When Being Stubborn Is Leadership And When It's Ego

Speaker A: That's the real win is moving on rather than having that, that anchor that everybody knows is there. Everybody recognizes that nobody likes it, but it's continually dragging them down. The real value is enabling the organization to move on to whatever's next.

Speaker B: I didn't align with this ethically. I did not think this was the right strategic. I was, I was being put in place as a, an axeman.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: And I didn't appreciate that.

Speaker A: I messed up my back a while back or something and my brother in law asked what I did and my son was like aggressive sitting entry music.

Speaker B: Uh, it's the Bob and jaw show. 1A, uh, 2A. Ah. 1, 2, 3, 4. Metacasters. If you've watched the show, uh, for a while, you may have heard, uh, me sing Mumble a song by the maestro, the man, uh, the legend Kenny Rogers called the Gambler. And in the Gambler there's a chorus and I'm going to sing it for you. Yeah. You got to know when to hold them, know when to fold them. Know when to walk away, know when to run. You never count your money when you're sitting at the table. There'll be time enough, uh, for counting when the dealing's done. There we go. So that's our intro for today. Now that's rather than insanity. What, what does that have to do with leadership? Uh, well, I want to talk about. I was thinking about. It's not all roses and unicorns in leadership all the time. We're happy I'm getting promoted. They're giving me tons of bonus and stuff. I mean, sometimes that happens, but sometimes there's like rough edges. Sometimes you have conflict, sometimes you hate your boss. Hate is such a strong word that it is, but, but you do or despise or whatever. And uh, so knowing when to. It's your journey, it's your career journey to. So knowing when to hold your cards, like stay pat. Knowing when to fold them. Maybe change jobs in a, in a current company or something like that. Look for a reframe. Uh, know when to walk away. So now you're look into. Is this the right place for me? Am I in the right situation? Do I need to find something else? And then knowing when to run is there's a lunatic with a machete coming at you, called your boss or the CEO or whatever, and you need to run out, you need to leave. Hey, sayonara. See you. See you later. Um, and uh, the other thing is, you know, sort of not, not counting your winnings but like taking it later. Not shoving things. Like having. Having a little bit of reservation. Right. Not shoving things in other people's faces, but having some reserve, having. Having some subtlety. So I'm wondering if, like journey mapping, if Josh and I could share some stories that might map to this knowing. Knowing when. So I'll kick it off to buy Josh some time, because I can see that the.

Speaker A: Well, I have a. Do you own slightly different spin that I'd like to try on for size?

Speaker B: I will take any spin whatsoever.

Speaker A: Okay.

Speaker B: Um.

Speaker A: Thinking of it like a game of poker where there's always another hand. There's always another hand. And so I think of applying those same thoughts of, do I stand my ground? Do I opt out? Um, or do I need to run away from this idea, this initiative, this change I'm trying to drive within the organization. There's times where it's a thing you believe in and you feel like you're swimming uphill, but. But you have to. You have to stay in the game. You can't fold because as soon as you fold, you know, it's over. Um, so I think of it also as a good analogy of the ups and downs of you as a leader trying to drive change, that not every change that you drive is going to be a straight flush. Right. There's going to be some hands that you're sweating it out, and is it going to work? What should I do? And there's also some times where there's change or there's an initiative or there's something that you're pushing that you get halfway and you realize, uh, this is not gonna work and you just need to run away and. And kind of accept. Okay, cool. I'm gonna play. I'm gonna play the next hand, right? And just always thinking about the next hand.

