How Principle-Based Leadership Builds Trust, Accountability and Team Culture w/ Kyle McDowell
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In this episode of Relationships at Work, Russel chats with bestselling author, international speaker, and leadership coach Kyle McDowell on embracing principle-based leadership to build a better work culture.
A few reasons why he is awesome — he is a bestselling author, international speaker, and leadership coach. His book Begin With WE – 10 Principles for Building and Sustaining a Culture of Excellence, which was on the Wall Street Journal and USA Today bestselling list, lays the foundation for a collaborative and inclusive approach to leadership. From the book, he’s developed and implemented The 10 WEs, a framework that has transformed leadership practices in – numerous organizations.
He’s also a former Fortune 10 executive who led tens of thousands of employees around the globe.
Connect with Kyle and learn more about his work…
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“When you can gain alignment with not just what we do, but more importantly how we do it, how we interact, how we treat each other as team members… it makes delivering excellence almost an afterthought.”
Kyle McDowell
Russel Lolacher: And on the show today we have Kyle McDowell and here is why he is awesome. He’s a bestselling author, international speaker, and leadership coach. His book Begin With We, 10 Principles for Building, Sustaining a Culture of Excellence. Building and Sustaining, gotta do both of those things, which was on the Wall Street Journal and USA Today bestselling list.
It lays the foundation for a collaborative and inclusive approach to leadership. My personal favorite. From the book, he’s developed and implemented the 10 WEs, a framework that has transformed leadership practices in numerous organizations. He’s also a former Fortune 10 executive who led tens of thousands of employees around the globe, and now he’s here talking with us about principles and inspiring a world of WE-ness.
If it’s not a word, it should be. WE-ness leaders. Hello, Kyle.
Kyle McDowell: Good morning, Russel. Man, it is really great to be here. You are doing such an important thing with your show, so I, I’m honored to join and, and help kind of further the effort.
Russel Lolacher: I, I can’t appreciate you enough for saying that. Thank you very much. My focus is all about having honest conversations and I have been very grateful to have guests that are very aligned with that approach. And so thank you for being yet another one of them. I thank you, sir.
Kyle McDowell: The pleasure is mine, sir. Thank you.
Russel Lolacher: But you, you know, you’ve been very sweet and kind to me to start off, but that doesn’t mean you get away from the first question I ask all of my guests, Kyle. You’re not off to hook that easy. What sir, is your best or worst employee experience?
Kyle McDowell: Oh wow. Ironically, the worst experience came before I was even an employee. True story. For a very senior position inside of a pharmaceutical firm, I went through 17 interviews in seven months. Including flying around the country to meet with various people, including flying to a consulting firm’s office and doing role playing for an entire day. 17. I can’t make it up. And the reason it sticks out is the worst experience. It should have been… I should have had all kinds of red lights and flags going off. It’s like, dude, if you have to go through this many hoops, there’s probably something inside or behind the curtains that’s not gonna be ideal for you. And I, and that turned out to be the case actually.
So I would say that’s the worst experience. And by the way, when you spend 30 years inside of, you know, big corporate America, there, there’s a lot to choose from. But the, that’s the one that jumps, jumps to the front of the list. The best experience, I think is also. It’s interesting. We could look at this as the worst experience, but I actually consider it the best experience, and I talk about this a, a fair, fair amount.
Many, many years ago, my mother was approaching the end of her road fighting cancer. It was about a year long struggle that she had, and I, I had my boss at the time, guy named William, who I’ve grown to just love and we haven’t worked together in well over a decade. He called, we had our regularly scheduled one-on-one, and right outta the gate I start going through my results, sharing updates as I usually do.
And he kind of interrupted me. He said, how you doing? I said, I’m good man. See, these numbers are pretty good. And I just kept, kept on the same talk track and he leaned in with such… he leaned in in such a caring way and he said, you know, I’m only asking because I care. And it’s, and it just, I’ve never had a leader inside corporate America anyway, tell me they cared. And that was a, it was, it was a, it was a highlight of on the list of best experiences. But it’s something that I’ve taken with me because that was the first time I’d ever heard it and it made it okay for me. Very senior guy. I was the COO of the organization,
Russel Lolacher: Fair.
Kyle McDowell: Which told me it was okay to behave that way and it wasn’t a light switch for me, but it’s something that I’ve worked on ever since then and have gotten better with over time, i’d like to think I.
Russel Lolacher: The reason I love that story is that what that leader did was use communication to remove assumption, especially as an a, a new employee who doesn’t know why this person who has all this power is ask, like they’ll jump to their own conclusions. I know I have my own narratives in my head. I’m like, why are they asking? Are they micromanaging? What, like, you’re immediately telling yourself this story. But the like, he can care, but if he doesn’t communicate that he cares, you’re filling, you can you fill the void yourself.
Kyle McDowell: Right, right. Yeah. Thanks and, and thanks for allowing me to share it. I’m a big fan of this guy. As a matter of fact, he’s become a client of mine. I gave a, I gave a talk with his leadership team a number of months ago, and we’re going back sometime soon, hopefully in the spring. But it’s just one of those things that it’s never left me.
It’s never left me. I remember like it was yesterday.
Russel Lolacher: That’s one of the big reasons I ask this question is not only, well, first off, the reason I ask this question, everybody doesn’t talk about stories from last week or last month. It’s always like from decades ago, because good or bad, it shaped their own leadership journey, right? For, for that first one, how horrible of a first impression is it of, do you think I wanna work for an organization that wants to talk to me 17 times or ghost me?
