Making Vulnerability your Superpower with Jacob Morgan, Author & Keynote Speaker

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:00) Today, we're talking to bestselling author Jacob Morgan about how to lead your teams with vulnerability. You're listening to Joel Beasley, Modern CTO.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:14) Dude, so you're a podcaster.

(Jacob Morgan at 00:00:16) Yeah, I got a podcast as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:18) Tell me about that.

(Jacob Morgan at 00:00:19) Focus on leadership. So I bring in a lot of CEOs and organizations around the world, ask them a lot of fun questions about their careers and leadership styles and what they learned, and try to share that with everybody else.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:33) Nice. How is that going so far? Is it growing? Is it just started? Are you a thousand episodes into it?

(Jacob Morgan at 00:00:39) I think it's almost a thousand, actually. Oh, nice. Now you're making me curious about how many we've done. Oh, 900 actually today. So we do full episodes, but then sometimes we also share little clips from other episodes. So it's probably not 900 actual interviews, but 900 pieces of content that have gone up.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:59) Okay. So how did you even get started in this? Why did you start your show? What was the reason?

(Jacob Morgan at 00:01:05) Probably selfish reasons. I mean, I wanted to learn from other people. I was speaking, I was writing books, and I needed a good source of information. I needed a good place to learn from. So the podcast was a really valuable way to do that and also to share the conversations with other people. So if I was benefiting from it, I thought, hey, why not release these things and let other people benefit from them as well? And it ended up being a good idea. I mean, it's still one of the places where I learn from the most. It's one of the things that I enjoy doing the most. So I'm happy I started it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:39) Nice. What's the name of your show?

(Jacob Morgan at 00:01:40) It's called Great Leadership.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:42) And that started after you had written your first book?

(Jacob Morgan at 00:01:46) Oh, man. Yes. I think it started after I wrote my first—first book came out. Well, the first book was, I don't really reference it as a book. It was with a tiny publisher. It was kind of like a pamphlet. It was on social media marketing. That was probably 2008. And then my first real book with McGraw Hill, which is an established publisher, came out in 2012. And I think I started the podcast shortly after that book came out.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:16) Okay. And what's your latest book that you have coming out? What can we promote?

(Jacob Morgan at 00:02:20) The latest book, actually, I just got it yesterday in the mail. It's this one, Leading with Vulnerability.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:25) Oh, that's been a big buzzword in the leadership world for the past couple years.

(Jacob Morgan at 00:02:31) Yeah. Yeah. Happy to talk about that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:33) Yeah. What's the short of it? What are the top two or three things within being vulnerable and leading with vulnerability?

(Jacob Morgan at 00:02:40) Well, I actually tell people not to be vulnerable at work. So it's a little bit of a counterintuitive message. I say that being vulnerable at work can actually cause more harm than good. Leading with vulnerability is being vulnerable, but adding the leadership piece to it. So for example, instead of saying, "Hey, I'm sorry, I made a mistake at work. I screwed this up," which is vulnerable, you might say, "I'm sorry, I made a mistake. Here's what I learned from the mistake. Here are three things that I'm going to do in the future to make sure that mistake doesn't happen again." So that's vulnerability plus adding the leadership piece to it. And I think that's what we're missing inside of our organizations. We're taught to be vulnerable and just talk about things, but without coming up with solutions, without sharing how we're learning and growing and getting better and becoming more competent. And that's really what the foundation of the book is all about.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:29) So it's not just all warm and fuzzy conversations.

(Jacob Morgan at 00:03:33) No. No. Definitely not all warm and fuzzy conversations. It's more about how do you combine and bring those two things together, because I think those are very foundational aspects. I mean, it's the core aspect of leadership, competence and connection, leadership and vulnerability.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:49) I'm taking notes now. We have a lot of the leadership topics and conversation, and we center them around getting a lot of insight and advice from leaders who are in the technical space. Some are more technical than others, but just people that are typically in the IT space. And I thought it would be interesting—one of the reasons why I wanted to talk with you is because your corpus of information is all a lot of people who are in leadership and talk about this regularly or do it regularly that aren't technical leaders. And so what makes a good leader?

