389 Small Shifts, Big Impact: Leadership Lessons from Mike Mears, Former CIA HR Chief and Founder of the CIA Leadership Academy

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Mahan Tavakoli: Mike Mears, welcome to partnering leadership. I am thrilled to have you in this conversation with me. 

Mike Mears: Mahan, I'm delighted to get the chance to talk to you today. 

Mahan Tavakoli: Mike can't wait to talk about certainty, how great bosses can change minds and drive innovation. And I love the fact that you're right here in DMV, District, Maryland, Virginia.

Our beautiful region, nation's capital. I tell people it is the most magnificent place in the world, but we won't spend too much time talking about that. I want to first get to know you a little bit better. Whereabouts did you grow up, Mike, and how has your upbringing contributed? To who you've become.

Mike Mears: I was guess you've heard the expression blessings in disguise. , I grew up in Newport news, Virginia, and I had three blessings. I suppose one of them was, I grew up lower middle class and probably on the lower end of [00:01:00] that. Now, why is that a blessing? It of course it depends on the person's basic personality, but what it really.

Gave me a sense of of a drive to do good in the world or to attain something and to help other people and so forth. And, my the beauty of my upbringing, my parents never restricted that it was, you may be whatever you resolve to be basically upbringing. And that's great.

What a gift that was. Then a second one was the fact that was an only child and I can hear some listeners right now saying, Oh, I married a woman who was the oldest of 12. Now you got to try to hold that marriage together. Only child with the oldest 12 What that gave me was an ability to deal with solitude and ability to reflect.

And years later I found out that was a gift. And then the third thing was this will horrify parents today, but, back then this was 1950s my exist, my upbringing [00:02:00] was completely free range where Saturday mornings I'd hop on a bike. I'd ride 10 years old. I'd ride three miles, through busy streets to get to the James River play all day.

And the only rule was I had to be back by dark. My, my neuroscience friends tell me That helps me today in my decision making and in creativity having that kind of a free range type play. So there you have it. Three blessings in disguise. 

Mahan Tavakoli: Those are three blessings 

I'm a big fan of Jonathan Haidt's work, including The Cuddling of American Mind. And Jonathan Haidt talks about some of the challenges we are having, specifically because, as parents, we have controlled the movement and every aspect of the lives of our young people. . Now, I wonder what brought you to the CIA for [00:03:00] a big portion of your career, Mike, and then end up in human resources, which might sound odd to people on the outside who are not familiar with the agency. 

Mike Mears: So what I can say is I was in the directorate of operations and that is the spy side of the house.

And I operated. In that directorate for many years with and someday you and I'll have a beer together and I can tell you more stories when it's not taped. But some hair raising stories there and then, I came I worked for Jack Welch for a number of years during the nineties when GE was in its heyday, and we can talk about that, that his style doesn't work today, but there's some really brilliant things he did to manage that organization.

And then I joined up , at the CIA in an overt. position, not covert, but overt. So that's why I can tell you that yes, I worked at CIA. I don't have to say I work somewhere [00:04:00] else or whatever. And , it was a fascinating time to have the experience from, I'd been in small business doing startups.

I'd worked for a big business with GE and I had had worked in at government organizations. And you really get a good feel for. Culture and all that good stuff. So what really knocked me or what got me started into the leadership thing was the director of operations, deputy director of operations.

I got a call one day and he, I went rushing up to his office. But first trying to find out from the caller what role. The old, could you tell me what this is about? 

Mahan Tavakoli: Because 

Mike Mears: you get that little spike of fear, what have I done now? Why am I getting called up there? We've all had that.

So I went running up there and he asked me a question which I have thought about, this was more than 20 years ago, and I thought about this question And it was simply looked up at me and said, Mike why is it when I pull the levers, nothing happens? [00:05:00] And the interesting, and I knew what he meant because we'd had many discussions.

The levers are the old line metric system to guide people and the reward system to pay him bonuses to do such and such training system, all that good stuff. Communications. And here's a guy in one of the most powerful positions in the world and he feels stymied. And what was, why the question burned into my head is my title at the time, it doesn't exist anymore, was the Senior Counselor for Leadership and Management.

So I was the guru. Everybody would come to me and I could give them answers. And I couldn't answer the basic question of why aren't things working around here? And I've. I've gotten that question from high level executives ever since when they let their hair down a little bit. And just last week I had a an executive at a very large, a senior executive at the large financial firm asked me the question why can't I get my organization [00:06:00] to adopt AI?

