Are you draining your team’s intelligence? According to Liz Wiseman, author of Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter, there are two types of leaders: multipliers and minimizers—and the latter only have about half the intelligence of their team. Discover the one question that can make you a multiplier, the alternative to micromanagement, and the five disciplines of the multiplier leader. Listen here.

Transcript

Peter: Before I start the podcast, I have a quick message for all the coaches listening. In November, I’m holding a Masters-level coaching training, and we’re looking for great coaches to join us. The training is where I and a small group of coaches share my most successful coaching techniques and strategies. It’s also where Bregman Partners looks to recruit new coaches for our coaching team.

Every time we run this training, it’s a powerful reminder of how important it is to have the opportunity to learn, practice, and build a coaching community. I’d love to meet you there. To register, visit here.

Welcome to the Bregman Leadership Podcast. I’m Peter Bregman, your host and CEO of Bregman Partners. This podcast is part of my mission to help you get more traction on the things that matter most.

With us, on the podcast, today is Liz Wiseman. She’s a researcher and executive consultant who teaches leaders around the world. She’s the president of the Wiseman Group, a leadership and research and development center headquartered in Silicon Valley. She’s a former executive at Oracle, and she wrote a great book that I enjoyed reading, Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter. She’s now a friend of mine because we met at MG 100, the Marshall Goldsmith group that Marshall put together, and it’s been a pleasure getting to know you as much as I do, I look forward to getting to know you even better. Liz, welcome to the Bregman Leadership Podcast.

Liz: Peter, it’s great to be with you. This is going to be fun.

Peter: I’m looking forward to that as well. Let’s get started. I love the idea of ​​multipliers. Can you explain the multiplier effect?

Liz: The multiplier effect is about a leader who draws out the best in the people around them, and so what I’ve studied is why some leaders seem to… you know, really smart people seem to suck the intelligence out of the group. I call them intelligence-depreciating leaders. They may be smart, but the people around them aren’t allowed or invited to be smart, whereas other leaders, who are equally smart, seem to use their intelligence in a way that excites, invites, and even demands intelligence from the people around them. It’s about the leader seeing, using, and developing the intelligence in others. They become, as a leader, a multiplier of the intelligence of their team. Or perhaps more simply, it’s about the leader who is smart in their presence.

Peter: That’s great. And I suppose if other people are smart around them, you associate that in part with their productivity and what they can accomplish, and that showing off other people’s intelligence leads to better outcomes for the organization and the team and so on?

Liz: Yeah. The gist of the research I did was asking people how much intelligence this leader gets from you, based on the way they lead. And what I found was that under diminished leaders, these leaders were getting less than half the intelligence of the people.

Peter: So basically people were saying to you, “I feel like I have a lot of good ideas, but they’re either being taken advantage of or I’m choosing not to share them because of the way this leader treats me.”

Liz: Yeah. And sometimes… Exactly, Peter. Sometimes these leaders shut it down. Like, raise your hand, no thanks. I’ve got that. Sometimes, you get this diminishing effect because the leader is really smart and capable, and then people are holding back because they don’t need to contribute. They defer ideas and accountability, and… So, we found that these diminished leaders were getting less than half the intelligence of the people, and when we asked the same question to the people around the leaders who they considered to be multiples, the average was 95% of the ability and intelligence of the people.

You know, what struck me first was that it was a double difference. And I wouldn’t suggest that it’s double productivity, but what I can tell you is that when you lead like that, you get all the ideas and abilities of the people, and you can imagine what happens when people go to work, and they work with diminished leaders, whether they’re tyrants or narcissists who are the kind of people who belittle people, or maybe even just casually belittle people. People come to work wanting to give 100%. 100% of their intelligence badges every morning, but what happens when less than half of them are used in a given day week, or month? What does it do to the environment when people resign themselves to the fact that they’re only able to contribute half? It creates toxic environments around them.

