Turning your managers into Multipliers

Turning your managers into multipliers with Liz Wiseman 

Carrying your business to success with leaders who amplify their teams

I am excited that you are joining me because I have a special treat for you. If you have worked in talent development for a long time or even a couple of years, you're probably familiar with the name Liz Wiseman and her bestselling book, Multipliers. I have known Liz for many years and had the chance to meet her briefly several years ago. I read her book when it came out. I also had the pleasure of getting certified to run a business simulation that is based on the bestselling book, Multipliers, of Liz Wiseman and something that was co-created with her and that I run from my clients. I've become a big fan of her and her work.

I was excited when she agreed to join me for a conversation. Not only excited for me to get to talk to her, but excited to bring that conversation to all of you. As I'm out there in the talent world talking with talent development professionals, interviewing leaders, her name comes up often and I know she is universally admired across the industry. When I tell people that I'm going to interview her, people get excited.

I was excited to be able to bring that to you. Not just to bring Liz's insights from Multipliers or repeating some of the things that you may have read in the book or teaching you some things that you haven't read the book, but what's cool about this interview is that it didn't quite go the way that I planned it to go because I had a lot of questions prepared. I had done a lot of research before this interview. I was a little bit nervous, to be honest, because Liz is a big name. I've admired her for a while.

I spent a lot of time going back through the book, different places I had highlighted, getting all the main points so that I could help teach all of you some of the main points from Multipliers, if you're not familiar. I came up with a whole list of questions. I didn't get to a lot of them because we had a candid conversation about Multipliers, diminishers, companies, corporate leaders and what works and what doesn't. What she's been able to prove and what she hasn't been able to prove from a business perspective. I was impressed with her authenticity, honesty and even vulnerability in this interview that it made me like her and admire her even more. I hope that you feel the same way after you read this interview. I hope that you get a lot of insights out of it as well.

If you're not familiar with Liz, let me give you a little bit of information about her. Liz Wiseman is a researcher and executive advisor who teaches leadership to executives around the world. She is the author of New York Times bestseller, Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter, The Multiplier Effect: Tapping the Genius Inside Our Schools and Wall Street Journal bestseller, Rookie Smarts: Why Learning Beats Knowing in the New Game of Work.

Liz is also the CEO of The Wiseman Group, a leadership research and development firm headquartered in Silicon Valley. Some of her clients include Apple, AT&T, Disney, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Tesla, you name it. She's worked with all the best companies. She's been listed on the Thinkers50 ranking and named one of the top ten leadership thinkers in the world. Liz has conducted significant research in the field of leadership and collective intelligence, and writes for Harvard Business Review, Fortune and a variety of other business and leadership journals.

A former executive at Oracle, she worked over the course of seventeen years as the VP of Oracle University and is the global leader for human resources. She's a frequent guest lecturer at BYU and Stanford. She holds a Bachelor's degree in Business Management and Master's in Organizational Behavior from Brigham Young University. She's most famous for the research she did in writing the book, Multipliers. She speaks all over the world and continues to research and write, and share those insights with all of us.

I was excited to get her on. I want to make a note here before we get into the interview. If you are a fan of Multipliers, the book, of the concept or you become a fan after reading this interview, I offer an exclusive leadership Multipliers simulation based on the book that we can use to help your leaders avoid diminisher behaviors and become better multipliers. Understand what diminisher behaviors to avoid and what multiplier behaviors to move towards, as well as what are the accidental diminisher tendencies and for people to learn what their accidental diminisher tendencies are. We also have a free learning journey for you on Multipliers that is completely free that you can go through to learn more about Multipliers and where you stand on the spectrum.

You can head over to our podcast website, which is AdvantagePerformance.com/hotseat. You're going to see all the info about the podcast. You're also going to see the information about the Multipliers learning journey. You can reach out to me if you're interested in learning more about the Multipliers Program we run or if you want to talk more about this interview and provide feedback and ask questions. Maybe you have a guest suggestion, reach out. We have a lot of great stuff around the Multipliers concept. If you're interested in learning more, I've got a great interview for you. Without further ado, here's my interview with Liz Wiseman.

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Liz, welcome to the Talent Development Hot Seat.

It's good to be here. When I heard this name, Andy, the Talent Development Hot Seat, it reminded me of my job at Oracle for about a dozen years. I felt like I was in the Talent Development Hot Seat. It's been a few years since I've been there. I'm feeling the heat.

[bctt tweet="At the end of all our journey, we will arrive to where we began." via="no"]

Multipliers

We're going to bring the heat. I'm excited to have you on. We met briefly many years ago. I've been following your work and I’m a big fan of your book and your work for the last few years. I facilitate a simulation based on the book, Multipliers. When I reached out, I was excited and grateful when said you would be willing to come on the show and share some of your wisdom. Let's start with a little bit of your background, if you wouldn't mind, for people that are not familiar with your story. How did you get to where you are now?

I went on an absolute circular path to get here. “At the end of our journey, we will come to where we began and know it for the first time.” It's a T.S. Eliot quote. I feel like I have gone this wonderful circular journey to get to do what I've always wanted to do but to know it. I came out of college and I don't know what prompted this, but I wanted to teach management. I came out of business school and I approached a company, Zenger Miller. They were one of the pre-eminent management training companies at the time.

