Ron Carucci is a co-founder and managing partner at Navalent where he works with CEO’s and executives who are pursuing transformational change for their organizations, leaders, and industries. Ron has a thirty-year track record helping some of the world’s most influential executives tackle challenges of strategy, organization, and leadership. He has been featured in many business publications including The Harvard Business Review and Forbes.

In this episode, Ron shares what first got him interested in topics like influence and leadership, the shocking statistic of how many people aiming for leadership positions fail within the first 18 months, the four traits his study revealed that all people who succeeded in becoming influential leaders in their organizations had in common, what his research showed about the connection between honesty and being an influential leader, how his company helps organizations diagnose and correct the issues within them, and more!

Mentioned in this episode:

• Ron Carucci’s Website
• Ron Carucci on LinkedIn
• Ron Carucci on Twitter
• Ran Carucci’s Free eBook | Leading Transformation: An Owner’s Manual
• Navalent Quarterly Magazine

Play here (the red triangle below), on iTunes, Stitcher or TuneIn Radio (Amazon Alexa) or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Transcript

Hey, hey! It’s Andrea. Welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast. Today, I have with me Ron Carucci who is co-founder and managing partner at Navalent, working with CEOs and executives pursuing transformational change for their organizations, leaders, and industries. He has a 30-year track record helping some of the world’s most influential executives tackle challenges of strategy, organization and leadership all over the world. He’s been featured in many business publications, including the Harvard Business Review and Forbes.

Andrea: Ron, welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast!

Ron Carucci: Hey, Andrea, good to meet you. Thanks for having me.

Andrea: All right. So your body of work is just a great fit for our audience, so we have a lot that we could talk about. It will be fun to see where this conversation goes today. To begin with, what kind of got you interested in the areas of influence and power and honesty and leadership in general?

Ron Carucci: Well, it certainly wasn’t looking around and seeing how well those things are going in the other parts of the world. I think we’re all discouraged when we look around and see the degree to which influence and power are being used in ways that caused far more harm than good. But it was personal.

Probably about maybe just under a decade ago, we were working with a client in one of our sort of very beefy, transformational products. As is always the case, a young leader distinguished himself in that project. When it was over and people were ready to be reassigned to bigger jobs and newer roles in the new organization design we had finished, he was given a chance to take on a much bigger opportunity. Of course, nobody was surprised and everybody assumed he would thrive.

In about nine months into that assignment, he called me. When I saw him in my caller ID I distinctly remember thinking, “Oh, he’s calling to check in and say hi, give me a great progress update and all the great things they’ve accomplished since we finished.” But he was calling to tell me he’d been fired and that he was looking for help networking another opportunity.

I was shocked. I just couldn’t imagine how could that possibly have happened. He was on top of every nine-box, eight-box, six-box high potential career property list.

A couple of hours later, the CEO, who had been our client, called also to tell me they had to let him go and he was a little bit perturbed and more than subtly _____ that similar responsibility for his failure was mine for not having better prepared him which, of course, to anybody in this field it’s devastating to hear that somebody is laying the failure of a great, otherwise promising, leader at your feet.

Andrea: Oh yeah.

Ron Carucci: So I said, “Can we come in? Can I come sniff around? I mean, I just want to, on my own dime here, understand how could we all have so badly misjudged his opportunity and talent and potential and find out what could have gone wrong here,” because I was just baffled.

So we went in and that short investigation is what led us to our 10-year longitudinal study with more than 2,700 leaders. And, Andrea, only to discover that he was just one more statistic that we’ve known for decades, that more than half of people in his position, leading from the middle of an organization trying to enter the top, more than half of them, maybe 50 to 60 percent of them, fail in their first 18 months.

And I thought, “How is this acceptable? How is this appropriately okay that we just continue to take otherwise very promising people and send them off a cliff?” So I was like, “We’re going to turn over every single rock we can find to uncover every landmine being put in these people’s way and expose them to find out how do we prevent this carnage.”

