How High-Performing Leaders & Teams THRIVE in Today’s Digital World

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
So how do baby boomers lead in a gen Z environment?
How do we take our leadership skills that we've learned
over forty or fifty years as baby boomers or thirty
or forty years as gen xers and actually deal with
the technology changes and the whole mindset changes that come

(00:22):
from this technology era. Today, we're going to discover just
how to do that, how to discover what leadership skills
thrive in this current business environment. And we have an
expert on the matter with us, Mike Peterson. Mike has
written the book Leading in the Age of Digital Disruption.
And Mike, it is a pleasure to have you on

(00:43):
the wealth Ability Show.

Speaker 2 (00:44):
Thank you so much. Sim it's a pleasure to be here.

Speaker 1 (00:47):
And Mike, if you would give us a little of
your background. How did you start, you know, delving into
this topic, because it's not one that I hear other
people speak about.

Speaker 3 (00:56):
It is one that we all experience. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (00:59):
Yeah, I have a fairly unusual background. I have always
personally been a tech nerd, a geek. I was actually
in the geek squad in college doing computer repair and
ended up going into HR and human resources, and through

(01:21):
HR really learned about how to apply technology from a
leadership perspective, and after about ten years, moved my way
into a head of HR role at a public pharmaceutical
company and really focused on leveraging technology to help leaders

(01:43):
in the organization thrive. And as I went through this
transformation process, the executive team was really excited about the
things that we were doing and asked me to take
over responsibility for IT as well. And so for the
last five or six years of my corporate career, I
was responsible for both the HR department and the IT

(02:07):
department and learned that there really are an uncanny amount
of similarities between the two functions, and most people don't
realize that. Just a little bit less than two years ago,
had a big health scare that made me kind of
reprioritize my life and left Corporate America to start my
own business and really wanted to focus on this kind

(02:32):
of intersection of HR and IT and how you can
actually leverage both in very similar ways to build high
performing teams.

Speaker 3 (02:40):
I love that, and I love that.

Speaker 1 (02:41):
You left corporate for what I call a real job,
which is being an entrepreneur. I'm a I'm the president
of the Entrepreneur Fan Club.

Speaker 3 (02:52):
I think because I love, I love entrepreneurs.

Speaker 1 (02:55):
I love I think, I think entrepreneurs actually lead the world,
both figuratively and literally. Technology is moving so quick right now,
and we really do have this issue that some of
us did not grow up with technology. I mean, my
idea of a computer was you know, two thousand and

(03:17):
one of Space Odyssey, right, and punch carts. I mean
when I was in college. We we used punch cards
when I was in college, or we used to, you know,
we we we were doing programming in basic or something
like that, right, We did not have this easy access programming.
We certainly didn't have anything rivaling AI whatsoever. And even
when we were uh first using things like I remember

(03:40):
my very first real foray besides the Apple two which
we which we used for spreadsheets in in in the
in my tax in the tax business when I was
at ernst and young, but also researching on Lexus and
Nexus where we had to use Boolean connectors. So so
our our brains are different that they're literally different than

(04:04):
the gen Z brains or or the millennial brains, and
even a little from the gen xers. But how do
you how do you deal with that kind of disconnect
between how fast technology is moving, and how do we
take those skills that we've learned and actually make them
work in that environment.

Speaker 2 (04:23):
Yeah, such a good question. And you know I didn't
have a cell phone when I was a young adult.
My first connected device so to speak with a pager, right,
And and so many kids these days don't even know
what a pager is.

Speaker 1 (04:39):
Right.

Speaker 2 (04:39):
You would you kind of go off on your own,
and if someone wanted to get a hold of you,
they would they would ring your pager with the phone number,
and you'd have to go to the nearest payphone and
call them back. Right. There was really no way to
communicate in real time. And and so now you know,
technology is moving at such rapid pace it's it is

(05:01):
sometimes hard to keep up with. Right. There's More's law
that's been around, I think since the sixties that basically
says every ten years technology technology capabilities are going to double.
So it's really an exponential process, and.