Which is the most reoccurring theme with people that are
Kyle McDowell: Right.
Russel Lolacher: Starting out and trying to get traction in a new role. So thank you for sharing both the good and the bad of it. It’s interesting ’cause it does lead into our conversation pretty easily because we’re talking about what principle based leadership looks like, and you showed a example of how horrible it can be with that first relationship that we’re starting with these applicants, but also this very principled leader that was showing you sort of the way of how to engage and interact.
Kyle, how do you define principle-based leadership?
Kyle McDowell: Well, I’ll, I’ll give you the definition that drives me every day. And it’s not my own, it’s from, it’s from Oxford Dictionaries. A principle, and I’m paraphrasing, but a principle is, is nothing more than a foundation for a system of beliefs or a chain of beliefs. It is our, and, and if, if I boil it down to Kyle’s terms, it is something to which we align. Something around which we align.
And when I discovered this thing called principle-based leadership, it’s not new. I didn’t create it, but what it taught me was when you establish principles for a team, and I don’t care if it’s the, the, the bowling team, the chess team, the most senior team inside a Fortune 10 company when you can gain alignment with not just what we do, but more importantly how we do it, how we interact, how we treat each other as team members, how the leader is expected to treat us.
How the team is expected to treat the leader. When you establish those expectations very early on, it makes delivering excellence so much, so it, it almost is an afterthought because we know how we’re gonna get there. We know when we’re facing adversity, we lean into these principles. So when I discover principle-based leadership, candidly it came after I created the 10 principles because I just established those as kinda like guide rails. Here are the 10 things and it, I, I, I didn’t start off with a goal of 10. I didn’t start off with them being the 10 WEs. Just for some context for your audience, I just accepted a role to leave 15,000 employees, 11 locations, a $7 billion program.
The night before I was gonna meet with the top 40 or 50 leaders of my newly inherited organization. I just. I knew I needed to come with something they hadn’t heard before, and I knew I needed to approach them in a way I’d never approached the team because to that, to that point, two decades into my career, the biggest emotion I was feeling was apathy.
Russel Lolacher: Right.
Kyle McDowell: And that’s a real hard pill to swallow, man, when you realize the environments that you loath are the same ones that you created or had a ma, you know, a major role in creating them. So I had to do something different, be a leader that I’d never had. And that’s when the principles came about, about midnight in Lawrence, Kansas. The night before meeting with this group.
I shared it with the team the next day, and my life has never been the same.
Russel Lolacher: Now I was gonna ask, and you kind of answered it, but I’m kind of curious to your thoughts of like, whose principles are these? You’ve, when you’re talking about principle-based leadership, there is the 10 WEs, but there’s also people may go, well, they’re my principles and I’m imposing them on my team or my organization, or they pulling it from the organization themselves.
Or they just using the 10 WEs as a framework going, you know what? I’m gonna start with these 10 and I’ll figure it out.
Kyle McDowell: So I, I’ll give you the, the way I approached this. So when I created the principles, I shared them the next, the next morning, and I was really direct with the team. I, I don’t care if you embrace all 10, you want to add to, but these are the 10 I. They don’t have to be the 10 WEs. They, they can be, you could dream them up anytime, any place.
I would, I would encourage a lot of self-reflection when we come up with these, these principles. But my, my goal in spreading the message of principle-based leadership more specifically to 10 WEs is not, is not isolated to just those 10. It’s what I’ve chosen. They work for me. But everybody’s different.
Everybody’s leadership style is different. My urging is to just create and document your principles and share them widely and be really overt in setting expectations about them and with them. So it can be, you don’t, they don’t have to be the WEs, they don’t have to be 10, but they have to be established is my position.
Russel Lolacher: How is this different than, say, a values-based leadership or service-based leadership? Because I could Google style leadership styles and get 173 of them tomorrow. So how is this differentiating itself or is it just foundational to other styles.
Kyle McDowell: I, I think the, I think principle-based leadership or principle, principles in general augment and enable the value. So, and a lot of organizations, the values or sometimes even the mission statements are kind of like these aspirational sentences or groups of, or set of words that communicate who we are and what we do externally. The principles in my mind enable that communica, enable the delivery of those values. So, for example, my favorite example, actually, there’s a, there’s a firm that I used to work with whose mission statement was helping consumers on their paths to better health. Who’s gonna, who’s gonna disagree with that?
It’s beautiful, but it doesn’t compel me to work any harder, any more collaboratively. It doesn’t place an emphasis on excellence. So what it, so what I have found, and I’ve had organizations and very senior people say, well, we can’t have the WEs replace our values. And that’s not the intention, they enable. So the principles are much more action-based oriented. They are they are actionable, they are quantifiable in many ways. So they just, they add a finer point and provide a little more direction and guidance than say just a value or mission statement.
Russel Lolacher: I, I love vision and missions. I think they’re completely vital to any organization. I think most organizations are horrible at them, but I, I still believe that they’re so integral to the forward movement. And can it be inspiring if done well, if communicated well, if connected to the… Do you see the, the principle based leadership or the principles, sort of that connective tissue because it’s, it’s not like these can go away, and that’s why I always get bothered when teams will go, well, we have our own vision.
I’m like, But there is a vision already. Like I get that you need your own motivation because it’s very personal to you and it what motivates you. And I get that, but you can’t work in a vacuum either. You have to be part of the larger organization fixing the larger problems. Is that sort of the connective tissue piece that we’re looking at?