I got on my resume and somehow, I got to the president and I told him, “I want to be one of your management trainers.” Ed Musselwhite is his name and he's like, “You seem great, maybe you'll be a better management trainer if you get some management experience.” He used some nice words but that's what I wanted to do. First of all, I could see that there was a closed door for me on this opportunity. I took, for me, what was very much a consolation prize job. I went to work for Oracle, this young maverick software company. I took a job in education. It was a job in talent development. I was doing training and I was teaching software programming.

When I was still quite young, maybe 24, 25 years old, they said, “We need someone to manage training for the company.” Oracle is growing, they’re doubling every year. I didn't want the job. I like teaching. I like training. Even though I was training on software, which honestly, I was not enamored with, I love the learning process and I didn't want the management job. There are other people in the group who wanted it. I didn't want it but they offered it to me. I remember Ed’s words, “Maybe you'll be a better trainer someday if you know what leadership and management is.” I took that job and I started up working at university and I led what we would call the company’s talent development or talent management function. We called it the global human resource development organization. I spent the first seventeen years of my career leading the talent management function. It wasn't until about years ago that I left the corporate world and started my work that I do as a management researcher and author.

Here's a little bit of a funny slap in the face. Years ago, ATD told me that they were giving me this award. It was a cool award. It’s the Champion of Talent Award and I’m like, “That's cool.” I read about this award and the list of people who've got this award is an impressive list of people. They said, “This is an award that we give out every year to someone outside of our industry who’ve made a big impact for talent.” These are Salman Khan, who started Khan Academy, Chris Anderson, who started up TED and then me. I'm like, “I appreciate the award but do you not know I am not from outside of this industry? These are my people. I am of this tribe. Clearly, this award is an indication that I'm a has-been in the talent development world.” I'm considered a thought leader outside of the industry. I feel very much in that industry.

You feel like you're in the industry but for all intents and purposes, you're on the outside selling to the inside like me.

I suppose. I had never seen myself that way.

You spent so much time on the inside, you know what it's like. You have the empathy. You have that experience. You have the connections. My perspective would be that everything you've done throughout your career since then is to help the people on the inside that you still feel like you're there.

The experience has given me a lot of experiences of what it's like to lead, to have to hire, to fire, to outsource, to move jobs overseas, to kill programs that people put their heart and soul into. I've had to do all that hard, gunky work. Not just the glamorous, fun part of running a learning function, but it also gives me a lot of empathy for people who organize conferences. I do a lot of speaking. I go to a lot of conferences. I don't know if I will ever forget what it's like to be on the inside and to be hiring a professor or an author or some luminary to come in and to put them on a stage and say, “We're going to give you the opportunity to educate our management ranks.” What an incredible risk they take by giving some yahoo a microphone. I think about that all the time. People are taking a risk. Some people are putting their career on the line when they invite you to come in and to teach or speak. That's why I have a lot of empathy for what that’s like on the other side.

The Right Mindset

That's going to take you further in connecting with all the people that you know. Of course, you're well-connected and highly regarded and admired across talent development. I've been running this for a while. I've interviewed over 50 talent leaders. I always ask people for a book recommendation and one of the top books that I always hear among all books is Multipliers by Liz Wiseman, probably that and Mindset by Carol Dweck. They’re probably the top two books that I hear recommended across the industry and that authors or speakers, people are familiar with will say, “I heard Liz Wiseman speak. It was amazing. I'm excited that you're having her on.” It's an honor to get you on here.

I'm thrilled to be here. I've been a long admirer of Carol's work. We live probably a couple of miles from each other. I'm right here in the shadows of Stanford. I've learned a lot from her work.

Multiplier Managers: If you don't get your people to operate from the right core belief and the right mindsets, then there's no amount of training, tools, and systems that will work.

Her work has had a big impact on me, not only in business but especially as a parent as well. When I read that book, Mindset, I completely shifted. I know you mentioned it in your book, Multipliers, as well as the conjunction where managers who are essentially diminishers have more of a fixed mindset. They believe intelligence is static and is not going to change and that they need to be the smartest person in the room, versus the multiplier who have more of a growth mindset and believe that intelligence can change. You can draw intelligence out of different people and even convince them to use more than they even knew they had.

Carol has told me her perspective on this. Carol read the book, Multipliers. I asked her what she thought and if she would be willing to endorse it. She was like, “I love the book.” That was all she said. I'm like, “Tell me more. What is it about?” She's like, “Essentially, what you've done is explore with what happens in an organization when the leader of the team is operating with a growth mindset.” I had never set out to do that per se, but in essence it is this premise which is how do you lead when you hold a deep belief? Not only that you can learn and grow and figure things out, because that's the essence of the mindset work. It's what happens with students and people, adults when they hold that belief. What happens on a team when you think that the people you work with are smart and will figure it out? What does it cause you to naturally do?

