00:00:00 Paula: Welcome to “TesseTalks” with your host, Tesse Akpeki, and co host me, Paula Okonneh, where we share with you top leadership and management strategies. This has continued to be a journey of discoveries, as we learned that leadership is personal and professional. And so we always encourage you, our viewers, to walk with us in this journey. The theme today is “vulnerability, a human gem”. And our guest is David Taylor Klaus. We’d call him DTK fondly. And I’ll let him introduce himself. How about that, David?
00:00:42 David: Yeah, it’s actually, I’d love the chance to get to introduce myself, because what’s in my bio and what I talk about when I introduce myself, so different.
00:00:49 Paula: All right.
00:00:50 David: Because what I like to say when I introduce myself is, look, first and foremost, you know, I’m a son, I’m a husband, I’m a parent, a friend. Oh, I mean, I spend my time during the day coaching and working with leaders and entrepreneurs, but what moves me is the impact I get to make in the personal wake and in the professional wake as well. I also collect and drink wine. I think I’m funny, so you don’t have to. I think other than that, that captures a good bio for me.
00:01:21 Paula: I love it. I love it.
00:01:23 Tesse: I’m laughing so much it warms my heart. The wine bit I love.
00:01:26 Paula: Yep, yep, yep. There’s no way I could have introduced him like that.
00:01:31 David: I mean, there’s no sense in collecting it if you’re not also drinking it, right?
00:01:34 Paula: I agree. I agree.
00:01:39 Tesse: We really admire you, DTK, because of your brilliance and your humility combined, plus your sense of fun. So you got it. You’re a fun guy, you know. And to me, you know, I’ve had the experience, not in a formal way of being at the receiving end of your coaching, which has been marvelous. You didn’t know that I was gleaning a lot, but I was, and you know, you’re a master coach, a master coach, you’re awesome. And in terms of master coaching, you know, what is relevant for leaders? What would you say in terms of leadership and leaders? What do they need to be looking out for and being aware of? Particularly at this time of such massive change.
00:02:24 David: Okay. So nothing like a really massive question to start off on. No, but I think that really opens up the opportunity to play with a cool concept. When I work with new coaches, when I mentor coaches, one of the things I talk about is we’re really in the golden age of coaching. And that’s because of a weird, a weird oddity that’s happening right now, Right? So leaders are expected to have a coach approach to leading their teams and their direct reports. But the problem is, so few organizations are giving those leaders either coaching or training and having a coach approach. There’s still so much of that lingering command and control style of leadership. And the militaries have abandoned command and control leadership a long time ago, but it’s lagging in a lot of corporate structures that, you know, I was hazed when I came up, so I’m going to haze you as you come up, right? I’m going to do to you what they did to me because it made me strong. That doesn’t plague you, right?. And it’s telling people what to do instead of bringing them up and bringing out what’s unique about them into their leadership role. We don’t, the old idea that leaders are born, not made is gone. So now we have a situation where having a coach approach is a core competency of leadership. But since the leaders don’t get that internally, they’re not given that support and that training, we see so many leaders reaching outside of their organizations to get coaching and to get training and having a coach approach. But they’re not enough trained, certified coaches out there to provide that kind of service and teaching and mentoring to these folks. So it really is a place where, I mean, that’s why I call it the golden age of coaching. That corporate is demanding something that they’re not teaching them, which is frustrating. I mean, you know, I see it, my clients spend 16 dot time zones. So this is not unique to the U. S. or to North America, although it’s really a horrid problem here. And I see it everywhere. So the opportunity is leaders need to look at what having a coach approach means. And we could do a six hour podcast on just that. So I want to set aside the details in the granularity because there’s so much information out there, whether you’re looking for some of the books from Marshall Goldsmith, where he teaches the idea of feed forward. You’re looking at Michael Bungay Stanier and the ability to work with Almost anyone. So there’s some incredible resources. In fact, there’s something called the coaching habit also from Michael Bungay, Stanier. There are ways for leaders to learn how to have that coach approach, but the first step is to realize that, there is no there, there as a leader. You’re never done. You’re never fully baked. You have to continue to grow yourself if you want to grow your organization.
00:05:17 Tesse: Wow.
00:05:18 David: Okay, so I’m going to step off the soapbox because I could go on that question forever.
00:05:24 Tesse: Absolutely love that piece. And I like the way that you kind of like the invitation to chunk things down a little bit from kind of that golden era and the big thing. And I’m going to segway towards you, Paula, because you have your particular area of interest around vulnerability. So David is yours for now before I get him back.
