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Transformational Leadership Symposium Transcript
Saturday, November 21
Audio starts at [0:19:15]
Karen Wilson: Good morning. How is everybody on this beautiful day in Ravinia?
[Applause]
Karen Wilson: We'd like to welcome back those who were here last night and
those who are joining us today. Welcome. We have a wonderful
day. We had a beautiful night last night and lots to look forward to
today and Tom's going to give you a briefing on our day.
Tom Terry: Thank you, Karen. Let me just start with this. So Karen and I are
sitting down here and I'm going oops, I pulled out my phone and I
put the darn thing on a silent and she says yes, you know, when my
ring – my ring just goes into a Calypso dance. She says, “I better
shut this off now or if it goes off when we're up there, they're going
to think it's part of the program.”
Karen Wilson: Then we'll have to dance.
Tom Terry: So just a reminder for everybody. Well listen, good morning. I echo
Karen's welcoming remarks, glad to have you all here. You know,
how many of you has been to a Ravinia Festival event in a
summertime? Isn't it cool to come back here at this time of year?
It's just awesome. I walked through this morning, I walked across in
a parking lot and I thought, oh here's where we are. Wasn't last
night magical? It was really terrific walking through all the candles
and the music coming out. I thought where are we? It's just like
we're in another beautiful place. So it transformed this morning into
something that we were much – obviously much more familiar with
for those of you who had been here before but this is a wonderful
venue and a wonderful setting. Wasn't breakfast terrific as well?
Excellent.
[Applause]
Tom Terry: Well some of you probably missed last night so I'm just going to
give you a 10-second overview of what you missed and we're glad
you're here today. We obviously have a full house and we have a
full day ahead of us. I'm going to give you a little bit of an overview
but let me just touch very quickly in last night. We had two speakers
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last night. Judith Wright framed for us I think very beautifully the
context of the times that we're in which are fast moving, fast
changing and indicative of that which we can all expect going
forward and so a beautiful states there in terms of why it is any of
us would think about transformation. And then we had a keynote
address last night by Brad Anderson, CEO of – a former CEO of
Best Buy who I think blew a lot of us away and was able to convey
to us what transformation and action really looks like and told some
very compelling stories about in the phase of dire circumstances
doing something that was just unthinkable and it was – I think it
touched a lot of us. I know that it conveyed and infused
conversations at our dinner table last night in a significant way.
So that was very, very cool. Well but the best is yet to come
because today – let me just give you a quick overview. We're going
to go from now until noon and we're going to hear this morning from
Ron Riggio who's going to be – who has written the book in
transformational leadership and Ron is going to sort of share with
us the dimensions, the many dimensions of transformational
leadership. Judith and Bob Wright are going to come on back up
and they're going to talk about personal transformation and how
that can infuse organizational society transformation but that it
starts with the individual. We're going to have lunch.
We're going to break for lunch right at noon and then right after
lunch, we're going to go right into a presentation by Don Beck
who's going to really convey to us a sense of organizational or
almost systemic transformation and share with us his change
theory and how organizations and systems in societies can be
identified and how change manifests in them. And then we're going
to wrap up with Brad Anderson yet again and Brad is going to go
through a question and answer process. We'll talk more about that
a little bit later and we'll wrap up by 5. So that's our day. So is
everybody ready for a good day? All right.
[Applause]
Tom Terry: So let me turn it over now to Bob. Bob Wright is going to come back
up and get us kicked off. Bob.
[Applause]
Bob Wright: Good morning transformers! Give yourselves a hand.
[Applause]
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Bob Wright: You know, whether you know it or not, you are transforming.
Humanity is transforming. We only have one choice to make. Will
we do it consciously and responsibly or will it be forced on us? Will
we be run over by it like a steam roller or will we be able to stay
ahead of this steam roller and creatively find new ways to become
who we could become. And how many of you are willing to engage
in that adventure today? Good. Give yourselves a hand. Thank you.
[Applause]
Bob Wright: You know, I think we're going to develop momentum through the
day. So I'd like to acknowledge some of the people that have put
this event on in addition to the ones that I acknowledged last night.
At the Wright Leadership Institute, one of the things that our groups
do is they're charged with putting on an event like this once a year.
So they work on their own personal transformation and then they
work on their team building and they have something like this to do
where they're giving each other feedback like very few corporations
or organizations in our country give each other feedback. They do
that in a safe environment because nobody can fire them.
So when you don't risk your pay, you don't risk your bonus, people
will tell you things that they would never think of telling you
elsewhere. So they do this to help themselves learn and develop.
So I'm not going to actually call them up but you've seen all these
people walking around, they're all on various teams. They're here
as part of their leadership training which begins at being an
engaged team member and empowering team member and an
empowering team lead. Those are the first three levels of our
leadership development. So if you could just give them a hand and
even if they don't hear it, we'd like to have them get it.
[Applause]
Bob Wright: And I talked about MedEd Architects who had been putting this
altogether for us. They helped Jon Fieldman find the location –
negotiate with a location but I didn't have Randy stand up. Randy is
the man with the yellow tie back there. Give him a hand please.
Thank you.
[Applause]
Bob Wright: And we've had huge contributions from designers and people who
have just cared about what we're doing. One among them is
Flutterby Design. Where are you? Would you stand up from the
back there? Just give her a hand.
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[Applause]
Bob Wright: This is over and above and Ken Wright Communications. Where
are you folks? They've done tons of design. Give them a hand.
Thank you.
[Applause]
Bob Wright: So in order to have a transformational day, we need to do a few
transformational things and we use a methodology called
accelerated learning. You’re going to be doing a lot of listening
today. If you don’t digest what we talk about, it’s not going to go
very far. The truth of the matter is in an event like this, if you leave
with one good idea, that’s a pretty successful even but what we
want you to be doing is making the material yours during the day.
So at times, we’re going to do something we called the paired
sharing. This is part of our accelerated learning methodology. You
have to step out of social politeness. We’re going to ask you to turn
and face somebody.
You can introduce yourselves to each but that's it. The rest of it is
we want you to talk because a lot of times you don’t know what
you’re really thinking until you start talking. How many of you are
like me? I don’t know – yes. Okay good. So we’re going to give you
a chance to find out what you’re thinking, what the so what of what
we’re talking about is and how you’d apply it for yourself because
we’re going to ask you over and over again today to think about
how you’d apply if for yourself. So we’re going to ask you to do this
paired sharing. You’re going to make eye contact with somebody. If
you don’t have somebody near you that you made eye contact with,
raise your hand and we’ll have an assistant come over and join
you. It’s really critical but you talk for yourself. You don’t need to
explain yourself to the other person.
Explaining ourselves is simply making ourselves what we have
always been all over again. That’s not transformation. That is an
attempt to stop transformation. You want to allow yourself to think
out loud the thoughts that you maybe haven’t thought yet and some
of the daring things and that person can’t fire you. You can say all
kinds of things that you wouldn’t have said otherwise. So we’re
going to do this paired sharing. It’s part of our accelerated learning.
And now it is, you know, this is a massive pleasure for me to
introduce our next speaker.
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In addition to being a consummate academic with over 100 articles
and books that he has written, he’s a leading thinker. He has
written – I was talking about the fact that there’s a real problem that
too often in the United States today, we’re fixated on the leader and
we don’t deal with good followership. So I’m talking to him and I
said I’ve got this idea for a book. It’s got to come out and you know
– and we got to have a book on how to be a good team member,
what’s an engaged team member because a lot of people lead
things but they really don’t know how to be good followers. Now I’d
be darn to – I didn’t say, “Would you like me to send you a copy of
my book on followership?” A cutting-edge thinker.