Peter: Right, we’ve seen… I mean, I’m sure you’ve seen. I’ve certainly seen these environments, where people come to work and they feel like they have a lot to offer but they’re not welcomed and there’s no real opportunity, so they start to shut down more parts of themselves than they would have otherwise, because they kind of give up and then eventually, if they’re smart, they find another job. I want to be critical for a second because I know leaders who will say, “You know, it’s true, there are a lot of great ideas on this team. But the reality is, we only have to do a few things, so I don’t need everyone’s great ideas. I know where we need to act fast, we need to move forward incredibly quickly. I appreciate that a lot of people have ideas, but I don’t want to hear them because I just need us to take action in that direction, and move forward. Don’t overcomplicate things. I don’t want to do everything by consensus. Etc. And I wonder if there’s an upside to that, or if that’s always destructive.

Liz: Yeah. Yeah, no, maybe there’s not an upside to belittling others, but there’s an upside to clarity, and there’s an upside to persuasion. What we find is that these multiplier leaders are not soft. They’re not consensus-driven leaders. In many ways, they’re decisive and assertive. When you presented… And Peter, I know you’ve written a lot of books and you know that feeling of sending the book to the publisher, the manuscript.

Peter: Right.

Liz: And I’m waiting to hear back. When I sent the manuscript to HarperCollins and I was waiting to hear back, one of the things that stood out to me was when my publisher came back and said, “Wow, these are not the kind of leaders who are going to exchange cookies and kisses.”

Peter: Right.

Liz: And I realized what I meant; it’s not about good guys versus bad guys as leaders. It’s about the kind of leaders who see a need, who have a mission, who have… whether it’s a vision or a goal or a mission, they have something that they need to get done. But they need all the intelligence of the team. They ask people to contribute. But when it comes to making important decisions, they don’t just jump in and make decisions like, “Well, this is what we’re going to do, I don’t need anyone else.” They’re the discussion maker. The role of the discussion maker is to identify the question that we’re trying to answer, frame it, explain why it’s important, and then invite people to participate. Not in a long discussion, but more of a process. Like, “This is something we need to figure out.” I need you, I need you, and I need you to give me your opinion. I hear you. We’re going to raise this issue and create a heated debate, even if it’s just for a few minutes, but then we’ll make a decision and move on.

And it’s amazing what happens when a leader lets others in. They end up getting buy-in, so they don’t have to command and control. And by asking people to contribute, they get commitment behind it.

Peter: Framing seems to be a really important part, right? It means we’re not just going to have an open conversation. We’re going to have to make a decision. These are the issues around the decision. I want to hear people’s perspectives before I make that decision. It’s framing in a way that moves forward, and you don’t get stuck in the discussion, you move from the discussion to the decision.

Liz: Yeah. You know, Peter, sometimes when I put all my research and the models and the book and all that aside I just think, how can I lead like a multiplier? How can I lead in a way that invites people to be smart? I just stop and ask myself, what information do people need to make a smart decision? And that puts me in a position where I say, Oh, my job is to frame things for my team, and explain what’s going on. And here’s why that’s important.

Or sometimes, at least, when I’m about to have a little downturn, and we’re all going to have a micromanagement moment. Sometimes, the framing is simply, “Here’s why I don’t have time to discuss this. Here’s why I need to micromanage this and take it seriously.” And explaining the rationale allows people to act intelligently and respond intelligently.

Peter: That seems important because the role of the leader is to shape the discussion and the direction and the boundaries around it, and then allow people the freedom to move forward in the way that they can best use their higher resources.

Liz: Right. And we all know that there are times when people put boundaries around this big thing, right?

Peter: Right.

Liz: And then there are times when those walls and boundaries are really wide. And as your team grows around you and the talent around you grows, I think you find that people can get… I think you can unleash your team.

Peter: Talk to me about people who put others down and what you call casual put-downers, right? These are people that we all know who maybe don’t intend to be put-downers. I don’t know many people who do intend to be put-downers, but that’s the effect they end up having.

Liz: You know, it’s interesting. In some ways, this was the biggest surprise and disappointment in my research because when I started doing this research, it was so clear to me. I could see these leaders who were brilliant to everyone around them, and then I could see the detractors, the vampires, and they seemed to me like bullies and tyrants and sometimes reckless leaders.

Peter: Can you give some examples of things that they do or say that represent them, so that everyone has an image in their mind?