(Jacob Morgan at 00:04:27) Well, and it doesn't have to be for a technical leader, right? I mean, the way that the book is structured, I interviewed 100 CEOs. I surveyed 14,000 employees around the world. And the whole premise of the book is it doesn't matter what role you're in. It doesn't matter how senior you are. It doesn't matter what geography you're in. The whole premise is whenever you know that vulnerability is going to be present, you should always take a step back and ask yourself, is there an opportunity for me to sprinkle or to add leadership to that vulnerability? And again, you could be in a technical role. You could be in a non-technical role. From that perspective, it doesn't really matter because the relationship that every employee has with an organization is the exact same. A company says, "We have a role we need to fill. We need help." An employee says, "I can do that. I'm good at it. Hire me." And then you get hired. So in that kind of an environment, if you get brought in—I mean, you mentioned you have a team, right? Imagine you hire somebody, and they say that they can do something. And now all of a sudden, every day they show up to work and they're like, "Hey, I'm really sorry. I messed this up. Hey, I'm having a tough time. Hey, I need some help. Can you do this for me? I'm not sure." At some point, you're going to say, "You know, when I brought you in, you told me that you knew how to do all this stuff. You told me that you were competent in these areas, and now it seems like you're really struggling. I'm not sure this is a good fit for you." So again, it's not just about being vulnerable, but you want to demonstrate that leadership. So this is, I think, one of the big mistakes that we make in a lot of our roles inside of organizations is we forget about that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:03) How do you define vulnerability?

(Jacob Morgan at 00:06:05) I'm glad you asked. There's the traditional definition of vulnerability that Brené Brown came up with. She's obviously one of the pioneers in this space, and she defines it as risk, uncertainty, and emotional exposure. So basically you can think of it as you do or say something that exposes you to the potential of emotional harm or risk or uncertainty. So any of those types of situations—I mean, especially if you're in conversation and dialogue with somebody else and you have a relationship with somebody else—you say or do something where that person could take what you shared with them and use it against you. So maybe there's a—you know, somebody's up for a promotion. There's one spot there. You're talking to one of your peers. You say, "Man, I really hope I get this promotion. I know I've never really done this before, but I'm super excited for it." And that person then says, "You never done this before," and then they go to the hiring manager and they say, "You know what? You should hire me because Jacob said he's never done this before. Why would you want him in that role?" So I was vulnerable. I opened up. I shared something with you, and then you then took that information and you harmed me with it. So that is what vulnerability is, saying or doing something where if somebody else has that information, they could potentially use that to harm you. Leading with vulnerability or being a vulnerable leader is different because you still you intentionally open yourself up to the potential of emotional harm, but you take action to create a positive outcome when you can. So me telling you, for example, "I am so sorry I made a mistake" is vulnerable. That exposes me to the potential of emotional harm. You could use that information against me if you wanted to, but I'm taking action to create a positive outcome when possible. So in this case, the action is here's what I learned from the mistake. Here's what I'm going to do going forward to make sure that that mistake never happens again. I'm adding in the leadership piece, the action piece. In other words, leading with vulnerability is all about demonstrating that you are trying to close the gap, demonstrating that you are trying to become more competent and better at the role that you're in.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:15) And so how could that individual in your Brené Brown example have sprinkled some leadership in there so that person wouldn't have gone back? Or is that person just always going to do it even if you didn't say anything vulnerable? I kind of got lost there.

