90. Alan Weiss - Ways to Change the Workplace Legacy Series - Hosted by Prina Shah

SPEAKER_01 0:05

Hello and welcome to this episode of Ways to Change the Workplace with myself Bruno Chad. I love what I do. I'm a global leadership coach, a consultant, a trainer, a keynote speaker, a podcaster. I help you to develop your leaders, your teams, and I help you to optimize your organizational cultures. I'm here to help you find ways to change your workplace. Why? Because we spend more time in our waking days at work than we do with our loved ones. It has to be a good place to be. During this podcast, you can expect a mix of interviews with amazing thought leaders and then some solo episodes from myself as well. Get ready. So I'm mixing things up with this Ways to Change Your Workplace podcast because I'm going to be speaking with people who leave a legacy every now and then in the workplace. And what better person to speak with than Mr. Alan Weiss himself, who is the co-author of Life Storming. I will be speaking to Marshall Goldsmith in the future. That is my aim. That is gonna happen. But for now, you have to listen to Alan, and it's an amazing conversation. Have a pen and paper ready and check it out. Hello and welcome to this very special episode of Ways to Change Your Workplace with myself, Prina Shah. And I'm very excited to introduce you today to my guest, Alan Weiss, all the way from America. Alan, hello, how are you?

SPEAKER_00 2:28

Morning. Good morning here. I'm good, thanks.

SPEAKER_01 2:30

And good evening from here, Alan. Alan, I have a little bit of a spiel, a bit of an introduction to you, if I may, first off. So this series is all about the legacy series and people who have made a significant impact on ways to change your workplace. Alan Weiss certainly has. Alan is a well-known consultant, author, and speaker in the fields of management consulting and professional development. He has written numerous books on consulting, leadership, and business growth, including million-dollar consulting and value-based fees. Alan Weiss is often recognized for his expertise in helping consultants and professionals to enhance their practices and to achieve higher levels of success. Alan Weiss not only helps entrepreneurs, he has been helping to find ways to change your workplace for years. Alan is one of those rare people who can say that he is a consultant, speaker, author, and mean it. His consulting firm, Summit Group Consulting, has attracted clients such as Merck, Hewlett Packard, GE, Mercedes Benz, Times Mirror Group, Toyota, and hundreds of other leading organizations. Alan typically speaks for around 20 keynotes a year at major conferences. And Alan's prolific publishing includes over 500 articles and around 60 books. And counting, Alan, you're still writing books. Yep, you're still going. I met Alan last year in Brisbane at a conference that he was delivering. I was there for the whole session. So the first introduction of the session, Alan, was to help business owners and entrepreneurs to become even bigger and better business owners and entrepreneurs. And then the second part of the conference, Alan, was to get accredited in your uh strategic planning process, which is called sentient strategy. Now, Alan, I did not know during that whole period, it was for a week that you trained us, and that's one of the best training uh I've had professionally for myself. I didn't know you were so jet-lagged. You were on every single day. I didn't know you were awfully jet lagged at that time.

SPEAKER_00 4:48

Well, it's a long flight, you know, it's a long trip to Brisbane from where I am. Um but I've got uh I have um four million air miles over my career, so you get used to it.

SPEAKER_01 4:59

Yeah, yeah, you've done it before. Alan, yeah looking back on your career, so right now you do a lot of things. Are you working? I know you help consultants such as myself to become even bigger and better. Are you also working with industry and finding ways to change your workplace still?

SPEAKER_00 5:18

I do uh a little bit of that from my older clients, it's of maybe 5% of my business. However, excuse me, with the people like yourself who I'm helping globally, uh I'm working with them to help their clients, which are primarily organizational clients. And so through them, I'm helping to change those workplaces.

SPEAKER_01 5:41

Wonderful. Alan, looking back on your career, what motivated you to make a difference in the workplace? Was there something that was there an aha moment? What was it? What happened?

SPEAKER_00 5:53

Well, I I felt that um there should be um uh a synergy among people who own businesses or run businesses or executives in businesses, and the people in the front lines of those businesses, and the customers and the suppliers and so forth. Uh I never looked at these different groups as being adversarial. I looked at them as being harmonious, but often they were not. Uh, and a lot of the complaints uh were legitimate complaints, and some of the complaints were illegitimate complaints. So it, you know, I think consulting is about simplicity. I think it's about clarity, not making things more and more complex. And so I would say to, you know, the old consulting phrase is it hurts when I move my arm this way. And so the consultant says, well, stop moving your arm that way. And in effect, that's what I told organizations. You know, we get complaints when we do this. Well, stop doing that. You know, find another way. So I didn't set out to change the world, but I did set out to try to make organizations more efficient and effective because I felt that way they could serve their clients better, their clients would be more loyal, uh, and consequently they develop still more business. So profitability was really a function of trying to ensure that employees and customers were happy.

