Robert Steven Kaplan: Mentorship as Dialogue | Big Think

[Music] So here's why you heard a little bit about me. I teach leadership at Harvard Business School. I had a long business career and still very actively involved in running businesses today. When I go to my hometown Kansas City or when I go back to New York City and I tell people that I'm teaching and I'm a professor at Harvard Business School, they are really impressed. They say, "Wow, that is really great! Who would have thought that you would be doing that?" And so I feel really good.

Um, and then they say, "What do you teach?" And I say, "I teach leadership." And then they go, "Oh." And I go, "I've gotten used to this. Why? What? What's the problem?" "Why?" Oh, well, first of all, they say, "Can you teach leadership?" And they say, "What is that?" And then they'll say, "Don't you have to... I think that's the kind of thing you're either born a leader or you're not. But I don't see how you can teach that in a class. Give me in two minutes what you teach." And I think, "Oh my God, this is so depressing."

What I've learned from all these experiences is actually no one knows exactly what leadership is. If I did a poll in this audience and asked each of you to write down right now your definition of what a leader does, I've learned from experience I would get a hundred different definitions. Some of you would say it's about getting people to follow you. Some of you would say it's about being a good follower. Some of you would say to me, "Forget all that stuff! Are you making money or you're not making money? If you're making money, you're a good leader."

I've realized, and I've spent the last six or seven years trying to demystify leadership because I realize the lack of clarity on what it is is a big problem. All of us get to the point in our careers where we're going to be a leader. We're going to be president of the United States, we're going to be a mayor, we're going to be CEO of a company, we're going to run a division, and we don't know what we're supposed to do because no one agrees what a leader even does.

Okay, so what I'm going to try to do in the next few minutes is break it down and give you a few things to think about in terms of being a leader. So let me start and yes, if you're expecting something high-tech from Harvard, I hate to break the news to you, you ain't going to see it.

Um, let me talk about my definition of leadership. Leadership at its core involves three basic things. Number one, can you figure out what you believe? This is not an easy thing to do. The television is full of pundits and other people, or you go to cocktail receptions. Everybody is really good at telling you or a public official why they don't like what they did. This, that's not leadership though.

Leadership is you're in charge, you're the owner. What do you believe? What do you think should be done? And the truth is most of us know who are striving to be leaders, we don't know. Most of the time when I get in a business situation, I'm not sure. I haven't figured it out yet. I'm still thinking about it. But what a leader does and what distinguishes a leader, a leader is striving always to figure out, as if you're the owner, what do you believe?

So that's step one. Step two, once you have conviction about what you believe, a leader has got the ability to act in an appropriate way on those beliefs. How many meetings have I been in over my life where I made a decision or we made a decision, or I thought we made a decision, we implemented, got all screwed up, and I got somebody comes up to me very proudly and says, "I never agreed with that! I knew that was a mistake!"

And after I'm done trying to strangle them to death, I'll say, "Where were you? You were in all the meetings!" "Well, I don't want to speak up. I don't want to make waves." You seem very sure, Bull! What a leader does is have the guts and the ability to act, and sometimes if you're a leader, acting may not mean...it's pretty complicated. You may have to think out a very detailed action plan for how to act. But what a leader does is learns to act.

The third part, whatever the action is, it needs to add value to someone else, ideally your organization, customer, client, society, someone else. So by this definition, can you figure out what you believe? Do you have the ability to act on it in a way that adds value? By this definition, you actually don't need to manage anybody to be a leader. You can be a leader without managing anybody, and there's millions of leaders in this world.

By the same token, you could manage tens of thousands of people, and I deal with a lot of people who do, who are not good leaders at all. They might be decent managers, but they aren't leaders. What we often criticize public officials, company officials, you name it, because of this: they don't actually...they try to figure out what everybody else thinks they should do, but they don't actually get conviction on what they believe. That's a different thing. That's what a leader does.

Or they have conviction, but they're afraid to act because of the ramifications or maybe it's unpopular in a way that adds value. And by the way, when industries get in trouble, they stop adding value. So that's my definition, and I would ask you: how do you stack up here? This is what a leader strives to do.