Speaker 3 (05:15):
Its like now it's like every ninety days.

Speaker 2 (05:18):
Yes, yeah, absolutely, you know, the pace just keeps getting
steeper and steeper. And you know, four years ago, when
kind of AI first came out, it really wasn't AI,
it was more kind of machine learning, but today now
we're really on that cusp of the singularity and having
kind of true AI and so in my book Leading

(05:40):
in the Age of Digital Disruption, it really talks about
how to bring all of this together. And so there
are kind of traditional leadership capabilities, so to speak, which
is trust, transparent communication, as well as accountability, and it's
all wrapped in this term that I use called servant leadership,

(06:02):
and servant leadership as well isn't a new term. It's
been around since the seventies. But the new application of
servant leadership is really making sure that we as a team,
or as a company or a function, leverage the technology
that we have access to as an organization, which now
there's technology in every aspect of everything that we do

(06:25):
every day. It's more accessible than ever and it's easier
to use than ever, and so it's really important that
we leverage the power and harness the power of this
technology and what we do.

Speaker 3 (06:39):
So let's break this down a little bit.

Speaker 1 (06:42):
You talk about in your book, you talk about some
leadership skills that you believe are outdated. Walk us through
some of those leadership seals that we'd consider classic leadership
skills that you think they just don't work anymore.

Speaker 2 (06:56):
Yeah, and it's it's not necessarily that they don't work completely.
There's just a lot of misconceptions around around some of
these skills that I hear a lot of times when
I'm talking to clients or I'm talking to leaders, and
a big one is trust, for example. So trust, when

(07:18):
you apply that to a remote or a hybrid organization,
oftentimes a leader will say, well, I need to trust
Tom to do his work, So I'm just I'm not
going to check in on him. Right, he can go
off on his own and do his work. But trust

(07:38):
doesn't need to be blind, right. I think people need
to think about trust as the mutual belief that we're
working in the best interest of the company. And so
that doesn't mean we can't talk to each other, right,
and can't build a relationship. And so it's really important
that we are active trying to build trust in everything

(08:02):
that we do as a leader in an organization. So
we are acting consistently, we're acting empathetically, we're acting transparently,
and we're communicating in real time. You know, these are
our skills that aren't necessarily new, but we need to
apply those skills through this new lens of technology that

(08:23):
we have access to.

Speaker 1 (08:25):
You make a good point to the remote work because
we've has actually been a topic on this show, on
the Wealtability Show many times over the last couple of years,
because the workforce, as much as we want them to
come back in the office, it's it's just not going
to happen.

Speaker 3 (08:38):
Everybody is at least a hybrid.

Speaker 1 (08:40):
Okay, they're just there are very few workforces that are
truly one hundred percent in office. Which was easy, right,
It's easy to verify somebody's working when they're there. It's
easy to when you can stop in their office. It's
not easy when they're you know, one thousand miles away
on their computer in you don't really know. So we

(09:01):
talk about you know, we always talk in the accounting
world about trust and verify. Right, you have to trust
and you have to verify that they are actually doing that.
So how do you bring that verification skill? How do
you bring that in with still being transparent and not
feeling like having people feel like you're looking over their
shoulder all the time.

Speaker 2 (09:21):
Yeah, Yeah, that goes back to this this core pillar
that I talk about in the Book of Accountability. So
there's there's trust, which we've already talked about, transparent communication
we can talk a little about in a little bit UH,
and there's accountability and they all go hand in hand.
And the misconception about accountability that I still hear all

(09:45):
the time is, you know, Mike messed up, he missed
this deadline, he never got fired, So there's no accountability here, right.
They think about accountability as a as a consequence of
negative behavior, and that's really not what we need in
the world of accountability today. And so we talk about