It's the same question as the levers don't work, right? It's all part and parcel. So anyway, that's what drives me. And when you start thinking that way, every time you see a psychological study or you hear somebody overhear a conversation, you're plugging it back into that question. And it's absolutely fascinating how , the brain will expand and pick up all these little pieces.

Come up with solutions. 

Mahan Tavakoli: I absolutely love that question for so many reasons. Mike, , I don't think there is a week that goes by when I don't hear a version of that question, whether it is with return to office, all kinds of companies, 

Mike Mears: all 

Mahan Tavakoli: kinds of CEOs doing fits, why they can't get their people to come back to the office five days a week when they tell them to.

So those levers that a lot of leaders in organizations have been used to pulling and getting things done [00:07:00] don't work. So now the question is, how come , when did these levers stop working? 

Mike Mears: It's interesting , let's take uh, performance management.

Um, GE. Actually was a performance management.

Actually was a foundational company in the early 1900s starting that whole concept, right? And it does make sense very logical, right? And so They carried that through until the time when I was working for Welch. I remember you recall this They would chop off the bottom 10 percent every year which is only why I only worked there eight and three quarters years.

I figured my time is probably come now, right? But what they had was that was a type a personality executive and management cadre. It was a lot of pressure and stress and and the use of the old performance management system, which if you think about it [00:08:00] was pretty heartless in that you had no idea where you stood for a year and then you get your annual review.

When we talk about this concept of certainty and uncertainty, that's probably the cruelest thing you could do to people is to hold them in uncertainty if you don't need to. And so he it's good for him realized that and actually change the system and kill that annual review off.

And he didn't, he what he did was he set in a system where managers and employees would talk along the way. It's not Adobe's check ins, but that's the seed of that really great idea. And I'm telling you just personally in my life, oh my God, I was, it was so much better to know where you stand with the boss than St being uncertain of how am I doing, boss?

Am I fitting in, fitting into the big picture and so forth. It, it was it's, that system has still stuck. We, we still are industrial age and I the [00:09:00] back, one of my favorite. Guys was a fellow named Douglas McGregor wrote a book back in 1959 and 60. He was an MIT prof and he wrote a book called The Human Side of Enterprise.

And he came up with this Theory X, Theory Y. And Theory X is you need a lot of accountability and punitive measures because you can't trust people. And Theory Y is, boy, what would happen if we pulled out the best of human nature? We're still somewhat stuck. On that theory X theory Y question.

Mahan Tavakoli: , we are, Mike. I want to highlight a couple of points that you made. First of all, with All his flaws and we can spend the rest of the conversation focused on Jack Welch, what he did right and what he did wrong. He did adjust that approach at GE. A lot of people still think about that, but he changed it while he was CEO.

Now, fast forward though. A few months back, Mark Zuckerberg did exactly the [00:10:00] same thing, and he announced it, which by itself can sound cruel for anyone who had been laid off from Facebook at that time. So that struggle still continues. It's not as if we've moved beyond it. 

Mike Mears: I think you had Anders , Inset?

Yes. You had a chat with him and it was really interesting because he was talking around an issue that I see out there and it is I believe that there is a massive executive cognitive bias what we call it, the executive extrinsic bias, which is sometimes people have called The tangibility bias, but it's not backed by psychology, but what did it the idea is that your mind will go to the tangible versus the intangible.

And the way I would express it, I see this every day is our minds. We will, we'll give lip service to we got to, we'll say that we got to get the mission done, but we got to take care of our people. The trouble [00:11:00] is we're giving lip service to the people side, the soft side. And then what do we do? We gravitate to the hard side.

So for example we conduct our budget reviews quarterly, if not monthly, how many people have leadership reviews? None. And there, I really believe that there is an innate bias that we, that all of us carry around. And we do know, by the way, you, there's a, that one called the extrinsic incentives bias, which if you ask a group of frontline managers what motivates your employees, they'll say money.

And then you ask the employees what motivates you and they say recognition. Now it doesn't mean that we don't all want money. They rank money as number six, but I did that experiment three times in CIA and I got the same, those same results. So isn't it interesting how. We know culture is important.

We know people are important, but we keep flopping back over to [00:12:00] process and procedures and structure. 

Mahan Tavakoli: We do. So why is that? I know you've studied the brain, human thinking. Why is it? That when you talk to me, Mike, it all makes perfect sense. And for the audience, they're listening. They've heard it before.

It makes perfect sense. But when it comes to actually behaving differently, that leadership behavior and those actions haven't shifted. 