Kyle McDowell: It should be. It should be. Yeah, and it’s your, your comment and question is really, really a good one because I, as I mentioned, and I’ll go, I’ll go a little bit deeper, is I’ve worked with firms that they hold their mission statement so close and, and with so much affection. However, if you ask the masses of the people inside the organization, most of them can’t recite it. They, they, they can’t even recite a few words of it unless they’re walking by the wall on which it is displayed. And when I get that kind of pushback, it’s like, I am not here to test, to test or, or criticize or scrutinize your mission statement. I’m here to help drive the enabling of that mission.
I’ve had, I’ve had people kind of gimme the Heisman to say, we’re not going deeper with these principles. We love to talk. We love the principle-based leadership, however they threaten our values, which I think is us being married to kind of leadership tactics or approaches of the past. I think you and I might disagree a bit.
I, I think mission statements are wonderful tools for explaining who we are externally, but again, behind the curtains, I don’t think they do anything to motivate.
Russel Lolacher: Fair. I, I can’t help but see the we of it all. And as you were talking, when you came with your epiphany in the middle of the night, which is always the time, these Jerry McGuire moments always seem to happen that way. For those that are the Gen Z, Jerry McGuire was a movie with Tom Cruise that you should definitely check out.
So needless to say, us as me as a Gen Xer, I will say I see the WE-ness of it all, but that makes me go back to what problem were you trying to fix when you came up with this principle, based these principles? You talk about your own personal journey with apathy, but I immediately think of me, the me culture that may have been, and, and maybe I’m just jumping to that conclusion because we seems like a fix to a me culture.
Am I wrong?
Kyle McDowell: You are not wrong. You’re not wrong that it wasn’t the intention though. So when I, when I stepped into this role, and I’d been in the position maybe 60 days before creating the principles. And what I had, had, what I observed that I think compelled me. There were two driving factors that compelled me to document these principles.
By the way, the night before I’m in the hotel room, had no idea what I was gonna say. I was a bit terrified because I knew this was a kind of a gut check transitional moment for me. I had no idea it would take me to the places it’s taken me since then. There was no muse on my shoulder. I, I, I sensed… the first factor. I sensed a, a fair amount of siloed paradigms. So if my, this is a 15,000 person organization, I had seven directs. Each of them had, at a minimum, a few hundred employees, and they viewed, and I love this group, so it’s hard to be critical this many years later. This is back in 2017. They viewed their success almost exclusively by the performance of the group that they led.
Not more kind of programmatic macro level success. So there’s some silos and a bit of sandboxes. Were, were needed to kind of traverse the, so that was probably the, the number one factor. And the second was, and you, you know this better than I do probably Russel is most organizations do a fair job, if not a really good job bringing new, new, new employees into the fold, telling them how to do their job. The, the SOPs, the, the nuts and bolts, the X’s and O’s of the role that they have assumed. I think by and large, most companies do an okay job at that, if not better than, okay. Where nearly every organization falls short is establishing similar expectations for the behavior.
So the how we know what we do, we train for that, but how we get there is an entirely different conversation. So my goal was to establish guardrails and they could serve as any type of defense for adversity that we’re facing for tough decisions that we have to make. You know, essentially for every day, every interaction.
So those were the two driving factors. Now I’d, I’d be dishonest if I said it was met with a rousing response and people were on board. I would say half the group was, a quarter of the group was skeptical but optimistic, and then there was a quarter of the group, you know, classically classic bell that, that they were obstinate.
They just thought I was full of it. ’cause they’d seen guys like me come and go. And so I wanted to really focus on setting those expectations. And I’ve led with those expectations of, if you see me behave any way contrary to any one of these principles, I, I’d literally said, grab me by the ear. Nobody did, but I said that.
I said, just because know this, I will hold you accountable just as accountable, no leadership gap to these same expectations. And I think levelling the playing field right outta the gate had a, had an impact bigger than I’d probably understood at the time.
Russel Lolacher: I wanna talk about accountability in a minute. ’cause that’s a huge blind spot I think in a lot of organizations. But first, I. Dial back a bit and go, as a leader, how do I know? Is there any canary in a coal mine? Is there any beige flags that we need to be looking for to go, you know what, this shift is necessary within my organization.
Where maybe we’re not going in the, you know, the healthiest culture, or we’re focusing way more on the ends justify the means as opposed to the journey to get there. How do we know?
Kyle McDowell: Well, the, the, the most straightforward and simple way is you just have to ask, I’m not naive in, in thinking that everyone’s gonna be as open and, and share, you know exactly what they’re thinking, especially to a brand new leader. But asking questions, you know, really open-ended questions, and not just listening, but hearing their responses and, and taking them to heart.
Taking them with a grain of salt in some cases, depending on the size of the organization, right? I’m a big fan of engagement surveys. I’m a big fan of anonymous feedback engines or loops, whatever that is. The, my, my bigger point is, or whatever technology works for you or approach. My bigger point though, is if you’re gonna ask those questions, you must be prepared to take action on what you hear, even if that action is, hey.
I hear you. Not a bad idea. Maybe it is a bad idea, but now’s not the time. We’re gonna put this over here in a corner and check in with me, or I’ll check in with you and, you know, let’s set 30, 60, 90 days or whatever. It’s a great idea and, and we’re gonna put it in the queue, but we just can’t take action.