Of course, all the recruiters love it because it’s an annuity for them, but we just felt like we can do better. The great part of the research was that we thought, “Well, okay. So if 50 to 60 percent of them are failing, what are the other 40 to 50 percent of them doing that are sticking the landing, that are arriving at higher altitudes and thriving in these more complex, more ambiguous purchase? How are they doing it?”

We were able to, in fact, extrapolate very consistent patterns in that population of people that set them apart and allowed them to be influential and successful for more difficult places.

Andrea: Well, that’s so exciting. What kinds of things did you find that helped them to be more influential and successful?

Ron Carucci: There were four. The interesting thing about these patterns, my research team got a little bit frustrated because I made them do 99 different regression analyses to keep looking at the data because they kept coming back, no matter how we cut the data up and sorted it, these four patterns, in some form or other, were the top of the list. And if any of them were not included, it put the leaders in the failure group.

What that meant was you had to be good at all of them or you were in the failure group. And I didn’t want to have to write that. I wanted to be able to say, “Three or four will be fine and you can learn the fourth,” but that’s not how…

So I tell people think of this as one thing with four parts.

Andrea: There you go.

Ron Carucci: Not four things because, while they can be somewhat isolated to develop them, the reality was that all of them are what’s required to succeed.

The first one was context. These were the leaders that could come in and read the tea leaves around them. They were curious. They asked hard questions. They wondered about the environment around them and they recognized that, for them to be influential, they had to adapt as much to their environment as they had to impose change on it. Too many leaders come into situations to be influential looking to impose an answer that they already had.

It’s interesting, Andrea, we do this to leaders on their way in. During the selection process, we say things to people like, “Hey, look at these great brands you’ve built. That’s what we need.” Or, “Oh, my gosh, you’ve had such success leading sales forces. That’s exactly what we’re looking for here.”

And in those statements, we’re setting those people up to fail because what we’re telling them is, “You have a recipe. You have a formula. And we’d like you to repeat that formula when you come here.” What they think is that they just have to go reach back to past success and slap it on formulaically to the environment they’re on without even adapting it or thinking about the context.

So this mythical mandate creates this contextual blindness in people, and it happens every day. We all see it. Of course the harder they slap, the more receptive _____ becomes and the people begin to back away. We’ve all seen the movie when somebody comes in and of course we all hear the famous last words, “Oh, they weren’t a good fit.”

Andrea: Right. It seems like there is an expectation of new leaders to be solid and not movable. But what you’re saying is that they should be moveable. They should be adaptable. There should be some adaptability in what they do.

Ron Carucci: Not ‘should be’, Andrea. There has to be.

Andrea: Yes.

Ron Carucci: How could you… there’s no one-size-fits-all. No matter how good you’ve been in your past, no matter how much talent you have, there’s no way that anything you can do is Plug and Play. So you have to walk into the environment assuming that you don’t have to go native. You don’t have to completely go native into the landscape and be like everybody else, because then your ability to create change is a little off.

But you have to adapt enough to build credibility with people, that they know you didn’t come to fix them or change them, that you came and that you’re willing to have them fingerprint you as much as you’re willing to fingerprint them.

Andrea: Absolutely. I love that so much. I really, really do. I love that.

Ron Carucci: The second one was breadth. Breadth, these are the people that they grew up in finance, they grew up in marketing, they grew up in some discipline, but they no longer have the luxury of seeing the world through that lens.

So, if you came up through finance, you can’t see the world economically. If you came up through marketing, you can see the world through consumers and customer analytics.

Breadth means you understand that the best parts of an organization happen at the seams. And that organizations naturally fragment, so you have silos, you have cliques, you have groups, you have regions, you have affinity to localization. And your job is now to stitch those seams. Your job is now to build bridges. Your job is now to create connection among people and to create traffic patterns that bring people together to create more cohesion in your organization, not intensify fragmentation.