(Jacob Morgan at 00:08:33) Yeah. I mean, again, in that situation, right? Well, two things. One is I can promise at some point vulnerability will be used against you. That's kind of the nature of the beast, right? It's just like at some point when you ask for a promotion, you'll be told no. At some point, you're going to ask somebody out on a date, you're going to be told no. It's just the nature of the game. However, the vulnerability is not going to be used against you as often as you think. So in a lot of the studies that have been done around trust, they find that on average, you think somebody else is trustworthy 50% of the time, kind of like the flip of a coin. But the reality is that other people are trustworthy 80% of the time. So there's a 30% gap between how trustworthy you think somebody is versus how trustworthy that person actually is. Again, it doesn't mean you're never going to get burned, but it does mean that it's not going to happen nearly as often as it does. And so the whole point is that in any situation where you have to open yourself up to the potential of emotional harm, do so by also trying to add in leadership. Again, the simple example of I made a mistake. I made a mistake, but here's what I learned. Hey, I need help with this, but going forward, here's what I'm going to do to make sure that I can solve my own problem. So it's always adding that leadership, that action piece in there so that you, as either my employee or as my leader, know that I'm doing something on a regular basis to close that gap between where I am and where I need to go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:00) Why does my brain, every time I hear vulnerability, just inject the word weakness? Because it is.

(Jacob Morgan at 00:10:09) That is what we associate with it. In fact, obviously, in IT, vulnerabilities are weaknesses. You don't want vulnerabilities. My parents came from the former Republic of Georgia, former USSR. They were in a communist regime. There was no room for vulnerability or weakness or sharing personal things because that stuff could literally get you killed. We do associate vulnerability with weakness. In fact, when we surveyed 14,000 employees and we asked them what's the number one reason keeping you from being vulnerable at work, it was because I don't want to be perceived as being weak and incompetent. That's the big fear that everybody has. But if you take a step back and ask, well, why do you have that fear? You have that fear because you don't demonstrate the leadership. You have the fear because you are only focusing on, "I made a mistake. I need help. I don't know how to do this. I'm having a tough..." You only focus on that. But if you bring the leadership piece in there, you will demonstrate the competence that you're trying to close that gap, and you won't worry as much about the negative perception that people have of you because you are yourself working on improving that perception. So it's natural, right? I mean, we know in our personal lives why vulnerability is important. You talk to your spouse, your significant other, your best friend, you know why it's important to be vulnerable because that's where connection comes from. That's where relationships come from. That's where these close ties come from. But inside of your organization, it's a different dynamic. Inside of an organization, you have a boss. Usually you have people who might work for you. You have hierarchy, you have employees, you have customers, you have deadlines and projects, and then there's also the issue of money—you're being paid. And so you can't just assume that the vulnerability that you might express to your wife or your husband is going to be taken the same way that it is expressed inside of your organization. Inside of a company, it's a different dynamic. Inside of your company, people want to know that you can do what it is that you're being asked to do. So the competence piece plays a very, very important role, and that's the big argument that I make. Do not just be vulnerable at work because it has the potential to really hurt you. You also need to demonstrate leadership with the vulnerability.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:33) I like that. I like that a lot. I'm not going to lie. I told you, I've read your book, but I like it now.

(Jacob Morgan at 00:12:39) Well, the book's not—it's coming out October 3rd.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:42) Oh, good. See? I don't—the book has come out. We'll put a link in the show notes too. Is it for presale yet?

(Jacob Morgan at 00:12:49) It is. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's available for preorder. We made a fun URL for it. If people can't remember the Amazon URL, which is leadwithvulnerability.com. So if anybody goes there, there are a couple of links that you can just click on. It'll take you to Amazon or wherever you like to buy your books.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:05) Nice. Josh can put a link in the show notes so people can find that. What else did you learn from the survey?