I grew up in the talent world and in the training world. I am the daughter of a behaviorist. My mom was a Special Education teacher and principal. I joke with my mom that if I ever write her life story, it will be called flashcards and M&Ms, because my mom believed that everything could be solved with behavioral conditioning. Every problem that I've ever had with any of my kids, my mom is like, “Here's what you need to do. You need to get a jar of M&Ms and a set of flashcards. On the flash cards, describe the behavior that you're looking for and then reinforce it with an M&M.” It always worked until the jar of M&Ms ran out.

I have this strong orientation that it's about behavior. It's about what leaders do. We train for skills and behavior, we skill up the workforce. I haven't replaced that understanding or orientation but I've added to it that if you don't get the mindsets right, there's no amount of behavioral training of reinforcement, of tools, of what are now our electronic versions of flashcards, all of these reinforcement systems and job-aid. None of that works if you're not operating from the right core belief set, and in many ways that's far more powerful. Get the thinking right.

We wiggle our way into the right behavior. That's not always true. Even if someone is well-trained in multiple ways of leading, they're still operating under diminishing assumptions, they're going to find their way back to diminishing behavior. It's inevitable. The end of the quarter will come and crisis will hit and they will snap right back to the things that they did based on those beliefs. I don't think we float into good behavior unintentionally, but if we keep our thinking right and square, over time our behavior catches up.

Diminishers

In the book, you talked about the idea of accidental diminishers and that most people don't come to work planning to diminish their people or to be a bad manager. There are not that many nefarious managers out there who are trying to do evil, but there are a lot of managers who are doing it anyway or bad managers. They're not realizing how much of an impact they have on their people who they want to do good work. The people want to do good work. If I could even read a quote from your book that sets all of this up, which is that, “People across cultures, industries, companies, etc. come to work every day hoping to be well-utilized, not by being given more work but through the recognition that they are capable of contributing in significant ways and doing progressively more challenging work. People want to do good work and then there are a lot of people out there diminishing them,” not on purpose. The big question is going to be, how do we help more managers stop doing that?

Before we go there, the thing that struck me was not only that most of the diminishing that's happening in our workplaces is coming from the accidental diminisher. Most people are completely unaware that they're diminishing impact. The thing that struck me and it still continues to blow my mind in some ways is that the crater that's created by the accidental diminisher tends to be as deep as the crater that's created by the high radical narcissistic bully. If someone is truly an intended diminisher, I was going to say a well-intended diminisher, they created a crater that is not only deep in terms of the effect they have on people in their work. There is a collateral damage that's created in people's lives.

I did a whole secondary round of research trying to understand how people deal with the diminishers. I surveyed about 200 people. When I try to understand what happens when you are being diminished, I can see this toxic carry over, not just people's work lives and how they shut down, pull back all of this. It's self-doubt. It's anxiety. It's depression. It's pervasive. The accidental diminisher doesn't necessarily have that same integral effect across people's whole life experience, but they cause people to hold back and be underutilized to the same degree as the intentional diminisher or that hardened diminisher who's busy, absorbed in their own self-doubt. They don't have time to think about the people on their team.

How do we help accidental diminishers?

A lot of it comes from helping people see. Human nature has it, that we judge other people based on their actions but we judge ourselves on our intentions. There's this lost in translation processes that your intentions as a leader don't come through your behavior. In helping people see, not only that other people can't see their intentions, they can only see their actions. Unless they can somehow divine it, intuit for the clairvoyant people on your staff, that people can't see it that there's something lost in translation. That things can go awry, that miscommunication. To see what they look like to some of the eyes of their employees.

One of the things that’s striking is when people realize that sometimes the things they do with their most noble intentions end up having the biggest diminishing effect. I don't know about you, I feel free to confess at any moment. I find that I have my greatest diminishing impact, not when I'm frustrated or mad or stressed, because in some ways, I've learned to regulate that. I have some basic emotional regulation. I don't usually yell at people when I'm stressed. When I am my most excited, most passionate, when I am fired up about something, I'm buzzed. I'm like, “We can do this. We can do that. What about this?” I tend to take over and I end up like a wet blanket on others, smothering the enthusiasm of someone else because I’m excited.

[bctt tweet="Human nature has it that we judge other people based on their actions, but we judge ourselves on our intentions." via="no"]

On a related note, if you look at the accidental diminishers that you have laid out in your book, there are a lot that I don't necessarily relate to. I'm lucky in that regard. The big one for me is definitely the optimist. I'm optimistic, enthusiastic, energetic. My friends will all tell you that I bring energy to everything I do. That means if any challenge comes up, I'm like, “We got this. No problem.” I have no sympathy for people that are struggling with things. I've gotten feedback from people who reported to me in the past, “You don't understand the struggle we're going through. You feel like everything can be done, no problem.”

The complainers are like, “You're killing my vibe here.” You’re killing the good energy and we don't tend to have sympathy for it. This is one that I struggle with as well. I've read all the research on optimism. It seems like optimism should have this positive, hopeful effect on the team. We know about the physiological benefits of optimism, seeing the bright side. We know that the higher you get in organizations, the more we see optimists in these roles because we need, in some ways, a healthy detachment from reality to even get up and go to work some days in senior management because you have to see these possibilities that don't yet exist. You can't get mired in reality, but yet it's deeply diminishing.

