and interconnected, the traditional top-down approach to leadership is really not effective. And we saw that in the first paradigm about production and competition, and started to see that relaxed with the second paradigm where it was about cooperation. But co-creation is more circular, I would say, than it is a pyramid.

To create lasting change, leaders really learn how to co-create with their teams by identifying team members’ strengths. Creating a safe environment — that’s important, where everyone feels heard and respected. Everyone’s got to have a chance to talk and leverage those abilities to achieve a collective success.

Now, there are a lot of ways leaders can hold the vision of a project or in a business. And it begins with leaders being really clear about what they want to achieve and why it’s important; getting the input on that, as well. You can’t just from the top down say, “This is what we’re going to achieve.” You’ve got to get buy-in. So they have to be open to input from all the team members and only then can the team reach a consensus and move forward together, as always, in alignment with an overarching vision.

You’ve got to also be able to leverage contextual intelligence. And I know I’ve talked about contextual intelligence before. I first learned that from Warren Bennis, who was in his day, the leading expert on leadership and I studied under him at USC. And it’s an intelligence in terms of understanding the context of the situation, and every context is a little different, people are different. And so you’ve got to learn how to work with them.

So, leaders have to be able to adapt their plans and strategies as circumstances change. I mean, we certainly did in BNI when COVID hit and we transitioned almost 10,000 chapters, pretty much overnight, to online. So leaders have to be able to identify potential challenges and saboteurs — people who might want to undermine the process, and they have to manage that effectively. You do that by asking questions; leaders can really get a lot of great value from co-creative teams simply by asking good questions. You know, when do you want to get this done? When do we want to make this decision? What is our ultimate goal for this project? What’s stopping us from achieving success? By routinely asking good questions, you have the effect of reinforcing consensus and ensuring a cohesive vision among stakeholders.

I tell a story in the book about “Richard,” we’ve talked about who “Richard” is. And there’s an example where there’s an argument going on, disagreement in an agreeable way, but a disagreement and someone said to the IT person who was running that meeting, “You know, you’ve got to shut this down, they really disagree.” And the IT person said, “No, this is good. This is good. Let them talk. They’ll hash it out. They’ll come to a consensus.” And they did. And that’s great leadership.

Sometimes, you gotta lead from behind, but with guardrails. You’ve got guardrails; stay in bounds, but you lead from behind. Sometimes leading a co-creative process can seem like your team is running the plays, they’re running the field, and you’re just running behind them. And I actually had someone say this to me once, “It’s got to be like everybody is running down a field or running down a track and you’re running behind them, Ivan, and you’re moving your hands and say, “No, no, you’re out of bounds. You’re out of bounds, move in bounds. You, over here on the left, you’re out of bounds move in.” And it is like that a little bit. But when everyone is running, and you’ve got these guardrails up, they’re achieving success, and they’re moving you in a direction that is going to be way more successful than trying to do this by yourself.

So by coaching and cultivating your team, leaders have to relinquish control and focus instead on coaching others to perform their best. And that’s why it’s important to identify team members’ strengths, and the leader can then position them to contribute to the group. Communication, clear and effective communication is necessary amongst all the stakeholders. And I talked in the book about communication saturation, which when there’s a challenge, you just saturate the community with information so they know what’s going on. You know you’ve done a good job of that when people stop barking, stop complaining, and to some extent, stop coming to the meetings that you might have, because they know what’s going on. They’re good, then things calm down.

Above all, the leader has got to be an example to others. They have to be open minded, respectful, professional, non-judgmental, humble, transparent, appreciative, that’s a lot of things that a leader needs to do. But these are the things that make a great leader. More than that, their actions have to embody the project’s vision, the mutually desired outcome. Otherwise, they’ll drag the whole process down.

We did an open-ended survey for this book. We had four thousand people; four thousand people responded. And what was amazing is it contained 1,945 mentions of the word “leader.” So of 4,000 people, we had almost 2,000 talk about leadership being important in co-creation. And so obviously, leadership is an important part of the process.

I know we’re running out of time but let me give you just a few more things and we’ll wrap up.  Things to really look out for is procrastination; that co-creation is dynamic, it’s messy — it is both a muddy mess, and a thing of beauty, and it holds both spots simultaneously. So don’t succumb to the mess, work through it.

A lack of transparency can be a problem; co-creation has got to have a lot of transparency. Perfectionism can be a problem with co-creation. We quoted LinkedIn co-founder, Reed Hoffman, who said, “If you’re not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.” So it’s okay to have some mistakes.

And lack of humility, that’s a problem. And I’ve said this before on BNI podcast, humble people don’t think less of themselves, they just think of themselves less. And the lack of humility can be a real problem in the process of co-creation. Leaders not only hold the vision of the co-creative project, but they have to hold themselves accountable. And recognizing and dealing with these barriers is a good place to start. I highly recommend the book for anyone who wants to learn a little bit about co-creation and a large portion of the book is how to deal with conflict. I don’t think I’ve talked about that section of the book; I need to do that down the road. But how to deal with conflict is one of them. That’s it for today, Priscilla.

Priscilla:
Oh, that was great. I think it was very enjoyable and great information. Well, that’s it for this week.

This podcast is sponsored by www.misneraudioprograms.com. These audio programs will provide you with the tools and the inspiration to powerfully enhance your BNI experience. So check out the great material available to you at www.misneraudioprograms.com and then use the promo code IVAN50 for 50% off of everything [this code is good for a limited time]. All of the proceeds go to the BNI Foundation.

Thank you so much for listening. This is Priscilla Rice, and we look forward to having you join us again next week for another exciting episode of The Official BNI Podcast.成功的四个知道”（The Four Knows to Success）