(Jacob Morgan at 00:13:13) Oh, man. There were a lot of things in there that we looked at. So another area that we looked at was data across seniority levels. And we found that there are a lot of different attributes and behaviors that make successful leaders, but what we practice least on those attributes, at the very bottom, dead bottom at that list, was showing the willingness to be vulnerable. We're not comfortable with it. We're scared of it. We don't want to do it. It's weird. And so across the board, leaders are not doing that. In fact, only 16% of employees that we surveyed said that their leaders are practicing this concept of leading with vulnerability. So most leaders in the world are not doing this. Most leaders, again, because they're scared of being viewed as weak or incompetent. We also found that the more senior you become, the less likely you are to show a willingness to be vulnerable. So imagine the higher up you get in your corporate environment, the less likely you are to be vulnerable. I thought that was a pretty scary yet also interesting statistic as well. So those are some of the other, I thought, interesting findings from some of the data that we collected.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:26) So it's a fear. I'll give you a little insight into how I think. With my background being engineering, I'm always just trying to be, I guess, pragmatic. Let's get the information out. Let's understand the variables, because we're all trying to get this carrot, right? It's like we're all trying to get to this goal. So we just need the least amount of clutter so that we can understand what's happening, so we can make good decisions, so we can move forward. So I'm just so focused on achieving the outcome that I'm not—you're not going to achieve the outcome without a bunch of mess. You're not going to achieve the outcome without mistakes, and all types of mistakes from relationships to money to all sorts of stuff. And so I'm just trying to close the delta between where I'm at and where I want to be.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:08) Right? Yeah. So when you say that people are scared of being weak or incompetent in leadership positions, is it just that the way I learned or came about maybe from my parents or my environment or engineering, I didn't run into that as much? Or because I don't see why they would be that way.

(Jacob Morgan at 00:15:29) Yeah. I mean, because that is how we were taught. I mean, if you look at traditional leadership going back fifties, sixties, seventies, eighties, nineties, there was no conversation about vulnerability. In fact, a lot of people who went to study leadership or management or went to MBA programs or people who were groomed to get into any kind of leadership roles were frequently taught and mentored by the people who were in leadership at the time to not talk about their mistakes, to not show emotion, to not demonstrate or talk about any failures that they had. And I have a couple of stories in the book of CEOs who told me that coming up in their career, their leaders at the time would pull them aside and say, "Hey, I know you made a mistake. You shouldn't talk about it. You shouldn't address it. You should never apologize as a leader." This is what was taught. There used to be Fortune magazine actually used to run a series of their publications, which actually was called America's Toughest Bosses. And it was considered a badge of honor to be one of the bosses on that cover. And it was a badge of honor to say that you worked for that kind of a boss. I mean, you can Google America's Toughest Bosses, go to Google Images and or Fortune, America's Toughest Bosses, and you'll see those articles. And I've read through some of those articles. And the stories that people say that they write in there are just, they're crazy. Right? I mean, it's like you can't believe that this is what it was like to be in corporate America, yet this was okay. It was taught. Right? Jack Welch, he was called Neutron Jack because he had the ability to just decimate all the employees inside of a building, but leave the building standing. Like, he would just get rid of everybody, but the building would still be there. He would throw things. He would scream at you. Look at Steve Ballmer. Right? I mean, he had that same personality. In a lot of our leadership, we were taught to be like a Jack Welch. We were taught to be like a Steve Ballmer. And now we're living and we're working in a very different world. Judging by the smile on your face, I'm guessing that you are looking at some of our magazine covers.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:34) No. I'm smiling because one time I was, you reminded me of one time I was on a show or something. We edited it out of whatever episode it was. But the guy was like, "Yeah. You know, I was in one of those meetings where, like, you just throw the flower plant, like, the plant against the wall and just shatter it." I was like, "I don't know. I've never been in that meeting. If that happened to me in a meeting, I'd be like, mentally unstable. I'm out of here."