He has also written a book on multiple intelligences in leadership.
One of the beautiful things about our speaker today is that he is a
very humble man. He embraces other thought which is a sign of a
transformational leader. He is truly a transformational leader as an
academic. I have never heard him need to put any other idea down.
For him it's all pulling them together, what's the best of it. We are
going to be very, very blessed today to be with him as he talks to us
about one of the things he knows more about than most anybody in
the country of the world about transformational leadership. Would
you help me welcome Dr. Ron Riggio.
[Applause]
Ron Riggio: Thank you, Bob. That was a terrific introduction. Thank you.
[Applause]
Ron Riggio: Thank you. Well I want to thank Bob and Judith Wright for inviting
me here for the organizing committee and I thank all of you for
being here. I'm going to talk to you about something that I'm very
passionate about and that's transformational leadership but first,
what I want to do is I want to briefly go over the history. Bob and I
were talking about this, a little bit of history of research on
leadership and just sort of give you the Leadership 101. So if we
kind of move to the next slide here and we'll talk about the search
for leadership.
If we go back to the early days of leadership research, there was
what we call the great man theory but the burning question of the
great man theory is, are leaders born or made? And I'm sure that
lots of you have probably wondered about that or thought about
that and you may have your own opinions. Well through – I was
going to say through the miracle of research – through research,
we actually know something about the answer to that.
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So – but I'm not going to have you do that. I was going to say how
many people – about two-thirds of leadership is made. About one-
third is inborn, okay? We know that pretty well because in the last
several years in the methodology, I will just really quickly go
through this but if you want to catch me after and discuss the
methodology but basically there are studies of identical twins who
share genetic material and so the studies are of twins read together
and twins read apart. So you control for the genetic material, you
control for the environmental effects and then you look at
leadership and that was just done recently and the best estimate is
about one-third inborn and about two-thirds learnt.
It then moved into a discussion of traits. What are the specific
qualities and that dovetails very closely with this idea about the
inborn qualities and there are a number of traits that are actually
related to leadership. One is extroversion. So generally, leaders
tend to be extroverts but not always and so again, we get this idea
that we can't completely predict these things. We move then into
the concept of behavior.
So those of you who had – think back to your organizational
behavior courses and talk about the history of leadership, we're
really talking about 100 years here in very quick time. But some of
the behaviors that were focused on would be task-oriented versus
relationship-oriented behaviors, right? So we all know leaders who
are very task-focused. My leader, the president of my college is one
of the most task-focused people I know. She gets lots of things
done and she'll tell you that relationships are something that she
has to work on, the relationship behaviors. Other leaders, they're
relationship-focused and they need to work a little bit more on the
tasks.
The management perspective comes into play and starts to talk
about – well we know that there are task-oriented and there are
relationship-oriented leaders but what's the real situation? So in
what kinds of situations do task-oriented leaders lead better and in
which kinds of situations do relationship-oriented leaders do better?
My early research was on charisma and that's how I came to
transformational leadership and one of the issues around charisma
is if we talk about charismatic leaders and we're going to see lots of
charismatic leaders because I'm going to talk shortly about the
overlap between charisma and transformational leadership.
But those of us who worked in the study of charisma and
charismatic leadership, we got stopped with what we commonly
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called the Hitler question, all right? So we talk about charismatic
leaders, we have the positive charismatic leaders and many of
them also transformational but then we get to the charismatic
leaders who are the negative side of things, right? The Hitlers,
right? The Solons, those folks. And that was always the problem
and so when I began my work in transformation leadership with
really the founders and I've had the good fortune of working with
the people who came up with the construct and develop the
construct, it was like my eyes were opened because I thought we
had moved to the next level and that's why I've embraced
transformational leadership because I see transformational
leadership as charisma plus, charisma plus the rest and so we are
kind of dealing with the Hitler problem.
So what we know from this 100 years of research is we do know
which characteristics are most important and I'm going to talk about
this characteristics and most of the characteristics that are
important for leaders are components of transformational
leadership. Just so you know and if you want to sort of follow along
with me, about 8 months ago, I started – I was asked by
Psychology Today Magazine to do a blog on leadership and so it's
called Cutting-Edge Leadership and if you just want to go to
Psychology Today, you can find it. But what I'm trying to do and in
fact yesterday, I posted – my post was 100 Years of Research. So
it was basically sort of setting the stage for this. So if you want to
find out more about sort of the history of leadership research, you
can go there but feel free to follow me along there and discuss
because what I'm trying to do is kind of put up a little course up
there, so the little mini-course and little 400-word bytes. So I
welcome you to that.
Okay. So what is transformational leadership? Well it occurs when
one or more persons engage with others in such a way that leaders
and followers raise one another to higher levels of motivation and
morality and the morality issue is important and we'll get to that a
little bit later but those are the words of James MacGregor Burns
who in 1978 wrote a book and James MacGregor Burns is a
presidential scholar of political sciences, a biographer. His primary
work has been on the Roosevelts on FDR and Eleanor Roosevelt
and won the Pulitzer Price for one of those books.
But in 1978, he wrote a book that really did launched a lot of work
in leadership generally but it was really the beginning of this
construct as we now know it today, what he called transforming
leadership with leader transformational leadership. And Jim Burns
was a friend to JFK so he was able to study transformational leader
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and just what you know about my intersection with Jim, there was a
group of leadership scholars across a variety of disciplines who met
for many years and I was asked in the later days to join that group.
It was called the General Theory of Leadership group, GTOL group.
We met about twice a year and we discussed this. Is there a
general theory of leadership?
Now Jim Burns had the answer. He knew what the answer he
wanted to come to that the answer was transformational leadership
but when you put a lot of scholars together, you get very little
agreement and so many of them stopped and said, “Well we just
got to stop this whole process because we're never going to really
agree.” I mean the idea of one overarching general theory and as
all this was going on, I said I think I found my overarching theory
and I'm in agreement with Jim Burns. I had the fortune at that time.
I was working with Bernie Bass and Bernie took in the 80s – he
read leadership and he took Jim Burns' ideas and was able to get it
down to something that's measurable and so I had the good fortune
of working with Bernie and with Jim Burns.
Jim Burns is with us today. He's 91 years old. Is that right, Sean,
91? And still producing books and still working in the area of
leadership. My good friend, Bernie passed away about 2 years ago
and so really what I feel like I'm doing is I'm carrying on the work of
Bernie and also Jim and that was really funny because I was sort of
the intermediary. I was going to the General Theory group and
meeting with Jim Burns and reporting back as Bernie and I wrote
the Transformational Leadership book.
So let me get right down to the specifics and talk about what is
transformational leader. So transformational leaders are
charismatic. It's charisma plus, they're visionary, they're able to
transform organizations but they do it through followers and so they
are the interest in followership. What do transformational leaders
do? Well they bring out the best in the followers and part of the
transformation is this idea of developing followers into leaders and
you'll see this when we get into the components. But they're not –
it's not just that. These are not just relationship-oriented leaders.
