***DISCLAIMER: Please note that the following AI-generated transcript may not be 100% accurate and could contain misspellings or errors.***


[00:00:00] Mahan Tavakoli: . Jan Rutherford, welcome to Partnering Leadership. I am thrilled to have you in this conversation with me. 

[00:00:05] Jan Rutherford: Thanks Mahan. I'm happy to be here. I've already enjoyed our conversation before you hit the record button. So I'm excited to be with you today, 

[00:00:12] Mahan Tavakoli: Can't wait to get more of your insights, both based on your interviews and your book, becoming a Self-reliant Leader, how Grit and Disciplined Duty Forge indomitable teams. So Jen, before we get to that, we'd love to know a little bit more about you, your upbringing and how your upbringing impacted the kind of person you've become.

[00:00:36] Jan Rutherford: It's an interesting question. At 12 years old, I was a paper boy in Florida. I babysat, I mowed lawns for drum lessons. Later on I would work in a plant nursery. I would work in a bait shop. I would work at a gas station, Burger King. I cleaned a meat department for a year, full time, 40 hours a week in high school.

I solicited money over the phone for a firefighters union at one point. And you know what, I've been working since I was 12 years old and then I was a private in the army and cleaned urinals and picked up cigarette And I think that's.

Why I am the way I am. I've worked really hard for a long time was poor for a very long time, and I know what hard work is and I've had crap jobs and sometimes people would say, why did you have all those crappy jobs when you're young? And it was because I didn't have nice clothes. I couldn't go work in a retail shop somewhere, because I didn't have nice clothes to wear.

And so I took all these crappy jobs and  a lot of that is, what drives me still today. 

[00:01:48] Mahan Tavakoli: You ended up joining the green berets. You actually have a fun book, the little green beret. So what got you to join the green berets? 

 Picture 1978. It's post Vietnam. The draft ended. So it was a volunteer army. Nobody wanted to go in unless the judge said, go in the army or go to jail.

[00:02:10] Jan Rutherford: And then there were people like me that, really didn't have a lot of options. I worked full time in high schools and my grades plummeted. I had straight A's until about 10th grade and then they just fell off the cliff. I get to my senior year, the beginning of my senior year and I realized I'm not getting in college.

 May be a community college, but I'm not getting a scholarship. We have no money. At that point I thought I wanted to being a band. I was a drummer. I thought I wanted to major in music. So I tried out for the army band I had this epiphany on the plane that I was good because I worked hard.

I wasn't good because I had talent. And I realized, there's people that work as hard as me and really have talent and I'm going to be competing my whole life with them. And I said, nope, So I get off the plane and I tell the recruiter I'm not doing it and he's all disappointed because he has a quota and I said, but I really like flying on that airplane.

It was my first flight and I think I'd like to, be a medic and jump out of planes, whatever the top medic is. And he said, special forces. I told him I didn't want to be a military policeman. He said, no Special Forces is the Green Berets. He hands me a brochure with these big strapping guys, with biceps like this

I'm like, can't do that. , on that day, I weighed 101 pounds. Oh, wow. . Yeah. And he said you could do it. And I said I can't. And he looked me in the eyes and he said, yes you can. And I believed him. I said, okay, I'll do it. And he goes, alright, first thing's first, you gotta gain three pounds.

You have to weigh 104 to get a waiver to jump out of planes. He put me on this program, and I had to gain weight before I could join. About two months later, I was up to 109 pounds, and they let me join the Army in January of my senior year. And then, two weeks after I graduated high school, I went in.

And, I was so ignorant. , there's one movie out there about Green Berets. There was hardly any books about basic training. There wasn't brochures, no internet. I didn't have family, and so I was so ignorant about what I was getting involved in. I just knew that there was a few people that said I could do it, and there was a lot of people that said I would fail.

And both those drivers contributed to me not wanting to quit. And again, as an older man now, I look back and it's did I really achieve the Green Beret? Did I really earn it? Or did I just survive the training and not quit? And I really think I survived the training and I didn't quit, more than like I achieved something.

I just didn't quit. I remember thinking again, as a 17 year old kid who thought he never wanted to get married, but there was this one thought in my head, do you really want to tell your grandkids? That you quit. And so all those days that I wanted to quit and I was suffering I didn't quit and I just kept picturing putting on that beret and being proud of myself.

