March 28, 2024

Episode 298 - Randall Stutman: Admired Leadership for Financial Decision-Making

March 28, 2024

Dr. Stutman is the Managing Partner of CRA | Admired Leadership, and is widely recognized as an authority in leadership style and executive development. Labeled by Goldman Sachs as the most experienced advisor and executive coach on Wall Street, he has served as a Principal Advisor to more than 2,000 Senior Executives, including 400 CEOs. With a fierce devotion to understanding what makes great leaders great, he is the founder of the Admired Leadership Institute which is dedicated to uncovering and teaching the uncommon behavioral routines of the world’s best leaders. He began his career at the University of Illinois teaching and conducting research on managing conflict in relationships, groups, and organizations. Among many published works, he is the co-author of the award-winning book, “Working Through Conflict.”

Dr. Randall Stutman is an author, highly sought-after speaker, and executive leadership coach to some of the world’s most exceptional CEOs, billionaires, and hedge fund managers. As the founder of the Admired Leadership Institute, he is widely recognized as a world-class authority on leadership strategy and style. Today, Dr. Stutman joins us to discuss the behaviours and skills that make admired leaders and how you can translate those characteristics and strategies into your financial decision-making process. Tuning in, you’ll learn about the importance of followership, find out why admired leadership is so rare, and hear some practical advice to help you make better decisions. We also discuss why you should actually disagree with your clients more often, why relationships are the cornerstone of any business, questions to ask yourself to find the right client or financial advisor, and much more. Don’t miss this fascinating and broad-reaching conversation on leadership and decision-making with specific applications for financial advice relationships!

Key Points From This Episode:

(0:03:36) A typical approach to leadership development (and why it doesn’t work).

(0:07:21) The two key qualities or characteristics of an admired leader.

(0:09:23) Benefits of followership to create change and implement decisions.

(0:10:28) A simple definition of leadership and why not everyone can be an admired leader.

(0:13:08) Why great leaders and great organizations are values-driven.

(0:16:15) Ways that consensus decision-making can hurt or strengthen an organization.

(0:23:02) Other shortcomings in the decision-making process and how to avoid them.

(0:27:29) Practical advice for financial advisors to become admired leaders.

(0:32:33) Why checklists should never be the focus of a conversation or relationship.

(0:33:52) Traits of admired leaders that financial consumers can emulate.

(0:35:55) The best way for a couple to reach agreed-upon financial goals.

(0:37:29) Tips for financial advisors to give better feedback and maintain relationships.

(0:44:30) What a successful relationship with a financial advisor looks like.

(0:46:07) How to avoid outcome bias for people who have been successful in the past.

(0:48:00) Rapid-fire time management strategies, hallmarks of effective meetings, what’s missing in virtual communication, what motivates people, and more.

(0:55:46) A very important metric by which Dr. Stutman defines success.

Read The Transcript:

Ben Felix: This is the Rational Reminder podcast, a weekly reality check on sensible investing and financial decision-making from two Canadians. We're hosted by me, Benjamin Felix, and Cameron Passmore, Portfolio Managers at PWL Capital.

Cameron Passmore: Welcome to Episode 298. And this episode is a particularly special one for me. As I think our listeners know, I'm a big fan of learning about leadership. And I've been a huge fan of our guest today, Dr. Randall Stutman, and his company Admired Leadership. We talked about Randall I guess a couple of months ago because I went to a 5-day leadership retreat in Utah led by Randall. And Randall is someone who's been studying and exploring the behaviours and routines of extraordinary leaders. And that is what he is all about and that's what his company is all about.

And as I said at the time, the experience to be with Randall and his team for a week was truly incredible. He's had an amazing career learning and observing leaders. And it's about the behaviours of leaders. Not necessarily the leaders or the star power, the leaders themselves. And that's what I find so engaging and fascinating about this.

I've been following Randall for many years and Admired Leadership as has Tessa, your sister, Ben. We're both kind of the in-house junkies of this stuff here at PWL. And that week had a big impact on me. Just things like how you make a decision? How do you give feedback? How to have a meeting? How to get the root of a problem? And it goes on and on. How to be in Admired Leadership? How to create followership?

Full disclosure, we work with Admired Leadership here on our team. Over the years, you guys have heard us talk about different firms. And people are helping us help people. And Admired Leadership has been working with us for a few months now on a regular basis. We are big fans. But through that, I asked if Randall would be willing to come on and join us to talk about leadership.

And the spin we put on it was we talked about decision-making. But we also got into how Admired Leadership in this framework can be important in working as a financial adviser and with your financial advisor. That was the angle we took with it.

Ben, I know I'm rambling on here. But any thoughts that you have?

Ben Felix: Like you said, we've been using the Admired Leadership Learning Resources as a team at PWL. And they're incredible on decision-making definitely, but on leadership more generally. It's really, really high-quality information. I think we got a lot of that from Randall in this conversation as well.

Randall has been a Principal Adviser to more than, get this, 2,000 senior executives, 400 CEOs. His work has taken him to the White House, to West Point, to Olympians. I mean the list goes on and on. Pro golfers. It's pretty wild who he has worked with in the past. And, again, it's not about the stars. It's about how these people have made and acted in a way that their leadership can be admired. That's what I find so engaging about this.

With that, I think we can just go to the interview. Ben, any final comments?

Ben Felix: I think this is a good broad-reaching conversation on leadership and decision-making with applications to financial advice relationships.

Cameron Passmore: All right. Let's go to our conversation with Dr. Randall Stutman.

Dr. Randall Stutman, it's so great to welcome you to the Rational Reminder podcast.

Randall Stutman: Privilege. I'm happy to be here.

Cameron Passmore: Great to see you again. And, again, thanks for doing this. Off the top, Randall, what is the typical approach to leadership development?

Randall Stutman: The way most people come at leadership development, and rightfully so, is you have to understand who you are. Your preferences, your personality, your traits and tendencies because without that as a foundation, it's pretty hard to improve or get better. And so, understanding and being more aware of the kind of person you are and who you've made yourself to be. That's kind of foundational.

And then the next piece is to understand who other people are. How your team or your clients, how they differ from who you are. What drives them? And how they orient? And usually, they're from different generations, and experiences, and ages, and backgrounds, and the like. Understanding them.

And then how most people approach leadership development is learning how to adapt and flex to those differences based on your foundation. One person on your team needs to be motivated by challenge by a swift kick in the butt by a high bar. Somebody else in your team needs recognition, needs praise, needs approval. You adapt and flex based on individual differences. Based on how you operate and how they operate. And so, that's how most development works. It's not how we do things and how I think of things, but that would be the most traditional way of developing yourself as a leader and as a person.