Mike Mears: The answer to the spy masters questions, not just unsatisfactory, but the answer is why don't the levers work?

Boss, it's a human nature. The levers work against human nature or only partially with human nature. , you've got to reverse engineer human nature. That's what we spies do. By the way, , we have to know what makes people tick and it can be, Life threatening situations  if you don't play your cards, 

Mahan Tavakoli: let me clarify something here. Might [00:13:00] it's not that the levers worked before and something has changed. And therefore the levers don't work. You were saying that the levers never really worked because they were set. Against basic rules of human nature and human thinking and the way our brains operate.

Mike Mears: Absolutely. I, that go back even farther. You think about I always I want to read a book with the title of hierarchy, history of hierarchy, nobody's written this book, but anyway, if you go back and back in time, who invented hierarchy and pre Egyptian and what a brilliant idea of you had basically, Anarchy or gangs, basically.

And then somebody said, Hey, Azibo, you go over there and cut those blocks. And Meriku you tie those horses and put rollers under and get them. And they formed, actually formed hierarchy. And that was a huge leap forward. To what was before. By the time we got, I think we [00:14:00] By the time we got to the industrial age, I think those levers were a giant leap forward.

And there's a fun website. If you go to the Smithsonian website, they have a whole bunch of historic videos. The first video ever taken of a workplace was 1904, and it was a company called Westinghouse Airbrake. Now Westinghouse Airbrake was the company. Of that era. They, you won't believe this. They gave workers half a day Saturday off.

Can you imagine that? And they they installed showers. There were postcards of that, that people would that company that people would pass around. And anyway, Edison and Westinghouse hated each other, but there was a truce and to get the. High intensity bulb from Westinghouse.

So Edison had movies. He came in and filmed the workplace But you look there's 30 some films and it really goes back to show you What we think [00:15:00] today was a pretty hideous existence But back then that was a giant leap forward from what they'd had before and I think that What Welch did is he did take an old industrial age?

company like that. And after 20 some years of grinding he was able to change the culture. And it really was with his workout, which is I call quick wins. And with Six Sigma, he the brains of his employees. And I think that was unprecedented. And I got a quick, so you've got a quick story for you. Welch story.

Okay. This was going around when I was at GE, that there had been a a dinner for the union chief. Okay. So the union chief and Welch, for obviously years had been colliding and butting heads. And but The retirement dinner for the union chief went very well and he did get his gold watch, just like the the old stereotype.

But at the end he stood up and he just was talking off the cuff and he was saying what a [00:16:00] great company GE was and how thankful he was to have worked there, that the employees were the best in the world. And right at the end, he slows up and he said and Mr. Welch you had my hands.

For 34 years, if only it asked, you could have had my brain and I think that, Welch had that very abrupt direct style, but I think that must have really hit him in thinking that, my God, am I the only brain running this massive organization? What would happen if we harnessed employee brains? in a controllable way with our, with the workout and so forth.

And I think that's a major breakthrough when you start thinking, going back to the human nature we know people are locked into the status quo. That's part of human nature. You got to recognize that. And that's survival instinct. We'll accept the current, no matter how bad it is. And yet humans accomplish great [00:17:00] things.

And the middle part Is what do leaders do that cause that transformation? And if once you just take that little simple model, it's not a brand of leadership. It's just a model. Then you start thinking about all the things you can do unleash that human potential on the other end. And some, you come up with some really exciting and interesting stuff.

And a lot of it is, how new is some of this stuff? Some of it is we've done before. We just never stopped to think this is. Crucial, a crucial step to get to where we are taking people from the certainty of the status quo and making the future certain for them. So to get them over.

Mahan Tavakoli: I think what you're mentioning, Mike, becomes even more important as before. It was possible for a smart individual on top of the hierarchy to [00:18:00] have all of the information process that information. And therefore have the hands working for that brain and that brain would guide what the hands should do as we're going through this transformation, where knowledge is accessible to everyone in part because of AI, 

doing what you're talking about with leadership becomes even more important. It no longer is enough for one person to be able to do the thinking. 

Mike Mears: Absolutely. And it's interesting too. I think each wave of technology, I think back I was working before we had computers. Can you imagine that?

And so they bring in the computer and say, Oh boy, this is going to save you so much time. It, of course it didn't, it just sped up the gerbil wheel. They expect, and then the internet comes along, Oh, this is going to really save you if we can adopt the internet. And Gates is banging his people adopt the internet and it didn't, it [00:19:00] did.