Liz: Oh, the real detractor? Well, so the classic real detractors, when it comes to talent management, tend to be empire builders. They like to hire smart people, but they’re resource hoarders. In terms of the work environment, they’re tyrants. They create tension all around them. When it comes to setting direction, they tend to be know-it-alls. They’re quick to answer, they know how to do everything. Meetings with them will end up being that they’re the smartest person in the room. They’re decision-makers. They’re micromanagers. These are some of the classic traits of those…

Peter: It’s funny because some of these traits are classic old-fashioned command-and-control leadership traits. It’s the way we thought leadership should be about 30 years ago.

Liz: Yeah. This is what we historically thought of as strong leaders. So that’s what I studied. I studied these multiplier leaders, these diminished leaders, and it was this nice contrast, and it was an easy world. But then when I dug into this, Peter, I discovered that most of the diminishment that happens in our workplaces, in our nonprofits, in our schools, comes from the occasional diminisher, which doesn’t look like that very often. These are well-meaning people. These are the people who are the first to sign up for management training. These are the people who read management books, and who listen to management podcasts. These are the people who host management podcasts, and who write management books. People like us, want to be great leaders, but we do things that drain the lives of the people around us. And we do it with the best of intentions.

So it was a little bit more complicated and a lot more interesting. And I think that the key to creating really smart cultures and places where people can be brilliant and integrated at work is learning to spot the triggers for casual belittling.

Peter: Right. And the way you described it, at least for a lot of the casual belittling people that I know, it seems to come from this place of insecurity. It takes courage to say, “I don’t know,” in any organization. It takes courage to say, “I need other people’s opinions to figure out how to make this decision.” So I think that more confident leaders are probably more willing to frame it and have the conversation than more insecure leaders, and that insecurity leads to arrogance versus confidence. Security leads to confidence, in a sense. I wonder if you see that happening in organizations and people.

Liz: Yeah, when I’m with groups and we’re talking about the decline of their leaders, one of the words that come up over and over again is that they were insecure. And that’s led me to double down on the point I’ve always had, which is that I want to work with brilliant people. But I also want to work with people who are confident in their intelligence. I want to work with the person who thinks they’re smart, they’re brilliant, they’re brilliant, they’re so confident in their intelligence that they’ve gotten over it. You know? It’s like, Hey, I’m brilliant. Okay. I’m relieved. Now I’ve gotten over it, and I can go to work every day without trying to prove that I’m the smartest person in the world or the room. I can use my intelligence in a way that invites the intelligence in other people to see the right challenge, to ask the right question, to know how to frame the right discussion. So I want to work with people who are very confident in their mental abilities.

Peter: Give us a brief overview of the five disciplines that make up the multiplier.

Liz: Here’s what we’ve seen these multiplier leaders do, which is push others around them to step up, to be fully accountable, and to do their best. The first is how they manage talent. While the multiplier tends to be empire-building, the multiplier tends to be a talent magnet. They don’t just see and discover talent, talent tends to find them, because they use people for their innate brilliance, which they do with ease and freedom. It would be like, okay, how does Peter build his mind? What will he do and can’t help but do, and how can I channel that and use it against the biggest challenges we face?

Peter: It’s a point you make in the book that I like, which is that one of the things that talent magnets do is help people grow and move on to new things. Sid Finkelstein talks about this a lot in his book Superbosses.

Liz: Mmm (affirmative).

Peter: And the worry is always that I’m going to lose all my good people, and the point that you made is that reputation precedes you and there’s a steady stream of great talent. There’s a line of people who want to continue to work for you. So you don’t have to worry about whether I’m going to let go of my best talent because new talent comes in all the time.

Liz: Yeah, there’s always this moment when people talk about multiples and downsizers and someone will usually say, “Multipliers have better retention rates, don’t they, Liz?” And my answer is no. Not necessarily. Not usually, even, because they tend to be a flow of talent. They become like super bosses, and I was fortunate to work with one of those super bosses that Sidney Finkelstein mentioned in Superbosses.