These are leaders who are able to motivate and to challenge teams
and I'm here rephrasing the title of Bernie's book, they're able to get
groups to perform at levels beyond expectations. So they’re truly
transformational and they're very performance-focused. So
transformational leaders are not easy leaders to work for
sometimes. They're very satisfying leaders to work for but they're
always pushing. They're always challenging.
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Okay so this is Bernie's model. These are the components of
transformational leadership and we're going to see this and we're
going to spend some time with each of these and I'm going to right
now spend some time going through each of them to help you
better understand them. And you have to realize something about
academics. We are masters of jargon. So you will see there these
are not easy terms. I've sort of renamed them before our eyes but
these are the components. And the first is idealized influence, a
little difficult to try to figure out what that is but idealized influence is
the part of the transformational leader, that behavior, that element
where the leader is a positive role model.
Transformational leaders are leaders that we look up to. We admire
them and we admire them because they're consistent.
Transformational leaders with true idealized influence as we say
they walk the talk. They're not the people – they're not the kinds of
leaders who are going to ask people to do things that they
themselves wouldn't do. These are leaders that are willing to roll up
their sleeves and get their hands dirty and pitch right in.
The second element of transformational leadership – oops, where
did we go here? We got to go back a little bit, sorry. The second
level of transformational leadership is inspirational motivation and
this is the ability to inspire people, to provide meetings, to provide
challenge, to establish a vision and those two elements, the
idealized influence, being able to walk the talk and being able to
inspire and motivate people, those are the elements of charisma.
This is the part of transformational leadership that is very similar to
charismatic leadership.
The third component is intellectual stimulation and intellectual
stimulation is the transformational leader's ability to push followers,
to stimulate followers, to be creative, to be innovative, to question
assumptions, to think outside of the box and like I said,
transformational leaders push people. They push people in a very
positive way and try to get them to be creative and innovative.
And then finally, the individualized consideration and I think Bob
mentioned this last night and this is really the transformational
leader's ability to pay attention, to be in tuned with followers to truly
understand their needs, understand their feelings, their orientations,
and there's a genuine concern in the transformational leader in
terms of developing individual followers. So think of it this way. The
transformational leadership is about leading change and leading
transformation in groups, in organizations, in collectives and
nations but it's also transforming individual followers and helping
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them reach their highest capacity. And so when we take a very
broad view of leadership and we talk about leadership in broad
terms, essentially they're transforming followers into leaders.
Okay. Let me go into each of these and so idealized influence
being a positive role model and we've got some examples here.
Okay. So now one of the things and Bob and I were – as we were
discussing, Bob is always saying okay, who is a truly
transformational leader and I think we've seen one, we've seen
Brad Anderson, those of us who were here last evening and I think
Brad is a very good prototype of the transformational leader but we
all have transformational qualities and sometimes we have
strengths in one area or strengths in another area and so the idea
of idealized influence being able to walk the talk. And so here are
some leaders and some quotes that typify this dimension of
transformational leadership.
So we have Jeffrey Himmel from GE and he talks about you know,
I'm always talking about this company. I'm always concerned about
this and we're transparent. You know, we have nothing to hide. It's
right out there. We put it right out there. The issue of
transformational leaders being willing to work hard not asking
followers to do anything that they wouldn't do. It typifies here with
Vince Lombardi and I love this quote because he says, you know,
leaders are made, you know. They're not born and they're made
through hard efforts. So transformational leadership is not easy
leadership.
I discussed with Bernie. I said one of the things – years ago I said
to really be a transformational leader, you've got to work very hard.
You've got to connect with individual followers. You've got to be this
role model. You've always got to be thinking about the impact that
your behaviors having on followers and I said, “Isn't this really hard
work?” You know, the transformational leaders work harder than
other people and so I came up with a hypothesis. I said let's test
this. My wife actually is working for a work family institute and I was
looking at the balance between work and family and so I came up
with a hypothesis and I said, “Bernie, I think the problem might be
the transformational leadership is such hard work that maybe your
home life suffers.”
And so my hypothesis is that transformational leaders put all of
their energy in the work and then their home life suffers. And Bernie
said, “Well that's not the case because if you have transformational
qualities, you would be able to transform those relationships in
much the same way.” And so he had this sort of counter-
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hypothesis. Unfortunately, we never got to test that but so idealized
influence, being authentic in a sense.
Okay inspirational motivation is ability to inspire, this ability to
energize people and Murthy, the founder of Infosys and he's
actually an amazing philanthropist. His wife – we have a Kravis
Prize that we created the methodology for Kravis Prize that we give
every year in non-profit leadership through the Kravis Leadership
Institute that I'm associated with and the Murthys have been very
involved in this through their philanthropy. But here's a quote from
him, “Great leaders raise the aspirations of their followers. They
make people more confident, energetic, and enthusiastic. So this
really embodies that idea of energizing people.
I think Judith spoke last night about the emotional contagion, being
able to infect people and that's a big part of inspirational motivation.
For Howard Schultz, we want passion for our business, workers
who can interpret and execute our mission. So another part of this
is it's not just generating enthusiasm. It's not just getting the energy
level up but it's directing that energy level, directing it towards
commitments to the organization, toward values, toward an
alignment of values, alignment with the organization's goal. So
through inspirational motivation, this is the alignment process of the
leader and the followers.
Intellectual stimulation, the ability to challenge people, to innovate,
to get people to think outside of the box in your task. Don't limit
yourself. You can go as far as your mind lets you, what you believe,
remember you can achieve. So you can achieve anything. So
pushing followers again to be their best, to be innovative, to be
creative. Knowledge cannot be merely a degree or a skill. It
demands a broader vision, capabilities in creating, thinking, and
logical deduction without which we cannot have constructive
progress. The wealthiest man in the world.
Individualized consideration. Our recent research is showing us that
this is probably the biggest driver of transformational leadership.
What we're doing is we're looking at literally tens of thousands of
people who have been assessed on transformational leadership
and looking at how each of these components contribute to the
overall outcome and what we're finding is the one that really seems
to be the driver is this individualized consideration and this is where
the leader pays specific attention to individual followers, develops
relationships with followers, empathizes with them, and when we
talk about coaching and mentoring, we're really talking about this
element.
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If there's one secret in success, it lies in the ability to get the other
person's point of view, to see things from other people's
perspectives. Now I put Henry Ford up there because Henry Ford
was transformational in that he transformed an industry,
transformed the auto industry. Henry Ford though I would think
would fall short of a truly transformational leader, right? But this is
the point. The point is that we have transformational qualities, right,
that people have transformational qualities in specific areas, right?
So everybody can demonstrate elements of this and someone who
I think is on the transformational side, Muhammad Yunus says,
“Each individual person is very important. Each person has
tremendous potential.” So it's this idea of realizing the potential
individuals. Okay. So does this matter, all right, to the research and
just really briefly I put up some correlation coefficient here from –
and those of you who have seen the book. This is not light reading
or our book is not light reading. Just to give you a sense, to give
you a sense of the size of the effects, so these are summaries, this
is all in the book but clearly the biggest effect of transformational
leadership is on followers.
Followers of transformational leaders report much greater levels of
satisfaction with their organizations, with their jobs, and with their
leaders and those effect sizes are pretty large. Transformational
leaders lead more effective work groups and we looked at that in
two ways. We had looked at rated performance. One of the
problems with rated performance is who's great in the performance
of the leader whilst the people around the leader and so that's
going to be a little bit inflated. If this is a person who has a lot of
charisma, you're going to inflate those ratings a little bit and so we
get larger relationships when we have rated performance but we
also looked at objective performance measures at bottom line
outcomes and found that transformational leaders actually lead
groups that are more productive in a very, very sort of hard
numerical sense not just in a feel-good sense.