Cameron Passmore: And I wanted to start there because I've heard you talk about this at length before. Can you explain why that typical approach is actually doing some real damage?

Randall Stutman: In its foundation, there's no damage to it. It's just when people get so involved in the diagnostic, the assessment of who they are. And then they take that so seriously as to treat it as fact, as reality. This is the kind of person I am. I can't do that other thing. I'm this type of a leader and so, therefore, I won't even try to improve on this other area. It lets them off the hook. It actually puts them in a box. They allow themselves to stay in a box. And it basically robs them of accountability for actually getting better.

I want to tell you a fun story for me. I have a long-standing client and he has a London team. One day I facilitated an offsite for his London team and one of his closest London associates came to me and said, "I'm so glad Paul is getting coaching," which just kind of a backhanded compliment. And I said, "Oh, really?" I said, "Have you ever worked with anyone?" And he said, "Oh, yeah. About 10 years ago, I had a coach." And I said, "Was it a good experience?" He said, "Fabulous experience." And I said, "Tell me about it." And he said, "Well, he gave me one of those assessments." And I said, "Oh, well, what was the assessment?" He goes, "I don't remember the name of it. but I learned that I'm on the 99th percentile of excitable." And I said, "Well, that strikes me as kind of odd that that was useful to you. Because, usually, if you're on the 99th percentile of something, you already know that." And he says, "Oh, I knew I was excitable. But now I have the proof that I was one of the most extremely excitable people there was." And I said, "Well, how was that useful to you?" He said, "I came right home and gave it to my spouse and I said, "Look at my test score." And she said, "Yeah." He said, "I'm excitable. You need to learn how to deal with it." And so, that's the classic example of funny for me. But it lets people say this is who I am. Not who I've made myself to be. This is who I'm not willing to change. This is baked in my DNA.

If there's any harm, it's not usually that that's the problem. That there is a harm or a consequence that's negative to what I call the psychological or individual difference view, it would be that. It would be that people get locked into their assessments and then they live those assessments through the future and limit their ability to grow. It's not what I think is the biggest problem with that approach. But it definitely is one of the problems.

Ben Felix: What does it mean to be an admired leader?

Randall Stutman: Admired leadership and admired leaders, how I came to that connotation was I was studying some exceptional leaders and it was the word that everybody used for them. I admire them for this. I admire that. I started calling these two particular leaders that I was studying admired leaders. Now realizing, by the way, that that puts a target on people's back. And there's only one place to go from admired. It's definitely downward. Not upward. There's no higher pinnacle for a leader than being admired.

But what it means to be admired is really that the people around you respect you, trust you, and hold you in such high regard that they're willing to follow you, they believe you, they're willing to walk into traffic for you. You're skillful enough to be able to have that relationship with them, to create a connection with them that's very real and authentic but also skillful enough to gain results.

What you find is the most admired leaders are not only extraordinary results leaders but they're extraordinary followership leaders too. That is they can create great followership. People want to be around them. People feel differently when they're engaged by them about themselves. People follow them from place to place. And yet they have these tremendous decision-making and other skills that enable them to generate great outcomes, great performance. Admired leaders have two qualities; results and followership. And in extraordinary ways. And they're really rare.

Most leaders that get promoted throughout an organization, they get there because of the results. They don't get there because of the followership. And they generally are very jealous of followership leaders, by the way, that people that are able to make that connection. Because they don't like the fact that people are popular and more popular than they are who aren't able to create the results that are sustainable or that sustain the organization.

It's both those things. It's those two qualities. It's really rare. And most leaders that we look at and we would say, "Iconically, this is the great leader in the world away from politics," which is just a strange leadership context, most of those leaders are results-based leaders. Rarely do we see someone that has both sides of things. And so, we call them admired leaders.

Cameron Passmore: Can you talk, Randall, about the benefit of followership?

Randall Stutman: Listen, you and I both know that if you make a great decision, it doesn't matter if I don't have any subscription buy-in. It just doesn't matter. I can make a lousy decision because it's not going to get executed. I waste the quality of what I produce if I don't have subscription and buy-in.

Creating followership and having followership skills about how I motivate, inspire, build relationships, create team, create cohesion, those kinds of things, they are the power of great leaders. Because without them, nothing else really matters. The idea of why followership is so important and why the skills of followership are so important is in order to really execute and get things done.

You can't produce change, you can't implement a great decision, you really can't do much unless you have followership. Now, most of us have enough followership to get execution done. But we don't have the kind of followership where people are just raring to go that have the energy or commitment. That's why followership so important, is it's the differentiator for how we really produce the kind of high-performance and outcomes that we want.

Ben Felix: How can everyone in an organization be an admired leader?

Randall Stutman: I'm not sure they can. And I'm not sure that's the aspiration. If somebody thinks of you as admired, you don't control that. That's an evaluation other people give you. I think it's great. You would strive to have that level of respect and trust. But I wouldn't be after the label. I'd be after being more effective on an ongoing basis. Like, every day, just be more effective and get better. Generate more respect. More trust. More of a view that your competence is one that benefits not just you and the organization but that other person or that team.

Eventually, as you continue to mature and be seasoned, and experienced, and get more and more done in the right way, some people will come to respect you, even admire you. And that's great. But, yeah. I'm not a big fan. I don't try to teach people how to become admired because I think that would be like teaching people how to be special. You're special because other people confer you that specialness. There's nothing in n in you that makes you a special person.

Cameron Passmore: But can everybody in an organization at some level be a leader?

Randall Stutman: Sure. In fact, I think that's always the case no matter what. The way that I come at leadership and define it is leadership in this most simple form and as well as its most complex form is making situations and people better. That's it. Anytime I try to make a situation better by having a higher quality decision, or by reducing the level of conflict that exists between people, or making it so that there's more clarity, whenever I do that, I'm leading.

And same thing with people. If somebody needs to be comforted, I comfort them. If somebody needs to be encouraged, I encourage them. If somebody needs to be challenged, then I challenge them. I'm leading because I'm trying to make them better. It doesn't mean I'm going to succeed and it doesn't mean that my intentions are always pure, which is a different issue altogether. It does mean that I'm attempting to lead. And I can lead without authority, without position, without title. Because anyone can make people and situations better or make choices to do so. And the more often you do it, the more often you're leading.

What I find fascinating is when you teach that to young kids, for example, teenagers, you teach it to people that are not empowered and they realize they're leading all the time. They just need to do it more intentionally, more actively because they want to be in the game. They don't need the authority, or title, or position. And it opens up an entirely new world.