I would think, especially in the technology world but anywhere, most CEOs have to be optimists. They've got to put on the face, go out to the market and say, “We're going to do these things.” I’m thinking of Apple with big launches. I used to do a lot of work with Salesforce, so I know Marc Benioff would get up on stage and say, “We've created this product.” Everyone else is looking around and going, “We didn't make that yet.” He's optimistic.

“In our minds we did.” I used to work for Larry Ellison at Oracle and same people would say, “Larry is always right. It's a matter of timing. We just haven't created it yet.” It’s understanding what our intentions look like from other people. How might this be received? My own optimism is what does it look like to other people if she doesn't appreciate the struggle? She doesn't understand how hard it is. It's learning to see what it looks like. Essentially, it’s what the psychologists call perspective taking. If anyone has read this research, I know Dan Pink popularized some of it in his book, To Sell Is Human. It's not in his Drive book, which is the one that most people are familiar with. It’s in To Sell Is human.

He talks about perspective taking, which is the ability to see things through the eyes of others and consider other people's experience a form of empathy that it is shown to go down with power and authority. Meaning, when we're the underdogs, when we're the new ones in the organization, when we’re the employees, it's natural for us to say, “I wonder what this looks like for somebody else.” We're in a low power position. When we're in the power position, it's easy for us to say, “Here's what it looks like for me and I want to impose that, share that with others.” A lot of multiplying is about countering hierarchy. It’s about breaking down the disconnects that come when people have hierarchical relationships with each other.

Multipliers And Diminishers Among Famous Leaders

Speaking of the leaders and as you rise with those senior ranks, senior level positions, on the book, Multipliers, you talk about how multipliers tend to get twice as much intelligence on average out of their people than diminishers do. Ultimately, multiplier leaders are the most successful both in developing their people and from a business perspective as well and getting results. Yet some people can look and say, “What about CEOs, leaders, famous leaders like Steve Jobs or even Larry Ellison who on the outside look like major diminishers in the way that they've acted?”

Perhaps on the inside too.

How do you explain their success if they are such diminishers? Are they anomalies or are they doing other things that we're not seeing to be multipliers?

It's a complex story in there and it's one I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about. Let me share a few perspectives on this. Let me go back to my earliest quandary about this. I get done with the book. I feel good about the book. I feel like there is absolutely a correlation between multiplier leadership and success of the team and the enterprise. I haven't proven that the businesses do better, but there are a lot of things, lot of indicators. I shared a book with a few people who I'm hoping will write an endorsement for the book. Carol Dweck was one of them.

I'd give the book to someone named John Doerr. He's a renowned venture capitalist. He was at Kleiner Perkins. This is someone who has invested and started Sun Microsystems, Amazon, Google and the list goes on and on. I know John well enough to ask him to read the book and maybe consider an endorsement. I give it to him. He writes back, “I loved the book. I would love to write an endorsement. I’m thrilled.” He sends me the endorsement and it reads something to the effect of, “What do all successful CEOs and CMOs have in common? They're multipliers.” I look at this and I panicked. I'm grateful for his endorsement but I'm looking at this going, “That's not true.” I live right here in the heart of Silicon Valley and I can drive up Highway 101 and down Highway 280, and I can point the companies that I am sure are led by diminishing leaders. I can't put that on my book. I did what any reasonable author would do, I edited. I'm like, “I’ve got to make this true-ish enough.” I wanted it to feel accurate.

It’s still his words though, not yours.

Multiplier Managers: Multiplying is about countering hierarchy and breaking down the disconnects that come when people have hierarchical relationships with each other.

I know but I felt like perhaps it was misleading. It gave me angst because of this tension that you described is real. I massaged that endorsement but that's probably as accurate. I send it back to him. I know John well enough to ask for an endorsement. I don't know him well enough to be editing his endorsement. That's what I learned. He wrote back to me and he said, “Liz, it has been my experience having taken a number of small, founder-led companies and grow them into large successful enterprises. The only ones that make it in the end are led by multipliers. My endorsement stands as is.” I'm like, “He sees something that I don't see. What is it that he didn't see?” What he sees is that you might be able to start a company with a genius, but in the end, you need leaders who are genius makers. You get to the point where the organization is too complex for any one person to know.

There are probably some leaders who have such incredible levels of genius that they can afford to underutilize the intelligence of others. There are probably a few of those. Maybe Steve Jobs was one of these leaders but there are not a lot of them. I do believe that there probably are some people who are incredibly brilliant and insightful and see around corners that their intellectual will can be imposed on organization but they’re not a lot of those. They’re not Steve Jobs. Don't play the Steve Jobs card in how you lead.

There are times when organizations can draw more singularly on certain leaders. There are market conditions where a strong-headed leader does extremely well. Software is full them. I come out of the software world. If you can go out there and get an install base fast and particularly if it’s enterprise critical technology, the switching costs are great that it ends up creating these pseudo-monopolistic environments where you don't see the effect of intelligence loss. In some ways, the water level is high, you don't see the rocks.