These are the leaders that could build bridges. These are the leaders that could cross borders in organizations, that could bring people together, that were willing to see that if they were in sales, they knew they drove marketing crazy and wanted to find out why. They knew that if they were in supply chain, they drove R&D crazy and they wanted to find out why. They didn’t just intensify the rivalries. They actually built bridges and created community across unlikely boundaries because they understood that that’s where real value gets created.

The third was decision-making choice. So, the most influential people are not afraid of hard choices. Too many people get into influential positions where they want to please everybody. They say ‘yes’ too often. They make promises they can’t keep. And they dilute the focus of the organization because they commit to way too many things and, in so doing, they institutionalize mediocrity, because everybody is trying to do everything and then, therefore, nothing well.

So these people could say no. They knew that that influence and leadership mean disappointing people at a rate they can absorb. That it’s okay to say ‘no’ for the greater good. And that the greatest gift you can give those you’re trying to influence is focus and a narrowed set of priorities.

And the last one, not surprisingly, was connection, was the relationship they have with people. What was interesting about this group, from an influence point of view, is that they didn’t prioritize their stakeholders, bosses, peers, or direct reports according to what they needed or what they could get from them. They prioritized their relationships according to what they could most contribute. They focused more on the people whose agendas they could drive, on whose development they could advance, on whose success they could contribute to more so than the people they needed to contribute to theirs.

You’ve seen them. We’ve all seen them in organizations. These are the people everybody wants to be around, the bosses everybody wants to work for, they’re the ones who are just nice, good-hearted people. They’re smart. You know that if you’re in their presence you’re going to feel good, you’re going to learn, you’re going to be committed, you’re going to feel safe to be yourself. And they’re the ones that are the most influential.

So context, breadth, choice, connection. Four not easy things but the key thing is, to your listeners, Andrea, is the time to start learning these is yesterday. If you wait until your first significantly influential role to start learning them, that’s probably not going to go too well.

But you can start learning these right at college. You can find seams and boundaries to cross. You can be contextually curious. You can start figuring out what is your decision-making apparatus and how do you prioritize and how do you narrow and say no and find the courage to make hard choices. And you can start finding ways to help other people be successful. So the sooner you start putting those muscles, the more likely it is you will be influential.

Andrea: That’s so good. These are great. OK, you also have done research recently on honesty. How does that connect with this? Why did you make that choice to study honesty?

Ron Carucci: After our 10-year study, the database grew. So at 15 years, we now have 3300 interviews in the database. In those first four patterns we isolated, we were looking for what shapes individual behavior. But I wanted to know what it was that could create systemic performance position.

We didn’t go looking for… we decided, since we’re using some pretty sophisticated Artificial Intelligence, we’ve got IBM Watson in there, which is an amazing technology, we thought, “Let’s let it tell us.” It reads the data, Andrea, we’re talking creepy-well, like it’s creepy what this stuff can read. So we thought, “Well, let’s see what it will tell us about the system of organization.”

It turns out it came back and it was able to predict four – there may have been more but we cut it off at four – conditions in which people will lie, but they line up very closely with the pattern. This was not intentional. This was just serendipity. But they line up with those four patterns of influence.

The first one was strategic clarity. So if your organization lacks that, meaning you have a mission, vision, and value, you have identity statements that don’t match your behavior in the eyes of your customers or your employees, or if I go around the organization and I say, “Hey, what’s your strategy,” and I get 20 different answers, or people’s own sense of purpose is not locatable in your purpose, so there’s a disconnect there, if that strategic clarity is missing, you are three times more likely to have people lie or withhold the truth.

The second one was accountability systems. The way contribution is measured, not compensated but measured, is seen as unfair. In other words, people think that there’s a bias. They think they’re not really truly being heard or seen. They don’t think they’re getting fair feedback. If your accountability systems are seen as unfair, you are four times more likely to have people lie and withhold the truth.

The third was governance. If your decision-making processes of the way resources are allocated is not transparent, it’s opaque, it seems capricious. In other words, there’s no form for the truth to be told and it has to go underground. You are three-and-a-half times more likely to have people lie or withhold the truth.