By the way, you and I both know, there's all kinds of people with position and title that are called leaders that do a really lousy job at it. Just because they’re leaders doesn't make them special people. It doesn't give them and entitle them to anything special. All of us are leading as much as we want or as little as we want. I encourage everybody to make more leadership choices. Make the choice to lead more often and to everyone's benefit.

Cameron Passmore: Love it. Let's shift to decision-making for a bit. How can or perhaps how should how an organization sees itself – things like reputation, values, brand, mission – How should those characteristics influence the decisions it makes?

Randall Stutman: Every great leader we've ever studied is value-driven. They know their values and they try to align and be very congruent with them. That makes perfect sense. The same thing applies to teams and organizations. If you don't know what you stand for, it's very difficult to have consistency and certainly difficult to raise performance to a level that's sustainable.

Job one is what are the things we're going to choose to stand for? And by the way, we can't stand for 50 things. We can only stand for a handful. It doesn't mean we don't value other things. But there's just a core set. And the majority of organizations that go through this, it becomes a human resources exercise. It's like a consulting exercise where they generate a bunch of bromides. We stand for – like, we're client-centric. We're about profitability. We're also about collaboration. We use these general words.

And in fact, when you go into most organizations, you look at the reality. Not just the aspiration, but the reality, it tends to be more specific. Take an idea like integrity. Is it integrity that you value? Or is it respect? Or is it transparency? Or is it fairness? Or is it equality? Get to it. But once you know what those values are, then they should shape every decision. They should shape who you select. They should shape who you promote, who you recognize, how you recognize. They should shape every single thing in your organization.

Now very few people and organizations have lousy values. There's not a right set of values. And so, you can drive to greatness from just about any set of values if they're held in high esteem and they're congruent with almost everything we do. They should inform strategy. They should inform everything that's going on in the organization. And that's how great organizations become great.

Cameron Passmore: As you said, values are often very broad terms and sometimes aren't concrete enough to help you make an actual decision that might be much more strategic or tactical in nature. What do you do with that? Do you have to kind of pivot to a specific corporate or business strategy to make that decision?

Randall Stutman: Maybe. But what I would suggest before you have to make that full pivot, Cameron, is I would say what you're doing really is you're taking that value and you're asking a question with it. If I hold this value, what displays that? What demonstrates it? If I hold this value, is there a more likely good answer versus not a good answer? What's the question that I can use from that value to help me make this choice or this decision?

You don't have to say, "Okay. It's respect." Not just how do I apply respect here. But if I'm being highly respectful, for example, and I was trying to make respect a cornerstone of my leadership in this situation, how would I go about doing that? What would count as respect here? And if you ask good questions from the values, you often times get a really good answer. If at that point you don't, then, yeah, maybe you need some other information or some other influence over that decision. But that would be rare in my experience. Value should be able to drive an influence almost every decision that gets made at every level.

Ben Felix: Can you talk about how consensus decision-making can hurt an organization?

Randall Stutman: In the last 50 years or so, almost all organizations have moved toward consensus. That is the value of inclusion and what expectation people have about being included, and being heard, and having an influence over the decisions that affect them has continued to rise and it's not going away.

Leaders, whether they like it or not, have had to become more inclusive and have had to create more collaborative environments. And the natural decision rule in that environment would be consensus. Consensus is not that everybody agrees. Consensus is that there's a few people that really believe strongly about something. And everyone else believes in those people or believes they can live with it. There's nobody that has to stand in the way of that consensus.

The problem is, with consensus and some organizations, it is a very inefficient way of reaching a decision because leaders identify too many stakeholders. They don't have a real way to get past the impasse of an individual that stands in its way. It's an art form in a lot of organizations to keep a decision on a table to eventually kill it by neglect.

And so, consensus can strangle the speed and the urgency of making a decision. It can even prevent a decision from being made if it's poorly used. And it's poorly used in lots of organizations. Because we're operating by consensus, it takes us way too long to reach a conclusion. And in other cases, we never reach that conclusion because some people are uncomfortable and we allow that to occur.

Consensus is a wonderful way of making a decision. You have to have goodwill to do it in an organization. That is people that believe in each other and trust each other's and defer each other's judgments and subject matter expertise. But even when you have it, if it's not engaged correctly, it can strangle an organization's ability to decide. That's a pretty common phenomenon.

People that are listening to this, some of them are going to go, "Oh, that's interesting.” But some of them who live this on an ongoing basis go, "That's exactly what happens in my organization. We never reach the decisions because we're always trying to reach consensus first. And we never reach perfect consensus. So, things just don't get decided. And what a shame because we're missing opportunities. We're losing all kinds of initiative." And it happens in more organizations than you would think.

Cameron Passmore: The key there though, Randall, is the drive for perfect consensus. Your definition of consensus I would say is not commonly understood.

Randall Stutman: It's not mine. It's the academic. The decision-making way of thinking about a decision rule called consensus. It doesn't come from me. But that idea that consensus is champions with everyone else who can agree, that's what consensus is.

But even if you operate, Cameron, from the rule that consensus, everyone agrees, that makes it even harder. It makes it more difficult to ever reach a conclusion. Imagine getting 30, 40, 50 people all who agree 100% with not only the decision but all the tactics below it. Really, really hard to achieve. And it only takes one or two people to say, "That's not my self-interest, that decision." That's been my experience. And then they ask questions and stand in the way of that consensus and they hold everything up and they hold the organization hostage basically.

Ben Felix: Okay. If we take consensus out and say that's maybe no good, generally speaking.

Randall Stutman: Oh, no. Consensus is great. You just got to do it differently. That's all.

Ben Felix: Sure. Okay. I think that's kind of the question I want to ask. Who should be making decisions if it's not a consensus mechanism?

Randall Stutman: I think operating by consensus is going to be the norm going forward. I mean, I think it's the way you create collaborative and build subscription and great collaboration in organizations. I'm not at all opposed to consensus. It was delightful to watch organizations, society move in that direction. It's much more person-centred and all kind of advantages. But, again, the subscription idea is a big deal.

The key is this, every major decision that has to be made has to have a key decision maker. Have to have somebody who's a decision-maker. Now if you operate by consensus, the decision-maker is just one person at the table. It's just one person who has a view. Maybe they're the most senior or most experienced person, so maybe their view establishes the foundation of what counts as a great decision. Maybe they lay out some guardrails, give some guidelines, whatever else. But then, at that point, their opinion is just like everyone else's.

The only time they become a decision-maker is when we can't reach a consensus. When we can't, then they have to make the call. They have to listen to everybody's arguments and say, "At the end of the day, I'm the decision maker, I was hoping we could reach a consensus. I was hoping the team would do that." We can't. We've set out some timeline. And now I'm going to have to make the call. And this is the call I'm going to make based on the objective hearing of everyone's views.