There's one other dynamic I would throw in there. I'm sure, Andy, you've got thoughts on this as well. You do see this interesting hybrid profile in founder-led organizations. They found their CEO types. We mentioned Steve Jobs. We could go there. Larry Ellison is one of my favorites. People are like, “Larry Ellison must be one of these diminishers in your book.” Not at all. Not for me. For me, he was an incredible multiplier.

One of my colleagues at Oracle said, “Larry, who’s known for being strong-willed and mercurial, if he trusted you, there was no greater multiplier.” Often, what you see is these leaders tend to have a strong multiplier presence in a smaller sphere, like in their inner circle. Not that I was in Larry's inner circle, but with people they know and trust, they’re amazing leaders, like, “Here's what I need you to do. I back you. You go figure this out.” They're incredible challenges but when it comes to a broad group of people where they don't know you, you don't necessarily hold those same assumptions. You may get these mix bags like Steve Jobs, who people could point to his behavior and say, “I see a lot of diminishing properties.”

If they have a good lieutenant like Steve jobs had Tim Cook who was running operations and, of course, now is the CEO, who might've been more of a multiplier to the people and could take care of the masses where Steve had his trusted inner circle. I imagine the same thing with Jeff Bezos who some could say, “He's that way as well.” It's a matter of opinion. There've been plenty of articles about the toxic culture of Amazon and then everybody rose up and said, “We love working here.” There are different perspectives and the culture might fit different people as well.

What you described is what John Doerr was capturing. The only ones that make it in the end are led by multipliers. It could be that that CEO, that Founder-CEO type, that genius type evolves and changes. It might be a Bill Gates story, but it could be that the way that they evolve is not that they themselves change their nature or their management style, they surround themselves with people who shorn that up. Tim Cook is very much a multiplier in how he led. I had this incredible blessing to get to do a lot of coaching work for executives as I was writing the book. He's a brilliant example of someone who brings out the best in everyone and he’s someone with a hard edge as well, not just with this gentlemanly charm and appreciation for others.

That was one of your surprising revelations in the book as well is that multipliers do have a hard edge. A lot of them do.

That's why some of these hard-edge leaders look like diminishers but they're hard-edge multipliers. Often, you get these hybrid profiles like Steve Jobs who had his diminishing properties. He could micromanage well and he had some tyrannical moments and was hot-headed. If you look at the profile of these multipliers, Steve was absolutely a talent magnet, as is Bezos. People would say, “I'd work for him anytime, anywhere.” Steve was challenger. There are those stories with him staring people down, like, “If I look at you long enough, you'll figure out that this ridiculous thing I'm asking you to do is humanly possible and is possible for you. I'm going to keep staring at you until you decide you can do it.” It’s twisted and some ways a little bit dark approach to a challenger.

A lot of them were talent magnets anyway. People wanted to go work for them and probably liberators to some extent as well. They are driving people on giving them freedom, once they convince them that they can go do these things, to go out and create new products and build stuff.

It's important to distinguish. I had to separate these out. It’s not that multipliers are good, nice people and diminishers are bad, evil people. One of the most fascinating things is to go into organizations where the nice factor in a culture has had a deeply diminishing impact, because people don't talk straight. People don't ask people to do hard things. They love people like, “Liz, we appreciate you. We love you.” People feel underutilized. Nobody is asking me to do something hard. Nobody is letting me suffer. I get rescued too quickly or nobody's telling me the truth. Nobody's giving me the information I need to calibrate and to change and adjust. We see nice diminishers and we see some tough embrace in multiplier roles.

[bctt tweet="The only ones that make it in the end are companies led by multipliers." via="no"]

No doubt, because as you say in the book when you talk about the characteristics of multipliers versus diminishers, multipliers are challengers. They've challenge people to do more than they think they're capable of. Diminishers, if they're not doing that, then they're not getting the most intelligence out of their people. They're being nice and letting them agreeing with them or not challenging them or wanting to rock the boat or help them realize that they could be doing more.

Maybe this is too autobiographical in my own experience, but when I look at my multipliers, when I make my list of people who got the best work, none of them niced their way into this. Most of them were people I were a little bit afraid of, not retribution, not, “What are they going to do to me?” I never felt unsafe. It’s that I would have done anything not to disappoint them. These were not cupcakes and kisses kinds of leaders, at least mine are. Maybe I am sick and twisted. I'm not encouraging anyone to artificially adopt some tough, demanding style. If that's not you, you’re not calling them out.

Creating A Multiplier Culture

You’ve got to be yourself but you've also got to be willing to challenge people as well. I'm assuming that a lot of my readers who are in the talent development space have read your book, or at least familiar with the work. They might say, “This is great. How do I create more of a multiplier culture in my organization?”

It starts with this accidental diminisher. The path does not look like, “Here's diminishing behavior, let's root that out. Here's multiplier behavior, lets inculcate that. Let’s educate people. Let's build those skills. Let's put the posters on the wall,” so to speak. That is not the path. It's far more nuanced than that. It's going back to this question, Andy, you asked. I sidetrack myself frequently. It's about treating the accidental diminisher. What I have learned as an educator and as a researcher on this is the path of learning is the accidental diminisher path, because few people can live up to this ideal of multiplier leader. All of us have our own diminishing tendencies and few people want to confront, alarm a diminisher like, “I'm going to sign up for the class for the diminishing managers.” Most of us don't want to do that. I had not found a leader who isn't interested in exploring his or her own accidental diminisher tendencies.