(Jacob Morgan at 00:18:03) Yeah. But believe it or not, that was so common for so many people. Right? Yeah. You know, and not just throwing a pot. Right? I mean, in the eighties and nineties, you're lucky if somebody threw a pot. We're talking about, like, flipping chairs, tables, laptops. One CEO that I interviewed was Frank Blake, the former CEO of the Home Depot, and he used to work with and for Jack Welch. And he said, Jack Welch was the type of person where he called you. You never took a meeting standing down or sitting down because you would be so agitated and so, like, pumped up and either angry or, like, so whatever that you could not be sitting down because of how he would talk to you on the phone. I mean, that was the corporate environment. Right? I talked to another CEO. This was the former CEO of VF Corporation. They're the parent company behind North Face and Vans. And he told me a story of when he used to work for a company, the CEO that he worked for at the time purposely had this big desk so that when people come in, he has this big desk and he's sitting up high and across from the desk, he would purposely have this low couch so that when you sit down, you are low to the ground and he's towering above you. And this was an intentional, purposeful design so that when you go see the CEO, you're kind of sitting there like a little child and he's sitting there over you. I mean, this was how a lot of CEOs and leaders would screw, and I'm not gonna curse on your show, but they would f with the people who work there. Right? I mean, we wanted to show—it's kinda funny. Yeah. We wanted to show our dominance. Leaders want to show you work for me. I own you, and that was okay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:46) No. Yeah. Yeah. I, you know, we used to—yes. I agree.

(Jacob Morgan at 00:19:50) The ceiling tiles in corporate offices to see who had the biggest office. You used to look at what material your desk was made out of to see if you're more senior in the company or not. Right? I mean, you get higher up, you get the better, better quality wood. You have more ceiling tiles knowing that your office is bigger. I mean, this was what a lot of the corporate environments were like.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:13) That, thank you for this. This is awesome. Wow. We've come really far as humans. Like, we've—we forget pretty quickly.

(Jacob Morgan at 00:20:21) People forget. Yeah. I mean, today, you know, people still complain, but we forget that there used to be a time not that long ago where if you made a mistake, you would get your head lopped off. Right? I mean, you would lose appendages. You would, you know, we were talking about life and death scenarios here. Today, even when you look at the eighties and nineties, as far as what the corporate environment used to look like, we have come a long way. We're talking about things like employee experience. We're talking about things like putting people first. We're talking about things like flexible work environments. And this is one of the reasons why I personally, and again, keeping in mind, I wrote a book about employee experience, which came out a couple years ago. And this is one of the reasons why I get particularly crazy when I hear about what's going on in the business world today, where employees during the pandemic, I think it's safe to say there was a little bit of a, you know, land grab, a little bit of taking advantage because we knew that companies were struggling. And so there were so many situations where an employee who would be looking for a job would ask to make more money than their boss's boss. They wanted equity in the company. They wanted amazing pay. They wanted amazing benefits. And on top of that, then they then tell the leader, "By the way, I don't even wanna show up to the office anymore to work." And so to me, it's crazy to think that the environment that we're in now that so many people are getting upset that they're even being asked to come into the office two days a week or three days a week. And that to me is just mind boggling. The fact that you have to convince somebody that you are paying, somebody who you are taking care of their benefits, I have to now convince you to come to the office. And a part of that, you take a step back and you're like, "What the hell is going on in the world? What happened to hard work and ethic?" It almost feels like, and I get this sense from a lot of the people that I've talked to, that a lot of this has died. It almost feels like a lot of people don't wanna work anymore. Hard work and work ethic has died. You look at some of the trending topics that you see on social media. The Sunday scaries, right, where I'm like, I'm nervous because I have to go into work on Monday. Lazy girl jobs is a trending topic. Yeah. There's been a trending topic on lazy girl jobs. There's another trending topic, which I forgot exactly what it's called, where it's when you show up to work on Monday, Monday needs to be your easy day where you ease into work. And there are lots of employees who are putting videos on TikTok and places like that where they just don't work. They're like, "Oh, I just get a coffee. I'm gonna walk my dog. I'm gonna just sit here and meditate for a little bit and kinda relax." And then as the work week progresses, then maybe Tuesday, I'll put in more effort. Wednesday, I'll work hard, and then I gotta ease into the weekend. And I look at that stuff, and I think, "What the hell is going on here?" I mean, I don't know about you, but I remember a time when I had a full time job. I was working forty, fifty hours a week for that company. And then I wanted to start my own business on the side and I was working an additional thirty to forty hours a week. I mean, I was putting in eighty hours a week. I'm not saying everybody needs to do that, but to complain, it's, I don't know. I almost feel—