(10:08):
it in the book as accountability based on trust. And
so we're working on the best interest of the company.
We're trans we're communicating transparently what the goals and expectations
are of the company, what the expectations are of me
as a leader for your specific project. And then we
build accountability as a kind of a transparent framework of

(10:32):
who is doing what in the organization, when they're doing it,
what are some big milestones, how do they how do
they tie into our corporate goals? Right? The why of
what we do is incredibly important. And if you set
this uh, this framework up transparently and UH upfront before

(10:54):
the work needs to be done. When employees have ownership,
they they generally want to succeed, right. They need to
know what success looks like. And oftentimes managers just think,
you know, oh, well, I hired this person with ten
years of experience. They should just know what happens. I
hired them because they have experience, and now they can

(11:15):
kind of go off on their own and do what
they need to do. But we really need to be
specific about what success looks like, and then we can
set kind of milestones to check in so people know
it's coming from a mile away, rather than a manager
not having any clue what's going on and feeling compelled
to always check in every day. Okay, well what's the progress,
what's the progress, what's the progress. It's really important to

(11:39):
just have these frameworks up front so that employees know
what to expect.

Speaker 3 (11:44):
So do you think that employees?

Speaker 1 (11:49):
So, I think our human nature is not wanting to
be accountable, is my sense of human nature.

Speaker 3 (11:57):
We don't want to be accountable. We don't want to
be told what to do.

Speaker 1 (12:00):
And entrepreneurs understand this because that's why we're entrepreneurs in
the first place, because.

Speaker 3 (12:03):
We don't want to be told what to do.

Speaker 1 (12:05):
And yet and yet accountability is certainly one of the
key to successes. So how do you build that in
that accountability where you require the accountability but they feel
good about it instead of instead of rebelling against that accountability.

Speaker 2 (12:21):
Yeah, I think it goes back to that definition of success.
And so when things go wrong, oftentimes it's because the
vision of success wasn't as clear as it needed to be.
And so in leading in the age of digital disruption,

(12:43):
I talk about a transparent communication cycle, and so it
goes back to very transparent communication upfront. So a manager
telling an employee what success looks like for this specific
event or project or milestone, and giving an employee the

(13:04):
space needed to do that work. And of course if
they need help, there needs to be space for them
to ask questions. But in general, employees need space to
do their work, and then there needs to be an
opportunity for feedback. So managers can think back to their expectation,
give employees feedback about what works well, what needs to

(13:28):
be improved, and give them that space to kind of
implement that feedback. And as managers get more familiar with
this feedback cycle, they'll start to realize that oftentimes what
they're giving feedback on is present because they weren't clear

(13:48):
enough upfront about what their expectations were. And so managers
will get better and better about setting these expectations upfront
and then giving employees the space to really knock it
out of the park once they have a very clear
picture of what success looks like.

Speaker 3 (14:03):
Okay, And so how do you combine that?

Speaker 1 (14:05):
I find it so interesting that your your company combined
it with human resources sources. So how do you how
do you how do you do that in that in
the AI environment? How do you combine those two so
that you can actually use it in a way that
actually helps you with that accountability and make sure that

(14:28):
you know, yes, it is getting done, Yes, this is happening,
and it's they're not faking it.

Speaker 2 (14:33):
Yeah yeah, And uh, you know, when when you're working
across time zones, right, I've done a lot of work
with Europe and with Asia, it can be hard. Right.
There's very few business hour hours that overlap, and so
as the manager, you only have a half an hour
every day or maybe an hour or two of overlap

(14:55):
to check in with your employees. And and now there
are so many tools out there to help companies with
what I call kind of asynchronous communication. Right, So, if
you use a platform like Asana that is a project
management tool, you can put in you know, kind of

(15:16):
what what the milestones are, what are the do dates,
who's responsible for them? And they can not only be
used as a way to track progress, but also a
way to communicate updates and have information disseminated to employees
so that they can read it in their own time
rather than having to constantly kind of chase updates for managers.