I wish I could claim that I had somehow planned this out, I had contrived this, conceived it, that this was some clever way to hold people. It wasn't. I've noticed that. Once it's accidental, the resistance is gone. I’ve also learned it's helping people to see their accidental diminisher tendencies and to either put in place, quick workaround. If you're an idea guy, keep a piece of paper with you and when you're in meetings and you have ideas, write them down. I call them my big girl list, my holding tank, my executive filter that says, “You’re not just about ideas.” I ask myself a simple question because I'm a massive idea guy, “Liz, do you want the people who are working on your team to stop what they're doing and start working on your idea right now?” They will. It's why these people give whiplash to others in their organization and why they're diminishing because people go home going, “I've been running around all day, but I'm not making any progress. I’m at the whim of Liz’s creative mind.”

I've worked for an idea guy and I've put together many reports and did many things that he did nothing with. I'm always like, “Why did I do that?” He's always throwing out ideas and I'm running around and doing stuff.

You learn to stay in neutral because you’re not going to go anywhere. It's finding little workarounds. My little workaround is I ask myself, “Do you want people to work on that?” Ninety-nine percent of the time it's, “No.” Write it down. Save it when you are ready to ask people to start working on this simple workaround or some bigger learning experiments. For those who have the book, it's on page 208 and 209 of the book. If you don't have the book and you don't want to read the book or you don't want to buy the book or what have you, we have this little two-pager chart on the book's website. To me, this boils down so much of the book onto two pages.

Page 208, you nailed it.

I don't want anyone to think I have some weird photographic memory. The only reason I know this when the second edition of the book came out and I'm opening it up and I know that this chart is the pièce de résistance of the book. I'm flipping through the book, this new little baby that's been born, I look at it and there's one thing wrong with the print job, and that's this chart being printed two left sides or two right sides. The most important part of the book was wrong. Some of reading might have ordered or received one of the early copies of the second edition, it had an insert, an erratum page. That's why I knew it. You can also get it on our website. We put it up there.

This is the minimizing your accidental diminisher tendencies. Going back to the question of how do I create more of a multiplier culture? It's keeping in mind that most people don't come to work planning on to being diminishers and then to help them realize what those diminisher tendencies are and help them improve those. Going back to mindset, if you have a growth mindset, you believe that you can improve at anything. You're always open to feedback and improve. A lot of people aren't that way. They take it personally and can get defensive. For the ones that aren't and truly do want to improve, it is an accident and you can help them by showing them where they are diminishing their people.

Help them build their awareness of it. See how things get screwed up in translation. Help with little workarounds, tips or some of the learning experiments like, “Try this.” Try shifting out of the mode of telling and ask. This is definitely on the path of building the multiplier culture. The other is about conversation. One of the things I've learned is that the work I do and the work that other authors do, I was at a gathering of a bunch of management authors and the observation I shared is, we’re corporate linguists in essence. The contribution I made is not necessarily the competency model like, “Here's what multipliers do and the skills.” It’s creating a language that people can discuss what has previously been undiscussable.

Multiplier Managers: When you become the how to the what, you earn the right to help shape the what.

One of the great pieces of work that Jim Scott has done, he’s created a framework and a language that allows people to talk about things that had been hard to talk about. When you look at what culture is in its pure sense in a society, there's not a common language. We have all these languages in the world. It developed around shared values and culture. Create a language that people can discuss the undiscussable. Where you can tell your boss, “I don't need to be rescued.” Nobody wants to tell their boss to back off and quit micromanaging.

If they could, they were freer to have those conversations and give feedback and you're going to have a better culture and people that are getting more done.

Let's say I'm working for you, Andy, and you're coming in, you see me struggling and suffering and out of the kindness of your heart, you helped. That shared language allows me to say, “Andy, I don't need a rescue. I'm going to get this done. I've got ownership over this. I'll come to you if I need help but let me get this and across the finish line,” or to say, “Andy, you are an optimist mode. You are nothing but upside, which gives me the unfortunate job of being Debbie Downer, Liz Downside and that sucks.”

It's having this language and also having a sense of humor about it, which is hard to have a sense of humor about our foibles when it's like, “You're a diminisher. You're a multiplier. You're not living up to our corporate values.” When we can laugh at what we do with the best of intentions, that is quite ineffective. That little bit of levity allows us to tackle the gravitas of these issues of like, “I want to do great work. I want to use all my mind and I want to share it. I want to give it freely but you're killing my vibe.”

I want to ask you before we finish, people reading that are trying to create more of a multiplier culture or they're saying, “I need to go help my accidental diminishers and maybe that's spending time with them or putting a program in place or whatever it is.” What's the business case for making the effort to create more of a multiplier culture? Did you find that multipliers do get better business results in the end?

No, I didn't find that but I didn’t not find that. I don't know, maybe out of some accurately formed humility. I don't know that I could pull off that research project. If I could convince my friend Jim Collins to do it with me, I would go for it. I've hinted Jim a little bit on this. It's a massive study with many variables, how do you establish cause and effect.