And so I pull, I pulled a couple thousand people on this. How much time do you spend per day? On in meetings or doing emails and I won't ask you to guess but the average, and it doesn't matter whether they're German business people or American nonprofit, it comes out to 85 percent of their day is grinding away on and so that doesn't leave a lot of time for that doesn't leave a lot of time for introspection, reflection, it doesn't leave a lot of time for building relationships.

And you and I know that's the name of the game. That's the magic juice that's going to get you to. So I think that. And AI will bring its own stresses. And therefore I think what you just said is so spot on is that the magic ingredient to relieve some of that stress is going to be better, more humane leadership.

And I simplify it by saying great leaders [00:20:00] just get the uncertainty out of our heads and make us feel certain about the vision for the future or where we are today or what the expectations are for the boss. I'm certain of that. And that is going to be so badly needed going forward.

 That's where 

Mahan Tavakoli: I would love to get some of your thoughts on Mike in talking about certainty. I was thinking about it and smiling to myself that if anything in intelligence, uncertainty is a constant because as I mentioned to you before, I had done some work with NGIA and some of the other parts of the agency, if anything, they deal in probabilities, not certainty.

And one of the guests that I absolutely love his work, Bob Johanson, Institute for the Future, brilliant futurist, talks about how leaders should avoid certainty, [00:21:00] however, have clarity about the future. So we'd love to get your thoughts on when you're talking about certainty, how does it align with the way we typically define certainty?

Mike Mears: Gosh, there's so many ways to answer that one. It's for one thing I used to teach an executive leadership course at DOD, and that is VUCA world, right? Volatility and uncertainty and and they're spot on in that, they, the world is getting more that way every day. Technology's doing it to us is getting that way.

That is all external uncertainty. And what I'm talking about, Is deep, deep inside that employee mind. If we go in with a flashlight and look around what do we see? You've got Kahneman's thinking fast and slow. So you've got that logical part of the brain. And we tend to Assume because we can be logical everything is [00:22:00] logical and therefore if we tell people what to do, they'll do it it doesn't work that way the fast part of the brain.

It's the fascinating thing and that's full of Everything, you know the heart so you think the mind and heart there's that school of leadership It's also gut Or instinct is in there all those delicious cognitive biases that you can look up on Wikipedia are crammed in there, operating very quickly you've got every emotion and dreams and aspirations and you've got habitual behaviors, some I've seen studies.

They think it's 42 percent of our day. We're running on habitual behavior Don't know if it's that much but you put all that stuff together and we're operating in fast mode for a lot but because of that It's very responsive and very fast and you go negative very quickly so UCLA's done a lot of work on something they call social pain, which is Strong [00:23:00] negative emotions.

So I flew out there to see this myself. They would put somebody in a MRI scan and show him a little cartoon picture of three figures throwing a ball. And one, the subject pushes a lever to throw the ball to the other person. And part of the experiment is the subject. It's made to think that the other two stick figures are run by real people, that they, you have to make it and then Matthew Lieberman, the doctor, after a couple of minutes, flips a switch and it changes the cartoon till they just throw back and forth, and you ought to see what happens in the human mind the human brain, I should say, on the MRIs, and it just, everything is flaring up, and then the prefrontal cortex goes dark, and then they debrief people afterwards and find out What did you experience and different emotions, some it's extreme jealousy some it's anger for being cut out.

What is interesting is that whole series of looking at when does the brain go. [00:24:00] Slightly haywire is because of unfairness if you sense unfair or loss of control autonomy or any type of basically Uncertainty that's affecting your head. So long winded answer So what I'm looking at is the certainty in your head and the certainty of my employee Sitting there.

How can I inject some sense of certainty and we've already talked about one way is stop doing the annual review and do check ins on a weekly basis and make them friendly and informal and under five minutes and you have just wiped the slate clean of all these hidden social fears that that lie there.

You talked to David McCraney, right in 2022. Let me, and he did a beautiful job of explaining all these social pain, social tension. That we've got in our [00:25:00] head because it is a survival instinct. We need other people badly. He did just a fantastic job. So to build on that, you'd say, okay so how can we alleviate the negative parts of that?

And the way is doing check ins. Another way is if I had my career to do over, I would give. Eight times more positive feedback, Mahan, than I did. What was wrong with me? I thought my A players and my B players knew they were A players. They don't. They don't. How much would it cost me? What?

Two minutes to give one bit of positive feedback each week to each employee. Now this is what happens when you do that. And Gallup's looking at this. I, my theory is there's about a week decay. From you getting a compliment about your work. The, when I give you the positive feedback you go home and you tell your spouse guess what the boss said today?