(15:39):
And with those limited hours of overlap, oftentimes those those
information meetings will kind of get rescheduled or pushed out
when managers don't have enough time.

Speaker 1 (15:51):
And then how does AI play a role in this?
I mean, you're I mean, that's that's what's going on
right now.

Speaker 3 (15:57):
AI is taking over.

Speaker 1 (15:59):
But part of the problem, I think is that as
as leaders, how do we use AI too.

Speaker 3 (16:09):
From a leadership standpoint? Is really my question?

Speaker 2 (16:13):
Okay, uh yeah, Well, so there's there's a lot of
kind of easy access to to AI to be able
to have access to kind of brainstorming and thinking through things,
and oftentimes leadership decisions that we have to make can

(16:37):
be very emotional and A great thing that AI has
access to is this wealth of information without emotion. And
so we can, for example, have a conversation with chat
GBT fill in the story about what what the situation is,
what's my kind of planned response to this employee, and

(17:00):
and it can help you kind of take out the
emotion of what you're talking about.

Speaker 1 (17:05):
So let AI do the Actually, I think in a
lot of cases, let AI write the email, because the
AI will write the email without the emotion in it,
which is what I always find is the problem with
email is that we tend to put emotion when we
don't have to look at them face to face, right
then there tends to be these emotion I'm sure you've

(17:26):
met had managers working in your businesses where their emails
were nothing. Their personality. Their email is completely different than
their personality face to face. Right face to face, Hey,
they were great, but boy, you put them behind an
email and all of a sudden they're nasty. And I'm
going so you're saying, well, let's let AI write that

(17:47):
email for us, because it'll take the emotion out of that.

Speaker 3 (17:50):
And that sounds like, actually sounds.

Speaker 1 (17:53):
Terrific, like a great way using AI to actually do
your work for you where it will take the emotion
out so that it actually communicates facts, not emotion.

Speaker 2 (18:03):
Yeah, and face to face conversations or phone calls are
still better than emails, but oftentimes with time differences, with
everything that we have going on, it can't we can't
wait for that conversation, right if it's always better to
have real time conversation than say, Okay, we're going to
save that conversation for two weeks until we can have

(18:24):
it in person. And so in those instances, AI can
be a great system of kind of checks and balances
to make sure that your email is objective and that
you're you're communicating the points very succinctly rather than having
this very kind of abrupt, emotional, angry answer.

Speaker 3 (18:44):
I love that.

Speaker 1 (18:44):
Are you Are you seeing AI uses for monitoring? I mean,
let's take care of a sauna projects We've used a
sauna in our business. Have you seen AI tools that
will either a actually the product the project flow right
or be actually monitor the project flow in asana? Because

(19:06):
for some of us, as entrepreneurs leaders, we find something
like that really cumbersome actually because it's I mean there's
just a lot of step plus step plus step plus stop,
and we we're looking for the answer, right we We
love we love a perplexity because we can just type
into question we can get the answer just like that. So,

(19:28):
you know, entrepreneurs love that kind of stuff. Have you
seen tools starting to be developed to do things like that?

Speaker 2 (19:35):
Yeah, definitely, have you know? I think every AI is
the hot keyword, right every company is trying to build
AI into their platform specifically to help with kind of
predictive analytics. Right where we know where we are right now,
but where if things continue at this pace, where are
we going? You know, A lot of a lot of

(19:55):
out of the box tools are still working on that solution,
but they're there are a lot of custom tools and
that companies can implement fairly easily to integrate AI into
what you do on an everyday basis, And those take
a little bit more effort, but very very doable if
you work with a company like Apex consulting partners to

(20:18):
kind of help you do that. And an example of
that that I was just talking with someone about the
other day is an example like employee handbooks. Right, everyone
every company that's over say, fifty employees has an employee
handbook and bigger companies. Their handbooks are often times well

(20:39):
over one hundred pages, and employees hate sifting through them,
managers hate sifting through them. But everyone kind of has
to play by the rules of the road. And there
are now AI tools that you can integrate into your
AI handbook and turn it into kind of a chatbot.