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:39) I almost felt better when I was in that state than I do now. Yeah. Because when you're, when you're, like, we're pushing yourself to the 100% boundaries, like, nothing's going to push you. I don't care how wealthy you are or how much you've achieved. Nothing's going to push you harder than your first setup, the setup where you have to take action or you won't be able to feed yourself. Like, that will teach you how hard that you need to work. And it's really hard to replicate that later. But, yeah, man. That is, that is, it's too comfortable. There's, it's too easy. It's too comfortable. And here's the thing. We know this cycle. This is not a surprise cycle. It's the weak time, weak people, and it's just gonna go. And so we're sitting here on the precipice of a time where weak people are being lazy, and that's just gonna make things super difficult.

(Jacob Morgan at 00:24:42) The victim mentality is accepted. Right? I mean, we are teaching people that it's okay to be a victim inside of your organization. Right? To complain, to whine, to ask for what you want, to not be a problem solver, but instead to point out the problems. We don't need people who are pointing out problems. We need people who are coming up with solutions to the problems. So why don't you show up to work and say, "I want this. I want that. I wish I, here's why I can't do this. Here's why I can't do that." Nobody cares. Right? What are you doing to solve your problem? And you're right. I mean, we have gotten very comfortable. It has become too easy. And if you think about it, what we're starting to see now, obviously, there's a lot of uncertainty with the economy. There's a lot of layoffs that are happening inside of organizations. If you think about this from the perspective of the business, who is going to be the first person that you lay off? Right? I mean, you have 50,000 people who work for you. You know every single employee who came to you to try to take advantage. You know all of the employees who said, "You know what? I want more money, and I don't wanna show up to work, and I want better benefits, and I want equity." You know who those people are. And so when your business is going through a tough time and somebody comes to you and they say, "Hey, Jacob. We're gonna need to let go of 10% of our workforce or 5% of our workforce. Who do you think we should let go of?" You're gonna say, "Why don't you get rid of all the people who were asking for more and who wanted to do less? And why don't you keep the people who were demonstrating that they wanted to work hard, that they wanted to put in the extra time, that they were willing to go above and beyond?" When I interviewed the former CEO of Netflix, Mark Randolph, he told me that in his career, he always did 10% more than what he was asked. And in today's business world, it feels like we wanna do 20% less than what we are asked. And that to me is just crazy. What's the solution?

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:29) Is there not a solution? Do we just let, we just let the cycle run?