[00:05:07] Mahan Tavakoli: That's part of what success is all about. Sometimes the willingness to stick in and not quit when the world is telling you otherwise. I wonder what did you learn about leadership through your Green Beret experience? 

[00:05:24] Jan Rutherford: Oh, that's a great question. And I think about this a lot, a lot of the people that were in the army in the late seventies, early eighties, were left over from the Vietnam War. And so a lot of them were people that maybe they wouldn't make it out in the business world, civilian life, and they stayed in.

And so some of them were, crazy. And there were some that were really extraordinary. And I had, a few bosses that I worked with , actually two were Medal of Honor recipients, one from the Korean War, one from the Vietnam War, and one was a POW for five years who survived and escaped and created a well known school in the Army.

And they were really interesting people. Two of them were majors, so they weren't the highest ranking people where I was at. Colonels and generals outranked them, but these two majors had more power and influence. than people that outranked him. And I just remember as just a teenager, Green Beret, 18, 19 years old going, how is that?

He has an Oakley cluster and this guy has an Eagle, the Eagle outranks the Oakley cluster, but this guy has more say so what is it about him? How he communicates, how he carries himself. His confidence and I was just fascinated, and even in the class I was in, we had leaders and we had followers.

We had clicks and groups and I was the youngest, the littlest, the least mature, the least world experienced. A lot of times I felt like an outsider, from everybody else. And so I think part of it is I became an observer, about all that. And I was just fascinated.

And as I took on leadership, I was always trying to figure out, , the question I'll never answer fully is what makes a leader.

[00:07:20] Mahan Tavakoli: Now you've spent quite a bit of time on leadership development and you do these things called crucible expeditions. You're a founder of that. Can you help explain what that is and how it contributes to leadership understanding and development? 

[00:07:37] Jan Rutherford: Yeah it's interesting. I go back to when I was in green beret training , We would be on a patrol and you'd be a follower and then all of a sudden at two in the morning they'd say you're the leader and you're trying to lead.

People are cold, wet, tired and hungry that have been at it for days on end. And I always thought, gosh, this is interesting. They teach us leadership in the classroom, but this is where we're really learning. And I thought, gosh, one day, I would love to take people on the woods and talk about leadership.

And that one day came, and after the book, the first book, we went out in , 2014. So just about 10 years ago. And we said, we're going to take executives out and oh, by the way, I'm working with a lot of veterans that are transitioning out of the military.

Hey let's pair the executives up with veterans. The executives will get a digital detox and learn that they have to slow down to speed up. And the veterans will learn the language of business and the executives will learn what leadership looks like in a life and death situation, not just time and money.

And the first crucible kind of was a disaster, not from a physical perspective, just, we didn't have the right recipe with everything. And I had a partner with me and he said I'm out. Like if you want to keep doing these, do them. And I'm like, okay. And I did the next one and it went great.

And I figured it out we still try to improve them every year. We've run 24 so far. We're going to have our 25th one next month. And we probably had 250 people go through and I would love to tell you that it's helped the veterans the most, but I have to tell you, I think the people that have been helped the most are the people that are the least experienced in the wilderness.

Because it's such a profound experience for them, to do things they never have done and to open up and, again, it's not the things we do and the places we go. It's really the conversations that we have that are really powerful out there where I always say that the conversations are real because people have nothing to prove, protect or promote, unlike if you're on a team in a business, in a company, You do have things to prove, protect, and promote, but out there, you can risk saying what you think, and you can be curious, and you can be authentic and vulnerable in ways that you can't. 

[00:10:05] Mahan Tavakoli: That's both the right environment for it, and I know you do a magnificent job in the facilitation of it, Jan, which is also important, the questions that are asked. 

[00:10:14] Jan Rutherford: Thanks. 

[00:10:15] Mahan Tavakoli: Part contribute to the kind of conversations insights. Now you mentioned one of the benefits for the executives, and it's something you also go into in your book, becoming a self reliant leader is an element of slow down to speed up.

 We're all living in a world that is speeding up where most of the CEOs and executives I deal with, Jan  they're barely keeping up with the pace of change, but you emphasize slow down to speed up. How can they actually do that? 