The other element that's important and I'm just going to touch on
this briefly is that transformational leaders seem to be able to
inoculate in a sense their followers. So the followers of
transformational leaders will report if they have less stress and less
burnout and those effects are pretty large effects. So we're not just
seeing leaders pushing followers to do more, to be innovative, to
perform at levels beyond expectations but these people are for
greater well-being. The followers of transformational leaders report
greater well-being. So that's important.
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Now the question is how does transformational leadership work and
what's the process? Well through research, we know a lot about the
process, about what's really going on. First, transformational
leaders enhance the followers' self-esteem and I think we heard a
little bit about this, the concept of self-efficacy. So transformational
leaders are able to persuade, convince, inspire followers in a way
that makes them feel like they can do it, that they have a sense of
self-efficacy that they can get the job done.
Transformational leaders are empowering leaders. They allow their
followers to take on responsibility but it's guided empowerment,
right? The hardest thing I think that leaders do is delegate, right?
Delegating, deciding exactly how much, deciding how much people
can take and so what we're finding is if you develop a relationship
with a follower, if you're truly in-tuned with that follower with their
abilities, their desires, their needs, you're going to be much better
able to determine exactly what they can handle. So there's the
empowering element.
Transformational leaders also align leaders, values and align, use
their vision to get people on board. And so there's an increase in
the followers' identification with the leader, there's an increase in
the followers' identification with the organization and the alignment
of goals and values. Now Bob had asked me to just talk briefly
about authenticity and this is work that we're doing in a very serious
way but let me just talk a little bit about the adding ethics to the mix
here in transformational leadership.
For James MacGregor Burns, the moral element, the ethical
element was critical for transformational leaders. So Jim Burns said
that this is critically important. We need to – a leader cannot be
truly transformational if that person is not a good leader, is not an
authentic person. Bernie came at that and I have – I can relate to
this being a psychologist. Psychologists don't deal well with issues
like morality. You know, there had been very few psychologists who
have tackled that. That has been the realm of philosophers, right?
So we have Cole Bergen, some of these – a few psychologists who
have studied the ethical dimensions of human behavior but pretty
much throughout most of the history of psychology, psychology is
the sidestep, the moral issue.
One other reason psychologists have sidestepped it is because
psychologists focus often on behavior or the outcomes of cognitive
processes in terms of behaviors. And when we talk about ethical
behavior, you get into some very difficult terrain when you're trying
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to measure that. So there's a couple of reasons. First, we sort of
sidestepped ethics as psychologists because we believe it's the
realm of philosophers but it's very hard to measure too. So when
Bernie Bass went forward and developed this model that you saw
of the four I's, he left out the ethical component of Jim Burns' model
and said, “Well that really doesn't matter because what we're really
talking about is the pattern of behavior.”
But of course he ran into the Hitler problem which you know,
charismatic leadership knew about this and Bernie butted up
against this. And so he talked about well transformational leaders
who are not truly transformational, there's something missing what
he called pseudo-transformational. And so in the book that we did
together and essentially the revision of one of his earlier books, I
persuaded Bernie to put some of these back, to start putting in the
authentic elements and so one of the things that we were working
on was okay, if we're going to put this back in, if we're going to put
in authenticity or we're going to put ethical leadership back into the
mix, we have to be able to measure it.
So our latest project and a little bit later we'll give you an
opportunity to maybe just get a taste of that but what we've been
working on for the last couple of years is developing a measure of
ethical leadership, a measure of authentic leadership. There are
some other ones that have come out. So it's finally psychologists
and measurement specialists have crossed over into that territory
but what happened too was as the intermediary between Jim Burns
and Bernie Bass, between these two great thinkers, I was carrying
that message back and forth. I was conflicted by this. I agreed with
Jim Burns that ethics is critical, I felt very much that we had to solve
the Hitler question and eventually was able to persuade Bernie to
move over to that side and so there was a reconciliation.
So now when we talk about transformational leadership, we talk
about authentic transformational leadership incorporating the
ethical component. And so as I said, that's our new step is we're
moving that in. Let me stop because I've gone through this all very
quickly. This is an awful lot. As I said, 100 years of research but let
me take some questions and discussion for just a minute or two. I
think we have time for that. Don't we, Bob? Just some reactions.
Yes?
P: Going back to the why this transformational leadership
[Indiscernible] [0:58:32], could you explain what those – I'm sorry.
Ron Riggio: Oh okay. What the R's mean?
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15.
P: What the R's mean, yes.
Ron Riggio: Okay. So R's, those are representatives – I should have done it.
Those are representative's correlation coefficient. So actually if you
square those – so we saw a lot of 0.6's which are very large effects.
If you square it, you get 0.36 and so that represents the amount of
variance that can be accounted for by that predictor. So in other
words, transformational leadership in terms of how much of follower
satisfaction and satisfaction is measured often very much in a
broad way as organizational satisfaction, how happy are you with
your job and your organization and your leader, the whole thing.
Thirty six percent of all that variance can be attributed to the leader.
So that's what that means which is huge because we never predict
100%, right? So with about the most we can ever really measure is
about 70% of the variance.
So from that, you can sort of extrapolate and say about half of a
person's satisfaction can be directly attributed to the fact that, that
person works for a transformational leadership which is huge. That
was a high estimate, right? You saw that they got down to 0.2, 0.2
is 4% of the variance which doesn't sound like much but when we
get 0.3's, 0.25's, 0.3's; psychologists get very excited in the
measurement. People get very excited because it means we're
having a significant impact. Yes.
P: Some of the adjectives you used inspire, stimulate, and challenge
people to think and innovate, a lot of times the discussion you need
to have with people in order to inspire them forward is actually a
little bit negative. It's a discussion about the limitations of the
organization right now and some of its weaknesses but all these
quotes are so positive and happy about moving forward. Can you
say a little bit about how you talk when – a transformational leader
would talk about challenges?
Ron Riggio: Talking about challenges? Well in a lot of ways and this may relate
to the fact that followers of transformational leadership report less
stress is that transformational leaders tend to do exactly what you
suggested. They tend to take what people considered to be a
negative thing. So this is the stress. We're in an economic
downturn, right? And then focus on the challenges associated with
that. So focus on the positives, right? So you know, how can we
overcome this whether you know, this is one of the opportunities,
that sort of thing.
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So I think a lot of probably what's going on with transformational
leaders is how you frame it. It is you know – and so yes, this is a
setback but what can we learn from this and how can we move
forward and how can we even be better than we were before? So
it's clear that a lot of this is changing followers' perceptions. Where
else the effects would be so high? I mean you know, it really is – I
think what – and Bernie called his 1985 book where he laid all this
out, he called it Performance Beyond Expectations because when
he found truly transformational leaders, they were leading groups
that performed well beyond what people had expected of them to
do.