(21:01):
So rather than having to sift through content, you search
it in. Yeah, you can say you know, I have
an issue about blah blah blah, and it can say,
you know, here's the recommendation. It's on page fifty seven
if you want to read more about that specific topic.

Speaker 3 (21:17):
I love that. I love that.

Speaker 1 (21:20):
So let me ask you kind of a different question.
We talked about the classic leadership skills that you know,
maybe a little outdated. What are some of the skills
that you find that an older generation might have that
are useful when it comes to modern technology. For example,

(21:44):
one of the things that I found is because I
had to work so hard as a young person to
come up with the right question, because I'd never get
an answer if I didn't, I find I'm able to
add an ask better questions to the AI bought.

Speaker 3 (22:00):
Then my young you know, gen z ers can ask.

Speaker 1 (22:04):
Because they've it's it's never been difficult for them, so
they haven't ever used those muscles before. Are there are
there other examples of that you can think of where hey,
maybe we actually have a plus and not a minus.

Speaker 2 (22:18):
Yeah, yeah, I think one one that comes to mind
right away is the ability to do research.

Speaker 1 (22:26):
Right.

Speaker 2 (22:26):
I remember it seems like just yesterday, if I had
a question, right, I was flipping through the Encyclopedia Britannica
to get the answer, and we each had this set
of you know, fifty books that was like five feet long,
taking up half of our bookshelf. And so as as
that process has evolved, you know, we went to having

(22:47):
to google answers and sift through you know, ten web
pages to now kind of googling and you get kind
of a summary of information at the top. But that
that drive to kind of research and answer I think
is very very important because while AI is is very

(23:09):
valuable and it has a tremendous capability of answering a
lot of questions very quickly, it's not always one hundred
percent accurate, right, you know, And so the ability to
to kind of have that that sniff test where you
get you get an answer from AI and you're like,
wait a second, that it doesn't seem quite exactly right.
Let me do a little bit more research where I

(23:31):
think a lot of the younger generation will we'll kind
of just take whatever is bit out and that's the
new truth.

Speaker 3 (23:36):
So how do you teach that?

Speaker 1 (23:38):
I mean, because that's part of the leadership skill right
is leaders are teachers, and so part of it is
teaching them. They don't have to fight through it. It's
kind of like, you know, when I was first starting out,
I had to I had a four column worksheet. I
literally had to put debits on the left and credits
on the right. I mean literally that's where they went. Okay,

(23:59):
today's they don't have to do that. They just enter
the number in and they assume it's going to the
right place in quick books or you know wherever, or
it's producing the right answer. And it doesn't always produce
the right answer. You said, so, how do you train
the younger generation in those skill sets that you had
to develop?

Speaker 2 (24:19):
Yeah, yeah, it's a great, great question, and I think
at least part of the answer comes to developing a
culture in your organization of being a learning organization. You know,
no matter how much you know how skilled you are
in one particular aspect of the business. No one is perfect,

(24:40):
no one has the answers to everything, and it's actually
okay not to have the answer to everything. But as
an organization and as a leader, you want to continue
to learn and have this be a cycle. Right. You
come up with a problem or a challenge, you learn
some new ability, you apply that to your practice, overcome

(25:01):
that challenge, continue to learn more, and continue to to
apply those learnings to to your everyday practice. And I
think a lot of organizations have a fear of failure.
You know, we all want to move so quickly. We
all want to uh to to do the next thing, bigger, faster, stronger.

(25:25):
And part of this, this trust building comes with the
ability to fail. Right, it can't happen all day every day,
but we need to instill this uh this comfort with
being able to fail, because without failure, you can't innovate either. Right,
you have to learn, You have to be willing to

(25:47):
experiment to to continue to get the best answer as possible.