(Jacob Morgan at 00:26:32) Yeah. The solution is the cycle runs. The solution is that over the next year or two years, things will get rebalanced. As we see more uncertainty in the economy, as organizations go through more layoffs, and as people need to get back to work. Right? I mean, if tens of thousands, millions of people are getting laid off and then they start looking for jobs again, and the companies who are hiring them are then gonna say, "By the way, don't think you're gonna be working at home full time. Like, we're done with that." Yeah. You know, that's what we're seeing now. I mean, you look at companies like Goldman Sachs. You look at companies like Tesla, even Disney, Apple. A lot of these organizations are saying, "Hey. You know what? You guys had a good run. It's time to get back to work," even Microsoft. Right? And it doesn't mean that they're gonna say get back to work five days a week, nine to five. I mean, I'm a big believer in flexible work. In other words, working in a way that is conducive to how work needs to get done. And, yeah, maybe that means one day a week you're from home. Maybe each day you come in for a few hours, whatever it is. But to assume that you're just gonna be virtual a 100% of the time is crazy. And part of the reason I think also comes down to productivity versus innovation. If you just wanna be productive and you're crossing things off a to-do list, sure, you never need to show up to an office. Right. I'm just gonna give you a 100 things that you do every day. Keep doing those 100 things. Stay where you are forever. I don't care where you're working or if you wanna come into the office totally get it. But we have to remember that businesses leaders, we don't just care about productivity. We live in a world that's changing. Productivity is how you kill your business. You want growth. You want innovation. You don't wanna just be productive. You wanna go to the next level. What does that mean? It means coming up with new ideas for products and services. It means developing better leaders. It means coaching and mentoring people. It means brainstorming and collaborating on things. How are you gonna do those things when everybody is just sitting at home behind a screen? Like, if I was teaching people how to have executive presence, how to become better leaders, and I could only do that virtually, and then one day they're supposed to get up in front of an audience of 500 people and give a talk or to give a motivational message, it's not gonna work. You know, similar for me, right, as a professional speaker, I could do way more talks at home sitting behind a camera. I could probably do five, ten of them a day. Or I could do one in person where I need to travel. Now I'm more productive doing the 10 virtual talks from home or the five virtual talks. But where am I gonna have the greater impact? Is it gonna be staring at a screen like this where I can't see anybody and I can't see anyone's body language? Or is it gonna be on a stage where I can walk around, where I can gesticulate, where people can see, you know, not just my head, where I can see the audience, where I can talk to people afterwards? Where am I gonna have a greater impact? It's obviously gonna be on a stage, and I think the same thing is true inside of organizations.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:44) Yes. Dude, yay. You've got a new fan, Jacob. I like what you're saying, dude. I'm, like, over here saying, like, preach. Go, Jacob. 100% agree with you on the stage thing. Right? The feeling that you get, you can, people don't under, people who don't get to speak to crowds and I only have, like, five, seven years experience doing this. Right? But so I don't have, like, a ton. But what I have learned is that if you haven't had the opportunity to speak to, let's say, a 150 people, I think that's when it starts to get real, you that you can feel them as a crowd. Like, they become this entity. It's like the crowd, and you can interact with that entity, and it's something, it's something that's magical that really only happens on stage. And I could speak, you know, I remember the day I was in San Francisco. I think I talked to, like, 500 people. Right? It wasn't a huge thing. And then the next day, I was at someone's, I think it was, like, Williams Sonoma, and we did a digital call with their global engineering team. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:47) And there were thousands on there, and I was just like, you know, there were 20 people or 50 people in the room, but then there were thousands. I was like, this is not the same. Right?

(Jacob Morgan at 00:30:58) Of course.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:58) It's not the same as being in a room with, like, a hundred or 500 people. And that feeling for me is, like, it's addictive. I feel bad that I haven't been doing much speaking. Have you started doing in-person stuff again?

(Jacob Morgan at 00:31:12) Yeah. Yeah. I mean, post-pandemic, certainly. I mean, it's not at the same level as it was before the pandemic, but certainly in-person speaking has come back. I mean, my wife is also extremely busy. She does what I do, but she focuses on customer experience. So she's been—

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:23) Oh, cool.

(Jacob Morgan at 00:31:23) Yeah. She's been super, super busy. But, yeah, for sure. Definitely doing in-person events again.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:33) Well, I have a real-life experience today, actually, in relation to what you said about people not working as much anymore, at least in person. We bought the property next door to us, and we wanted to build a house, so I needed a survey. And the surveyor people are a year and a half delay, a year and a half out to have someone come out for, like, two hours and put some cameras up and take some pictures and stuff. They're a year and a half out. And I started, you know, calling around. Everyone's a year, two years, a year, a year and a half. And I'm like, I so I finally got frustrated, and I said, will you just talk to me for, like, five minutes and explain to me why this is happening? And they're like, yeah. There's just not enough people. There's just not enough surveyors. There's just not enough of these types of people. And I said, oh, man. Maybe we kind of shot ourselves in the foot as a civilization of selling everyone on college knowledge worker jobs, and now we need these surveyors, and we don't have them.