You know, I’ve heard a lot of people say that about multipliers. They say, man, I’ll work with him anytime, anywhere. These are the people we want to work with because they see our talents and they use them and they highlight them, and at the moment when we’re at the peak of our productivity and our career, they say, “Hey, Liz? You’re ready to do the next hard thing.” Like, move on, sister. They’re not keeping people in their productivity zone as much as they’re staying in their learning and contributing zone, which is uncomfortable for everybody in some ways.

Peter: Creating intensity is another thing.

Liz: Yeah. Yeah, so it’s about the work environment that they create. Whereas that debilitation creates tension around it, the multiplier creates safety. It’s the intellectual safety where people can do their best work. It’s the difference between working in a stressful environment and an intense environment. One of my favorite examples of that is KR Sridhar at Bloom Energy. They’re a cleantech startup, and he says, “I try to create an intense environment.” One of his distinctions was that I ask my scientists, the people who work with him, to do experiments, but I don’t hold them accountable for the results of the experiments.

Peter: So it’s about the process, not necessarily the outcome.

Liz: Right. Because it asks people to take responsibility for what’s under their control. And if you’re going to innovate and push the boundaries with science, you can’t hold people accountable for the outcome of that. But you can certainly hold them accountable for asking questions, setting up… doing good experiments, and learning.

Peter: Does that apply to sales as well? Science, it makes sense, from a research point of view. Sales, you could argue the same thing, that you can be held accountable for making X number of sales calls and X number of contacts. But ultimately, what you’ll hear in sales is that the outcome is what ultimately matters. What do you see in sales organizations?

Liz: You know, one of my favorite examples of a strong leader, this kind of liberating discipline of multipliers is Rob Enslin at SAP, who is an extraordinary sales leader. We know the world of a sales leader, a sales leader with a multi-billion dollar stake, and when the economy goes bad, and a lot of times there are a lot of other leaders pushing and running the numbers, in this case, he steps back, asks the right questions, and demands that his team think about the issues, but creates a safe environment where it’s okay to say, “You know that deal? It just came out of our pipeline. We lost it.” And one of the things that his followers say about him is that he’s a sales leader who never gets surprised. Because people are willing to tell him the truth. He’s created a safe space for people to say, “This is what’s happening in the market.”

Peter: Right.

Liz: I don’t think they get their numbers wrong very often.

Peter: Right. You’ve already talked a little bit about discussing decisions, expanding challenges, and instilling ownership and accountability. Those are the other three. I’m kind of curious about… because we talked a little bit about the idea of ​​challenges and discussion. The most powerful way to instill ownership and accountability is by getting other people’s ideas. Are there other elements of that that you can share?

Liz: You know, I think it’s about putting other people in charge. I think there are a lot of leaders who are stuck in this conundrum where they want their people to step up, but they haven’t let go of it themselves. It’s like… let me see if I can find a pen here on my desk. It’s like the pen represents accountability, and if I say, “Okay, Peter, I want you to take responsibility.” And I hand you this pen and I say, “Okay, go ahead and take responsibility. It’s yours. Do it. You’re in charge.” And then I wonder why you didn’t pick up the pen, and I’m at home talking to my husband, and I say, “Yeah, I put Peter in charge, but he’s not acting that way.” The problem is that most leaders never let go of leadership.

Peter: Right.

Liz: Yeah. For someone else to take over, I have to let go. There has to be a handoff. Imagine a baton race where the lead runner doesn’t let go of the baton and lets the next person go. I’ve heard people say this over and over about these multiplier leaders; “Oh, they’re empowering.” As an author, Peter, you can appreciate this. I made sure that the word empowerment never came into the manuscript. One of the last things I did before I sent it to the publisher was make sure that the word empowerment never came up because I wasn’t sure what the word meant, you know? It seemed vague. But when you push empowerment, what empowerment means is giving power.

Peter: Right.

Liz: So if you want people to step up and take responsibility, you have to say, “Well, it’s yours, which means it’s not mine.”

Peter: Great. That’s great because I think of a leader who accidentally belittles other people. From everyone’s perspective, he belittles other people, and I think from his perspective, he belittles other people by mistake. And I think that’s not his intention at all. He does exactly that, right? He’s handing over the pen and not letting go. One of the challenges is that they’ll say, “Look, I’m happy to let them go if they follow through and do it, but two months later, they still haven’t done it, and at some point, I have to step in and do it. ‘Because I have a standard, and they’re not meeting the standard, and I’ve been very clear, but they’re not prioritizing it or they’re not doing it, etc., and I have to get it back or I have to grab their tail, etc.” What do you say to that person?