And lastly, if you have unresolved conflict, if you have cross-border rivalry, if you have conflicts at the seams between departments that remain unresolved, in other words, if you fragmented the truth and now we have dueling truths, you’re six times more likely to have people lie or withhold the truth.

Andrea: Wow!

Ron Carucci: And it’s cumulative, so for the cash, the cruise and the car, if you have all four of those conditions, congratulations, you’re 16 times more likely to find yourself on the headline of a newspaper and a story you’d never wanted to be in. So I was sort of sitting around playing with these content and I put them side by side and I realized, oh, my gosh, if you’re a contextual leader, you could bring strategic clarity. If you have breadth, you can bridge the seams. If you’re a good choice maker, if you can narrow priorities, you can contribute to great governance. And if you build great connections, you can hold people accountable in an honest way.

So the four influence patterns can have a direct implication on creating a more honest organization, not just a more influential one.

Andrea: That’s just incredibly powerful. So how do companies utilize or how can they utilize this research that you’ve done in these connections and these insights that you have you’ve made?

Ron Carucci: Well, the first thing is to be honest.

Andrea: Right.

Ron Carucci: Everybody wants… 5,000 people did not wake up at Wells Fargo one morning and say, “Hey, here’s an idea.” You know, 90 R&D engineers didn’t get up one morning in Germany and say, “I know how to beat out that electric car market. Let’s sell more diesel cars.” These are things that happen over time, right? The fungus in that ethical Petri dish grew over time.

So be honest that the origins of these problems are much, much sooner than you think they are. By the time you were starting to hear noise or symptoms are starting to appear or scandals are emerging, you are years past the origins of those stories.

So diagnose. What do we say about cancer? Early prevention, early cure, right? Get your annual MRI done. Have your organization looked at not just for ethical things but just for its wholeness. We’re not just talking about integrity as a matter of truth telling, but integrity as a matter of consistency, congruence. You are being who you say you are. You are deciding on things according to a strategy you commit to. You are teaching leaders to con to talk about contributions in a fair way.

This is all organizational health issues that will… if you’re wondering why half of your employee population is disengaged or your employee engagement scores are what they are, or you’re having talent defections by your most talented people, this is not random. It’s not because it’s a good employer marker, right? People really do quit bosses, not companies.

So, for goodness sake, don’t ignore the signs that there are some even minor cracks in the foundation of your organization. Go dig deep. Get an MRI to understand where might we be at risk, where might we be susceptible to problems down the road that we might not want to be part of, and do and address it head on.

Andrea: Now, with this one, with this being honest part, this is kind of hard because prevention is much more difficult or it’s much more difficult to convince people to actually do. What kind of organizations tend to actually be honest in the first place? Which ones are choosing to not ignore the signs and things like that?

Ron Carucci: I’m studying one company right now in Phoenix, Arizona. They’re called Nextiva and I’m studying them. I just wrote a piece in Forbes about them and I think I’m going to study them for a book I’m writing on this. The hard answer is the ones that build them from the ground up that way, right?

Now, I don’t want to have to say that either. It’s like saying you have to be good at all four of these things. I don’t want to have to say, “Well, if you’re now 40 years old, you’re too far gone.” I do think if a leadership is committed to wanting a healthy, whole, vibrant organization, you can. And, you know, people can come back from Stage VI cancer, right? You just have to go and do the work. You have to care enough to want to go there.

If your complacency, if your success, if your financial success is tied too much to the status quo, if you’re too fearful of making change or too fearful of looking in a mirror of what it might tell you, it’s like the person who doesn’t go to the dentist. It’s like, “Well, I don’t want to go now.” So suddenly it’s eight years later and their teeth are falling out. Denial is a very powerful force.

I think the organizations that are, it’s hard to say it, Andrea, but the ones who are in pain, the ones who skin their knees, who get some early warning signs that things aren’t going well. Pain is a marvelous source of commitment. As the old adage goes, the sight of the gallows focuses the mind. But it would sure be great not to have to wait until you’re in pain before going. You get an annual physical for a reason.