I just rung your bell. That's a definition of ringing somebody's bell and they feel pretty good. So what [00:26:00] happened is I answered all these. Questions that I found in a study. I looked at what do employees really want to know? And it's not how we're doing on revenues this month or who's visiting the plant.

It's, is the boss happy with me? Is how well do I fit in around here? Do my colleagues respect me? It's a lot of those Q12 questions that Gallup asks. So there, that's what you've got. And by giving that little positive feedback or doing a check in or asking asking questions that are basically show concern, like how are you feeling today or doing any of that injects a sense of certainty in that employee's mind.

And you probably got them for about a week and then we started drifting back. So , the model is just, how do you reverse engineer human nature and look at what we think is good and maybe a little negative and then adjust the levers to fit human nature as opposed to trying to go [00:27:00] the other way and lever against it and use accountability systems that are too negative and actually give you counterproductive results.

Mahan Tavakoli: I love the way you described that, Mike, in that the certainty you're talking about is not. The certainty about the external world and projecting into that, which we can't do in a more uncertain VUCA world. However, because of our human emotions. There is a level of certainty we are looking for in that individual relationship, that feedback that you're talking about, including the positive feedback that Gottman's, I'm sure you're familiar had done a lot of research, but marriages and the positive interactions were five to one, the marriages that ended up lasting.

Over the years, Harvard Business Review did something similar with managers seeing [00:28:00] that it's almost the same ratio, five to one positive feedback to correct the feedback by the best managers that keeps people engaged. So what you're talking about, certainty is not. I'm certain this is , what's going to be happening in our company three years from now.

Certainty, how am I doing? What do you think about me? And unfortunately, because of the 85 percent of the time that you said we're spending on email and meetings and everything else, the last thing we get around to is those emotional certainties we need to convey in our organizations, in leading other people.

Mike Mears: Let me talk about Gottman for just a second. This was fascinating to me. I hadn't put these two together till you said that what he did one of his studies was he formed a lab, of course, in films, couples all day long, the interactions and he calls it bids where, I would say I'm working on my computer and my [00:29:00] wife is reading the newspaper and she says, Oh, there's a new Thai restaurant in town.

That's a bid. She gave me a bid. And then I can reject the bid by ignoring her or say I'm working. That would be a rejection where I could just say that gee, we ought to give it a try sometime. And I go back to my computer. And by the way, women offer more bids than men. It's interesting, but isn't that interesting?

It's it's a sonar for us to ping. Even I've been married for more than five decades. And so we ping each other throughout the day and it's how are you? Is everything okay? And I hadn't thought of it. I'm embarrassed to say in terms of a certainty that we're looking for, are you still there and still with me and how are things going?

Mahan Tavakoli: Beautiful. 

 I love the pinging each other. That is such an outstanding way of putting it because that's what we are doing with our world and the people around us, most especially people we care about. We even ping people at Starbucks with a quick glance or a quick [00:30:00] smile. Let alone people whose opinions we value, including our coworkers, our bosses.

So there is that constant pinging going on. Now, sometimes we're focused on our newspaper or our cell phone or the next project, and we aren't receptive to that ping. We need to be more receptive. And that's , the kind of certainty you're talking about. So I appreciate your. Clarification on that, because there are these human emotions that really play a huge role.

You also talk about the fight, flight and freeze responses that we have in workplaces. And I think Mike, for a whole host of reasons, people are experiencing a lot more of that. . So how can leaders reduce these fear based reactions in their teams? 

Mike Mears: It's interesting.

 I can't believe you brought that one up because I just heard another F word last week [00:31:00] from a CIA psychologist. Are you ready for this? You got fight, flight and freeze. And another word is flock like zebras the lion is coming. What do they do? They compress and they basically flock together.

And so I started thinking about that. Isn't that interesting? There's another stress or fear response. And so as people are being recalled to come back to the workplace, that's a huge amount of stress because there's change. But at least the downside is maybe there could we harness that with flocking and at least find ways to pull people.

back together again and trigger some of the Some communications or some fun, and so forth in the office to offset that Isn't that interesting? So I did an to answer your question though about What can the boss do? We did. I did a study back in, started in 99 through early two thousands of CIA.

And what I did very simple. I [00:32:00] asked, I got groups of random groups of people 20 and I would have them list every boss you've ever had at CIA. And then you rate them great good. Neutral, poor, awful. And so what I collected was not the names of the bosses, but just simply the ratings.