[00:10:48] Jan Rutherford: It's a great question. I've said to more than a few leaders lately, who wants to follow you? Who wants to follow somebody that's running around like a crazy person? Nobody. Nobody wants to follow that person. We also interviewed a really interesting fellow named Joel Peterson, chairman of JetBlue, and he said something really profound.

He said, 24 hours is more than enough time in a day to work out, to be with your family, to do a hobby. To sleep to eat to work. It's more than enough time. And everybody looks at me like I'm crazy when I quote him and it's because he said, if it's important. If you know what your values are, the priorities, then there's plenty of time

here's the thing. I think where we're failing. Throughout the chain of leadership we're failing to negotiate, especially at the top. Leaders are saying, yep, I can deliver that 20%. Okay. 20 percent growth this quarter? I can do it. And so it gets passed down and then you have these crazy unrealistic goals and nobody hits them and then they're demoralized.

 The whole idea of slowing down to speed up is also people support what they help create we've got to move from leading people and just telling people what to do. Of course, we've got to be clear with expectations, but we have to realize if we're going to work through other people.

We have to negotiate. It's not a democracy per se, where everybody gets, a vote and complete say so, but they have to have some say so in what they're agreeing to, because ultimately the leader needs commitment and loyalty, not just mere compliance. And , by negotiating, you're basically giving up control.

You're giving up power. You're being vulnerable. And again, you can only do that if you've successfully negotiated with your boss that, I can't deliver 15 percent this quarter. I can do 12 or I can do 10. Again, this whole balance of, which everybody wants to do, they want to stretch their teams, but not break them.

And we know from the Gallup survey that just came out, we're lucky if one out of three people are engaged and motivated at work. We're lucky if we've got one out of three. So as a leader, that's on you right now. You can't just say, Hey, these are lazy people. They're your people. Figure out how to motivate them, how to get them to buy in. That's your job. 

[00:13:16] Mahan Tavakoli: It is a tough challenge. Now. I want to get your thoughts on one element before going more into a Jan. I was just hearing a conversation, an interview with Elon Musk, and he was talking about his hundred plus hour work weeks, oftentimes, and the fact that he demands that of.

The people around him, many of the executives around him. And I don't know if you read Walter Isaacson's biography on Musk or not. There is that level of intensity that Musk has, which enables him to do so well in much of what he has done, whether with Tesla or SpaceX. So there are those examples out there.

Of people who are competing nonstop hundred hour work weeks with their teams. And part of what I get asked by executives is wait a minute. We live in a world where it might not all be Elon Musk's of the world with their genius and their crazy hundred hour work weeks, competitors are willing to do whatever it takes.

So we need to be willing to do whatever it takes. 

[00:14:33] Jan Rutherford: It's really interesting. I look at my own success. I said it at the very beginning. I've worked hard. I've sacrificed. What I say to people when they have big goals is I remind them, okay, you want to be the CEO.

Are you willing to pay what it will cost? The more that you want career wise, the more sacrifices you are going to have to make. Every time you raise your hand, say, I want to lead, There are sacrifices required. You are gonna have to put in more time. And with a lot of the people I coach, I always start out with a values exercise.

I ask them, what do they want? What do they value? What's important? What do they hold dear? Oftentimes this whole thing comes down to time and money. And it's I need money to take care of my family and I want to spend time with them. A conversation that we have to reconcile in our own heads is literally what do you want? 

 That's why what you mentioned slow down to speed up both relates well to our teams and organizations and us as individuals in that there isn't a set answer , but we do need to slow down in order to determine what our values, what our priorities, what our choices are, and the choices that make for,, great memes on social media aren't the right choices for us.

[00:15:54] Mahan Tavakoli: So it might be the right choice for Gary Vee or Elon Musk or whoever else, but it is not the right choice for Jan or Mahan. So that's why that slow down to speed up is important for us as individuals as well. 

[00:16:09] Jan Rutherford: I always talk about, sometimes you got to be in the trenches and sometimes you got to go sit up on the hill.

And for a lot of us sitting up on the hill and not doing anything is really difficult. But we've got to do that to get the perspective. With life and career, you've got to make sure you're on the right track, that your, the trajectory is where you want it to be.

And again, it's really hard. We all want to retire with a lot of money and, we want to have wonderful relationships with our family and time and like everything in life there's a balance but I do think this.