00:05:43 Paula: So, you know, what I heard from you which I loved was that, you know, the old adage of leaders are born, not made should be debunked. All right. So can leaders be vulnerable? Should leaders be vulnerable?
00:06:01 David: So on one hand, you know, you, I hate the word should, and yes, they should, right? That idea of leaders who don’t bring themselves and their full selves to their leadership are experienced as not genuine, and a disingenuous leader is one that people won’t follow. If I’m, I think it was General Patton who said, there’s nothing worse than leading a charge and turning around and realize that nobody’s following you, and that goes inside of business and personal life as well as the military. You’re not a leader. If nobody’s following you. And if you’re disingenuous, people won’t follow you. They may work for you. They may cash their paycheck. And that’s only until they find a leader that they want to follow. And so, yes, vulnerability. Now, laying on the floor in the fetal position and sobbing when you get a bad analyst report. Okay, no. There’s a way to do it professionally and be honest about what’s happening and still be in a leadership role. So again, this is something that is a skill that hasn’t root and by the way, being vulnerable is a learned behavior. Most of us, it’s taught out of us as we come up through our education and our culturation and our socialization systems. So it’s relearning how to be vulnerable and learning to do it in a productive way that brings people towards you and they’ll walk with you. So yes, leaders should be vulnerable, part of being human.
00:07:30 Paula: I love it. Because I know you talk about, you know, playing, bringing play at home and at work. I love that concept, you know. Because we are human. I love, you know, I keep saying this because may not be alive when all the research is done on this younger generation, the millennials, the Gen, are they Gen Zs? I think it’s Gen Zs. Yeah. Who really, really, really, you know, honed on the whole thing about being vulnerable, being truthful, you know, knowing, meeting people where they are. Because we were brought up more with the stiff upper lip. You’ve got to be mature. You know, men don’t cry, and it hasn’t worked.
00:08:11 David: No, not really, not well. Yeah, look, I am amazed constantly at how much more effort, energy, time, and attention people will put into playing with a new idea or a new concept or a new way of doing things versus working on something new or with a new idea, right? People will play with something more than they will work on something. And yeah, it seems like just a semantic shift. Look, you know, these companies that go on and on about how innovation is in our DNA. And yet these are the companies that punish failure. Those two can’t coexist. You have to celebrate failure. I mean, go back to the cliched and overtold story, and I’m going to tell it again. Of Thomas Edison, who were, you know, when asked, weren’t you discouraged that it took 10, 000 tries to make the light bulb? He said, Oh, I discovered over 9, 000 ways not to make a light bulb. And if you punish every failure, you never get to success. So if innovation is part of your DNA, celebrate the swings and the misses, celebrate the failures. Don’t punish them.
00:09:20 Tesse: I love it, David. I mean, Paula asked that question and what came into my mind of is this another cliche about be the best version of yourself, bring the best version of yourself, which is what happened. But the other side of that is how to bring the best version or make good other people. So make yourself good and make others good. I’m curious about your thoughts about the vulnerability piece, but also knowing that we’re human and we have good days and bad days or not so good days, how we can be vulnerable, authentic ourselves and do that with and for others.
00:09:56 David: Okay, this kind of gets into the diversity bit, because diversity is not just where you’re from and what you look like and who you love and who you sleep with and what you say you identify as. It’s so much more because we have a diversity of opinions, a diversity of styles, a diversity of values. We have also a diversity of brain function, neurodiversity and neurodivergence. And when we force people to hide bits of who they are, for any reason, social, political, emotional safety, it doesn’t matter. When people can’t bring their full selves, then they’re sequestering off parts of them, then they’re bringing an incomplete self. So if leaders are inviting folks By creating a sense of belonging in an organization. If leaders are inviting folk to bring their full selves, good days, bad days, everything, right? Who they are. And they’re not saying, you know, oh, check that, leave that part of you in your glove box before you come into the office. Whether it’s your heart, your soul, your sexuality, it doesn’t matter. When everything is included in an organization and expected, we get the best out of people. And it’s a leader’s job to create a psychologically safe environment that allows us to bring our full selves, or we will go find somewhere that does. These younger into the millennial generation, the Gen Zs and the alphas that are coming up. They do not put up with an environment that doesn’t invite them in their fullness. They will go work for somewhere that does. And those are the companies that are going to grow and thrive. And those are the organizations that are going to grow and thrive. And frankly, those are the families that are going to grow and thrive. They will vote with their feet.