So I had 8, 000 ratings. And what's beautiful about that is first off, you can get a quick cut of what's your leadership acumen in the organization. Have you got 17 percent great and and and the rest good up to 50 percent and then you got 25 percent poor and awful. Let's just, this is a good number to know.

And next step, I want to know what were the bad ones like, and that was fascinating because you get I've got a list of 70 descriptors of bad bosses is amazing how many permutations and combinations, you can come up with but then I decided, okay what about the good bosses? Cause George Tenet asked me to start up a leadership academy there.

And what do we teach? What do we show them? What are the proper role models? [00:33:00] And so we got down to 200 best bosses, and it was still hard to get people to tell me their, the behaviors of their best boss. But when you ask the question tell me a story about Your best boss.

Why was he your best boss? Lo and behold, they will tell a story, and the behaviors are in there. And so we extracted all these behaviors, and then started grouping them. How do they fit together? And we got about six clumps of behaviors, but the first one, are you ready for this? Now again, this was before Amy Edmondson done her first study on psychological safety.

First thing we found was They give you a sense of safety and I. I confuse people always with that because they thought safety was physical safety. Why didn't I say psychological safety like she did, but this was really important. And so what were those behaviors? How hard is this [00:34:00] smiling at people in the morning saying hello asking them how their weekend was in certain instances showing you value them if a little bit of empathy is appropriate, like how's Bobby's ankle after the soccer game?

So that was you know what we clustered under safety And then what we found is okay. After safety you have to feel safe with somebody before you can trust them. So the next step was trust So what are those trust building behaviors? They you know, the there was an anthropologist that At CIA and we were out at the Vienna Inn.

I don't think you know this place. It's a dive bar in Vienna. Sounds like a white tablecloth restaurant, Vienna Inn. And we were having beers and I'm waxing eloquently about the foundation of leadership is trust and just spouting off left and right. And he looked at me and said, no, Mike, you're wrong.

And that's unlike him. He's a great guy. And I said, why? And he said in psychology and sociology, or [00:35:00] anthropology, it is the law of reciprocity, and what it is, it's the consistent behavior with another person, and you're giving gifts and exchanging gifts back. It's not the gifts, it's the reciprocity.

Consistency of that behavior. And so that set us on a new area. So we looked at all those behaviors. Some bosses give gifts of data and information to people who value those gifts. Some give gifts of praise, which is a gorgeous gift to continue to give and some would give gifts of delegating stretch jobs to people that respond to that.

You can there's probably 20 gifts that you can give. And there's an old book called influence without authority from 10, 15 years ago. It's like trust is just different direction. Influence is sideways influencing people and trust is up and down, but they both have currencies or gifts.

So that was the [00:36:00] second batch. So those are things that you can do to answer your question. You establish safety and you build trust. And once you've got the trusted safety, now you can go for clarity and that was the third and that was simple, very simple one on one conversations and they could be.

Total chitchat, it doesn't matter and that's something Cotter discovered in his first kind of experiment he ever did. The chitchat is really important. So it could be chitchat, it could be question asking, which is still the most underutilized arrow and a leader's quiver asking good questions and it could be something like again now that we have the check ins, I can't think, I can't speak highly enough for that process.

That's how you start getting the meeting of the minds and that employee now knows, oh, now I know what the boss's expectations are. It didn't have to be written down. And paste it on a board and didn't have to be job bullets or any of that [00:37:00] stuff. It can just be a meeting of the minds. And if I have a question, I feel safe enough.

And I trust the boss enough. I can ask because I'm no, I'm not going to be ridiculed to, to clarify something. So that was the stair step. And then once you get that clarity, now you can go to the fourth step is just challenge the devil out of them. You can put the pedal to the metal because they feel safe.

They trust you. There's clarity on where we're going and what we're doing. And by golly let's go for it. Give them a challenge. 

Mahan Tavakoli: . I really appreciate the clarity with which you describe these.

The question is why aren't these consistent part of our practices? So people not Mike makes perfect sense. Yes, exactly. But if you ask their teams, is this how your leader. Leading you or your manager managing you, the answer [00:38:00] in vast majority of cases is no. Where is the disconnect?

Mike Mears: Interesting because Oh gosh, we got so much to talk about on that one. For example, let's say we put people through leadership training and all this stuff is taught and the deep dark secret. And this has been decades and decades is people don't practice it when they get. back to the office.

So why is that? That's part of your question. And I think the answer, of course, could be some of that culture. But what's interesting about culture is we tend to talk about culture is this big thing. And it's not because again, back to the CIA stuff. I did studies down to what we call group level, and I found there were cultures inside CIA.