We as leaders have to help younger people move away from viewing work as a transaction of trading time for money and that whatever work you do is helping other people. I don't care what you do. If you're getting paid money, there's an element of your work where you're improving someone else's life or helping them in some way, shape or form.

And if you can't view it that way, And only view it as trading time for money. I put it 50 percent on you as the individual, and I put it 50 percent on the leader for creating an environment where people don't see it that way. 

[00:17:19] Mahan Tavakoli: That sense of purpose is really important. And as I mentioned to you beforehand, Jan, I'm deep into AI and some of its impact.

And over the past few years, some out of Silicon Valley have been big advocates for universal basic income. Whether that goes anywhere or not is not the point of this conversation, but even if it does, we still do need a sense of purpose from what we do and what we contribute, which is really important.

And you go into that sense of purpose in your book. Now, one other thing I want to get your thoughts on, I love the emphasis you place on selecting the right people over the best people. 

[00:18:05] Jan Rutherford: Real quick, on AI.

Bill Gates in a discussion with Sam Altman said, he worries about, if AI does too much, he's like, where am I going to find my purpose? But going back to your question about selecting the right people versus the best people, it really goes back to the values of the organization. I've yet to see an organization whose values can't be put into three buckets.

Thank you very much. Do your best, do what's right, treat others as you'd like to be treated. There's a gazillion variations, but I think most of them are about work ethic,, about ethics, do your best, do what's right. And then treating others with dignity and respect,

and whatever your values are, it's about finding people that really align with your values. I'll give you an example. I was talking to someone that was looking at help working with me. And, I, we had this discussion, what do I really value? And I'm like, I value responsiveness.

And this was somebody that was a young parent and said Hey, I've got really hard boundaries with work there, some things I won't get to for hours and okay, great. That's awesome. And we both agreed this was not a good fit. My life isn't have boundaries. My life is blended all together.

, my clients are my friends. My friends are clients. I take vacation. I work, I don't have boundaries. I'm really lucky cause I don't have a job or a career. I have a calling and I know some people don't have that, but I value responsiveness. And the best people might be somebody who went to Georgetown and got straight A's and went to McKinsey and Bain and, has all these experiences. But if they're not responsive, they're not the right people for me, I think Netflix years ago with Their famous deck of values showed us that values by themselves don't mean anything.

[00:19:57] Jan Rutherford: What an organization must do is define observable behaviors for the values. So if you say, Hey, we work smart, then you've got to present the yin and the yang of working smart. Working smart might mean, Hey, we take shortcuts. Yet. We don't scrimp on quality or we take shortcuts.

Sometimes we make mistakes. Mistakes are tolerable. If you don't really look at those values, the pros and the cons of them and what they mean from human behaviors then there's ambiguity and there's no standard by which the leader can uphold, those behaviors. Again, I don't think you have to micromanage it, but.

If you say, hey, we value innovation, but then you don't tolerate mistakes, that's crazy. What's innovation really look like? It might mean, hey, I'm allowed to negotiate my priorities. I want to have a pet project over here. So I think that's a big miss with a lot of companies. I see very few companies that can define observable behaviors for their core values.

And so how do people manage and performance manage and even assess people and even develop succession plans. 

[00:21:13] Mahan Tavakoli:  I love the way you put it. It's observable behaviors.

It's not values in abstract because everyone has integrity, care for the customer, all those things up on the wall. And those are meaningless. It's behaviors. But at what level are those behaviors determined and then prioritize? 

[00:21:32] Jan Rutherford:  It really has to be at the organizational level. When somebody comes to me and says, Hey, I have a difficult employee, somebody's not performing.

I always ask three things. Does that person understand the expectations with regard to behaviors and results? Two, do they know where they stand? And three, do they understand the consequences to themselves, the team and the organization if they don't perform in their role? Along with that conversation and those three questions, , you have a series of documents by which guide that conversation.

The first is the job description, and every job description are the responsibilities. They should align with the core values. Then you have the business plan, the results that they're supposed to do, and then you might have a professional development plan, and then the foundation of all this are the values.

If you're as a leader really going to these documents, you can't go wrong, because you're not making stuff up and you keep pointing to the core values I've yet to see somebody described behavior that's not acceptable where I couldn't point to the values and say here's the behavior you need based on a value you've articulated.