If you simply identify a decision maker and everyone knows, by the way, that in three weeks' time is an example, if we don't reach consensus, they're going to make the call. Trust me, you're going to get a lot more consensus and you're not going to be held hostage. It's a really simple change but most organizations haven't accepted it or don't do it.

Again, you don't have to do that for everything. But for major decisions, you don't want to be held up by a small minority voice that is against something. And somebody has to make the call. And because we don't identify the decision-maker, everyone's making the decision together in consensus and that's the problem. It's not hard to solve. And then when you do it that way, consensus is your friend. It's a wonderful decision rule relative to organizations.

Ben Felix: Interesting. Okay. Consensus is not bad. But there needs to be an ultimate decision-maker assigned.

Randall Stutman: Somebody has to be able to break the log jam when there's a log jam. And if you don't do that, then consensus is a problem.

Cameron Passmore: Which is why you need trust.

Randall Stutman: Absolutely. There's lots of other decision rules, by the way. But consensus is the most popular and most active. And, rightfully so, in today's world, I can't even imagine or even conceive of the next decision rule beyond that. We've moved away from unilateral decision-making, autocratic decision-making, decision-making by vote, which is a very strange thing in some organizations.

The ultimate irony here – and I don't want to give anybody a headache, but the ultimate irony is how does your organization even decide what decision rule is going to operate? Because you need a decision rule to even make that decision. If I decide we're all going to operate by consensus, do I do that by consensus? Which means I'm already applying that rule. Or do I do that by majority vote? Well, why would I only vote on our decision? How do we decide that we're going to vote?

The ultimate paradox is, this is back to the decision-maker thing, somebody has to make a call that says, "Here's how we're going to decide what decision rule we're going to make." And that's a unilateral call. And it's always the case. There's no way to escape it. And now, again, I don't mean to give anybody vertigo in the process of thinking about that. But I always find it funny because people say, "We've chosen to operate by consensus. And I'll say, "Well, how did you reach that decision? Was it by consensus?" It's just too funny.

Ben Felix: That is funny.

Randall Stutman: You have to be somebody like me to think that's funny though. But –

Ben Felix: I'm laughing too. We talked about where consensus can be problematic. Can you talk about other shortcomings that you often see in decision-making processes?

Randall Stutman: If you look at the decision-making literature over the last 50 years and so – and, by the way, it's gotten fabulous. It's gotten so much better. But, generally, it focuses too much on certain biases that decision-makers have to the benefit. I mean, we know there's more than 25 major biases that decision-makers have. And, again, back to that psychological view, if you understand your biases, you might be able to offset them to some degree.

But there's a bunch of things that we know that are really enhanced decision-making in a big way. Just take the idea of options. When I say me, I'm using the generic we across the literature of everyone that studies decision-making of which I'm one person. Not my forte. But I certainly spent a lot of time thinking about it and reading about it. But we know that any team that operates and tries to make decisions, the more options they identify early on, the more likely they're going to land on a really good option.

Too often, what happens in teams is we have two or three options. We don't get creative beyond that. We think we're constrained by those options. By the way, they may be very good options. But they may not be and. We've limited our ability to think creatively and to look for other win-wins and all kinds of other things.

The better thing to do early on, of course, is to identify the problem and then think about all the possible options that we have to approach that problem or opportunity for that matter. And then once we have that list, then to evaluate those options. And what you're going to find is simply more options produces better quality decisions. How simple is that?

But if you ask me what gets in the way of decision-making, the biggest problem is too many times we actually solve the wrong problem. We're making a decision about something that's not the problem. And that is because we haven't spent the time to identify the root cause of the issue, or the problem, or the opportunity.

And so, as a result, because we haven't spent that time, we haven't admired the problem long enough, we haven't identified the root causes or issues underlying it. We therefore presume what the problem is and we solve it. But it's the wrong problem. And so, therefore, we realize we still have the same problem we had before even though it was an elegant solution we put it in place. The consequences and implication symptoms of that problem haven't gone away and that's because we solved the wrong one. And that happens a lot.

Ben Felix: That's so important. We did an episode a while ago with Ralph Keeney who studies decision-making, and he talked a ton about the points you just made.

Randall Stutman: I have to look at that one. He's really smart. So, I'm sure I can learn something from listening to a podcast on him. I missed that one. Sorry about that.

Cameron Passmore: Randall, are there some decisions that should be made quicker and some that should be made slower especially given the number of options you're bringing to the table?

Randall Stutman: You can divide decision-making into two different buckets. Decisions that can be reversed and decisions that can't. By reversed, I mean easily reversed. And other ones that you can't reverse them, they're not very easily to revoke them once you put them in place.

Once we make the decision to buy the house and we actually put the money down, it's hard to revoke. And once we decide on a new strategy and we bake that into what we're going to do tactically in our plans and operating budgets, it's really hard to revoke it.

You're going to treat decisions that can't be revoked or not reversed very easily very different than decisions they can. Naturally, you're going to spend more time with more analysis, with more energy, with just more engagement around decisions. And not just because they're important. Some decisions can't be revoked that aren't that essential but they still can't be revoked. You're going to spend more time on those kinds of decisions than the decisions that can be reversed. You're going to treat their decision process a little bit more seriously. You're going to engage with a lot more vigour. That's just natural. But it's not so natural that we automatically do that all the time.

I always advise people to bust up decisions in terms of those. Just ask the question. Can you reverse this decision? Can you revoke it? Would it be not that hard to change course? And if you can change course, then make your decision but don't fret about it. Go through your process and then figure it out and land on something. And better you act more quickly on those kinds of decisions. Why? Because there's not that big a consequence. I don't mean the consequences aren't real. But we can reverse them if we need to. Versus the other kind of decisions where we can.

Again, you guys are treating me like I'm the decision-making expert of the world. I'm not. I just happen to study leaders. I don't know why we're on this decision stuff. But nonetheless, keep going if that's where you want to go.

Cameron Passmore: Well, we're going to shift right now, Randall. I want to get into some of your thoughts around our world in the business of financial advisory services.

Randall Stutman: Of which I'm a client. Keep going.

Cameron Passmore: Excellent. How do you think a financial adviser could or should act like an admired leader?

Randall Stutman: If you think about leadership and making situations and people better, they are leading their clients. And if they're not leading their clients, something's seriously wrong. They should be thinking about who I am? What I am? But also, what is it that is my particular situation? And how do they make it better? And how do they make me a better partner in the process based on what I need, what I think I want, and so forth and so on?