Speaker B: So I'm gonna. I'm. Yes, I love your twist. But there are times where you gotta leave. Yeah, Right. You gotta leave. So I'll start with one. I took a job once. Interviewed. Real excited. Uh, qa. Uh, director of QA for an organization. I was out of work, so I was sort of. I wanted dev leadership, or QA leadership as a backup. Took it, took the job. Um, and it was leading a team. There were some offshore folks, there were some onshore folks. They were looking at an automation program. I was real excited. They didn't have. I actually knew one of the. The managers. I've, uh, known him for a long time. And I, uh, was sort of excited. And not, uh, sort of. I was very excited. Diane was excited. She's like, you know, get your sorry butt out of the house and. And work rather than be unemployed. And, uh, walked in the door and I think it was on day. Afternoon of day one, morning of day two, somewhere around there, uh, the SVP pulled me in, and he's like, bob, we've changed our strategic minds. Uh, we want to offshore everything. Uh, so we want to take all of the testing that we're doing here. We want to fire all the people, uh, onshore, and we want to move it offshore. And I want you to do that. Uh, and I hadn't heard any of that in the, uh, interview, Josh. So it was. It was build a competency center.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: And then it was, no, we're gonna. We're gonna whack them all. Whack a mole, Whack them all. And, uh, and it'll be you. And I said, oh, wow, that's an interesting twist. I really appreciate that. Thought about it overnight. Came in on Wednesday and said, thank you, but no thank you. I'm not going to do that. Uh, and I think I resigned on Thursday. Uh, so I lasted three and a half to four days. Four days in that job. Came home to my product owner, and she was incredibly sad. Uh, she wished I would have holded them, I guess, or something, or. But not run away. Uh, but in my mind, the most congruent thing I could do was run away. I know that's an extreme thing, but it's a real example of, you know, sometimes you don't. You encounter a hand that you don't. Maybe it's like, ethically, this was, uh. This was. I didn't align with this at the. Ethically, I did not think this was the right strategic. I was. I was being put in place as a. An ax man. Right. And I didn't appreciate that. He should have talked to me about it. If he would have talked to me about it, we would have had a wonderful discussion, and then I would have decided to take the job with those constraints. Right. Instead of, like, surprising me with that. So. So to me, that was not a. Ah. The only option was to run away.

Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. Any reactions? I. I've had a similar situation like that where, um, I was asked to do something like that, and I just opted out. Similarly, um, it's just like, no. Like, I'm not gonna be.

Speaker B: Oh. And I didn't have. I didn't have a big bank account.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: I didn't. I didn't. And I'm not. I'm laughing about it now. At the time I was really, it was really not what. It was not. I was not a happy camper. Right. It was not an easy decision to make. It really wasn't because we were, you know, I had been on a play for a little while, but, but at the end of the day, so that, that I only bring that up not as a downer, but that's an example of maybe one of those runaway kinds of situations. They're rare. They don't happen that often. Why don't we get back to one of your things, like the hold and fold stuff? Do you have any examples of that in your, in your back pocket?

Speaker A: Yeah, like, from an initiative perspective. There was, there was one time where I had built a new space and our team was growing, and the way that we had seated everybody, it felt, I don't know, not good enough or something. I, I, I wasn't happy with it. So I came up with this idea of how we were going to restructure everything, and we were going to take an afternoon, and everybody had their own tables with, on, um, wheels and all that stuff, and there was power everywhere.

Speaker B: So was this the dude?

Speaker A: This wasn't the dude. And so one, one fateful afternoon, I said, okay, we're going to rearrange our desks. It's going to be so much better. This is how it's going to work, and this is how it's going to shape up. And so everybody was like, okay, sure, whatever. We'll give it a shot. Like, if you think this is the right thing. They were, they bought in. Like, okay, let's do it. We got halfway through, and, like, I could see the look on everybody's faces of, like, this is a shit show. Like, what are we doing? This is not gonna work. This is not gonna be any better. So, like, halfway through that move, I was like, okay, clearly I was wrong. Clearly, all of you see that I was wrong. So let's, let's not continue the charade of trying to go through this adjustment. Let's put it back to the way it was. This, you know, maybe this was like, the grass is greener on the other side. And we got halfway across the road and realized, oh, we were wrong about that. Um, so, yeah, that's like, I still remember I was standing in the corner kind of watching everybody trying to make it work. They were doing their darndest, and, you know, it was a good college try. And I could see everybody just slow. Not actually, not too slowly, but I could see the realization come across, like, waves of people's Faces of like, this is. This is worse. Um, but they still were like, okay, well, Josh said, we're going to do this. We're going to give it a shot. It was just like, okay, I was wrong. Let's undo everything. And sorry I've wasted your afternoon.