Now why do people fail then to be leaders? I'm constantly...Harvard's a little bit, I've learned, like Switzerland. By the time they get to me, they're really desperate! Okay? I mean, they've tried everything and then someone has referred them to me and it's usually a CEO or somebody well-known. Here are the biggest reasons, and they're not the reasons that I always thought.

Reasons people get in trouble are: are you willing to ask a question? A lot of people, because they don't know what a leader does, they think a leader has to have all the answers. You know, we've even had public officials who say, "I need to have the answers. I can't admit that I was wrong." We've heard other things that suggest they're not willing to ask questions. As a leader, leadership is about asking the right questions.

There are absolutely times where you've got to say we're going to do this, but a leader is confident enough to know you have to ask questions. You'd be shocked how many leaders, or promising leaders, disagree with that. They think, "Oh, I can't do that. I'm going to look weak. People are going to lose respect for me." And what they learn is people will lose respect for you because if they think you don't know what the heck is going on, if you never ask a question, you're not.

Second, what relates to not asking a question: isolation, inability to learn. Why do leaders fail? Isolation. You never ask a question; everyone around you has got feedback, and you send out a vibe, "I don't want to hear it," and you're not able to learn. This is why you see all sorts of people move up, move up, move up, fizzle out, fail. They can't adapt. They can't learn to ask a question, or you see people going from one venue to a different context and they never learn.

They have to relearn and ask a whole series of questions. Going from business to government is a great example. You've got to ask a whole series of questions and go to school again, and a lot of leaders think, "I can't do that. I'm going to look like a weakling. I'm going to look like I don't know what I'm doing." What they don't understand is a confident leader actually asks questions with an open mind.

The other big reason why this gets people into trouble: business going well. It's going well, it's going well, and then things change. They always do, sadly, which is what makes business so hard. And you're isolated, and you're stuck doing things the way you've always done them because you've been a success because you did it this way. Are you open to asking a question and actually listening—listening and being open-minded about changing your mind?

Most liberating words in business are: "I don't know. I was wrong. I'm not sure. Maybe we need to rethink this." Can you do it? And then last, in order to do those things, it makes some people feel vulnerable. Yeah, if you're asking for advice or asking a question, for some people it makes them very uncomfortable. Can you stand it? Can you be yourself? Or do you think you need to have all the answers? If you're somebody who does, my experience is you're going to run out of steam at some point. The world's too complicated, it's changing too fast. You will not reach your potential.

Okay, so last two points. There are two, and I'm simplifying this down given the time. There are two processes going on at all times, whether you think of it this way or not, in terms of the basis of questions you should be asking. I'll start with the first one, which is more your brain—vision, priorities, and alignment. What I mean by vision, it's used a lot, but here's what I mean by it: how do you add value to someone else, to a customer or client, based on what key competency?

I.e., what's our edge? What's different about us? Excellent leaders are asking this question all the time. I came from an industry where the only way to survive was to ask this all the time. Products are getting commoditized all the time. Regulation, other changes, globalization, technological innovation, all sorts of things are making it...What added value three years ago doesn't work anymore. Ask people in the bookstore industry or many, many others.

Anybody who's had to compete with Apple or Amazon, this question is in the extreme. You got to ask it all the time. A leader has to ask this question, has to strive: how do we add value based on what clear competencies? Then you have to establish three to five key priorities to add that value and build those competencies, and we're doing this quickly.

And then the rest of your life is alignment. Do we have the right people? Are we giving them the right tests? Are we paying people the way we PR? Even the way we sit, is it aligned with how we add value? This is critical for a leader. And when I see a leader that's in trouble, or a business is in trouble, and many of them have been successful for a long time and they don't know what happened, it usually starts with this: they're afraid to ask a question. This is the question they fail to ask: given all the changes in the world, how do we add value? Are we still adding value based on what key competencies? And then are we willing to realign the business to do that?

This is a series of questions, and this process is going on. There's another more disturbing process that's going on in parallel, and this is disturbing and the subject of this second process is terrifying, disturbing, unnerving. And the second process is about you. This is a rough one. You have to continue to understand yourself better to do all this stuff.