Getting people heard, understanding their risk appetites, all the normal stuff that everybody oandn your listeners know. But using that work in order to intentionally help improve and grow not just the assets but the person themselves, the relationship also, that's a pretty important part of all of this.

At the end of the day, this is all about relationships. You and I both know, you can do great work and not maintain a relationship. And what a waste of time and energy. Most of your advisers are more in the relationship business than they think and they're a lot less in the financial advice business than they think. And I know that's controversial. But I'd argue that one comes before the other.

If you're not any good at building relationships, you're not going to grow an incredible practice. At the same time, you're not going to grow that incredible practice unless you offer some pretty sound advice too. One's more the requisite but it's not sufficient, if that makes sense.

Cameron Passmore: Are there any admired leadership behaviours that you think might be unique to financial advisers?

Randall Stutman: No. I mean relationships are relationships are relationships. And just like leadership is, the best behaviors universally apply in all cases. That doesn't mean that there aren't some things that you would do specifically as an advisor. You would do it other places but you might emphasize it more as an advisor kinds of things. It depends on who you're dealing with.

Let me tell you, I'm in the business of promoting what I do. I run a large organization of coaches. And I've learned this a long time ago. I deal with a lot of very high-level, high-profile people, CEO types, and everything else. It might surprise you, but when I go into conversation with those people, which probably are not dissimilar in terms of the client set of your listeners, one of the first things I do when I get in those environments is I try to find a place to disagree. And people would go, "Really? I mean, because I've been taught, I want to be likeable." And I go, "I want you to be likeable too. And I want to be likeable too." I want people to trust me. If you disagree with someone and really make a good and sound argument, who does that but somebody that's willing to tell you the truth?

And, by the way, that tends to be my brand. I tend to be very candid. And I don't smash people on the head with the truth. I don't want to be offensive or unpalatable with the truth. I always want to be more candid because that's my real role as an advisor coach. I go in there looking, sometimes I can't find it. But, boy, if I can disagree early in a conversation with a prospective client, I go right for the disagreement. Because I want to prove to them that they can trust that I'm going to tell them what I really think.

Now that doesn't work every time but it works more in my advantage. At least I've convinced myself it does. It works more in my advantage than the downside. And I build really trusting relationships with people because of my candidness. Now, that's me and that's how I approach it. But it wouldn't be surprising to me that a lot of your advisers should be disagreeing with their potential prospective clients more than they actually think.

Some people are smiling when they listen to it because they go, "I disagree all the time. I'm dealing with people that don't know what they're talking about." That's the simple way of disagreement. But disagreeing on something truly of substance where you have taken a position, where they have also taken a very strong position, and saying, "Hey, I want to disagree agreeably, by the way. I want to say you have a right to your position. I want to say, hey, that makes sense. I understand where you're coming from. But here's what my experience says. And this is kind of how I see it. And so, I have a different view than you do." Do that early.

Now that's just one example. I'm not arguing that that's the tactic or strategy of everything. But I can think of lots of things that advisers might be doing relationally that might be a little bit different than we do in most relationships. If I'm trying to find new friends, new neighbours, and I'm looking for a place to disagree very early, that's just not going to go well. But I would with prospective clients in that case.

there are some things we do with clients that are a little bit different. But how you add value, the kinds of ways you build trust, how you congratulate, how thankful and grateful you are, some of the things you do to include people, those are all universal things to building great relationships. And they work no matter what arena you're in.

Cameron Passmore: I think your disagree point is so insightful, especially – and I assume you do this with your clients. You link that disagreement to the goal goals they've come to you to try to solve. Is that a correct assessment?

Randall Stutman: Not always. But usually. I'm just trying to build trust through candidness. I deal with CEOs and some of the most powerful people in the whole world. Everybody in the world wants to tell them what they already want to hear. They find it refreshing. Not all of them. If somebody's willing to disagree and stake out some ground. Even if they don't agree with it they go, "Okay, here's somebody that I can trust that's going to tell me the truth. Now I have to assess whether you actually know what you're talking about," which is a separate issue altogether. But again, relationship before content.

Cameron Passmore: So many things in our world, there are items to do in all the different parts of someone's financial world. This becomes this massive checklist of stuff that has to get done. I'll link us back to your earlier comments around it's important to have great followership to inspire people to get that list done. Do you have any thoughts around having a list to help people and to motivate people to get through that list of to-do items?

Randall Stutman: Checklists are really valuable because they help people organize, remind things, remember things. I mean, I think checklists are great. They also help create consistency and the like. The key is though not to create them and treat them as so much of a task that they become the focus of your conversation or relationship. That's all. I think if you have to get stuff done, you have to get stuff done.

We go to the grocery store all the time, we have a grocery list. But the grocery list is not the focus of our day. It doesn't become the mainstay of our conversation. And it's not even really what we do spend all the time in the grocery store doing. We're checking off our list but we're also looking at all kinds of things. And thinking about what we're going to cook and lots of other things. You just can't let the checklist dominate and become the overarching focus of the conversation in the relationship. But the checklist is really important. Without the checklist, I forget all kinds of stuff. I have to go back four times. What a waste of time. I want a good checklist and I want to be able to work through it. Just don't let it take things over. Don't let it drive you.

Ben Felix: Sticking with the theme of financial advice relationships, what traits of an admired leader do you think a financial consumer should bring to their relationship with a financial adviser?

Randall Stutman: Well, I think they should want a real mutually influential relationship. I don't think it should be one-sided. There's all kinds of different clients in the world. If you're somebody that doesn't value relationships, then go find other people that don't value relationships. You'll have a great time. But I would want somebody, if I was on the other side, to, A, I would want to be heard. I want to listen to you. But I want you to listen to me. I want to build a relationship with you. I want you to build a relationship with me.

If I'm a client on the other side, I want you to explain the things that I want to know. But I don't want you to over-explain the things I don't. We don't drop our car off to the service people and go, "Can you explain to me exactly what you did and mechanically how that all worked? Because – no. No. That's what I'm paying you to do. Now tell me – by the way, the bill's bigger than I thought it was going to be. So, you must have done some really great work." But at the end of the day, I don't want all your theory. I don't need to know. Are you good at judging what I should want to know, and what I need to know, and what I would value? Or are you just dumping on me all this stuff to make me impressed by how much you know? Because I don't need your theory. If I have all your theory, by the way, I can do what you do.

By the way, there's way too many people that think they can do what your advisers do. And that's part of the problem. I want you to find the right clients, the clients that resonate with you or that are consistent with your values. But when you say to me, "So, what should those clients do?" It's a hard one because it depends on – I mean there are going to be different kinds of clients and they're going to have different needs.