Speaker B: So can I, ah, can I, Can I. Uh, yes. And to that. So at iContact, we were moving. We were moving, uh, from one floor to another floor. And we were growing and we wanted. And so we had this wonderful opportunity to buy, uh, new desk space, reconfigure it and buy the configuration, right? So set it up any way we wanted. We wanted to set up pods, so 10 person pods, and we needed like 20 of them or something like that. And, um, and we did some trials. Uh, we did not demo. So the idea was we wanted personal, uh, space and shared space. So we had these. So around the pod where these. We planned on these. You ever see those library cubes, Josh, where you sit in a library cube and you have two little panels of wood to either side of you? You pictured this with me? Yeah, that, that, that was our, our unique space idea. So we had those and then we had, uh, like, like stuffed chairs and a big old oval table and wonderful chairs that there. And you could pivot back and then pivot into your space. And we, and we did a little demo, but we didn't demo it enough. We didn't get everyone to try it. And then we blew, I don't know, a million bucks or something, some huge sum of money on this. And we had, we had people like, we had to reconfigure the networks and the floors, Josh. Right. So every. So networks, telephone. It wasn't just. And then furniture and set it up. And we set it up and we populated it and, and people were like sitting like this and they were like chipmunks and they. And. And it would be like, like, if I'm looking visually at you and I, this is our office space. I need to see your head right here. Uh, so they didn't even. It lasted a day and there was a rebellion. It was freaking. It was like, no, what the hell? We're not. We're not chipmunks. We're. What the hell is this? And it was tious roar. And we had to, uh. We bought it. We actually had to blow another million bucks. I know, I know, I'm laughing now. But the CEO was going nuts and he didn't have any choice because it was stupid. It was like this stupid configuration. So we had to like, Go out and actually build something that was humane for everyone. It was funny and just, just. So that was a fold up. That was a hard, that was a hard fold'. Em. Would you buy that? Yeah, it was embarrassing. We had to order the stuff and it took like three, three weeks. And then folks had to come in and assemble it. And, uh, there was assemblers.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: And it was, it was just an absolute disaster. To our credit. The one thing I give us for credit is we actually, we were at that crossroads where suck it up or oops and we're going to make it right. And we did. And we decided to make it right.

Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. So it was that tough hand of like, well, I can stay in the hand. Yeah, maybe, maybe. You know, there's like a 5% chance that that next card comes up, the one that I need, but it's a really low percentage. I know I could keep playing that game or do the smart thing and fold and just live to play another day.

Speaker B: I'll never forget that. And then, then we did a retro, which we probably shouldn't even done. Right, right. We did a retro on it. Right. And we like, oh, we should demo the next time. Well, there won't be, I mean, unless, uh, it's ten years from now, we're probably good or whatever it is. So we, we had our, we had our shot and we blew it. Uh, so there's not much retroing around that we should have set up like a real space and made everyone sit and try it out. Right. And ask. And, and then adjust. Um, even, even. There wasn't even enough space for some of the screens, Josh. Right. How did I know we covered that now, you know, smart devs. Right. I mean, devs are smart. Right. And, and then they're smart asses as well. I mean, they were, they were all, it's like people bringing it.

Speaker A: Did you.

Speaker B: Oh, there's this thing called a, uh, there's a ruler you could use.

Speaker A: But, but, but there are some leaders out there just like.

Speaker B: No, no, there's, there's actually quite a few leaders. Yeah. I think out there who would not have folded. Right, right. Not they would have doubled down on that. Yeah, yeah. I, I, I mean, from a pure expenditure point of view, it's not just the money. It's embarrassing to say we screwed the pooch like that. Right. It really is. Like, really?