And here’s the why. Why are we not doing something or why are we doing something? So I think asking, having I’m a big fan of skip level meetings as well, so I just, I, I just believe in, you know, almost sometimes dangerous transparency, you know, unless it’s something confidential, I can’t share. I, I just believe in asking questions, hear, asking the awkward questions, and being open to hearing them.
What do you, what do you think? How do you assess it?
Russel Lolacher: I think, I think curiosity is by, so I think first off, I think so I always talk if you want great leadership, you need three things, self-awareness, situational awareness and great communication. You need to know yourself, know your team and organization, and know how to connect with them, and that’s where the communication comes into it.
So I think if you have a deeper understanding of those three things, you’ll know your organization well enough to know what it needs. If it is vacant of values, if it is, to your point, mission and visions are posters on walls and websites. And there’s a disconnect between the words said and the actions taken, then those actions need to be better aligned.
Much like your WEs is okay, well we need to, we need to close that gap because that gap is where trust with between employees and leadership is lost. Because the bigger that gap is, the more employees aren’t stupid. They see what you say and what you don’t do. So to have a blueprint, or at least to your point ins inspiration to go, no, no, no, we need to show our leadership, not just say, we’re leaders,
Kyle McDowell: Right.
Russel Lolacher: Is what I think these, this is what these principles do for me.
But not everybody’s from the same song sheet, Kyle. Like, I’m looking at these, you know, looking at these principles. We lead by example. We say what we’re gonna do, then we do it. We take action. We admit mistakes. Love them. However, leadership is not in a great place. Leadership is not trained. Leadership is a bunch of people that applied for jobs just to get more money, not ’cause they were qualified, because they just want, they just wanna move up the ladder and people just want bum in seats.
So we perpetuate this under qualification in leadership roles. So to embrace something like this, this principle base, these principles. Where does a leader need to be? What, how do they qualify to be ready to put these principles into place? Where’s their mindset need to be?
Kyle McDowell: Man. There’s a lot to unpack there. Yeah. Right. No, no. It’s a, it’s a really great question and, and framed so well. The I do, I do, I wanna push back on one component of the question, though.
Russel Lolacher: Sure.
Kyle McDowell: There’s nobody named leadership.
Russel Lolacher: Hmm.
Kyle McDowell: You know what I mean? I could not agree more with you. There’s this cycle that happens.
Let’s pretend you and I are on the same team. Our boss just got a promotion. That role is now opened and I think, man, I wanna make some more money. I want to tell people what to do. I want, I want to be a leader. So I throw my hand up well. Our former boss is now the, the fellow or, or, or or woman in charge of hiring into the role that they just left ’cause they got promoted.
We’ve loathed the approach that this man, you and I, we, we lo we have loathed the, the, the approach, the way this person treats us, how they behave, how they prioritize their communication. We’re inclined to mirror that behavior. We want to endear ourselves, right? This is the perpetuation you talk about. So I, I, I couldn’t, I couldn’t respond with a disagreement without telling you how much I completely agree with this thing.
And until somebody steps up inside of a team, inside of an organization inside the world to say, this is no longer how we do things. It’s a new day. As you said, leadership is in a, I think you said dark place or a bad place. Couldn’t agree more. So how do you know you’re ready to make that transition? I’ll go back to what you said, man.
It, it’s, it is, it is probably the most important aspect of an impactful leader. I mean, we could argue about a couple of other kind of approaches, you know, empathy, communication’s, important, self-reflection. That’s where it’s at, dude, self-reflection. Am I, am I comfortable in the shoes that I wear? Am I okay sharing the things that I’m not good at? Being transparent about my, my blind spots? Because as you said, dude, it’s so true. The blind spots I’m trying to hide from my team, they could describe them intimately. They know those blind spots that I’m trying to, they know what I’m not good at already. So hiding them creates this lack of relatability and inauthenticity.
And then it’s impossible to establish trust. So if you, if you’re questioning if you’re ready for it or not. We have to first understand where we sit individually on this spectrum and the spectrum is, I, I would say on one end of the spectrum is everything’s about me. I only care about me, my raise, my promotion, it’s all about me.
The other end of the spectrum is completely selfless and focused on, you know, those around you. I think most people sit in the middle, if not towards the left side of that spectrum. So having that self-reflection or that moment, I, I call it the mirror of truth. And it’s a metaphor just for saying either a confidant that I can really rely on to tell me the stuff that I may not want to hear.
Or have I evolved enough where I can do it quietly in a, in a place where I’m not gonna be interrupted. You know, it’s not meditation, it’s not just kinda like staring at my navel. It’s thinking through things. And that’s, that’s the process I went through when I created the principles. It’s like, what did I, what have I disliked the previous two decades?
Where do I want to go and what impact do I wanna have? What leadership legacy do I wanna establish? It’s two words A lot of people don’t use together leadership and legacy. So once you, once you reach a point where the self-reflection is something that you’re comfortable with, and I have to tip a cap to i’m a, I’m such a fanboy and of a guy named Harry Kramer. He’s the former CEO of Baxter International. He’s a professor at Kellogg School of Management now. He wrote a book called From Values to Action, and one, he has four values that he opines on in the, and I think it might be the first, but it’s regardless.
It’s, it’s true self-confidence. And self-reflection is another one. So if I can have the self-reflection and really be comfortable in the things that I’m good at, not be an asshole or arrogant about it, but just, you know, check the tape. These are the things that I’m, I’m pretty good at. And augment those things that I’m not so good at with a really great team around me.