A colleague of mine, Marty Chammers [Phonetic] [1:01:57] did a
study and it's an interesting study just very quickly. He studied –
we're in division three in the NCAA. So he studied basketball teams
and volleyball teams and he went to the players and he said,
“Who's your leader?” Right and very often it was the coach but
sometimes it would be the team captain or whatever. And then he
got their ratings, the precedes in ratings of where these teams
should finish at the end of the season, okay? So the coaches do
these polls and by measuring the transformational qualities of that
leader, he was able to predict the outcomes of the ends of seasons,
okay? So you know, I mean that's really the kind of amazing. I
remember Marty presenting this in a room full of CEOs and it just
sort of stopped the conversation and probably because CEOs, lots
of them were in the sports but also this idea that you could actually
have that kind of effect, right? Yes.
P: I think transformational leadership is obviously very important but it
runs the risk of becoming jargoning because suddenly any change
that is not transformational doesn't really count and everything that
anybody claims things are transformational. The thing that I'm
hearing about what you're saying is that what's transformational is
really transforming the nature of followership in a way.
Ron Riggio: Exactly.
P: So I'm wondering if that's the definitive piece and also if there is – it
might be also a piece where transformational leadership might
[Indiscernible] [1:03:30] dimension where you're really raising the
ethical level of an organization. If you could speak to those two
issues.
Ron Riggio: Yes. Well now the reason Bernie sidestepped the ethical issue is
he thought that idealized influence had that. So in other words, if
you're authentic, if you're a positive role model then he just sort of
Transformational Leadership Symposium Transcript 16

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assumed that, that carried over into the ethical arena, right? The
problem is that we can have these sort of pseudo role models,
right? So people who you know, in their public lives and when
they're in front of their followers, they're displaying ethical behavior
but in their private lives they're not, right? So these inconsistencies.
So it was there in the original work but now we're sort of putting that
element back. Okay. Now your other concern is – yes.
P: Speaking to that one point because Brad Anderson used the word
integrity about a leader. I think the word authentic also has a sort of
ambiguous terminology ...
Ron Riggio: Right.
P: … because it can sort of be an ethical term or maybe not.
Ron Riggio: Right.
P: So why not just go with include integrity as part of the model?
Ron Riggio: Well and I think when we use the term ethical, we are using that
idea of integrity.
P: Am I correct also that the idea of transformational really is about the
transformation of the followership and relationship? Is that what
you're defining as transformational?
Ron Riggio: Yes, absolutely. Absolutely and that was why we started looking at
followership, right? So – I'm getting a signal from Bob. So we stop
this quick Q and A and start going to our group exercise. Okay. All
right, good. Thanks a lot. Okay. So what we're going to have you to
do, Bob is going to come up here and help me and we're going to
have you and if you turn to your workbooks and if you get to the
end of the slide show here, there's a couple of pages and we're
actually going to – the first one says small group task, discussing
the components of transformational leadership, we're going to
change that. We're going to let you take that part home and deal
with that and then there's a quick test leadership assessment.
Let's set those aside for now. Are we all kind of on the same
page here?
P: Oh yes.
Ron Riggio: Okay. So at the end of under my tab here, at the end of the
PowerPoint, there should be a small group task. We're hoping
these are all core, so just set that aside and set aside the quick test
Transformational Leadership Symposium Transcript 17

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leadership assessment. You can do that later and then you'll get to
the transformational leadership dimensions and that's the
worksheet we're going to work on now. Okay. We got a signal
[Indiscernible] [1:06:10]? Okay good. Okay so Bob is going to come
up here and what we're going to do is we're going to have you
break up into groups.
So you're going to break up into groups of about five or six people.
Those you know and we can move the chairs around. We'll put the
chairs back. You're going to choose a spokesperson for the group
eventually because we're going to have your report out and we're
going to be recording some of your output and we're going to have
you get into the discussions and so some summarization but we're
going to do it this way. We're going to have each of you take one of
the components. So we've got the next four sheets here, idealized
influence, inspirational motivation, so we got the four I's and I think
we're going to do it this way.
We're going to have – we're going to sort of cut the room into
quarters but we're going to do it lengthwise. And so we're going to
have – well let's just do it right now. So idealized influence will be
this quarter of the room. So from about here down, so go ahead
and we can start forming into five or six-person groups. Those
students and the folks on the side will help us. Idealized influence
and if we take the sort of the midpoint from this sort of three
quarters to the midpoint, inspirational motivation. We're going to
have these groups discuss inspirational motivation. So you can go
ahead and turn to that page and this third quadrant, intellectual
stimulation, so to this quadrant and over here on the end,
individualized consideration. Okay. So it turns to the fourth page
and we hope they're in that order of this but you'll find the right
page.
Bob Wright: Yes. So turn your chairs and form groups so that you can
communicate together.
Ron Riggio: I thought the Q and A – I mean there were lots of – I can see lots of
questions.
Bob Wright: Okay. See if you can get this done pretty quickly because we want
to get the most out of this time.
P: How much time do we owe?
Bob Wright: Well we'll give you directions in just a sec, so you just get your
groups. Okay you should be lighting in the group. As
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transformational leaders, you're going to make sure everyone gets
included. Okay quickly – okay, would you raise your hands? Let's
start a normal – we raise our hands to trying to get attention back
again. So okay. I'm going to give you about 60 seconds to introduce
yourselves to each other. Would you please do that? Okay you
should be finishing up. Take the next 30 seconds to finish
introducing yourselves to everybody. Okay so let's pull it back
together. Hands up please. Help us out. By the way, are we
honored to have Ron with us? It's pretty good.
[Applause]
Bob Wright: I don't know whether you know – I think a good sense how lucky we
are. The treasured probe of data and his ability to be a friend and
be respected by experts who were generally seen as polarized on
an issue and to be the primary person tying it altogether and
helping bring them to resolution. That is a mighty man of extreme
decency. So give him another hand.
[Applause]
Bob Wright: Okay. Well so now we're going into the applied part. We're going to
want you to go into your data banks. We're going to want you to
think about leaders you know and what they did. How did they act
because you know, this morning is about how do leaders act? The
next part of the morning is going to be about what goes on inside of
leaders and then the afternoon is what happens in organizations.
So this is what’s unique about what we're doing here is we're trying
to give you a broad perspective of what's going on.
And so what we want you to do is to go in your data bank. By the
way, how many of you are humbled by this and we're doing an
inventory of all the ways you fall short? Every time I go, you know,
we're discussing an ideal against which we measure ourselves for it
which we want to grow. So I think we need to have a little self
acceptance and forgiveness. At least I do or I wouldn't be up here.
So what we want you to do is you're going to take the one that you
have. Now how many of you have idealized influence that you're
doing? Okay raise your hands. Thank you. That's exactly what we
wanted. What was our second one?
Ron Riggio: Inspirational motivation.
Bob Wright: Inspiration motivation – oh you folks are good.
Ron Riggio: Okay.
Transformational Leadership Symposium Transcript 19

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Bob Wright: And that's by the way …
Ron Riggio: Intellectual stimulation and …
Bob Wright: Yes.
Ron Riggio: … individualized consideration. We got them into perfect.
Bob Wright: Oh perfect. Okay good. So now what we want you to do just so you
have an overview of what's happening, you are holding your area
for the room. You're going to be putting together, you know,
characteristics and what a leader does. What we want you doing is
imagining, you know, how you do what we're talking about and how
you could do it better and – but you'll be talking about
characteristics, you're going to put together the behaviors,
characteristics, habits, anything that you could put onto a video
tape. This is about the transaction between the leader and the
follower.
So what is it that they do and then we're going to go on what goes
inside of the leader later on and then the leader in the organization.