So, I don’t know why leaders wouldn’t want to be honest in the employee engagement survey. Would you not want to have some ongoing set of metrics that tell you is my organization and those leading it healthy, and doing it in a way that is consistent with who we say we are?

The thing I always tell my leaders is, “Would you tell your mother? If the next morning, would you make a decision that you would be proud to tell your mom and that you wouldn’t mind having it on the cover of the New York Times?” If you can tell me ‘yes’ to both those things, you’re good. But if you would not be proud to tell your mom or you would not want it on the cover of the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times, there’s a reason that you should have paused.

Andrea: Yes, absolutely. That’s really interesting. And definitely with the pain, it’s the same way with individual people. People don’t want to change until they are kind of shaken. It takes a lot for people to change individually too.

Ron Carucci: And most of us are all _____ until our doctors say, “two of the four are occluded,” we don’t think about our cardiac health. I was walking around with a really strong pain in my calf all fall long and I was afraid it was a blood clot because I had blood clot pain in… DVTs, deep vein thrombosis in my family. I went and had an ultrasound on Christmas Eve. I was so panicked. It wasn’t that at all. That’s OK. It’s muscle strain. So I continued to play tennis. I continued to play. I wrapped it. I didn’t really ice it much, but I kept it wrapped.

Until one day on a tennis court, early January, big popping noise, and I’m down on the ground writhing in pain because I slipped muscle. Why? Because I thought, “Oh, it’ll be fine.” I checked and it wasn’t a blood clot. Well, when the lady came back into the ER and said, “Not a blood clot,” and handed me a whole bunch of information on muscle strains, what caused me to not go, “Oh, I guess this really is a problem.” I decided it wasn’t the problem I was most fearful of, so it wasn’t a problem.

Andrea: Right. Yes. It’s not the one that we’re looking for.

Ron Carucci: Right. And then I paid a price for this. Then I was off the tennis court for two-and-half months, where it could have been probably three weeks had I just taken care of the problem when I really first dealt with that, which was like October.

So you’re right, as human beings we’re comfort-seeking, stability-seeking machines. We want stability. We are homeostatic-seeking machines. And we all say we’re all for change but what I really am is all for you changing, especially if you change so I don’t have to.

Andrea: Totally. OK, so be honest. That’s the first one. What’s the second one?

Ron Carucci: So get data, do diagnosis that tells you where you’re vulnerable, where you susceptible, or where you have a disease growing and then act upon it. And don’t look for quick fixes. Don’t run everybody through an integrity workshop for half a day on a video. Don’t do a campaign. Don’t go put up posters that say, “Hey, if you see something, say something,” and think that the “nudges” are going to change behavior.

Don’t do team building. If you’ve got a lot of cross-border conflict, don’t bring everybody together to do trust falls.

The origins of these problems are systemic and you have to put in systemic solutions. If people in sales or marketing aren’t getting along, don’t just bring them together for a workshop on collaboration. Look at the incentives and what their metrics are. Look at governance to see where decision making is happening. Look at how the resources are allocated to see do they understand the value of your brand that both of them hold? Is sales being incented to sell things and make promises that marketing can’t keep? So, look at the systemic things that may be causing the conflict. It’s not just always interpersonal

Andrea: Totally.

Ron Carucci: The interpersonal things you’re seeing are probably more symptoms than they are roots.

Andrea: That’s great. So, either two then? Is that what you’re basically…

Ron Carucci: I think the last thing I would say is install a mechanism that continually gives you ongoing feedback. Just like a diabetic puts a meter in his or her arm to constantly be monitoring blood glucose, find ways that you have regular access to the health of your organization and the vibrancy you want it to have and be fine tuning all the time so you don’t get to the place where you would ditch.

Andrea: So how do you, how does your company actually help other companies to do this?

Ron Carucci: We have a really forensic way of doing a deep MRI. When we go in and we want to get a look under the hood, we do a very, very comprehensive diagnostic look. We extract data from people’s minds and hearts and the archives of your database, unlike what most people can’t do, and when we bring together an entire story that’s comprehensive.