Speaker A: Yeah. Like, uh, you know, as I was thinking about how to kind of weave this back into the story, there's, it's like, there's times to be stubborn and there's times not to be stubborn. And what, what is, what is the differentiator of when you're. You're being appropriately stubborn? Um, yeah, I think it gets down to where Bob started, where there's like a moral obligation of like, yes, it's harder for us to do it this way. I know it is, but this is the, the right thing to do. This is the proper thing to do. Um, and then there's times where, to Bob's point, yes, it's a lot of money, but it actually makes things worse. But there's, but, but there are people that are stubborn around. You know, a decision was made and we're sticking with it. It's my decision, and I can't be seen as wrong or whatever it is. But there's, but there's times when, um, you do have to hold that line and you have to say, this is who we are. This is who we're going to be. This is how we're going to operate. And I think it is around those words. I don't think it's like any of the ancillary stuff that Bob and I just talked about. You know, the, the seating, the spacing, the labeling, the naming. Like, like people put a lot of weight on that, but at the end of the day, it doesn't really matter. Um, you know, just like, make it reasonably good. Um, so, yeah, I think that's the challenge that a lot of people have is, Is really knowing when to hold them and knowing when to fold them. And there are times when you need to hold them and it's hard, but you got to do it.

Speaker B: Well, there's. We've talked briefly in the Metacast many episodes ago, I think even before we did the leadership switch about sunk cost thinking. And there's this notion of.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: And it's. It's sort of a, uh, metaphor that a lot of leaders struggle with. Well, we, We've sunk so much into this that they hold on to it. You see it in products. We've sunk so much into the design of this product. We've sunk so much money. It's not just m. It's money. It's thought leadership, it's marketing. It's time. We've been working on this for five years. Uh, and it is money. It's sunk. You know, we've sunk the cost into this. And it's, it's really hard to, to move out of sunk cost thinking and to let it go and to release it and say, this is the decision we need to, you Know, we need to fold it and move on. Right? We need to go to the next hand, like you were saying early on.

Speaker A: And I think that's the key is moving on, and that's the real win is moving on, rather than having that anchor that everybody knows is there. Everybody recognizes that nobody likes it, but it's continually dragging them down. The real value is enabling the organization to move on to whatever's next, as opposed to always being drugged down by whatever it might be.

Speaker B: Well, and when I was originally thinking about this, I was thinking about it as being a, uh, metaphor for career. I mean, at some point, as a leader in a career, you need to look at how am I navigating, how am I holding them and folding them, and how am I playing the hands? And then do I need to walk away from the job?

Speaker A: Right?

Speaker B: Am I not in it? Is my head not in it? Am I. I was just coaching someone the other day, and they ran into. They ran into, like, they had conflicting leadership. They were both trying to strategically do transformation. Uh, the CEO was directing both of them. There was the. The seat, the. The chief, uh, the. The chief people officer, so hr, and then this transformation person. And the. The HR person was getting defensive and thought that they were trying to take their job. So there was conflict, mostly driven from the hr, the maturity of the HR person. And this was going on for months. And then finally, organizationally, uh, they had to make a decision and they cut the other person. They went with the HR person. But the leaders had created that problem. Uh, that would have been a case on. On this conflict to. To realize, hey, you know what? I'm, um, I've been folding them a lot, and now I need to walk away as a, you know, a leader. You. Our. Our time at, um, Teradata is indicative of that. There was Walkaway Bob, or. No, no, this character, Runaway Bob. No, no, I'm just going to change it. There was Runaway Bob, and there was Walkaway Josh. Right. And you were. You were playing that and then deciding when enough is enough, and, and understanding that from a career point of view. And there's some folks that really struggle with that. You and I both work with people that should have walked away five years ago, 10 years ago, and they just. They just stay, and my.

Speaker A: I.