If you help me get an interview with Jim Collins, I'll be happy to help you persuade him.

I know, we’re going to double him. He's my research hero. He's one of the people who inspired me to go do this work for Multipliers because he was rigorous in his research and open and transparent in his research process. I thought, “I can do the same comparison study.” I have not attempted it. One of the reasons I haven't is lack of skill and capability on my part, which usually doesn't hold me back. I'm usually like, “I'll figure it out as I go.” I haven't run into organizations who don't, at one level, intuitively believe this. In most organizations, by the time I'm visiting them, they've already decided that the world is changing and the command and control form of leadership doesn't cut it. Whether it's their growth agenda, their innovation agenda, their inclusion agenda, their talent acquisition strategy, it needs a certain way of leading. I haven't found it to be a deal breaker.

It's easy to make the jump. If you're getting twice as much intelligence out of your people, then they're going to be more efficient, more effective, more productive. They're going to come up with new ideas and the business is going to be probably more innovative and therefore we're going to get better results. Maybe you don't have the hard and fast evidence but it's fair to say.

It's probably fair to say that there are some people who are reading who don't work in organizations where that belief is a prima facie assumption or a commonly or widely held belief. There are some people who are up against senior leadership or stakeholders who don't necessarily see that relationship. My guess is most do but what I'm saying is, my heart goes out to the people who are trying to make that case and hitting a wall.

More About Liz Wiseman

We've mentioned a few authors like Carol Dweck and Jim Collins. When it comes to the world of talent development and developing great leaders, besides those books and your own, is there any other book or books that you highly recommend or have made an impact on you?

[bctt tweet="You might be able to start a company with genius, but in the end, you need leaders who are genius makers." via="no"]

I'll tell you an unlikely one. Ed Catmull’s book, Creativity, Inc. is one I love. It speaks so much to not just innovation but to talent management and talent development strategies. I envy him not for getting to run a Pixar but how did he, in one book, do what it took me two books to do, like Multipliers and Rookie Smarts? He nails it. I found that to be extremely helpful. Laszlo Bock, his book, Work Rules!, he nails something for us that describe the future of talent management and talent development. The book is well-written. People should read it for nothing more than pancake recipe in the footnotes. If you read the book and you missed the pancake recipe, go back and find that in the footnotes.

I spoke with Kim Scott who has done layers of texture to what it takes to get people to perform at their best. She offers incredible thinking. She's got this phenomenally interesting background. I'm sure most people are familiar with her book, Radical Candor. I'll tell you what's on my reading list, I haven't read it yet, but I'm excited to read is the book, Insight. I bet a bunch of people reading have already read this. It's Tasha Eurich’s book, Insight: The Surprising Truth About How Others See Us, How We See Ourselves, and Why the Answers Matter More Than We Think. Tasha has done some great work there. I'm familiar with the ideas but I haven't read the book yet. I love the work Amy Edmondson is doing at Harvard with emotional safety and the impact it's having on teams and people's ability to take risks and innovate. Do we want a more?

We're good at this point.

Can I add one more? Dolly Chugh’s book, The Person You Mean to Be. I got a chance to read that and write an endorsement for. It's a delightful book. The book is written for those who are believers in that dynamic of unconscious bias, but who want to be a colleague or a boss or a friend who sees and uses other people capabilities well. It's an explanation for why we tend to miss that and what we can do to be the boss, the colleague, the person that we need to be. She's got a wonderful TED Talk.

Doesn't that speak to what we've talked about with accidental diminishers who don't show up? They mean to be great leaders. They mean to get results. They mean to help their people. They're not trying to diminish them but it happens accidentally.

There’s much more we can talk about but those are a few that I have learned from.

A couple of more questions for you, are there any trends that you're paying attention to that you think are big or hot or impacting talent development?

This is where my has-been status in the talent management industry gets on because it's not like something I'm actively tracking, other than the obvious things of this tension between deep learning and bite-size learning. Deep, immersive, peer-based, emotionally rich learning experiences that tend to create these big a-has, these breakthroughs, the relationships we need to sustain behavioral change and transform versus, “I need to know. I need a tip. Help me right now.”

I'm continuing to explore, certainly online learning versus in-person learning. Interestingly, I'm a little bit of an in-person, deep learning bigot. I'm a little bit oriented this way but I got done releasing some new programs all on webinar and webinar series. I found that it was not only as good, I found in many of the indicators that we're looking at, it was far superior to in person learning. That's one. I don't know if this is a trend for anyone else but me, it's a trend. It’s hardly a trend. Here’s what I'm paying a lot of attention to. As organizations are looking to build culture and transform, our paradigm for the last couple of decades has been a look to our leaders work in the intervention. Tell the leaders the culture. Build a set of leadership skills. Build a set of leadership values. Train your leaders. Get your arms around a leader because leadership matters. If you can get the leaders to do a certain thing, the organization will follow.