00:11:34 Tesse: You know, a question is emerging for me, is how can a company or a network get beyond words? Because you see all, in fact, you just say, oh, that one had just read that book. They’ve been on that course. I’ve listened to that podcast. How did they get beyond words? How did they do that? It’s a lot of cliches about so much cliches, so many cliches.
00:11:55
00:11:55 David: I Have to make this rated G. They’ve got to practice making mistakes. They got to practice screwing up. We’re so averse to it. You’re going to get it wrong. You’re going to get it wrong a lot. My youngest is dating somebody who’s non binary. And it recently discovered they are, and we’re now working on getting all the Pronoun’s right. I’ve got an eldest child who’s trans, and getting all the language right. I screw it up all the time. The difference is I’m learning and I’m making the effort. And that’s what you’ve got to do. You can’t say, oh, it’s hard. Well tough noogies if it’s hard. You, it’s hard for me to play with the language. It’s hard for them to be in their own skin. So acknowledge it when you get corrected, because as a leader, you’re going to make a mistake. Leaders make mistakes. Everybody does. Leaders clean them up. If you’re afraid of making a mess, you’re going to make a bigger mess, right? Lauren, who was the Lyft CEO? Oh boy, they messed up big. They reported their earnings as a 500 basis point Lyft, 5%. It was actually 50 basis points, half a percent. He didn’t come out the next day and blame the CFO. He didn’t come out and scream about this or that or deflect. He said, oops, my bad. It was a mistake. He owned it. He apologized. He made an effort to rectify it, and he apologized again. That’s what you do. Those are the four steps. You acknowledge it. You own it. You work to change it. You own it again and apologize. Leaders are going to make messes. If you want to take anything you learn and put it into practice, you have to be willing to suck it at first if you’re ever going to get good at it. And boy, aren’t people afraid of sucking at something.
00:13:36 Tesse: Definitely. Definitely. Yeah.
00:13:39 David: That’s how you take it from words into action. You mess up and you fix it.
00:13:44 Tesse: So that, so that’s stickability and suckability.
00:13:48 David: The willingness to suck at something. That’s the only way you get good at something. Oh my God. It’s like, oh, I used to be really bad at this. Now I got good at it. So this is the only thing I’m ever going to do. Cause if I do anything else, I’m going to have to suck at it first, and that feels gross. No, it’s human. The only reason we exist and we have gotten as far as we have over millions of years is because we’ve made mistakes and we’ve learned from them. The ones who didn’t learn from the mistakes, they died and they didn’t pass on their genetic material. So yes, you have to make mistakes.
00:14:19 Tesse: So is that where compassion comes in? Yeah, the compassion to forgive ourselves, to suck and whatever, is that kind of self compassion and.
00:14:29 David: No, it’s exactly self compassion. Giving yourself a break, like ease up. I have a leader in a Fortune Five company that I work with, beats himself up incessantly whenever he makes a mistake, more so even personally than professionally. And I’m like, do you remember when you were about two or three and you were potty training? Did you beat yourself up when you peed on the seat? No. Did you celebrate every time you didn’t? You celebrated every win and you didn’t beat yourself up for the mistakes. What if you brought that same simplicity here? By the way, We have all done impossible things. What it takes for a human being to learn to walk is amazing. The reorganization of the brain to go from a lump that lays there to something that stands up, balances and walks, it’s a Herculean task from a brain organization and motor skill perspective. It’s impossible, right? And it was done really without a lot of language. And yet we all learned how to do that. We’ve all learned how to speak. Some of us never stop. So, but the idea is we have learned how to do seemingly impossible things, and yet we’ll look at the simplest task now, and if I don’t see a quick path to mastery on it, I’m like, oh, that’s scary. Have we forgotten what we’re capable of? Yes. Is that a great place to find grace? Absolutely. And you’re tapping all the places I love to get preachy, so.
00:16:00 Tesse: We’d love to hear you. We’d love to hear you, Paula?
00:16:02 Paula: You can see I kept quiet because he’s saying a lot of things that make sense, you know. And I remember the first time I heard acronym for “FAIL” First Attempt In Learning. And I thought, I wish I had known that when I was 12, you know, we were.
00:16:18 David: Wish I had known that when I was 30.
00:16:24 Paula: I agree. I wanted to go out to this. I wish I had done that when I was 30, 35. I think I started knowing that when I was 40. You know, they said that this life begins at 40 was really true for me when I realized, you know what? So what if it didn’t work out? I’ll try it again, and keep trying it. I love that. This sounds very contrary to what we’re seeing. Would you say, therefore, that success is based on failure?