Speaker B: And my heart goes out. Uh, I'm like, you are the most miserable. You hate this job, but you can't. You're holding them, and actually, you're probably folding most of them, right? You're folding most of the hands. You're. You're not happy playing, you're not winning the game, but you're not willing to walk away. And how do you make that pivot?

Speaker A: And I'm not going to say every. Because I. Because I can't. But most of the people that I know or that I've coached or that I've talked to that are in that position know it, okay? They see it and they accept it, but they continue to remain there. And, and there's times where, like, I don't know what else I can say. I don't know of any other coaching I can provide, or I don't know of any other guidance that I can share or any stories that is going to get you over making that decision, because ultimately it's going to have to get down to you making the decision. And, you know, I think the hard part is people are waiting for something to happen as opposed to taking action. And, well, they're waiting. Happen.

Speaker B: They're waiting for some wonderful winning hand to plop in their lap, but it's not going to happen. And so, and, and they're hoping for that. Uh, the other thing is they're complaining. I was talking to someone the other day and, and they all. They will remain nameless. And it wasn't Josh. Medicare. So. And they were just complaining and complaining and complaining. And I said, you know, I am tired of listening to you complain. You need to either shut up. This was not so Medicare. This is not a coaching note. This is a frustration note. So don't do, don't do what, um, I'm saying. But I was like, you need to just shut up and be happy where you are or you need to leave. Right? You're in this between point and I'm just absolutely exhausted. Listen to you, you know, bitch and whine about it. Just suck it up and get in. If you're going to stay there forever, then go embrace it. M. Right. Embrace it somehow. Embrace the misery. Whatever you have to do to stop. Because they would repeatedly complain about the same things all the time. And I'm like, you know, either if it's. If it's a marital couple, either renew the love for your spouse or get divorced. But. But stop. Stop whining about it.

Speaker A: Yeah. Yes.

Speaker B: So in this, um, in this song, there's. I think there's a make a decision aspect to it as well. Right? If you're in danger, like, if you're playing, you know, Kenny is a wise man and he's like, if you're in the danger zone, you, you need, you need to walk or run. Right. You're in the danger. Like you're playing poker with some miserable people and you take their money. There might be weaponry coming out. So don't sit there smirking. Right. You need to. You need to excuse yourself and run towards the door with your winnings. Uh, and on to the next. And the other thing is on to the next game. Right onto the neck. There's always another game out there that you can play. Josh. Any. Any other reactions, medications? Um, Josh went with this. I brought up this idea, and I think we're squeezing all the juice. And it had limited. We. It had limited juice to begin with. My. My bad. And I'm trying to squeeze more juice out of it. If there's any in there. Any more juice. Josh.

Speaker A: Yeah. Just to really drive the point home, Kenny's given you four actions to take, and none of them is really like just kind of hang out.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: It's take definitive action. Um, and that's how you play another game. And you keep playing more games and you. And opportunities do fall. Fall in your lap. But you do have to take some sort of action. You have to do one of those things. Otherwise you're just stuck in, you know,

Speaker B: a revolving door in nowhere land at a table with. With a. You know, with a sad look on your face.

Speaker A: Yeah. And a dwindling pile of chips.

Speaker B: Exactly. Which isn't a good thing. Hey, everyone. I want you to write. So I want you to listen to the song for me. For me. As a way of closing this episode. So you, Kenny Rogers, and the song is the Gambler. Uh, and you don't have to listen to he. He drones on a little bit. In those old songs, they would have the chorus and they would say they would sing the chorus like five or six times. You only need to listen to the chorus once, and then you'll get it and then really reflect on where you're at. How are you playing your game? Uh, in your organization, in your context. And should you be taking some Kenny Rogers esque actions? So from beautiful downtown Cary, North Carolina.

Speaker A: And beautiful downtown Fuqua, Varina, North Carolina.

Speaker B: I'm, um, Bob the Gambler. Uh, Galen.

Speaker A: And I'm Josh Anderson. Just ready to move on from this song. Shake and bake.

Speaker B: Take care, y'. All.