You just haven't articulated this as an expectation to this person. In unambiguous terms. Most of the time it's the leader's fault first, if somebody is not performing, very few people I , talk to you, say they know the expectations. They know where they stand.

They know the consequences. Because again, people aren't having candid, compassionate conversations with people and, figuratively they have their arm around them trying to help them succeed.

[00:23:13] Mahan Tavakoli: Having those ongoing conversations, caring conversations can help people align with the values, can help them develop.

And it is incredible how few organizations systemically make sure that happens. Now, if you were speaking to people. Who are in leadership roles, but not at the most senior levels of the organization, what can they do to both align with the right values and have the right people for their teams? 

[00:23:41] Jan Rutherford: Let's go right back to AI. This is a wonderful thing about chat GPT.

Here's what you do. You say Hey, based on these six values boom. What are three observable behaviors or blah, this role For those values and let chat GPT spit it out and then take that and edit it and use that with your people and then use your power and influence to manage up to help, communicate to your boss.

Hey, here's what I'm doing. Is this something that my peers would benefit from if that gets adopted, then ask your boss Hey, is this something I could present to your leadership team? And we could share the success we're having and try to Spread it from the bottom up, but you can't go wrong if, the basis of what you're coming up with is the core values.

You're not going to go wrong and , I've had a lot of senior leaders that have gone to really prestigious business schools say, Hey, Jan , when they say scale, , how do we scale?

And I always go back and I'm like, if you want more capacity, you have to have more individual capability. You want more capacity? You want to grow? You want to scale? Grow your people. That's it. And that's what it takes to grow your people. It's hey, if you do these behaviors, these skills, the results will come.

 Jen you also talk about the importance of relationships. and accelerating relationships. How can leaders and organizations accelerate relationships in order to be able to take advantage of the trust that you talk about? 

[00:25:18] Jan Rutherford: That's a great question and we tackled it today in another call. Accelerating relationships. We've also talked about it like they can only go so fast. I think here's my bottom line, Mahan. I think, again with AI and everything else and we're trying to be productive and efficient.

And as Margaret Heffernan said, since the pandemic, we've realized what works against us with efficiency is adaptability. We need to be efficient and adaptable in business. But I think the other leg of that stool is the humanity that we are getting work done through other people, even if we've got AI and other things, it's still people.

And people have fears they have hopes they have goals and they have drivers. If we don't understand that, we're not going to get the best performance out of people. And we cannot believe like an industrial mentality that. We can get 100 percent productivity and performance out of people 8 to 5, 40 hours a week.

It's never going to work did 30 or 40 years ago, if it ever worked then. My thinking is the challenge of today's leader is we have to personalize our approach to leadership with individuals. Yet, the entire team and organization feels we are fair. And that's a tall order. A very tall order.

[00:26:48] Mahan Tavakoli: It is. And to personalize that approach, your book shares great examples and stories as well, becoming a self reliant leader. Jan, how can the audience find out more about your book and follow your work? 

 Thanks Mahan. Of course on LinkedIn, Jan Rutherford and my website is self reliant leadership.

[00:27:12] Jan Rutherford: And I appreciate you mentioning the book and, we worked hard on it. I hope it does well. I really do. There's lots of resources for people out there and I hope this one resonates. It's funny, you think about what goes into a book., it's not three years, it really is, , more like three decades.

And, it's more about what I learned by failing than what I learned by succeeding. And when I look at the business today and the work we do, there's a certain amount of success, but the pile of failures would outweigh the successes by a mile. All the fits and starts and even, relationships that went south and things that you wish, you could have done differently.

And. Those way outnumber it. I was just at a baseball game and I know people are tired of sports analogies, but, I found it really interesting, as each player came to bat, what the stats were and how many failures that swings and misses you gotta have before you hit stuff.

 I'll just say you gotta have a lot of reps in your work, lots of reps. And they never end. 

[00:28:18] Mahan Tavakoli: And to have those reps, it's best to learn from the best. There is a leader who says success leaves clues and speaking with today's most successful leaders reveals a lot. Thank you for sharing some of those clues with the partnering leadership community. Thank you so much for the conversation, Jan Rutherford. 

[00:28:41] Jan Rutherford: Thank you, Mahan. It was a pleasure. Real pleasure. You're a great interviewer.