SPEAKER_01 7:12

Alan, you have had the opportunity to work with some of the world's best leaders and some of the world's best organizations. That didn't happen overnight. What what kept you, what motivates you, Alan Weiss?

SPEAKER_00 7:25

Today at the beginning.

SPEAKER_01 7:29

When you were starting off.

SPEAKER_00 7:31

Well, at the beginning it was survival. Uh you know, I mean uh I was fired in 85. I was president of a consulting firm, the owner and I hated each other. I was fired. Um, and so that was a matter of putting bread on the table. Yeah. And I decided that uh, you know, more in this business, you have to be a marketer. And I said to myself, you know, well, how many ways to market are there? Well, it turns out there are six. And I was really good at two, writing and speaking. So I wrote and I spoke, I wrote and I spoke. And what am I doing today? I'm still writing and speaking. Uh, and that helped me to generate business. Now, so once I got away from the survival mode to sort of the you know, alive mode, I could sustain myself, uh then I was able to be more discriminating about what I did and who I wanted to help and how I helped them. I was able to develop original intellectual property. And then when I once I got past there and you know, let's say the thrive level, uh, and people came to me and I had a strong brand, and then I could uh take the role of an expert. And instead of I wasn't worried about my survival anymore, so then I could say, I'm worried about your survival. I'm worried about your ability to sustain yourself. And I was very right about that, because if you look, you know, there was a financial crisis, there was this crisis, then the pandemic. Uh, and the people who had resources and the people who were resilient uh and had courage were the people who survived and then thrived again. But the people who did not have resources and the people who were not courageous, uh, they disappeared.

SPEAKER_01 9:01

Yes, indeed. And we yeah, we have seen that firsthand. Alan, can I ask you, in your words, how would you define the legacy that you have left in the corporate world with your clients and now what you're doing through other people and you know, through their clients?

SPEAKER_00 9:18

Well, I, you know, you create your legacy every day. Every day there's a new page in the book. You know, it's like a company's valuation. You don't wait until you want to sell it and say, well, let me increase the valuation. Every day you're trying to increase the company's worth. And as for legacy, every day there's a new page. So the question becomes am I writing that new page or is somebody else writing that page? Or is it blank? Or is it the same as yesterday's page? So I think every day the new page for me is to improve ways to help people achieve a better life. Uh, because we don't have a business life and a personal life. We simply have a life. And we should stop kidding around about that. I have a newsletter called Balancing Act, but Balancing Act doesn't uh focus on business versus personal life, it just focuses on people's lives. And so I think that what I my legacy, uh, I hope will be uh continuing is that I help people achieve lives that are tremendously rewarding for them and consequently they are able to contribute to others because I don't feel that we should consume wealth or consume happiness without creating wealth and creating happiness.

SPEAKER_01 10:20

Absolutely. Alan, so I've read many of your books and life storming, especially in that I that you wrote with Marshall Goldsmith, I picked up the big fact that you just mentioned now. You create a legacy every single day. That's such a beautiful that statement is profound. And then the fact that you've got the pass it on mentality as well, you know. So whatever we do, we're passing it on to our clients, and they're passing it on to their employees, to their families, to the communities that they're a member of, and to ideally a better society is the ideal hope that we all have. Alan, can you share a specific example of a curly career challenge you had and how you overcame it?

SPEAKER_00 11:04

Well, um, I I can share with many. Let me pick this one. I found in organizations that it was very easy to talk to people at low levels, particularly human resources, but they couldn't make decisions. They could say no, but not yes. And consequently, they usually said no. Uh, and frankly, I found the people in human resources were there because there was nothing else they could do. Uh, and so the challenge was to find people who were decision makers. So this led me to this concept of the economic buyer. And the economic buyer had to have an independent budget, and that budget could be used to purchase value.

SPEAKER_01 11:41

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 11:41

Value that you and I provide.