Why can't you ask a question? Why can't you delegate? Why can't you change your practices? Why can't you be open-minded when you see a freight train coming right at you and you convince yourself it's not real? Why can't you share power? Why can't you do all the things that you do? Why do you lose your temper when you're confronted? Why, why, why, why, why?

And we could talk for hours. What a leader has to constantly do, particularly as you get more senior and the stakes get higher, you have to understand yourself better. Last comment, which I guess gets to the topic of what we're supposed to be here talking about, which is mentoring and coaching. You cannot do this alone. First of all, leadership is a team sport. You want to build anything of significance, you need to engage others.

Everybody would, on the surface of it, agree with that, but one of the things that you've got to do in order to understand whether you're on the right track is you've got to be willing to tell people what's on your mind, share information, self-disclose, I call it, and seek advice. And I can't tell you how many leaders say to me, "You must be crazy! I can't do that! That is terrible advice. A leader doesn't do that! That's going to bring me down. That's going to make me...my people are going to think I go from here."

I can't tell you, every week, I've EX' come and they say, "That's going to take me from here to here." And what I say to them, your people are...they're biggest fear, and they are freaking out. They're not freaking out that you're asking too many questions; they're freaking out that you're not asking any questions, and they're afraid that everybody knows, and everybody in the company knows you're out of alignment, everybody but you.

Okay, so let me mention...here's a reason, though. People, despite agreeing wholeheartedly with this concept, still don't get feedback and get isolated and fail to learn. There's two types of relationships to get advice. One I would call mentoring; second is coaching. We use them; we talk about them like they're the same. They are not, not even close.

A mentor...mentoring means I tell you a story, you give me advice based on the story. The problem is the advice is only as good as my story, and every one of us, especially if we're successful, has blind spots. Okay? Any of you play sport, golf, tennis, something like that? Imagine getting on the phone with your golf coach and saying, "Let me describe my swing. I left my left arm straight. I had an athletic stance. I turned like this." They'd say, "Sounds great! Here's the pro!" You would never do that. It sounds ridiculous, right?

Coaching requires direct observation. Okay? You need to have coaching relationships; a mentoring relationship isn't enough. Who observes you? The people that observe you every day, if I ask them your strengths and weaknesses and where the company's in trouble, it would not even take them 10 seconds to answer. They'd know immediately. Sometimes the last person to know there's a problem is you.

And so you've got to be better at reaching out to people who observe you every day and seeking advice and disclosing what's on your mind, and for many people this is very uncomfortable. And second, your people, especially if you're a senior person, do not want to tell you. Okay? Unless they're suicidal or want to blow themselves up, nobody wants to tell you. But I can assure you they know; they've got the answers. You must ask. There's an enormous power asymmetry between a leader and a subordinate. Only you can turn the key.

Most often, when I sit with somebody who's worked with me over the years and I'll ask them, "Can you give me one action that I need to improve on? One thing we need to do differently?" Normally their answer is, "Nothing I can think of." And I sit there and I say, "No, I'm serious. I want... I want to just take a minute. I want you to think of one thing." Beads of sweat forming on their forehead, and they're saying this is some kind of weird loyalty test, and this is kind of a sick trick, and they're debating, and you sit there, and you earnestly say, "No, I'm really serious. I really mean it."

And you've got to be very patient. It's got to be done one-on-one. They eventually will say something; they will regret it as soon as it comes out of their mouth. You'll hear it; it's devastating. It's devastating because you realize, "Oh my God, it's true!" They will...you'll thank them, they will leave, you will call home and you say, "Am I...?" And they'll say, "Yeah, that does sound like you." And you're, "Oh my God, you got a problem!" But you will improve. You will improve, and you will work on it, and people in your company will know too that when you ask a question, they mean it.

They will come and be more likely to give you advice. You will be less isolated, and you will do better at all these things. So again, what is leadership? Can you figure out what you believe? Do you have the guts and the ability to act on it in a way that adds value? Are you willing to ask a question? And part of my role in life as a professor is to say to people, it's okay. I'm not a touchy-feely person; I didn't certainly come from a touchy-feely industry. It's okay to ask a question, be somewhat vulnerable. But you've got to have coaching relationships as well as mentoring. Share information and seek advice.

Good to talk to you. [Music]