And we put back in the room every single voice that you send onto the room. So we force leaders to listen to… by reading hundreds of pages of comments and data that we code in very sophisticated coding technology so you don’t know who said it but you know what was said.

So you hear everything we heard, you see everything we see, and then we make you spend time in a room for day or two. You have to make sense of that story. We’re not going to come and tell you as consultants, “Here’s the answer.” We’re going to say, “OK, here are the questions you obviously have been avoiding. Now, you as the leadership would have to look each other in the eye, look in the mirror at that hundred pages of story and we’re going to work until you have conclusions, until you have a plan you feel good about.

And at that point then I’ll tell you what I think. I’ll tell you my point of view as an outsider comparing you to the other hundreds of companies I’ve worked with. There might be a 15 percent gap that I may have to sharpen the contrast on but, for the most part, we’ll be aligned. The difference is you’re going to own it because it’s your story.

So the next chapter of that story is yours to write, not mine. So I think then we’ve got a very different psychological process that I’ve now forced you and your team to look at in the mirror, look at a story, say hard things to each other and now take ownership of a story in ways that you can circumvent.

And the minute that consultants come in with the answers, they went in and now it’s analyze and recommend, then I’m going to get up and 20 slides and tell you what you have to go do. There is zero emotional ownership for those answers in the room. I’ve now sidestepped the most important part of creating transformational change, which is embedding into your heart, mind, and soul the need to understand your role in how we got here and how we get to where we’re going to go.

Andrea: I think that’s brilliant. And it has to be very, very effective. Do you have a difficult time getting people… or I suppose if they want to work with you, that’s just the way it is, right?

Ron Carucci: Well, yeah. On occasion, we’ll get a leader who will say something like, “Oh, you don’t need to do any diagnostics. I can tell you what’s wrong.” To which we typically say, “Uh-huh. If you could have done that you wouldn’t have had to call.” So obviously we already know what you’re thinking the problem is as either, at best, partially right or completely wrong.

And I think if you have a severe pain in your chest and you walked into a cardiologist and you pointed to it saying, “There’s this really sharp pain right here.” And your cardiologist quickly said, “Oh, upper-left quadrant ventricle needs a stent.   Let’s go put one in.” Would you just walk into the OR with them and let them put you under and cut you open? Would you not want to say, “Uh, don’t you want to look first?”

Why, for goodness sake, would you do that with your organization if you wouldn’t do it with your own body? Why would you just go cutting up your organization? And we do it all the time, just we snip orchards and rearrange deckchairs. We slap on new processes. We overlaid new training and skills. And we just pile up, we pile on new governance with new task forces and new committees and whatever. It’s like bad wallpaper in a house. You walk into a house and there’s like nine layers of wallpaper smacked on top of each other, and they’re all peeling off and it won’t take another one.

Why would you do that to your organization if you wouldn’t do it to your body?

Andrea: I love that. That’s a great analogy. So, is there something that… just off the record here real quick, I have on here that it looks like you have something to offer people, your website and then transformation. Do you want to tell people about it?

Ron Carucci: Yeah. By all means, come stay in touch. We can be found at Navalent.com. We’ve got a free ebook called Leading Transformation. If you want to know more about our playbook and how we do this, come to navalent.com/transformation and download our free ebook on all the ways we think about change and transformational work.

We’ve got some phenomenal videos. We’ve got great whitepapers. We have a quarterly magazine called the Navalent Quarterly. You can subscribe for free. We’ve got lots of rich content. If all this is of interest to you, come hang out with us. You can all also find me on Twitter @RonCarucci and you can find me on LinkedIn as well, so love to keep chatting.

Andrea: Great! Thank you so much for being with us here today at the Voice of Influence. We’re really honored to have you and inspired. There’s so much here to dive into and for people to really chew on and think about and really act on. Thank you so much for sharing your voice of influence with our listeners,

Ron Carucci: Andrea, the pleasure was mine. Thanks so much for having me.