SPEAKER_01 11:43

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 11:43

And so the challenge was to get to those people. And uh I surmounted that challenge, or I I conquered that, uh, by I mentioned these six ways to market before. Uh, you know, there's there's uh speaking and there's publishing and there's pro bono work and there's hosting events and there's networking. Those are five, but the most important one is the sixth, which is referral business. Yeah. And I found that, and I've been I've been um supported in this by research that's been done over the past 20 years, particularly by um a fellow I had uh speak for me at one of my events, Jonah Berger, who's at the University of Pennsylvania at the Wharton School of Business. And what he's proved in his research is that executives, these buyers I'm talking about, 84, 87% of the time, something like that, make decisions based on peer-to-peer reference. They don't do it from the internet, they don't do it by advertising, they don't do it by interviewing, they do it by asking someone they respect. So you or I might say to a colleague we respect, uh, who's a good dentist? Who's a good real estate agent? Where's a good place to go on vacation? Because we respect each other. They say, I need a good consultant, who should I get? Yeah. And so I found that once I was in, that I could stimulate business through this renewal, this uh referral system, uh, and that took off like wildfire.

SPEAKER_01 13:00

Amazing. Alan, can we step step back a couple of steps? You have hurt the ears of all of these human resources professionals who are listening in now. So I know. Um, can I can I ask you one question? Uh, in your opinion, what does HR stand for? I have heard this before.

SPEAKER_00 13:19

Hardly relevant.

SPEAKER_01 13:20

Now, can we poke and prod a little bit further? How can they become more relevant? How can they flip it? Well, what is the problem with HR? What's happening?

SPEAKER_00 13:29

I'll I'll tell you what the problem is. I've been consulting for 35 years, and in 35 years, I have found three HR people who were truly brilliant and who could uh help their organizations. And the way they did that, one was at Merck, which you mentioned before, one was at Ewick Packard, which you mentioned before. Uh, and the way they did that was they had good relationships with line managers. Yeah, and they didn't even pretend to try to make decisions about hiring people or not. What they did was they'd say, I have a line manager who has a need, I'd like to introduce you. So they saw their roles as putting outside resources together with um people in the organization who needed help and who had buying capacity, buying power. The problem with HR is structurally, it makes no sense. And so uh line managers have financial goals, financial responsibilities, and budgets that they they're responsible for maintaining. Uh they don't report to the CFO of the organization. They're responsible for these budgets. They should be responsible for HR as well. And here's the here's the transformational thing that's happened. HR had two primary responsibilities. One was transactional, um, moving people around, salary and payroll, features and benefits, and so forth. That's all been outsourced, right? You outsource that now. The other was transformational, organizational change, structure change, and so forth. Yeah. But they lost the power for that. They did they keep getting cutbacks. They don't have see, HR isn't an attractive enough place for a heavyweight for those. So those went to people like me.

unknown 14:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 14:56

Outside consult who could come and go. And companies abused HR for the wrong reasons to prove how diverse they are.

SPEAKER_01 15:04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 15:05

There's a disproportionate number of minorities heading up HR instead of these minorities running sales, running manufacturing, running operations. No, they're an HR in finance. And it's it's it's dishonest. And I'll tell you one more thing that I can tell you from the United States. I don't know what it's like in Australia or elsewhere, but in the US, if you go back 10 years, you can't find me three HR executives who became CEOs. You could you could find sales vice presidents, you could find general counsels, you can find CFOs, but not human resource executives. And so it has not become a place where top talent goes and where the organization has a lot of respect for that talent. So if you're an HR right now, what can you do? Get the hell out of it.

SPEAKER_01 15:52

Alan, yeah, okay. I did just that. And a lot of the stuff that you've talked about was exactly my I kept on hitting a wall. So I worked internally in corporate HR. I had the best of ideas and I'd be taking them to the executive with wonderful ideas. We'll get a consultant to do that. We'll we'll find out whether a consultant will advise on that first off, let alone do it. I thought, I'm gonna be that consultant. So that's what I am now.

SPEAKER_00 16:19

Um you mentioned before that you went through this uh the strategic certification process with me in Brisbane. Yes, yeah, and I've done a lot of strategy work over the years, yeah, and there's never been an HR person in that room. I mean, uh, they might have titles like chief human resource officer, yeah, a high-level uh uh an impressive title.

SPEAKER_01 16:40

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 16:41

Uh but they're not in that room. The CFO, the COO, maybe the sales vice president, the other people in that room, not the HR people.

SPEAKER_01 16:48

Yeah. Okay, another thing as well. So I've been doing a lot of learning. So once you have your own business, you've got a you that learning curve is very, very steep. Um, so for HR people who are listening, whose ears still might be hurt, the advice I could give, and and no doubt Alan highly recommends consider yourself as a consultant rather than that internal, you know, transactional partner. Read books such as, you know, million-dollar consulting. Learn the kind of skills that you pick up from there and apply them to the workplace, and it really changes the way that you operate as well. Um, I don't know whether I could ever go back into corporate life now, Alan, after what I've learned here. So that's going to be very interesting if that future ever, ever calls back to me again. Um Alan, you have done many unconventional things throughout your career. And, you know, I've heard many a story, and I've read many a story about some out-of-the-box things you've done for your clients as well. In terms of some unconventional things that you have done, what are a couple that you're the most proud of and why? Obviously, without breaking confidentiality, if you can share, please.