So you're going to be doing it for everybody then what we're going
to do is we're going to come back together. You're going to – so a
few of the groups in each area are going to report the
characteristics they come up with and we're going to ask you to
listen to that personally for what you would want to do and we want
to finish this segment with you having one area that you're going to
focus on and one behavior. Too often we come up with huge
grandiose plans and none of it happens because speaking of
integrity, there's no way we could do it. So we're going to ask you to
boil it down to one area, one behavior you're going to focus on
coming out of here. So we're giving them how much time, Ron?
Ron Riggio: About 10 minutes actually.
Bob Wright: So you're going to have 10 minutes. Pick a spokesperson who is
going to record for your group and report for your group. Okay
you've got 10 minutes.
[Music playing]
Bob Wright: Okay. Sorry to pull you back. This is like stopping a speeding
freight train.
Ron Riggio: You're just getting started, right? So they're …
Transformational Leadership Symposium Transcript 20

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Bob Wright: Yes.
Ron Riggio: … yes.
Bob Wright: Another part of accelerated learning is the 80-20 rule. We tried to
get 80% of the results and 20% of the time. The truth of the matter
is, is you can only get so much. We're trying to actually plant into
your unconscious mind expectations that will help guide you
forward in your life and remember, we're going to boil this section
down to just one area that you're going to focus on as a leader and
one behavior that you're going to focus on implementing.
Otherwise, you'll say things that will destroy your integrity and your
authenticity will suffer or you'll end up apologizing all the time falling
short.
Okay. So we're going to get to groups to report in. We're not going
to try and get everybody in. We're going to actually – we may be
asking them for clarification so that each one of us can be really
grasping what they're talking about and we have our wonderful –
Vanna White is insulting. Who are you? You are our scribes. Let's
give them a hand and thank them.
[Applause]
Bob Wright: They're going to be scribing for us. So we want to go to …
Ron Riggio: Yes. Let's start with idealized influence that's over here. There, over
here on the …
Bob Wright: Okay.
Ron Riggio: What are some of the …
Bob Wright: In the backyard? Take the mike.
P: So for the behaviors that manifest as dimensions, we had roll up
sleeves, that's one of the things they do, jump in and get involved
and not afraid to be vulnerable to make mistakes. Demo weight,
demonstration is a big aspect of a force. They demo it live not just
to tell you how to do it. One of the characteristics our team talked
about was lack of victimhood that they take it on. It's not – that it's
not a sense of victimhood around it.
Ron Riggio: Actually, how did they have this lack of – instead of a lack of
victimhood, what did they have?
Transformational Leadership Symposium Transcript 21

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P: Well they take responsibility …
Bob Wright: Because there's no such thing as a lack, right? So we know there
isn't victimhood in there as …
P: A little. We talked about responsibility and probably the ownership
as they took ownership with the whole group and the results that
they wanted. So that's how they tackled it. They helped analyze
their own mistakes and they teach other people about their
mistakes so that other people can learn from theirs. The one
characteristic that we felt strong about is that they tend to work
harder than other folks around them and that's how they influence
them to work hard. They not only do the very minimum but they do
also with optional.
Ron Riggio: Very good.
Bob Wright: Oh, it's wonderful. Wow. Give them a hand. Thank you.
Ron Riggio: Yes.
[Applause]
P: Okay.
Bob Wright: By the way, clapping is another part of accelerated learning and
keeps you physically involved. Judith may actually tell you a little bit
later about the neuropsychology of learning but you don't learn if
your emotions are cut off from you. Your emotions are essential for
learning and your body is where your emotions come from so we
try to keep you physically involved. It was a group in the back.
P: Some other behaviors we had are they ask a lot of questions.
Ron Riggio: Okay.
P: They're curious.
Bob Wright: And what is it about questions that make this idealized influence?
P: Well we also had that they engage their team and listen to them
and that's part of the asking questions just taking their input. It's not
I've got all the answers. It's engaging the team and the mutuality
with the team.
Transformational Leadership Symposium Transcript 22

23.
Bob Wright: Okay great.
Ron Riggio: Okay.
P: They also have knowledge and expertise so they know – they're not
asking people – their team to do something they went through
themselves. So they're knowledgeable and they know what they're
asking them to do. They lead with vision, principles and values and
they consistently communicate from that. So any plan they derive
or anything they do is based and stem from that.
Ron Riggio: Now what about that – it facilitates idealized influence?
P: Well because idealized influence is to me that was – that whatever
vision they created, that's their ideal that they're working towards.
So that's the kind of influence that they're leading their team with.
Ron Riggio: And if there was a gap between those two things, we wouldn't
idealize them.
P: Right.
Ron Riggio: We would look – we would have seen them as extreme hypocrites.
P: Right. And so they're – and then consistently communicating.
That's their team at a higher frequency and engagement of having
rapport with their team. That also gives them credibility with their
team.
Bob Wright: Give them a hand. Thank you.
Ron Riggio: Very good.
[Applause]
Bob Wright: Shall we get one more?
Ron Riggio: Okay. We do got some more.
P: We augmented what we just heard by saying a couple of other
things. One was that influence derives from the consistent
application of principles to new situations and the leader has to live
large meaning that to live in an obvious way so that people can see
that they're painting a picture for how they will react in the future
and others should follow.
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24.
Ron Riggio: And that's very important, the issue of visibility, right? We talked
about you know, management by walking around, making yourself
visible and that's really what you're getting, yes. That's great.
Bob Wright: Okay give them a hand. Thank you.
[Applause]
Bob Wright: It's exactly what we want to do when you've got one to add
otherwise we'll move onto the next group.
P: A couple of other ones is walking the walk is that we get to see and
sharing who they are. They're honest, their humility, they admit the
things that they might need to improve so the other people and their
followers can approve as well.
Ron Riggio: That's good. That's the – and I know we had some conversations
last night about level five and the humility and so this is really
where the humility comes into play, right? I mean because it's
authentic, right? Good.
[Crosstalk] [1:31:14]
Ron Riggio: Okay perfect.
Bob Wright: Okay. Let's move to inspirational motivation. That's this group.
P: Okay. Our group, we looked at the behaviors and then some
examples of what we thought the ideals would be and some other
behaviors and looking at challenging ourselves with. The first piece
is just meaning and challenge, these people who are involved in
motivating and inspiring are willing to question more in terms of
looking at how we typically do business kind of like Brad Anderson
talked about yesterday of looking at what's impossible to do and
thinking outside the box. Also they talked about the vision
repeatedly that referenced to the GE person who's constantly out
there saying this is what we're about, this is what we care about. I
just keep putting that kind of message out to people, the dedication
to the cause.
I believe that there are people that are capable of more than they
think they are. Constantly, the good leaders that we saw had really
brought up the best in us and made us think about something
beyond what we had thought about we could do previously. And
also they are less invested in ego and more into results. So it's not
who did it or whether I did it or what but did the results get
Transformational Leadership Symposium Transcript 24

25.
accomplished and you know, what are the examples of that? So we
asked, what are some of the leaders that we have that we admire?
Gandhi was one example that kind of embodied all of that totally
transformational and also able to kind of use his motivations to be
able to change the whole nation.