The real question is are you finding the clients that should be looking for you too? Because there's a match in heaven there for everyone. And there's going to be enough clients, by the way. But if you take on everybody, you're going to waste a lot of time and be a very frustrated person. Because there's going to be people that do things, ask you things and you go, "Why am I doing this? This is not normal?" And the reason is you found the wrong person and they found you. And, by the way, you're the wrong person for them too. You need to find the clients that want to find you and then satisfy them in the way that they want to be satisfied.

Cameron Passmore: Question for you on goal setting. Do you have any thoughts around the best way for a couple to come to agreed upon financial goals?

Randall Stutman: They need a target. I think if there's any advice I would give is the more you start from a blank piece of paper the harder it is to reach an agreement. It's easier for people to riff off of and respond or react to a position, a proposal, a target. Give people a target as to what goals we think might be reasonable and start from there. And once you have that target, then you'll know – once you have that proposal and there's disagreement, now the key is to find what's the underlying reason for that disagreement. And then we can start walking it through.

Listen, here's what I've learned. A lot of disagreement has nothing to do with the content. It has to do with the relationship. And so, when the relationship is not ideal or problematic, it gets expressed through that goal-setting process. People fight over goals not because they don't agree with the goals, they have a problem in the relationship and they're expressing their disagreement over the goals. They're using that as the forum by which to say our relationship is not where I want it to be.

Trust me, when your spouse says to you, "You don't put the top of the toothpaste back on the toothpaste tube," it has nothing to do with the toothpaste tube or the top. It has to do with, "Do you hear me? Do you respect me? Am I a partner? Do you understand all the work I do around here?" It's a relationship issue. It's not about the toothpaste. But they'll use the toothpaste in order to bring it up. That happens in goal setting a lot too.

Ben Felix: What do you think is the best way to deliver feedback in an advisory relationship?

Randall Stutman: Oh, my gosh. You got a couple, about five, six hours for me?

Cameron Passmore: I knew it.

Randall Stutman: There's so many important things to giving feedback. This will be a little bit abstract but it'll be worth it by the end. When you think about giving feedback, the very reason we call it the word feedback is because it comes from a place of power, experience, expertise. Let me give you some feedback. Let me give you an idea that is important for you. Criticism falls in the same bucket.

Now I know very few people that prefer or like criticism or feedback. If I came to you and say, "Hey, Ben, I have some feedback for you." "I don't know you. Wow. I can't wait to get it." Very few people are like that. Imagine the feedback message I was sending you is that you need to be more diligent of understanding where the marketplace is in any given moment. Just making that up. Now I can say, "Can I give you a little feedback? That you're not as diligent as you should be and you need to have more discipline in understanding the macro environment." That produces resistance because it comes from a place of power. It says I have the experience, I have the expertise. I'm the one with the knowledge. And that's why I'm giving you this feedback. By the way, I'm your adviser. And so, I have the power.

That same message, I can reduce power by offering some advice. The advice is the same message, by the way, but it reduces power. I can say, “Can I give you some advice? And you say, "Sure. What's your advice?" Now, advice I can accept or reject. And it comes from your experience but it doesn't come from your authority. Same message. My advice is that you have a more macro-oriented view and take more discipline to understand what's going on in the marketplace.

Now I can reduce power again by calling it a suggestion or a recommendation. Can I make a suggestion? Sure. What's your suggestion? My suggestion is that you learn and I help you learn how it is that you can have a more macro view and so forth and so on. Now same message except I simply reduce power.

Anytime power is high, people resist it. As power gets lower, people resist it less. All the advisers should not be in the feedback business they should not be in the criticism business. They shouldn't even be the advice business. They should be in the recommendation and suggestion business. If they start thinking like that, and acting like that, and describing things like that, they're going to find that people have a higher degree of receptivity. That is so basic in the way I think about things. It doesn't even bother me to give it to your whole audience. I'm happy to talk about that.

Now, we know so many cool things about feedback. How the best instructors, and teachers, and leaders, and coaches give feedback that I really could spend a tremendous amount of time and tell you a lot of the magic that we've learned over time. But just starting there is so important. Just reduce your power and start describing things more in recommendation and suggestion and you'll find that people respond very differently to you.

Cameron Passmore: We are all in a similar business. We provide advice to people. Do you have thoughts or experience around how often you should connect with the person you're helping to build out an effective relationship?

Randall Stutman: There's no exact right answer. Your instinct is probably more than less. People that aren't able to sustain relationships generally don't have enough cadence and frequency of contact. And so, the question though is through what mediums? By what value am I going to connect with you?

I'll give you an example that is a personal pet peeve of mine. I have insurance. I have multiple insurance agents. I live in different places. And every one of them works in the same organization. They don't know that I have other agents probably. And they all call me once a year. Actually, they call me twice a year. The first time they call me, they always piss me off because they call and wish me a happy birthday, which is on their checklist.

Now I don't know these people. And, by the way, birthdays are not a happy moment for me anymore. The idea that somebody I don't know calls me and wishes me a happy birthday is enough to put cream cheese right in my shoes. I just want to do anything to get away from them. And if it weren't for the fact that I actually coached the CEO of this particular organization, I'd probably change insurance companies just for that reason. How dare you treat me so unrelationally as to put me on a checklist and then do something that is highly relational in a way where we don't have a relationship? As you can tell, I get energized by this, right?

But the second thing is they call me once in a while and they'll say, "Hey, can we review your policies?" And, again, I don't know you. It's not a bad idea to review my policies. But wouldn't it make a lot more sense to have a little bit more cadence with that to say, "Hey, by the way, we notice this in your policies. And, by the way, this is something. This is a trend going on in the marketplace. And then, by the way, we're in your neighbourhood if you'd like this to stop by." Then, all of a sudden, you say, "Can we review your policies?" I go, "This is somebody that actually cares about me. This is somebody that's thinking about my business. This is somebody that's thinking about my insurance. This is somebody that wants to have a relationship with me and that is actually engaging me."

I think your instinct is cadence and frequency matter. I'm going to guess that it happens to have a minimum seasonally. In other words, have no contact with you at all for a whole season. All I get from you is something in the mail from you a statement or whatever else. We've gone way too long for you to sustain our relationship. And my guess is it's a lot more frequent than that for most people depending on the size of their clientele and so on and so on.

But you can't sustain a relationship and keep a conversation alive unless you have at least a quarterly cadence to real connection, to real conversation. Not just a hello. Not a Christmas card. Not a here's a question for you. Here's my e-letter. By the way, e-letters, most ridiculous things in the whole world. Nothing could be less relational than an e-letter. Put me on some master distribution and tell me some amalgamated form you're telling to the rest of the world. We don't have a relationship. I'm just a checkbox on a list for you.