That’s the recipe for success. If you have that moment of self-reflection or multiple moments, ’cause it’s an ongoing process of self-reflection and you recognize that there might be a way, a better way. That provides more fulfillment and greater impact than you, than you are having at the moment. So how do I get there? And it’s, it’s, it’s a mistake to read a book, to go to a seminar, to watch a, a podcast, to come back in the next day and say, here’s who we are. I’m gonna lead differently today. I. Because it’s not a light switch decision. What I have done and what I encourage those that I work with today is establish the principles. 10 WEs. Great. If not, don’t care, but establish what they are and share them widely. Set the expectation and then back away. And live it, every single day, not just every day, every interaction, because they’re watching, as you said, Russel, they’re watching to see if your actions and your words align. So long story short, do the self-reflection.
Find the gaps of, of where you are and what you want to be and the impact you want to have and create the expectations that will, that will essentially be the bridge between those two places. And don’t walk away from ’em. Be open to pushback. Be open to maybe someone saying, those aren’t the right, that’s not the right list of principles.
And then we talk about it and we communicate and come back and forth and we land on what’s perfect for us. That, that’s the approach I would recommend.
Russel Lolacher: How do we keep ourselves, back to the accountability question. How do we keep ourselves accountable to this? Because a lot of leaders, and I, I don’t mean to crap on leaders. Leaders have a lot of challenges and a lot of lack of training that they’re, which is the whole, it is exceptionally hard, and they’re kind of left out to go learn how to swim.
I’m gonna throw you in the deepest water I can find. Go figure it out. And that’s, leaders need leaders and that’s a huge challenge for them as well. So it makes me come back to the thought of accountability, because we talk about responsibility a lot. Responsibility is your job description.
Responsibility is, but accountability is so rare. I bring up the example of if you see a bad leader. We are like, okay, we need to address the bad leader. I’m like, great. Do we ever talk about the leader that hired them? Do we talk about the leader that was accountable to train them to be a better leader, to have regular performance and blah, blah, blah?
No, we only focus on the bad leader. So I’m thinking of this going, okay, we’ve got principles, whether they’re the 10 WEs or not. How do we keep them to be accountable or, and consistent because it also is that other blind spot of the too busy, right? I, I don’t, this is a checkbox exercise, but Kyle, I told them what the 10 principles were. I’ll come back in six months and see how we did, because they’re onto the 17th meeting today. How do we break through that wall? Crack that nut as it were.
Kyle McDowell: Well, there’s no substitution for care. There’s no substitution. So if you don’t care, you can’t lead and out of care comes, theoretically, if you really and sincerely, genuinely care about those that you lead and you wanna develop those around you and as I’ve mentioned, have an impact and a, a legacy, it is a decision that must be made every single day and almost every single interaction and letting go of the ego that comes with the business card you hold.
And that was a challenge for me, man, when I created the principles. One of the principles is we challenge each other, followed by, we embrace challenge. As the leader of a team, or more broadly an organization, you really don’t have to embrace challenges from those on your team. Your business card says you don’t have to, but that’s where the disconnect comes and that’s where the alienation comes, and that’s where the apathy is born.
When I have a standard that you don’t follow and, and vice versa, so I can’t make someone care. I get this question a lot, a similar question. It’s like, well, okay, we’ve, we’ve quote unquote implemented the principles. Everybody has the book. You gave a great keynote. So how long until we have this culture of excellence that you talk about?
My answer is, I don’t know. I don’t know because I can’t assess your level of care and commitment to these things. But what I can tell you, and I can guarantee it, because I’ve lived it firsthand and I’ve seen it in dozens of organizations at this point since the book’s been out. If you make the conspicuous decision and those around you, again, it’s our foundation for system of beliefs.
If those around you make that same commitment, I say subscribe. You subscribe to these principles. We’re all gonna live them. We’re not just gonna live them, we’re gonna talk about ’em, and they’re gonna be conspicuous in our everyday actions. Russel, I still wear a 10 WE bracelet everywhere I go. It never comes off unless it gets cruddy and then I have to take it off.
I cannot make you care, but I can guarantee if you, if you approach this because you want something better and you’re open to being held accountable to those and by those that you lead and you’re gonna do the same. Hold them accountable. This magnetism begins and you start, and the beau, the beautiful thing to me that I witnessed firsthand is once the principles were established, as I mentioned, I pulled away. I go visit a site every month to go to a different location every month, and each month thereafter, I would start to see new signage. I would see coffee mugs, I would see desktop wallpaper. None of this I commissioned. I didn’t force any of this and I was always struggling, man, candidly, is this a bit of brown nosing for the new boss or is this the real deal?
And it took me over a year to really become comfortable that it was resonating, they were resonating. So I that, you know, that’s, that’s, that’s no substitution for care. State them, gain alignment around them. This foundational set of beliefs or our system of behavior, live them every day and be comfortable being called out when you don’t, because you won’t. Nobody’s gonna be perfect at it. So we allow that grace as well.
Russel Lolacher: There’s so many leaders that don’t have the influence they want to have, which is I, I can influence my team of 10, 20, but the larger organization, they’re not getting it. So from your experience, from working with clients and stuff, what is the best approach? ’cause truthfully, you can go to the CEO and they’ll be like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, we’ll do that.
But there are passionate, passionate middle management leaders who are basically going, oh, this I can control. This is great for my team. This is motivating for my team. We see the vision and mission ’cause they’re on the poster, but really this is where, this is where the rubber hits the road, right? So how do you approach an organization? Because sometimes organizationally they’re not ready, but they are at a subculture level.