Speaker 1 (25:52):
Oh so some of it is just building that in
your values, in your culture and doing that. So if
you're if you're talking to UH A leader forty plus. Okay,
we'll go there. We'll make it pretty broad. And you're saying, okay,
here's three things that you could do probably to improve

(26:14):
your organization from a leadership standpoint, given technology and where
it is. What would those three things be in your opinion?

Speaker 2 (26:25):
The three things that I think are are often missing
are sitting right in front of us.

Speaker 1 (26:30):
You know.

Speaker 2 (26:30):
It's trust, transparent communication, and accountability now applied through the
lens of technology. And I'm happy to go into more
detail if you, if you want to.

Speaker 3 (26:42):
I love it. Yeah, give it, give it. If you
would just give us one or two examples of that. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (26:48):
So, so transparent communication, I'll start there. I uh worked
with the leadership a leader recently who led a global
organization and there was a lot of triangulation, and that

(27:11):
means that people were hearing from their leader, not through
their leader's mouth. So there was a lot of kind
of rumor mill happening and that was really degrading trust.
And when I came in to do an assessment, really
found that it was just because of this delay in
having face to face communication. So when a conversation presented itself,

(27:36):
the leader would say, well, let's just wait and tell
you're in the office next week to have this conversation
in person, and he would have the conversation with the
employees that were in the office, and then they would
of course tell the others, right, oh did you hear this?
And the other people would be like, what, No, I
haven't heard it. And so it's just a very small

(27:56):
tweak that's needed to really drive trust in this organization, right,
having conversations in real time, you know what, it would
be better if we're in person, but I'm just going
to schedule a quick zoom meeting with Tom and we're
just going to have this conversation right now in real time.
You know. Thinking about accountability, right, a lot of a

(28:20):
lot of people think that it's this consequence that they
need to be fired if something goes wrong, and instead
of investing in making sure it goes right from the beginning.
These are our very simple concepts, but they they manifest

(28:44):
themselves in different ways when you're inside an organization.

Speaker 1 (28:48):
I love that, and I love what you started with
was employees need to know what success looks like.

Speaker 3 (28:55):
I think I think customers do too.

Speaker 1 (28:57):
They need to know what success looks like, and we
need to know what success looks like from their point
of view, and I think we also need to know
what success looks like from the from the employees' point.

Speaker 3 (29:09):
Of view, what would make this successful for you?

Speaker 1 (29:12):
And involving We've had discussions with others on the welt
Ability Show about how do you involve your customers in
building your product, how do you involve your employees in
developing your values or your culture. How do you involve
them in answering these questions? And it can be very simple.
And what's great is now we have AI tools where

(29:34):
you can literally ask the question without asking the question
because that you can use an AI tool to ask
the question right.

Speaker 3 (29:41):
So you can just build that right in. So I
think this is fascinating.

Speaker 1 (29:46):
Mike Peterson is our guest. The book is leading in
the age of Digital disruption.

Speaker 3 (29:53):
Mike.

Speaker 1 (29:54):
Where would we find more about you and your business?

Speaker 3 (29:58):
APEX Consulting Partners.

Speaker 2 (30:00):
You can find out more information on my website, which
is Apexconsulting Dot Partners. You can find me on LinkedIn.
I'm pretty active on LinkedIn. You're welcome to reach out anytime,
and my book is launching on Tuesday, April eighth, and
you should find it on Amazon or wherever else books
are sold.

Speaker 1 (30:19):
That's awesome. So thank you Mike for being on The
Waltability Show.

Speaker 3 (30:23):
Industry. Remember, you know when we do.

Speaker 1 (30:25):
Have this transparent communication, we have the accountability people know
what success looks like. We're always going to find that
we're going to make way more money by doing this
and in the end we'll pay wayless tax. We'll see
a'all next time in The Waltability Show. Thanks everyone.

Speaker 3 (30:40):
This podcast is a presentation of rich Dad Media Nestler

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