SPEAKER_00 17:57

Well, you know, I won't mention names, but uh a lot of people call me the contrarian. And uh I tend to look at things in very different ways. Uh so for example, I would tell a client who's bending over backwards to try to accommodate uh customer complaints that the customer is not always right. You know, we had this big thing about being customer centered. People felt that was, you know, an absolution. We're customer centered. Well, a customer is not always right. Also, you have to triage your customers. Some customers are better than others. People hate to hear that, but it's true. So the customers give you the most referrals, the least complaints, the most repeat business. These are the customers you want to treat the best. And if you look at airlines, uh, you know, they treat their first class, business class customers in terms of amenities and in terms of benefits, the best. If you look at American Express, they came through a green card and then a gold card and then a platinum card, and then a few of us have a black card. And they're saying we recognize some of you are more important to us than others because we're here to make a profit. So uh that's one thing. I think the second thing is that uh uh you have to understand that things like alignment and communication, uh, improving these isn't necessarily important. Now that sounds like heresy, right? But the fact is you can improve communication. We have a phrase in the United States, you can improve communication until the cows come home, but it won't improve your profitability. So you can have a firm that's excellently aligned, excellently communicating. But the test of this is are you improving your revenues? Are you improving your repeat business? Are you improving profit? Are you strengthening your brand? Those are the outcomes that are important. And so you have to take a different look at things, uh, and you have to be willing to say just because we've done this in the past doesn't mean that we should keep doing it. I'll give you one more example. Yeah. Uh over the post-pandemic, everybody's talking about disruption and volatility, right? And if you think about it, that would be a great name for a law firm, you know, disruption and volatility, personal, personal injury lawyers. But what I tell my clients is use disruption and volatility as an offensive weapon. And you saw this in the strategy process you went through. The fact is that the best companies in the world have deliberately disrupted their markets. So if you look at FedEx, if you look at Dyson, the air people, if you look at Amazon, if you look at Apple and so forth, I can go on and on. They have deliberately disrupted markets, which gave them market leadership. In the mid-90s, as far back as then, I introduced value-based fees for consulting. And today I have the strongest independent consulting brand in the world. That's what disruption can do for you.

SPEAKER_01 20:44

Alan, you are a lifelong learner and you're always, you know, taking things in, taking things in, and you're always developing others as well, always giving back. How do you learn? What's your development? How do you feed your brain? What's your thing?

SPEAKER_00 20:59

Well, I have quite a few. One is I'm a voracious reader, but not in business books. I mean, I'll read a business book because I need to be conversant, you know. So Collins writes good to great, you know, so I need to read that book. And I don't think it was a tremendously important book, but there you go. You know, we've had open book management, management by wandering around, all this kind of stuff. Yep. Uh, so I stay conversant, but I read biographies, I read history, uh, I read fiction, uh, I read um about the military, uh, I read a wide variety of things. There's always a book on my night table or in my briefcase or on my tablet. Uh, because I think we need, we're, we're obligated to keep developing ourselves in as wide an array as possible. You know, my wife says I can talk to almost anybody about anything. So if I'm talking to, you know, a nuclear physicist, I can't talk in depth in depth about quarks and so forth, but I can talk in general, you know, about I about, you know, um, let's say um Einstein's, you know, universal laws and so forth. Uh, so that's one thing. The second thing is I have a global community of people like yourself. And so uh every Every day I have three or four coaching calls with somebody, you know, in Argentina or in Shanghai or in Germany or across the US. And so I'm constantly learning, my fingers constantly on the pulse because these people are at different stages of the profession. And so I learned that way. The third thing I mentioned to you is that I'm kind of fearless, you know, and I'm always willing to try things because you learn as much from failure as you learn from success.

SPEAKER_01 22:27

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 22:28

I have this might be somewhat contrarian I have limited my news intake considerably. It's been about two years since I've listened to broadcast news on the networks in the United States because it's sensationalistic.

SPEAKER_01 22:42

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 22:42

It's breadth. It's always bad news. That's what sells, they think. Yeah. But I'll I'll tell you something that maybe your listeners might find interesting, and that is that, again, from a US perspective, uh most newspapers and most TV broadcasts um are going to disappear in the next five years. Uh the United States will probably have the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today. There'll be global editions, and then there'll be a community newspaper. There'll be a weekly community newspaper for the cities, but the Boston Globe and then the San Francisco Chronicle and things like those will be gone. Um and the same thing for the networks because everything's moving past cable onto streaming. Yeah. And so these are big, huge changes, but they're changes you can see coming. And so we have to adapt to that. So I think people have to adapt to their input sources for news as well.