Kyle McDowell: You are so spot on, dude. I go through a bit of a vetting process personally. So my, I have a very small team. We’ve got a team of five people and before committing to doing a keynote, before committing to doing any type of coaching or, or leadership summits where we, we lead a multi-day, multi-hour session, usually five weeks of really deep dive into the principles of the book.
I have to do a bit of vetting. Is this a check the box process that you’re going through? Perhaps the CEO is told the next level of leadership change the culture. So I have to, I have to weigh how serious this is and, and this is where some, and I’ve turned down business more than once to say, this feels like an initiative and not a way of life.
So I, I, you know, we’ve got to, you’re so right, that middle layer of management is thirsty. They’re so hungry for a different way, a better way, but it feels as if it feels almost impossible because they’re just not seeing the same level of effort and energy around the same topics above them. Air quotes on the org chart.
So, you know, I just I want, I want, I wanna make sure that folks understand, your audience understands, I recognize if you’re in a place where the, the toxicity or dysfunction in and, you know, in the org specifically above you and maybe even around you is so great. That you’re not able to make the change that, that you wanna make.
I, I get it. And if you, and if you choose to keep your head down and continue down that less impactful path, I got nothing but love for you. We got commitments, we got bills. You know, it’s not easy to sometimes take a step back to go two or three steps forward. And that’s a decision all of us have to make.
But if you care enough and you are committed enough to a different way and you wanna find that fulfillment, I all but guarantee that one step backward is almost always worth the 2, 3, 4 steps forward, that will result in leading differently.
Russel Lolacher: I wanna just to get a little bit more granular with those managers that are trying to implement this. Diversity comes up for me a lot when we talk about general, like 10 principles. I know we’ve already established that these don’t need to be your principles. They just need to be there to maybe inspire what works for you.
But even looking at one of your principles, which is we challenge each other diplomatically. I hear that and I also hear, I know so many people that being challenged means something completely different from person to person. You could have the softest touch and that person’s like, I’ve had so many horrible leaders to date that I am, like the walls go up.
Or others that, more neuro, neuro divergent who see being challenged differently in how they want to be challenged. So how do we adjust principles to better connect with those that we’re responsible for when they may see things quite differently?
Kyle McDowell: Well, there’s a rule. First of all, we challenge each other. As a rule, every challenge must be grounded in either data or experience.
Russel Lolacher: Okay.
Kyle McDowell: Not opinion. Not opinion. So part of the adoption or subscribing to these principles involves understanding the, the nuances underneath them. If you have an issue with anything we’re doing.
Bring me the data. Show me how, and it could be experiential data. It could be your, it could be something that you’ve lived in a former organization. Pretend we have this new marketing approach that’s about to launch, and someone on the team has had a sim or, or took a similar approach with another firm before they joined our team and they saw it fail miserably.
We must listen to that challenge. We must be open to hearing that. It’s when we come and say, you know. I don’t, I don’t like those glasses, Russel. Like, that’s not helpful. Your opinion is not, your opinion is, is wanted and heard, but it’s not part of the challenge process. And I’ll tell a really quick story.
So I, I introduced these principles back in 2017, and as I mentioned, the acceptance or response was mixed. Largely favorable, but not entirely. The, one of the people, a direct report of mine inside this subgroup of those that were pretty obstinate. Her name’s Julia. She knows I tell this story, so it’s, it’s all good ’cause there’s a great ending to it.
Julia was difficult to, to me at nearly every turn, you know. Nearly 10 years later, she doesn’t quite remember it the way I do. My, my, my, my recollection is nearly every ask I had of her was met with some type of pushback. And I am, I am far from the brightest guy in the room, dude. But when I introduced these principles, I was so passionate about the adoption and wanting them to take place without me forcing it. I recognized that these were challenges she was giving me, and if I didn’t embrace them, if I didn’t take my own medicine, the whole thing is dead on arrival. So here’s this guy that’s just evangelizing all these things, and one of them is. We must embrace challenge, and the first time somebody pushes back on him, he bangs his fist on the desk and uses his business card to say, no, no, no. Here’s what we’re doing, because I said so. Well, I, I knew my, the best example is Julia sent, I asked for a workbook. I wanted to do some analysis, personal analysis of this new organization. So she had all this data. She, I said, send me the workbook. She sent me a screenshot. Not helpful. I said, please send me the workbook.
She sends me a single tab of a workbook. At this point, I’m fuming, but I just couldn’t react the way I wanted to. I behind the scenes probably to my wife or something I did. Let’s fast forward nearly a decade later. She’s one of my closest colleagues we haven’t worked together in, in six years. We still have almost regular one-on-ones every four to six weeks we check in with each other.
She ultimately assumed the role that I had after I left that firm. So I, there are people that you must walk the walk a lot longer than you talk the talk. And she was one of them. And, and she’s one of my, I, I, I would say best confidants as well. We, we talk, she helped name the book. So I just, you know, the example that I share there is so important, and I think it’s similar or in line with the question that you asked, is it’s easy to not embrace challenge when you don’t have to.
But the flip side of that is when you do embrace challenge as the leader, the results and the alignment and the bond that comes is really hard to break once it’s there.
Russel Lolacher: That really, I mean, I was gonna ask because I was curious about it, how the principles can actually help relationship building with your teams. And that’s a perfect illustration of it is, is it gives you a baseline from which to, and please correct me if I’m wrong, it seems like it gives you a shared foundation to build from regardless of the timeline as you’ve timelines might be different in how that relationship’s formed, but at least it gives you a basis to build from.