Brad Anderson is a good example. It's exactly what we saw. Martin
Luther King, Herb Brooks from the 1989 hockey team that the US
beat the Russians was an example we came. Wilbur Forrest who –
in his help in the slavery in England were all examples that we
came up with. And then in terms of our own personal steps that we
need to take, one of them was getting beyond our feeling that we
can do it better than our followers and being able to say you know,
let's look to what they're capable of and kind of getting our egos out
of the way. Also, having the courage to put out our own vision. We
talked about how scary it is to be out there as the leader and how
you're subjected to – you become a target when you become a
leader. So there's a lot of risks involved and I think there was also
for at least for me personally the idea of taking fear and comfort
and being able to transform fear into the excitement of leading as
opposed to hiding and what's comfortable. So …
Ron Riggio: All right, another way of looking at transformation, right?
P: Yes.
Ron Riggio: So that's good.
Bob Wright: That was great.
P: Okay.
Bob Wright: Terrific.
[Applause]
P: A couple of things to ask from our group is good communicators,
inspiration and motivation leaders who are terrific communicators.
We got Churchill in a motivation to victory and then a sense that
each person matters and being able to instill that sense of
individual capability and mattering and then we did – we run up
against the Hitler problems if you're certainly inspired and motivated
but we didn't exactly want to put them on our list. So …
Ron Riggio: That's the problem.
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26.
[Applause]
P: We just said a couple of other things. One thing in our group that
was very important was truth. So there was a starting with, you
know, the inspiration starts with the truth about the situation. So
actually putting that out there right away. Another thing was
intention. There is an intention that was very important and
intention in why we're doing these things which help keep the focus
on a purpose and keep people's eyes on the purpose and directing
that anarchy in the right way with that strong intention.
And then we also – and just to underline ahead a lot of the
questions around why and the so whats and then you know, why
are we doing it? So keeping with that clarity of the task, keeping it
focused on where we're going. So and then we had some other
personal traits just you know, being attractive, having energy, being
inclusive. We had a conversation about being emotional, you know,
really getting people behind you and inspiring them.
Ron Riggio: Right and you've touched on the critical elements about inspiration
and motivation. It's not just the energizing, getting people up and
getting them, you know, round them up and head them out, it's
where we're going and why, you know, why should we be
motivated? Then you ask you, double that question.
P: Okay..
Ron Riggio: Good.
[Applause]
P: Hi. Just to add to a few things that the other people said, we also
said that we were thinking about people that actually have these
qualities. So this individual really speaks in plain language and
translates that vision to something that people can relate to very
directly. So language is very important. Also really as a basis, you
have to be really good at connecting with people. So this is critically
important to you know, everybody said really seeing you as a
person, being able to pull you out from the crowd and inspire. We
also talked about not being afraid to talk about the realities of the
business. Being challenging yet also seeing that as an opportunity.
Also interestingly enough, we were comparing two people that are
– actually I'm from Best Buy so it's our past and current CEO that
both have this quality but they do it in very different ways. They
Transformational Leadership Symposium Transcript 26

27.
actually have very different styles so I thought that was really an
interesting point to pull out.
Ron Riggio: And you're bringing in the point that we think about inspiration and
we think it's all emotion and so both, the last two groups here
brought out the sort of cognitive aspects of it. You have to, you
know, you have to be for the vision, you know. It's not just ra-ra
here's the vision, it's articulating it for the audience so that they can
understand it in their own terms, right? And so that's very important.
So good, very good.
[Applause]
Ron Riggio: Okay. Let's move on to our next group which is intellectual
stimulation, right? Okay.
P: So when we look at the behaviors that manifest intellectual
stimulation, we talked about inspiring creativity in your followers
and empowering them when they're curious. The word trust came
up for us a lot because if you're inspiring intellectual stimulation,
people are going to think differently. They're going to come back to
you with ideas and answers that may be different from yours and
you have to be open to letting those ideas come forth. There was
also a sense of feedback, being open to a rigorous evaluation. We
had the example of the leader who said, “Tell me, this is what I
think and tell me where you think I'm wrong. What am I missing
here?” So that was that kind of tough evaluation.
Humility was the word that came up a lot, a commitment to a
continuous learning, education, and training. Knowing about
resources either providing them or being mindful of where they are
and encouraging people to go find out. So when we thought about
behaviors, you could add you know, personally one of them was
not rescuing, not directing that, not wanting to lead and then solve
things for people but saying what do you think? How would you go
solve this? Being vulnerable and asking for the feedback.
Also there was an element of training your staff how to present
problems to you like okay, come in and teaching them how to talk
about things so that you really could have a good inquiry about
what was going on not just your problem. Don't just come in and
throw the problem on my desk but come and tell me about it and
tell me how you might go about solving it. What do you think the
aspects of it are? And really training and encouraging people to
think for themselves, use their own minds.
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Ron Riggio: Great. That's very good, very good. One of the things – and you
mentioned to that idea of the sort of getting the feedback and
getting the criticism and so we're often afraid of upward feedback.
I'm planting a seed here because we're – one of our assessments
will involve your direct reports as Bob told you yesterday. And so
you know, it takes courage to do that but you know, you want to
encourage that and particularly with today's workers, I mean as
we're going into this kind of you know, technology age where the
younger workers probably know more than the leaders, you've got
to be able to you know, deal with that – to that you know,
vulnerability and say, okay tell me you know, what you think you'd
do, you know, which may be very different than what I would do.
Very good.
[Applause]
P: Hi. This is – yes. A couple other things we mentioned were to be a
good listener and accepting as new ideas and the importance of
including diverse voices that so often it was the solution that came
from bringing in people who were thinking differently than
yourselves from a different department or a different perspective
and encouraging people to make mistakes by also making mistakes
yourself and being accepting of that. Some of the behaviors that we
are committing to, listening more, being open-minded, creating
teams, reframing, restrained tongue, that discipline about what you
say and letting people make mistakes.
Ron Riggio: Good.
[Applause]
Ron Riggio: That our scribes working over time there and keep up.
P: Yes, we just stay at that. Listening came up a lot in our
conversation as well and it's a critical behavior and challenging as
well to make people think. I had a leader that always asked – he
always – when he presented something to me he said, “So I'm
confused and you really thought this through?” You know, which
meant go back and think about it. Come back with a – you know,
you haven't – come back with a great new idea and they think out
of the box. They force other people; look they've got out of the box
and challenges their ideas.
People we talked about that had this or see jobs and really trains
forming his company, getting people, his employees to think out of
Transformational Leadership Symposium Transcript 28

29.
the box and one I really like was Phil Jackson with his team and
Zen. I mean getting basketball players …
Ron Riggio: Right.
P: … to read Zen.
Ron Riggio: Yes.
P: … and get them into a different place intellectually.
Ron Riggio: Right, very much challenging. That's definitely outside of the box,
yes.
P: Exactly.
Ron Riggio: Good. Great.
[Applause]
P: Okay. So a couple of things to add to that list. I think carrying a new
touchdown is a little bit too but just a restless curiosity to continue
to never settle for you know, the way things are just because
something has been done a certain way doesn't mean it's right. You
can continue to look for what other ways to do things. This ties into
the fourth area a little bit but define what excites people. I found
recently talking about a lot of the Wright Institute where you know,
you talk to the guys about emotions and they're oh emotions, you
know, but you mentioned neuroscience that you know there's a
benefit of oh neuroscience, oh yes.