You had places where people would do their write in comments of thank you so much for letting me work here. I can't wait to drive to work every morning. I can't believe I get paid. And then another one [00:39:00] is saying I've never thought about resigning until now. I love this. I love the CIA, but I just can't stand my boss.

So what it is and you've covered this a lot, but it is. What is that boss like is driving more and I disagree with gallop They say it's a majority. I say it's far more than that because they say the boss drives, I don't know 65 70 percent and then 15 percent toxic environments. Yeah the boss creates the toxic.

Mahan Tavakoli: Yes, 

Mike Mears: so I say it is it's all about the boss. So if you really wanted to change an organization. You go back to that that little profile. I said off the cuff, I said 25 percent poor and awful bosses. Let's say that's your profile. That doesn't sound bad. Yeah, that's, we can live with that.

But now think about let's take up a hierarchy org chart. And what we're going to do is our managers will turn over every two years, Yeah. What does that do [00:40:00] internally with that 25%? Poor and awful managers. This is where it gets interesting because there was this was years ago a group downtown DC that Gardner bought out did a study and they found that if you've got a very toxic boss in an organization and you move That organization is disabled for up to five years after the boss leaves.

Now, why? He created a microculture of fear. And so think about that. That's, there's this residual. So I built this model. I just paid out of pocket myself and got with a statistician, built a model of CIA or any other organization, put in the number of levels. Good, bad bosses, turnover rate, the lag factor of what happens when that bad boss goes from this group to that group and in four years he goes to another, he's now polluted three of those [00:41:00] organizations.

And so they have a huge disproportionate amount of impact on the organization. Okay, so long winded answer. What should they do to have the most impact? I would say this. Stop saying my key job is developing future leaders. Stop it. Just stop saying it. Your key job choosing the future leaders in the first place and using scientific selection to choose those people.

Then your job is developing, but get that development Push it down to second place. And do you, oh, I got a good one for this. You can use this for cocktail chatter. Do you know who invented psychological assessments? 

Mahan Tavakoli: No. 

Mike Mears: Okay, you ready for this? The CIA, 1943, it was called the OSS and they were dropping people into France, teams, Jedburgh teams, and they were having a [00:42:00] lot of problem with everything from what they called nervous breakdowns to bad leadership and teams falling apart and people were getting killed by this.

The psychologist at OSS in August of 43, went to General Donovan and knocked on his door and said, Chief we think if we leave our Jungian and Freudian baggage at the door, that we could come up with a way to assess people. Scientifically and and predict their future behavior. And he said, it won't be perfect, but it's going to be so much better than what we're using now.

So he said, go for it. They went to the farm three weeks later, four days, they hammered all this out. Three weeks after that, they went to a place called Fairfax Circle down near here and rented an old estate and ran the first OSS class through. Now, top secret, same time the Brits were working on this.

Just imagine what a leg up you've got in warfare if you've got good [00:43:00] leaders. And you can inspire people to do superhuman things. And the Germans were working on it. And the Germans and Brits failed. And the Americans because I think we are more egalitarian so we could figure a poor person could have leadership skills and so in 1948 they published a book and I think it's one of the five biggest discoveries in psychology that century because and today you've got the Gallup Gallup does this, Talent Plus, you've got companies that do this, but too few companies like Ritz Carlton take advantage of this and discover What are leadership attributes and it's not to preclude people But for goodness sakes just filter out that bottom 25 percent get rid of the psychopaths the near psychopaths the autocrats the narcissist and My model shows, who knows, this is not a scientific study, my model shows if you can get down to 8 percent poor and awful bosses, your organization can fly.[00:44:00] 

And it's because of that pollution effect of having the bad ones, they affect culture and this, that, and the other. So imagine everybody having that boss where I said, I love driving to work in the morning because I can't wait to Get the, start the task at hand. And I love working here.

And it's back to the old engagement numbers from Gallup. It's just that suddenly you've done more to engage employees than all the training in the world is going to get you. 

Mahan Tavakoli: It makes a huge difference, Mike. And I couldn't agree with you more in all the years of my work with companies across the globe, whether when I was at Dale Carnegie or as I have been.

Doing consulting work people talk about organizational culture. To your point, there are very few organizations that have a culture. You might talk about a culture, even Amazon, which has its leadership principles and everyone knows those leadership principles. Any two teams can be [00:45:00] drastically different in their culture, in part because of the person who is leading that specific team.