Kyle McDowell: It is almost like a cultural currency and that value and, and the currency has the same value if it’s an intern or the CEO you, but you said something just now and then you, you, you said this is, is is important for the principles can be a foundation or important for relationships, and then you said with your team.
What I’ve learned the most beautiful, unintended byproduct of this whole mission that I’m on, is the impact that I’m hearing it’s having on personal lives, and you, man, based on your work and, and what I’ve witnessed with you, you, you are probably at the front of the pack trying to get folks to understand you can be the same person inside and outside of work.
Now, of course, there are things we don’t discuss and there’s, you know, there’s areas we don’t get it, maybe certain words we don’t say. I’m not naive to that, but what I found personally is when you lead a particular way inside of an organization, a team gets to know you a certain way. And for me, this transition from the bang my fist on the desk to this principal based guy, I started to feel like a hypocrite ’cause I wasn’t living these same principles outside of the workplace. And I thought, man, if these guys ever saw me behave this way, if I’m the guy focused on doing the right thing. This is, I’m a hypocrite. So the, the short answer to your question is yes, they absolutely set a framework or a foundation for relationships, but it’s not just inside the workplace.
If you find yourself, if, if you can apply these same principles, how you treat people, how you want to be treated, the, the value you placed on their, you place, on their humanity. If you, if you, if you, there should be no line between the work and outside of work approach. I had a guy at, at a talk once, man, I gave a talk at Audi, all senior executives.
At the end of the talk, this fellow raised his hand and stands up. We were in an auditorium style setting. This guy stands up Russel, he’s like a big former Division One football player. Big dude, bald head, really intimidating guy. He said, I’m paraphrasing, but he said essentially, if you read the book.
Or more importantly, you understand it and digest these principles that will change your relationships with your family. As a matter of fact, it’s changing how I’m raising my children. I teared up. At that moment in front of this group of executives, I teared up standing behind this podium and I sat back in the stool. I said, I got nothing else. I. I, I, I have no further value to add, and I found that to be the case in my relationships as well. So that’s, I’m glad you tipped the cap there, but I just wanna take it a moment or a, a step deeper because that is where real excellence is found in our existence, not just inside the workplace.
Russel Lolacher: Thank you. Yeah, no, completely agree. I mean, I, I, I find it more and more interesting that we talk about leadership development, and I’m like, no, that’s just personal development. That’s it. just you being a better person or, and I tell this story a free a few times where I remember going through a values exercise, ’cause we’ve been through about a million of those at one point or another.
And the woman, I, I was at a table doing it with a group of, a cohort and there was another table behind me and this woman had values set up differently at work than she did at home. They were
Kyle McDowell: She shared this with you.
Russel Lolacher: Yeah. She shared it with the entire room and she’s like, is that wrong? I’m like, yes. Because if your values are family, do they suddenly become not important when you turn on a computer or walk through the door?
No, but so why? Why are we suddenly dismissing that because you’re in a work setting? Your boundaries are obviously not strong enough. Your principles are not strong enough, or you’re not communicating them strong enough to the people around you, so you are becoming a different person. It’s like, was it that TV show, severance? You completely are severing. You are they talk about bring your whole self to work, and that’s a whole other conversation I have challenges with. But at least you need to be true to yourself and honest with yourself or you’re gonna be miserable. And she was not a happy, a happy colleague and this was such a window into that.
Kyle McDowell: But, but man, if, if we agree that nobody or very few people, and I think we agree. Very few people come to work to be a saboteur. They’re not there to sabotage or they exist. Those people do exist. There are bad people inside of the corporate landscape. No doubt about that. But if we agree that for the most part, no, nobody comes to work to, to be a saboteur.
The question we should ask ourselves, and you probably did ask her, is why do you feel the need? Why do you feel the need to have a different set of values or even principles in and outside of work? She, she didn’t lie in bed one evening or wake up a morning and said, you know what? I wanna be two different people.
She was, she was programmed that way. And I, and most of us can relate to that. I was, which is why it was important to put the word sustain in the title of my book because I, you know, by most accounts, Russel, before I found principle-based leadership, my career was, by most standards, successful. I had a really, really good run.
Made more money than I ever expected to. These fancy titles, these, you know, cool corner offices with conference tables and the… all the things, right? I behaved in a way where the impact I was having was not sustainable. It’s not, it’s not sustainable. It didn’t create the legacy I was, I wanted to look back at and be proud of and at, and at some point I actually realized those that I thought had a tremendous amount of respect for me, they didn’t actually feared me. And that’s not a good feeling. So it’s not sustainable. You can have great results being a jerk. You can, but at what cost is, I think the question to ask.
Russel Lolacher: And I see people in that situation, I’m like, it’s either one of two things. One, it’s either you are seeing that modeled somewhere else and think that’s the path to success.
Kyle McDowell: That’s the program.
Russel Lolacher: Or you’re doing it outta survival and that you need to be a different person to survive within an environment that is obviously not healthy for you because you can’t be the person that’s at home.
You have to be put up this, this mask, this, this facade in order to make it through the day. And that is not a way to live either.
Kyle McDowell: It, it is the worst way. It is, I call it soul sucking. It, it, it, it. And then the unfortunate thing, and I heard a stat on a, on one of your episodes, and I’m, I don’t remember the exact number now, but it was about engagement and people actually wanting to be there. We’ve accepted it. So many of us have accepted it.