Yes and just to kind of put the hooks into them in a way that gets
them engaged and excited. So you know, I think he was talking
about you know, how you frame it or Bob have mentioned that and
there's a lot of potential there. You know, looking to and listening
and you incorporate other people's ideas to play devil's advocate,
you know, to take a contrarian point of view to just sort of see what
happens. We were thinking of the guys at Google, Sergey Brin and
Larry Page in that idea. You spend 20% of your time on innovation
to feel like that's part of the culture that you can take risks and see
what happens and to have more of sort of an open source
perspective that the ideas – the decisions don't necessarily come.
The ideas don't come from the top down of that, you know, each
person has an opportunity to say something that will contribute and
potentially change the company.
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30.
Ron Riggio: Yes, that's great. The Google example of actually setting aside time
to be creative, to be innovative. That's a terrific example. Great.
Very good.
[Applause]
P: These are great. We just have a couple of things. One is vision.
You know, when everybody is aligned on a vision, that stimulates a
lot of creativity and the other thing is accountability. Accountability
is usually thought of as results but what we talk about is when you
have a goal and you're not making that goal, the creativity that
comes out of okay, what do we do now and everybody wrapping
their minds around that can create a lot of intellectual stimulation.
Ron Riggio: Okay, very good. Okay.
[Applause]
Ron Riggio: Let's move onto the individualized consideration.
P: We had three or four themes that emerged from our conversation.
One of them was you know, to be individualized, you need to have
a relationship. So you need to build your relationships with people
by listening to them, by building trust by asking them a lot of
questions and getting to know them well. So that was kind of like
the foundation. Second is support, this overlap with some of the
other groups; support, feedback, giving people things – challenging
things to do. Another part of support is vision. Now we just heard
vision, you know, building people into an overall vision but also their
individual visions and how it relates to a broader vision. And always
particularizing what is going on in the organization and how it
relates to them and what their opportunity is.
Ron Riggio: That's a good idea. One of the ways of individualizing the vision is
to say well, you know, here's my vision. What is yours? What's your
interpretation of that, right?
[Applause]
P: Great [Indiscernible] [1:45:37] themes across all four which is
interesting. In addition to that, I think a major one is not assuming
your answer is the right answer. Big part of it is not over-assuming
and investing in the followers' development rather than your own
desire to get a task done and open to getting to a desired outcome
in different ways. So we thought President Obama is actually a very
good example of this type of leader as well as Warren Buffett
Transformational Leadership Symposium Transcript 30

31.
1.46.11 and Animo Keehie [Phonetic] [1:46:12] and Mr. Kelleher.
We're calling him Mr. Kelleher because no one could remember his
first name.
Ron Riggio: Sure.
P: There we go. Okay. Thanks.
[Applause]
Ron Riggio: Okay, one more.
P: A couple other ideas. We have included that – those included, the
ability to assess individuals what their skill levels are, what areas
within themselves that they want to develop and what it is that
they're capable of. And also being someone who really fosters an
environment where people seek feedback or they provide feedback
and that you know, you yourself go to them and solicit their ideas
and then one other that we had really strongly is that the leader is
someone who holds the vision for you and has your clear that they
have your – she has your best interest in mind and they want you to
grow and develop.
Ron Riggio: Very good.
[Applause]
Ron Riggio: One of the things that we're seeing is that these are – it's very clear
that these are interconnected, that there's overlap, there's pieces
where the themes of these four components come together, right?
And we've seen that across the same themes. Okay.
Bob Wright: By the way, give yourselves a hand. That was great.
Ron Riggio: Yes.
[Applause]
Bob Wright: I'm asking you to spend 60 seconds in silence reviewing the areas
picking the one that you'd like to focus on. You can do whatever
else you want. I'm suggesting one and then thinking about the one
behavior that you want to increase and also think about the results
that you want in your organization. Area, behavior, and the results
you want with 60 seconds of silence to think about that.
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32.
Okay. So now we're going to give you 3 minutes to share it around
your group. By the way, people who succeed at what they want to
implement, tell other people what it is then set measures up for it.
One of the measures you can use is to take Ron's transformational
leadership self-assessment and then have your direct reports
assess you and you could do it now and then later on as a post-test
6 months or a year to give yourself some feedback about how
you're doing and you don't have to let anyone know what the rating
was but you. However, you may want to and I've seen CEOs do
that very successfully. Three minutes to share with this group and
then think about sharing it with others.
You're getting done in the next 30 seconds or so. Make sure
everybody has the chance to report. Okay. That's it. Come on back.
By the way, we're going to have these transcribed and put on the
website if you want to go back and use it as a resource, you know,
please do that. If you want your workbook, please put your name
on it because Ron's going to do a summary and then we're going to
ask you to actually take your personal effects and put them over on
the side because the assistants are going to rearrange the room
back the way it was. We're going to have a 15-minute break after
Ron gets done.
Ron Riggio: Okay. All right just very quickly, okay? So what we're talking about,
the transformational leadership is really the very best qualities. We
really do know what will work, okay? So I think a lot of times my
colleagues – well there's all these theories of leadership but we
actually do know what works. The other thing and I think is we're
sort of getting into; this represents a model for leadership
development. So you can work on your own personal leader
development and so understanding a little bit more about the four
I's is going to help you in that regard and you've written down
something to work on.
And as Bob mentioned, the next step is this online assessment of
your transformational leadership profile. Now what we've done is
it's actually sort of three steps. There's a very green version of one
of our instruments in there, that one page. So you can do that and
they were in order. They're in the same order so you could score
the four items. So they're individualized influence, inspirational
motivation in that order. But if you want a more detailed
assessment and a much longer instrument, it takes you only about
10, 15 minutes to do is online and it's actually multiple instruments
online so that you can go on and take it. Then the third level is to
get your direct reports or those around you. We could use sort of a
360. Have them go online and assess you.
Transformational Leadership Symposium Transcript 32

33.
The bonus there is that we're going to roll out our ethical leadership
scale and that's always another reported measure. So your direct
reports will also complete that and we'll give you some brief
feedback on that too. So those are the last steps and thank you so
much for your participation and for all of these terrific ideas. I think
and as Bob said, this is going to be a terrific resource on writing
and to do websites. So thank you very much for your time,
attention, input.
[Applause]
Bob Wright: That's Ron Riggio.
[Applause]
Tom Terry: Thank you, Ron and thank you, Bob and now we're going to get
going again at 10:00 but we're going to take a brief break. We've
got coffee and refreshments right over to this side of the room and
as Bob said, please take all your personal effects with you because
we're going to reset the room as it was when we came in this
morning and just as you know, this facility's – the restroom facilities
outside in the quarter around up here as well. So we'll be back at
10:00.
[Music playing]
Tom Terry: Okay. Welcome back from our break. Well that first segment this
morning was terrific. Wasn't it?
[Applause]
Tom Terry: Thanks to Ron for that. Thank you very much. You know for me, it
just dawns on me you know, what am I going to do next? What is
the one thing I'm going to focus on? It really is about me and like it's
about all of us and some of the chatter I had about the morning
session and the break absolutely brought that home. And the next
two speakers are folks who've been talking about leadership for a
long, long time and their particular entry point into leadership is
personal transformation and Bob and Judith Wright, many of you
know, many of you don't know them, Bob and Judith Wright who we
introduced last night and you became acquainted with last night are
going to connect the dots here. They're going to talk to us about
leadership from the inside out and so with no further adieu, let me
just introduce Bob and Judith Wright.
Transformational Leadership Symposium Transcript 33