In some ways, I'm not only questioning, I'm trying to call BS on that a little bit. I've been involved in this. I do a lot of that work and I'm starting to ask the question of, “If you want to shape a culture,” and the lens that I look at this through is, “What creates a high contribution culture?” People contact me and say, “We want to build multiplier leaders. We run a multiplier culture.” I'm like, “That got my attention, yes, but that's not what you want.” Nobody wants multiplier leaders or multiplier culture. What they want is they want an environment where people can contribute at their fullest. I call that a high contribution culture. Leadership is only one lever. There's a lot of gain to be made by going to the talent side of the equation. What is it that contributors need to do in how they show up and how they engage and how they interact with their leaders? I suspect that it might be a more powerful lever.

Last question for you, Liz, as someone who was on the inside for many years building a talent development career, building a university and a major tech company, for people reading who are earlier in their career or looking for ways to accelerate their career and talent development, what is some additional advice you would give them?

Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter

I'll share the advice that I was given, one was from Ed Musselwhite which is, “If you want to teach people how to be good leaders and managers, go learn how to do that yourself.” As I watch people do that work, I can see those who have made the investments and had done the work themselves. The second thing is let go of your own agenda and go work on the agenda of the organization. Maybe it was a year into Oracle and the organization was shifting and I was looking for a new job inside the organization, I went to interview with my would-be boss who has this organization ended up starting the university. It would be my boss’ boss is my vice president.

I'm in this interview and I'm telling him what I want to do, “Here's what we need. It’s a management curriculum. I can do this and I can help with this. Here's what I'm passionate about.” I was maybe channeling my inner Millennial before there were Millennials. I’m like, “Here's what I can do for you,” which seems like it makes some sense. He's like, “That's great, Liz. Yay for you. The problem we have is that we're hiring technologists by the thousands and what we need is to not help them be better leaders. What we need is we need to teach them Oracle software. What would be great is if you could help your boss figure out that problem.” That’s not what I wanted to do, but it was what needed to be done. I said, “I hear what you're saying to me. I'm not dumb that I would not figure out what's important and go make myself useful in what's important,” and I did.

I taught programming to people who are coming out of MIT and CalTech, Bachelor’s and Master’s and PhDs and Electrical Engineering, Computer Science and even Machine Learning and all of this. I did not have the love for it. I've learned to sublimate some of my own agenda and go work on what's important for the company. I find that when you become the how to the what, you earn a right to help shape the what. It's like, “I know what's important. Go make yourself useful.” It's rarely what you want to do. When I'm having a party at my house and one of my family members comes in and sees me frantic and they're like, “What can I do to help?” I'm like, “You can do that.” They go, “I want to do that.” That’s not what needs to be done. You know the kind of people who are going to come in and say, “What needs to be done? I will go do that.” They become your go-to people.

When they're like, “I would love to help you cook,” you're like, “I have all the food I need. I need someone to wash dishes right now.”

I need someone to wash the dishes or fill glasses with water or something. I was taught that, slightly against my will, but it changed the way that I work. Find out what the agenda is and go work on that agenda.

Go add value and get involved and get that experience so that you're more qualified to go teach people later. That's great advice. Liz, for anybody reading that wants to find out more about you and what you do, get the book, where's the best place for them to go?

We've got information and resources about the book on the book's website, MultipliersBooks.com, because there are several versions. There are a couple of Multipliers books. You can go there. You can get information about me and my company, The Wiseman Group at TheWisemanGroup.com. I'm easy to find on LinkedIn and Twitter and all of that.

I've seen you posting on there. I've tagged you in some stuff on Multipliers as well. Liz, it has been an absolute honor to have you on. I appreciate you spending the time to share some of your insights and experience and wisdom. I also want to honor you because I feel like you are accomplished. You've done all this with these bestselling books and multiple versions and help many companies. You are authentic and honest and open about your experience, and what's working and what's not and what you're still not even sure about. People appreciate that. I appreciate that. Thank you so much for coming on and being open and honest and who you are.

[bctt tweet="If you want to teach people how to be good leaders and managers, go learn how to do that yourself." via="no"]

Thank you. It’s such an eloquent way to say, “Liz, you are scrappy and messy.” I don't know another way to be. Thank you for the work you're doing and for a great conversation.

Thank you, Liz. Take care.

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Thanks so much for reading this interview with Liz Wiseman. We have a lot of great information for you about Multipliers. You can find more information about Liz and her book at MultipliersBooks.com or go to TheWisemanGroup.com. Of course, the book is available on Amazon. If you want to find out more about the podcast, about the multipliers program that we run or the free multipliers learning journey that we're offering, head on over to AdvantagePerformance.com/hotseat. I hope you have a great day.

• Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter
• The Multiplier Effect: Tapping the Genius Inside Our Schools
• Rookie Smarts: Why Learning Beats Knowing in the New Game of Work.
• The Wiseman Group
• Mindset
• To Sell Is Human
• Drive
• Creativity, Inc
• Work Rules!
• Radical Candor
• Insight: The Surprising Truth About How Others See Us, How We See Ourselves, and Why the Answers Matter More Than We Think
• The Person You Mean to Be
• MultipliersBooks.com
• TheWisemanGroup.com
• LinkedIn – Liz Wiseman
• Twitter – Liz Wiseman