Liz: I’ll give you my favorite, very practical ways to put other people in charge, and then a caveat about that. The first one is to remember the pen. People can’t take it unless you give it up. One of my favorite examples was John Chambers when he was CEO of Cisco. He was fairly new to the CEO role. He hired his first VP of the company, a guy named Doug, and Doug was going to run customer support, he said to Doug, “Doug, when it comes to this part of the business, you get 51% of the vote and 100% of the accountability.” I don’t know of a faster way to tell someone that they’re in charge than to say, “You get 51% of the vote.”

Peter: So who’s holding him accountable? Who is—

Liz: John.

Peter: When you say 100% accountability. So he’s still there, and he says, “You get the votes, you get the decision, but I’m going to hold you accountable, but let me make clear to you the procedures I’m going to use to hold you accountable, and those procedures will be public enough between us, and it’ll be very clear and objective whether you’re meeting them or not,” so he doesn’t have to sit there constantly saying, “You’re not meeting my standards. Let me tell you what my standards are; they’ve just changed.”

Liz: Yeah. And I think 51% of the vote is really important. If someone tells me I have 51% of the vote, and 100% of the accountability, that reminds me that I don’t have 100% of the vote. 51 means that someone else has 49%, so what Chambers is saying is, well, you know what? This is your role in the business. You run the support. I run the business. I’m 49% of the vote, and that means I want to give you direction. I want to be informed. I want to be consulted. I want to offer ideas that I have, but ultimately, if you and I don’t agree or you don’t have time to talk to me or whatever, I support you. I just think it’s a really clear way to put someone else in charge.

Another favorite way of mine… It’s very empowering. Just on Saturday, my husband and I were working on a little home improvement project, which was really… I was leading it, and my husband came in, and he said, “Liz, you can do this. You got 51% of the vote.” And I said, “Oh my God, I do! I do! I love it!” But I also remembered 49. I need to consult him a little bit on this.

Here’s one of my favorite ways of doing this… Because I think collaboration has been in some ways the enemy of good leadership. I think a lot of us want to collaborate, but don’t we want to know who’s really in charge?

Peter: Right.

Liz: I think we can work together, but you have to know who’s in charge. I often use the 51-49 ratio when I’m collaborating with someone. We’ll say, okay, let’s work on this together, but who’s 51%? Well, you have this, you have that. Sometimes I say to people, “Well, this is yours. You have 51% of the vote.” And then this is what I say, just to make it very clear. I say, “I’m going to cross this off my to-do list now.” And I remember there was a guy I used to work with, Ben Putterman. I love him, he works at Tesla now. And he would stop and say, “Are you saying I should put this on my to-do list?” And I’d say, “Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying.” And he’d say, “So I’m in charge. I should do something about it?” And I’d say, “Yes, exactly. I have good interpretive skills.” Or some days I’d say, “Ben, you know what? I want you to take this on. You’re in charge.” And then I’d say, “I’m going to stop worrying about this.” Or, “I’m not going to wake up tomorrow and think about this.” And then he’d stop again and say, “So are you trying to tell me I should wake up and think about this?” Yeah! Exactly.

Peter: That’s a great example. It’s a great example. That level of clarity is necessary because people, in crazy ways, get misunderstood all the time and that’s human nature.

Liz: That’s right. And we want to work together, so we say, okay, we’re going to do this together. Okay, if we do this together…

Peter: So nobody’s personally responsible.

Liz: Our rule in our house is, if nobody’s responsible for feeding the cats, the cats are going to starve. You know? We figured out who’s responsible for this—

Peter: Yeah, that’s great. Having that conversation, figuring out who has 51%, figuring out who has 100% accountability.