And therefore, going back to Jim Collins's. Words in analogy, get the right people on the bus, the right people in the right seats on the bus becomes really important. More so than all the training in the world. I am a big believer in training. I spent many. Years in training and development, but you do need to have some of the right characteristics.

Mike Mears: And , I'll give you a solution to that problem on the development side. Again, just what is human nature? It's reverse engineering. So how could we actually get people to apply what we teach? And I just did an experiment that a group called CISA in December. This is a couple of months ago.

CISA is the Cyber and Infrastructure Security [00:46:00] Agency. And what we did was recognize What We can design world class training. This is really good stuff And it's a lot of what you and I've been talking about. There's a lot what's in the book and so forth, but That's not good enough because what I found over the years is people will go out and They'll pick one thing And they're able to apply it.

And the reason is we're coming, crashing into it's not really the culture that stops them because they have their little microcultures, it's really habitual behavior that stops them, right? And of all the literature I've read on on changing your habits, I find it very unsatisfying.

Because there's no magic wand. Duhigg who you've interviewed, and Atomic Secrets, and It's really a grind, because habit has such a hold over us. I started thinking about, okay If habit is the problem, how could we [00:47:00] come up with something I call habitual process where, and I got this idea, oddly enough from Welch when he was doing Six Sigma stuff.

He would school us up that we were black belts and we use these tools and now we're working on a Project to improve a process. We're doing a lot of really applying a lot of really good leadership things Asking questions and pulling out ideas from people and so forth so I thought okay, what would we like them to do?

Wouldn't it be great if they would just smile? let's go back to that first step on the Okay, if we get them to go back and they smile at their employees And they have one on one conversations. And what if they could even ask questions? Wouldn't that be great? And so it dawned on me. Now I'm going to go back to the check in.

The check in is a I call it a behavioral process because it includes lots of good little [00:48:00] leadership steps. So what if we could get them to do check ins? We're dragging along a lot of other behaviors. And okay, so now you're saying habitual behavior will stop them. Of course it will. But now what you do is you come up with a what I call a soft accountability, which is I went to the leadership at CISA and I said, look, here's the list of, I think I gave him 15 ways that you can put accountability for them to do check ins.

And the easiest was simply, what if we, what if you make them do a weekly report. With four bullets and the four bullets are what did I learn about myself doing check ins or what did I learn about my people doing check ins? That's the extent of the report and it's just sentences, right? So it's not burdensome.

And then after 90 days, what we're going to do is we're going to [00:49:00] destroy the report. It goes away. Why? Because it's a bureaucratic burden to do reports. But what we've done is we've created habitual behavior for them to do check ins and we make them announce to the employees when they get back, Hey, I just want everybody to know I'm going to start doing weekly check ins with you guys, see how you're doing and see how I can help.

And so by doing the public pronouncement and then having That report driving them out of their mind for 90 days. You're getting the accountability in for the behavioral process to drag along those. So that to me is the secret. 

Mahan Tavakoli: You just gave everyone one of the most effective ways to drive engagement and change within the organization, which is making sure.

There is no ifs, ands, or buts in my view. There is no cancelling and saying how about once a month, once a quarter, once every six months. Making sure that on a [00:50:00] weekly basis there is a regular cadence of those check ins. One on ones, which makes it easier. Most of us are human enough to want to know how the other person is doing.

Are human enough to want to engage. It's just that we are so busy running around that we don't take the time to do it. So when you systematize the check in process and make it part of people's habits. It's unbelievable the impact it has on engagement on coaching. So all of those things can come in addition to that.

Now, I feel like Mike, you and I can go on for hours. 

Mike Mears: I'm just starting to roll. 

Mahan Tavakoli: I love it. So tangible. Insights on things that can actually make a difference. , where can the audience find out more about your book, follow your work and your writing?[00:51:00] 

Mike Mears: So I do have a book site certainty is the name of the book. How great bosses can change minds, meaning change behaviors. And it turns out something called the insight mechanism, which is Key to that , and drive innovation.

And it's just all of the things we've talked about. So if they look up certainty, it gets on Amazon, be ordered through any of the bookstores and it's in all the e borders, eBooks and so forth. So it's out there. 

Mahan Tavakoli: Really appreciate that, Mike. 

 Having worked with some incredible people in the federal government, including at the CIA, NGIA, there are hundreds of committed people, some of the most committed people I have known who have dedicated their lives To serving others. So I appreciate you having served and now serving through communicating how we can become better, more impactful leaders.

Thank you so much for the conversation, Mike Mears. 

Mike Mears: Thank you so much, Mahan. [00:52:00] It's been wonderful.