E-letters, great. As long as they're personalized. As long as on the top of that e-letter I call you and I want to talk to you about it. Or I emphasize one paragraph in it. Or say, "Hey, please don't miss this," or whatever else. And I include a photo of my most recent vacation where you and I have been before. Whatever it might be. But by themselves, they basically kill relationships. So does social media too. But that's all a different issue.

Ben Felix: You made such an interesting point that when someone does something relational, like wish you happy birthday, when they don't actually have a relationship with you, that's actually detrimental to the, I guess, non-existent relationship in that case.

Randall Stutman: If I didn't already have a policy, we would call it stalking.

Ben Felix: Context matters, I guess.

Randall Stutman: Yeah. Exactly. And so, somebody you don't know all a sudden says, "Hey, can I help you mow your grass?" And you'd be like, "Okay. Whoever you are, get as far away from me as possible." If that person says, "Hey, I don't really don't know you. Okay. We've never really met. But I would love to invite you to my organization to learn more." You go, "That's great." Okay, let me back up slowly. Yeah, it's called stalking. Nobody wants to be stalked. You have to have a real conversation.

Relationships and conversations are so tightly connected. They're basically the same thing. And so, I have to find a way to create a real conversation with you. And once I have it, I can't let it die and I have to sustain it. But I have to create it. Until I have that foundation, anything I do that's highly relational is going to be very awkward.

Ben Felix: You spoke to elements of this. But how would define a successful relationship with an adviser?

Randall Stutman: It's mutual. Both parties are influencing. Both parties are adding value to each other. Both parties are curious of each other. It's not just curiosity on one side. Both parties are engaged in common goal, obviously. We agree to what that goal is. And both parties have a commitment to the longevity of the relationship. We both expect to have this relationship over a really long period of time and we act accordingly. That's what I would expect.

Cameron Passmore: From a family perspective, do you have any thoughts around how you would motivate kids to get involved in the financial decision, financial planning process?

Randall Stutman: Well, first, you have to ask them good questions. That's where it would start I guess. Again, it's not my business. But if I was trying to get kids involved, I would want to elevate their status in our conversation and I'd want to ask them a bunch of questions and what they know without having answers. Like, no gotchas. Oh, let me ask you a question. Oh, gotcha. You don't know something that I was hoping you knew or that you should know. I want to ask lots of questions and get very curious about how they think of wealth, and how they think of money, and what they think in terms of their own careers and things of that nature.

When you get curious and you invest in that curiosity with other people and you ask lots of quality questions, you're going to find a lot of it's going to get reciprocated. Not all of it. You don't control a lot of the other context of where these kids have come from, and what they've learned, and what they're expecting and the like. But reciprocity, one of the strongest things between human beings. And curiosity, energy, interest, inquisitiveness, they're all highly reciprocated between people and kids are no exception.

Ben Felix: You work with a lot of successful people and powerful people as you mentioned, how do you avoid outcome bias affecting the decisions of people who have been successful in the past?

Randall Stutman: Separating between outcome and process. You and I both know that we can have some great outcomes with having a lousy process and vice versa. We can have a great process and have a lousy outcome. We don't control the outcomes. We always control the process. How you avoid some of the biases? You control for what you can control for and you don't talk yourself into believing that, in fact, your experience, prowess, and everything else is entirely in control.

I don't mean you don't have any influence on the outcome. The hardest part about dealing with successful people is they've been successful. And so, they believe in their own nonsense. They believe these things that are just spurious, that have no real correlation to their success. They believe those are the driving forces of their success. And they double down on them, which is even weirder. And so, they continue to do things.

I can't tell you how many leaders who are successful despite what I would consider to be an abrasive, mercurial style as leaders. And they've actually convinced themselves it's because they're so harsh and stern that that's what's created their success. And so, they double down. And even as they get more experienced, and older, and more successful, they get even harsher, they get even more coercive. And it's so fascinating, they learn the wrong lesson from what I consider to be the wrong outcome.

That's the thing you do is you avoid being overly committed and attributing too much of your own influence to outcome. And you entirely control the thing you can control, which is process.

Cameron Passmore: We kind of have a catchall of rapid-fire questions for you, Randall.

Randall Stutman: Oh, wow. This is kind of like speed dating except speed questioning?

Ben Felix: Yeah.

Cameron Passmore: If you have longer answers, we welcome them. It's up to you.

Randall Stutman: All right. I'll try to be as succinct as I can.

Cameron Passmore: Do you have any general time management strategies that you'd recommend for busy leaders?

Randall Stutman: That's your speed question? That's the one you want me to do fast? Wow. Okay. If I was trying to improve someone's time orientation, the most important thing in there is you got to start on the hardest things first every day. You can't start on the easy things first. You got to start on the hardest things first. And it just takes a lot of discipline. But it's going to make you so much more productive.

And, by the way, you're giving yourself a reward because the easy things are going to come later. You're looking forward to those things. And so, you really just have to tackle the hard things and you have to know what those hard things are as you look at your priorities, and look at your tasks, and everything else. That's where you got to start.

And as simple as that sounds, it's the magic of almost everybody that's any good at being productive and time-oriented. The second thing I would say to you is it's really about being time congruent with your values. Tell me how you spend your time, I'll tell you what your real values are. You got to look at your time field all the time and say, "If I look at this field of time that is all in my appointments and all my commitments, is it truly representing my values what I say matters to me?" And if it does, then kudos to you. And if it doesn't, you need to make some changes.

Ben Felix: Great answer to that question. This one's probably also not going to have a short answer. What do you think makes an effective meeting?

Randall Stutman: An effective meeting, we know exactly what the outcome we're looking for. We've already agreed as to what the goal of this meeting is. We know we're making a decision. We know we're about discussing things to generate an idea. We know what the goal or the outcome we're looking for is. We're going to basically make sure that, before we conclude this meeting, it's absolutely perfectly clear what our next steps are. And there's a lot of other things that make for great meetings. But if you did those two things alone, that would be a big, big plus.

Cameron Passmore: What are some of the biggest impacts in a post-COVID world of fewer face-to-face meetings and more of these virtual-type relationships?

Randall Stutman: What we know is a couple of things. And they're surprising. Number one is people really are more productive when they set their own boundaries. People get more done with higher quality when they're in control of their time, when they work, and where they work. No question.

The problem is that two things become missing. One is the relationship and cohesion between colleagues and between leaders and the people that they lead gets frayed or fragmented. So, that people are out of mind. They don't get thought of for assignments. They don't get thought of for promotions. They don't get thought of. Period.