SPEAKER_01 23:35

Absolutely. So I disconnected from commercial TV probably around 10 years ago. Haven't missed it. Yeah. Yeah. You get stuff via email, you can look on the internet, but yeah, I completely agree about the sensationalized um news stories and they just repeat, repeat, repeat. Alan, you talked about failures. You have had many successes. With success also comes failure. How do you deal with setbacks?

SPEAKER_00 24:04

Well, the you know, one of the key things, I wrote a book called Fearless Leadership. One of the key things I've noticed in great leaders is their resilience, absolutely resilience, so that when they hit a sit back, a setback, they bounce forward. So you learn and you bounce forward. You don't bounce back. And uh resilience is a factor of high self-esteem, it's a factor of confidence, it's a factor of of uh tremendous resources and abilities. Uh, and so when you have when you have a setback, you move forward, you learn from it. Now, some setbacks are significant. You can have a personal setback, a death, an illness, loss. Um, and in that case, um, you deserve a grieving period, you deserve a mourning period. Some religions have built-in mourning periods, you know. Uh, in the Jewish religion, you said Shiva, in Christian, uh, you have a usually you have a a wake or a viewing and things like this. Uh, we should mourn a little loss of an of a pet. I mean, all that's legit. But here's the difference pain is inevitable in our lives, but suffering is voluntary. And so we have to decide for how long we're going to mourn and grieve, and then we have to move on. Because if we are going to help others, we can't be immersed long periods in our own grief. We have to acknowledge it and move on.

SPEAKER_01 25:28

Okay. Pain is inevitable, suffering is our choice. It reminds me of the um, there's a Buddhist philosophy, Alan. Have you heard about the second arrow?

SPEAKER_00 25:38

What is that?

SPEAKER_01 25:39

So the first arrow hurts you. That could be the death of someone, or it could be Alan spoke really rudely to me. I don't know, whatever, right? So I'm really, really hurt. Then the second arrow is the repeat stories I tell myself, or the stuff that goes on here that we do to ourselves. And that second point, suffering is our choice. So the second arrow is the one that we keep on stabbing ourselves with, and that's the one that we have control over. Absolutely. So um, interesting statement. Now, Alan, I have one final question for you. Looking at the state of the corporate world, and we've got lots happening in terms of technological changes and beyond, right? Um, if I was to hand you a magic wand, what is one way that you would change the way of the workplace, Mr. Alan Weiss?

SPEAKER_00 26:32

Uh I would change the way of the workplace so that um it was far more flexible. Uh, we're starting to see that now with remote workers, workers who are in offices, workers who do both a hybrid. Uh, I think that we have, in both our business and our educational systems, been too locked into systems which are hundreds of years old. In education, we warehouse kids according to their ages, instead of letting them progress depending upon their learning, their ability, and their socialization. And in business, we tend to put labels on people. You know, you're a frontline supervisor, you're an executive, you're this, you're that. Uh, I think probably the organizations that we are evolving toward will have uh a small group of executives responsible for strategy and direction, nature of the business. Uh, and then we'll have some talent wranglers who make a decision about what kind of permanent talent that we need. We'll always need this talent. And then what kind of situational talent do we need as different business and projects come our way? And then you'll have the talent, which will be either the permanent or the transient talent. Um, and who knows how long that will last. But I think that organizations have to be much more agile and much nimbler than they are today, because one of the problems with the pandemic was that people tried to consistently reinforce and support structures that no longer made a whole lot of sense.

SPEAKER_01 27:59

And we've bounced back to them now, Alan.

SPEAKER_00 28:02

Well, yeah, and I think that, you know, government's the same way. We we need to have uh, you know, you didn't ask me this, but I think government agency, the way government relates to the population, yeah, uh has to change because uh we've seen such change in society, uh in demographics, in economics, in social justice, and so forth, that we have to make profound changes in the systems and procedures. We can't continue to try to support what is old and no longer works today.

SPEAKER_01 28:30

Yep. Interesting times ahead. Alan Weiss, thank you so, so much.

SPEAKER_00 28:35

Thanks for inviting me. I appreciate it.

SPEAKER_01 28:37

My pleasure. Sign up to my newsletter, which is detailed in the show notes if you stand against crappy cultures, lousy leaders, and toxic teams. And I'll see you in the next episode.