00:16:50 David: 100%. Absolutely. Absolutely. If you’re not willing to fail, you will never succeed. And by the way, I fight that all the time, because I hate failing. I hate the face plant. But you know, talk about first attempt in learning. I had a revenue shortfall several Decembers ago in the middle of COVID. And the first time I’d have it had a month over month shortfall in like 12 years at that point, freaked me out. Yeah, I did not handle it well. So I was like, holy crap, I’ve got to create something and run a program to fill the coffers. And so I quick slapped together a program and a marketing for it, work with the marketing team and the design team that got it all put out there. And you know how it feels to throw a party and nobody comes, right? You do all this promotion and nobody signs up. And I’m like, what the? And what I realized is whatever you’re creating is stained by the energy of the container in which it’s created. So I was in a place of fear and scarcity and panic and that stained everything. Everything that was written, everything that was designed, the structure of the program, everything. And you know what? It felt icky and nobody wanted to be part of it. Like, so it’s being attentive to your frame and your energy as you’re creating something, and whether that’s your presentation to your board or whether it’s the next, you know, all hands meeting, it doesn’t matter. The energy you’re in stains what you create. And remember stain can be a good thing, right? It’s not just the coffee stain on whatever you’re wearing. It’s also that lovely hue you’re putting on the wood. So that stain carries be super intentional. And I think the intentionality and consciousness about your energy and where you are that makes all the difference. If you’re afraid and hiding how you really feel, my god, everybody can feel it. Can they articulate it? No, but they can feel it.
00:18:52 Paula: Love it.
00:18:53 David: I’m not sure if I answered your question. That’s sort of the angle that went.
00:18:56 Paula: You did. You did. You did. You did. You really did. You know, you probably saw me just. I’m musing over how you were able to answer it so well.
00:19:07 Tesse: And again so vulnerably as well, you know, what happened to you, which happens to a lot of us when we are kind of frightened and we’re not in that place of abundance or abundant thinking, and it’s hard. But, you know, David, I know we’ve talked over the years, but somehow you seem to do hard with elegance. And it’s hard to put that in words other than I can say that you’ve moved me when you show up when it’s hard for you to do that. And for me, what it said is you can show up too. And while you’re at it, explain to people what’s going on so that they know. Because I saw you do it, until the time I saw you do it on LinkedIn, I had never seen that before. And I called Paula and I said, this is just what’s happened and I like it. So I’m going to do it. But the funny thing was when I started being that real, people didn’t turn away. In fact, I think they liked me more.
00:20:08 David: People lean into authenticity. They lean into that human being human. My friend, Brian Kramer talks about human to human. That’s the core of leadership. And I think, you know, I also hold that we’re all leaders even if we’re not leading a company or an organization or a team, we’re leaders in our own life. And when we take that leadership position, that’s a piece that’s important. People won’t follow you if they can’t see you, they can’t trust you, they can’t feel you.
00:20:36 Tesse: But the funny thing that some people said, we always knew it. It was like, when you say anything, you know, so how many years does it take? Oh, five decades.
00:20:52 David: That makes a lot of sense because if you’re not talking about it, it makes people uncomfortable. Right. It’s sitting the elephant’s in the room and nobody’s talking about it. Speak to it.
00:21:04 Tesse: We really, really, really love you. And any closing thoughts for people? What would you like them to take away from our conversation today? Vulnerability, hidden gem.
00:21:14 David: Well, you said hard, and I think you opened up the key, because yes, vulnerability is a human gem. It’s a core part of who we are and it doesn’t have to be hard. It just has to be conscious. And when you bring it up to conscious awareness, when you invite it, when you lean into it, it’s not hard, it’s a practice.
00:21:35 Paula: It’s a practice. We said a human jem. It’s a practice. Let me close on that. To our amazing audience thanks so much again for tuning in. We ask that you head over to “Apple Podcasts”, “Spotify”, and I would have said Google Podcasts, but they’re moving over to YouTube Music, so YouTube Music. Where you can listen to podcasts and please click subscribe. And if you like what you just heard, as you heard me say, I was musing very quietly, just thinking over everything that David said. We ask that you write us a raving review. And if you have any questions or topics you’d like us to cover related to leadership or governance, please send us a note. Remember, it can be personal as well as professional, and if you’d like to be a guest on this show, we ask that you head over to our website, which is “tesseakpeki.com/ tessetalks” to apply. Thank you, DTK. Can I say that?
00:22:36 David: Absolutely. It’s my pleasure. Thanks for having me. Always a joy to play with y’all.
00:22:44 Tesse: DTK is just a gem. Thank you for being a gem.