I was on a plane recently and I was flip, I had my, my laptop open. I was heading to towards the keynote and I was going through my slides, just kind of trying to get prepared and this, I could see this guy, we’ve all been there, right? I could see this guy starting to lean over, lean over to look at my screen, and I didn’t, I didn’t fret. Finish what I was doing, closed the laptop.
He said, Hey man, what do you do? We just had a brief conversation and within this first three or four minutes, I, you know, I share with them what I do and. His response was, well, I just thought that was how it’s supposed to go. You go to college or not, but you get out into the workforce, you ultimately start to hate your job.
He said that. I think that is the sentiment for so many people in the workforce, and I think the data supports that and unpacking that is a much longer conversation and, and probably a much tougher topic. But the point here is nobody wakes up to hate their job. They’ve been conditioned to hate their job.
And that’s not by leadership, management. That’s not by the label or logo on the wall. It’s by people. It’s by people. That’s how we got there.
Russel Lolacher: And thank goodness that seems to be shifting a bit generationally because we hear a lot from your Gen Z, Gen Z for us Canadians that they’re not putting up with things that, that don’t provide value, that, and they’re vocal about it. They’ll go on social media about it and then there’s us whose older generations going, we hated meetings too. We just didn’t say know you could say something about it. Like we, no, that was how we were supposed to be successful. We just were drones thinking that. We didn’t kick back at the status quo because that was all we knew. So there’s this inspiration coming from younger generations that are saying all the things that we’ve wanted to say since day one, which I find really funny when we talk about the future of work.
Ooh, the future of work. Oh my goodness. We need to be prepared for the future of work. I’m like 90% of those things we’ve wanted for two decades. This is not the future of work. This is stuff we’ve been too scared to ask for. So, and I, I feel principles is so embedded in that because we haven’t been living with principles, we’ve been living with productivity and monetary success. As opposed to are we the right people to like money is, and Simon Sinek has said this a few times, is money is the outcome. It is not the, it’s not the goal.
Kyle McDowell: Right.
Russel Lolacher: And I think principles to your point, is getting that foundational stuff to get us ready to whatever we need to do.
Kyle McDowell: Well said. Agreed. Well said.
Russel Lolacher: I wanna wrap it up with one last question ’cause there’s a few people probably are going, okay, this sounds great.
I’ll buy the book, I’ll check out guidelines. But where do I start? Where do I, do I start self-reflection? Do I write down these 10 principles and just repeat them as a mantra over and over again? Like what is, what do I need to do to take that first dip in the pool?
Kyle McDowell: Well, don’t spend money on a book until you’ve gone through the self-reflection that we’ve talked about. You, you, we, I think people underestimate just how difficult and the additional exponential level of effort required to, to, to transition from boss to leader. Anybody can manage, I, I really, anybody can manage, but nobody wants to be managed.
We wanna be led. So that self-reflection must include, do I have it in me? Is this something that I’m, you know, is this a fight I want to have? Because sometimes it will feel like a fight, it will feel thankless. You will spend more calories and time. You must, because just managing the, the ends and outs and the output of the team is half, maybe half the battle.
You know, forging strong relationships and bonds and setting a vision and, and holding people account, and so many other things that go into it. That, that self-reflection at first is incredibly important. Now, if you’ve made the decision or you feel as if you’re ready to take on a different approach, yeah, pick up the book.
Learn the values or the principles, or establish your own, you know, use mine as a guide, as a, as a series, like a blueprint if, if you will. And, and, and conspicuously share them with those that need to see and hear them. Usually it’s your own team. If you’re leading a group of people, if you’re not leading a group of people, share ’em with anyone who will listen because again, there’s this magnetism that starts to be created when we realize, oh my gosh, this person actually seems to care about me.
They actually seem to care about the, the contribution that I make. They see me adding value. I feel valued because of them. I’m contributing to this team. Momentum is a hell of a thing in this, in this domain. So take the time, have the quiet conversations with someone you trust, or do it alone in that mirror of truth, environment or setting. Pick something up. Establish your principles. You don’t have to buy a book to do that, but it’s really helpful to have the framework and I’ve actually lived it. So that’s the one thing I would really try to leave your audience with is these principles are not hypothetical, they’re not academic. They’re quite simple.
They’re incredibly simple. But simple is not easy. It’s not, we all know how to lose weight. We all know we gotta lower our calorie intake and, and, and reduce and burn more calories. We know that. We know, we know what’s, we know what to do to get from one side of a thing to another. We know what it takes to learn a second language, how to play guitar.
We know how to get there. It’s all the how is all simple, but actually doing it, it’s very difficult. So it’s, you know, just be careful how much you bite off. The worst thing you can do is start off, start outta the gate with some huge aspirational transformation. And the first time adversity strikes the team is like, what happened to all this principal stuff you were talking about? You’re better off having done nothing at all.
Russel Lolacher: I think that’s a beautiful way to end this conversation. Thank you so much, Kyle, for being here. I really appreciate your time, sir.
Kyle McDowell: Well, the pleasure’s mine, man, and as I mentioned, I, I really and truly feel you’re, you’re doing really important work and if I get a chance to share the message on a platform like this, I can’t say no. So thank you.
Russel Lolacher: That’s Kyle McDowell. He’s a bestselling author, international speaker, and leadership coach, and if you haven’t picked it up yet, please do. It’s his book. Begin with We 10 Principles for Building and Sustaining A Culture of Excellence. Take care, Kyle. Thank you so much, man.
Kyle McDowell: Thank you.