And then second, it's impossible virtually remotely to get as much feedback. Because most of the feedback we get are through nonverbals of eyebrows, and facial expressions, and things of that nature. And so, we don't get enough of it. In fact, don't forget, when we get on these team Zoom calls, Google Meet calls, we stare at our own image more than we stare at anything else. We're not even seeing the other person very much.

In the process of that, those are the two things we have to make up for. And we have to figure out a way to make up for them. There's lots of alternatives but you asked me for speed. That's the consequence. I want people to have flexibility. But I also need to create more relational cohesion. And I need a lot more feedback than what that medium allows us to have.

Ben Felix: You mentioned people being more productive when they set their own boundaries. Are most people self-motivated?

Randall Stutman: I live in a world of self-motivated people. I'm probably the police officer that only sees crime and then I think everybody's a criminal. Yeah, in my world, most people are very self-motivated. But probably not true. But I don't have a good lens on that one. What I can tell you is you have to have at least to modest amount of self-motivation, otherwise, you don't get anything done. That creates the discipline to even get out of bed in the morning. And there are some people that lack that for sure.

But what I might say is this, there's a difference between A-players, B-players, and C-players. A-players are highly self-motivated and only need a goal. That's what makes them A players. They just need a direction. They just need know what you're after and they will figure it out. And they are highly motivated to figure it out for whatever reason. Intrinsic motivations, extrinsic ones, rewards, whatever ever it might be. We know that the best players are self-motivated. I don't think there's anybody that's too self-motivated is what I'm getting at. And so, anything you can do as a leader to foster, promote, encourage self-motivation I think is part of your job.

Ben Felix: You acknowledged or mentioned that you have some serious selection bias in the people that you deal with. What do you think motivates that sample, the ultra-motivated people?

Randall Stutman: Yeah. There are some people that are very much coin-operated, that are motivated by compensation and other kinds of rewards. No question. And there are some people that are very much motivated by the self-satisfaction they receive by lots of positive feedback, and encouragement, and so on and so on. But I'm going to tell you that the people that I deal with the most that makes the most impressive is they have a tremendous desire to improve to be better. And their learning orientation is what makes them so different. And they're motivated to learn not so much to reach outcomes.

Their notion is, "If I'm not getting better, if I'm not learning, and if I'm not engaging and recognizing more things about what's happening both to me and everybody else, then I would lose the desire to do what I'm doing." And so, they are learning machines and they're self-motivated to learn more than they are toward outcomes and other kinds of intrinsic even or other kinds of rewards.

Ben Felix: I really like that answer partially because I got some confirmation bias. One of my benchmarks – I don't know if I ever thought about it as something that motivates me, but I always want to be able to look back to a previous point in time and be embarrassed about how little I knew about something that I now know about.

Randall Stutman: It's a great one. Not knowing what you don't know is a pretty big deal.

Cameron Passmore: Second to the last question, Randall. Can you talk about what you see happening in the next 12 months for your company, Admired Leadership?

Randall Stutman: We're excited about Admired Leadership. As you know, we write field notes every day and they go out to tens of thousands of people. And that's great. And those are free to anybody, admiredleadership.com field notes. And we love our platform and our coaches. We continue to hire more coaches and train them up. And we're having more success with our behavioural view every time. We are probably the largest coaching firm of full-time employees in the US. We don't know. But we suspect what we are.

But the thing that I'm most excited about is we have a digital coach that's about to come out. And that digital coach is informed only by our data. That is by our field notes and our transcripts, to our webinars, and our conferences, and those kinds of things, and our white papers, and things that have been happening inside our place for years. We think our answers and our content is better than everybody else just like I hope we do. But we really think it's different.

And so, this digital coach, which has a snarky attitude, by the way, which I think is really fascinating, we call him Alex. And it might be her. It's a gender-neutral name, Alex. And, Alex, when you ask Alex a question, Alex uses our data to give an answer.

And here's the other cool thing about Alex, is when you ask Alex a question that doesn't have an answer that's any good, that our data is any good, I'll get the question and then I'll create the answer and then it'll go in our database. It's going to get better and better over time. It's going to be a great tool. Our own coaches can't wait to get their hands on it. And it'll be part of our platform and things like that. I'm excited about an AI digital coach that'll get more better and better. Initially, it'll just be text and you'll be able to select from six voices. But it'll eventually over time have an avatar and you'll be able to interact with it. As AI develops, we're going to be as cutting-edge as we can initially.

But, again, if you use any other AI device, it's going to pull from the entire world of the internet, which is why it gives you such mediocre advice. The advice is all solid, by the way. It's just not interesting. And it gives you much of it. Our digital coach, Alex, is exciting. He's going to come out here shortly. And I'm anxious for it. And, hopefully, it's a big splash.

Cameron Passmore: That is very cool. I'm a big fan of your field notes. And I believe you write most of them, right?

Randall Stutman: Most of them.

Cameron Passmore: Excellent. They come out every morning. They're fantastic. Final question for you, Randall. How do you define success in your life?

Randall Stutman: I'm a lot influenced by people that I've asked that same question to. And I've changed my view of what counts as success drastically throughout the course of my life. And the thing that has created my success or my definition of success most recently, and by that, I mean the last 10, 15 years, goes like this; if you ask the majority of very established, very successful leaders what defines success, they will unequivocally tell you it is how many people they matter to. How many people – not that they used to influence, not that they once had impact on. But how many people do they matter to right now? That to me just resonates with me and it just makes too much sense.

And so, I've started to gear the way I think of my own success and the way that I think about how I want to be successful in the future about how many people can I really matter to. Now I don't mean matter just in terms of influence. I want to have a relationship with people. There's a reason I don't write books. There's a reason I'm not even on social media. I'm not even on LinkedIn. I don't want people to find me. And it's not because I enjoy my privacy. Although, I do enjoy my privacy. And it's not because I'm scared of haters. Although, haters, I can't even imagine. I haven't had any haters yet. But that's just a matter of time.

What I really value is relationships, real interaction, real conversation between real people. And so, how many people can I have real conversation with that I really matter to? That not only value my advice and counsel but value me as a person, and that I matter, and I value them. And so, that to me is success. And the more the better. The more we die with, the more successful we've been.

Very few people look back in their lives, truly at the end of their lives, and say, "I should have tried a different strategy. I should have spent more time investing." It's all relationships that become the foundation for how they define themselves and define their success. And I've learned from them. And I agree.

Cameron Passmore: It's a beautiful answer. Randall, this has been an incredible hour. Thank you again so much for joining us.

Randall Stutman: Oh, pleasure. Thank you for having me. Anything I can ever do for you, guys, you just got to ask.

Ben Felix: Thanks, Randall.

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