Liz: Right, and who has it on their to-do list, and who’s going to wake up in the morning thinking about it? And then here’s another example. If you’re having trouble with ownership and communicating the facts to people, one of the techniques that I’ve seen people use well is for the leader to describe what it looks like. You know you’re done when that happens. Yeah, sometimes I do simple things like when I ask someone to do a document or some preparation, I’ll say, “What I expect is a document with a pin,” which is my way of saying, “It’s not a paragraph. It’s not a single page. It’s got a pin.” Or, “You’ll know you’re done when you can summarize this on one piece of paper.”

Peter: I love that.

Liz: So whenever you can tell people what it looks like in your mind … I think most leaders fail because they move too quickly, and there’s this laziness thing that sets in, and we don’t stop to take what I expect and let me share it. And in the absence of that, how do I know? How do I know?

Peter: In the last minute or so, I’ve loved the idea of ​​a 30-day challenge. I’m kind of experimenting, trying to become a multiplier. Can you give the listeners that challenge?

Liz: The challenge is, what’s one small thing you can do to be more multiplier? And I’ll give you a couple of challenges that you might think about. One is instead of telling people, ask them. I would encourage you to take the challenge of extreme questions, and the challenge is this. Go to a meeting, a one-on-one meeting, reach out to someone, a staff meeting, and say, “My job is just to ask questions.” My promise to you if you take this challenge is that it will be hard. It may be very hard. But it will reshape the way you see your role as a leader. So maybe take the challenge of extreme questions. Maybe if you tend to over-contribute, you bring too much energy, and too many ideas, and you accidentally underestimate yourself. Maybe take the challenge of poker chips and come to a meeting with a stack of four chips in your head. Each one represents something you say or contribute. We have found that the best leaders know when it’s time to do the big work, and they play a chip with a big idea, a big request, a statement, or a clarification. And then they also know when it’s time to do the small work. And they don’t withdraw, they withdraw intellectually and create space for other people to contribute, maybe you identify the innate genius of the people on your team, or maybe more importantly, the innate genius of someone on your team that you’re having trouble with. The person you don’t see as valuable. Instead of asking, “Is this person smart? Seriously, is this person smart?” ask instead, “In what way is this person smart?”

Or maybe you do the rubber band challenge and… oh my gosh, maybe… let’s see if I have an equal rubber band here with me. Do you do the rubber band challenge and instead of giving people things to do, you think of work as a rubber band, and that’s the delegation of work, and you think of it as; what can I give someone to do that’s the maximum stretch?

Peter: Stretch the rubber band.

Liz: The thing that’s going to stretch them to the point where they’re uncomfortable and they almost feel like they’re going to snap, and then my job as a leader at that uncomfortable point where Liz is struggling and I’m asking her to do something difficult is to just hold the position and let her come to me and have the satisfaction of knowing what the difficult thing is. My job is to learn how to properly set the stretch.

Peter: Sitting in someone else’s discomfort without relieving it.

Liz: You know, I think that’s true. A lot of leaders have not been comfortable watching other people be uncomfortable. Yes, and I think that’s the root of the occasional decline, which is that oftentimes, it’s not that we don’t trust people. It’s that we care too much sometimes, and we rush to save, and we rush to make an idea instead of sitting in silence for a few minutes.

Peter: We’ve been talking with Liz Wiseman. We’re talking about one of her books: Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter. Liz, you’ve made me smarter in this conversation. I appreciate your perspective. I think the book is excellent. I think people should rush to buy it, it’s helped me lead more effectively, and it’s going to have the same impact on everyone who reads it. So, Liz, thank you. Thank you for sharing your thoughts, and thank you for being on the Bregman Leadership Podcast.

Liz: Thank you. Thank you for leading and teaching all of us.

Peter: Before we go to the closing music, I want to remind you again that my master’s level training is coming up in a few weeks. I’m excited to see you there. To sign up, visit here.

I hope you enjoyed this episode of Bregman’s Leadership Podcast. If you did, it would help us out if you subscribed to iTunes and left a review. A common problem I see in companies is too much busyness, and too much hard work that fails to move the organization as a whole forward. That’s the problem we solve with our Big Arrow process. For more information on that, or to access all of my articles, videos, and podcasts, visit peterbregman.com. Thank you, Claire Marshall, for producing this episode, and thank you for listening.