(Jacob Morgan at 00:32:25) Yeah. I mean, if you look at what's going on with the economy, right, I mean, a lot of people say that what we've done over the past few years is just give people money, incentivize them to stay home, incentivize them to not work. I mean, whether you agree with that or not, um, but that to me seems like a lot of what we've done. Right? I mean, and so in that kind of an environment, what are we doing to incentivize people to work hard? And I don't think we're doing much there, not just in terms of a general economy, but just in terms of leaders of organizations. Like, what are we doing to tell people, get back to working hard? Right? Get back to the old school work ethic that we used to have. I come from a family of immigrants. So working hard and having that work ethic is just kind of ingrained in how I operate. And to me, it's just crazy sometimes to hear stories of people. And and I don't know if you've ever gotten this, but one of the things that used to drive me nuts is when I would speak at an event and somebody would say, oh, you're a speaker. Oh, you're so lucky you get to do that. And in my mind, I'd be like, what are you talking about? I used to work eighty hours a week. I would go to bed at three in the morning. I would go crazy with how much I was working to be able to—like, there was no—it wasn't luck that I just woke up and somebody said, hey, you want a book deal? You want to get on stage and give a talk? No. It was years, more than half a decade of just grinding as much as possible and saving and building and growing. I mean, I do that to this day. Not necessarily eighty hours a week anymore, but it's always building. It never stops. You're always trying to get to the next thing. You're always trying to build. And I think a lot of people forget that to do that, you have to work hard. So when I see some of these trending things on social media, I go absolutely crazy. Like, I don't understand it. And this all ties into a lot of the themes with leading with vulnerability because post-pandemic, what we've seen is that a lot of employees do want that connection with their leaders. Right? I mean, that's important. Nobody's gonna say, uh, nobody wants to work for a robot. Nobody wants to work for a leader where you don't understand their values or what they care about. You wanna work for a leader where you have that good relationship or you have that good chemistry because that's where the motivation, the inspiration, the engagement, all that stuff comes from. So vulnerability is a good thing. But, again, demonstrating the competence. People wanna know that you're good at your job. And there's actually a concept in psychology called the pratfall effect, which basically states that if you are good at your job, and then you're vulnerable, what ends up happening is that you get a bump in the perception of how competent you are. Because people are gonna say, oh, wow. Jacob's really good at his job. Oh, and he made a mistake and he talked about it. Now he's human. Right? Now I view him as even better at his job. Like, you get that bump. However, if you're not good at your job and you're vulnerable, what ends up happening is you reinforce your mediocrity in the eyes of other people. So if you're a C player, for example, as we oftentimes say, and you're vulnerable, what a lot of people are then gonna say is, oh, yeah. I get why Jacob's a C player. I get why he hasn't been promoted. Like, I understand. In other words, you reinforce your mediocrity in the eyes of others. So again, there's no substitute for being good at your job. And if you can combine being good at your job with being able to connect with people, that's when, as I talk about it in the book, this superpower is unleashed. That's when you can lead through change. That's when you can unlock the potential in those around you, create trust, and drive business performance, but you have to be able to do both. And if you think about these kind of on a quadrant, right, an x and a y quadrant. Let's say you work for somebody. Let's say you work for me. I'm really good at the leadership piece, the competence piece, really good at my job, and you work for me. And somebody says, well, what do you think of Jacob as a leader? You're probably gonna say, well, Jacob's really good at his job. He's bringing in a lot of deals. He's closing in business. He's really good at what he does. But I don't have that connection with Jacob. I don't feel motivated or engaged or inspired. We don't have that sense of collaboration. It's not easy to, like, brainstorm on stuff and come up with new ideas. I mean, he's really good at what he does, but I just don't have that relationship with him that I wish I had. Now the flip side of that, let's say I'm really good at the vulnerability aspect. And, again, you work for me and somebody says, what do you think of Jacob as a leader? You're probably gonna say, oh, Jacob is awesome. Jacob is such a great person. We have this great chemistry. He's always fun to hang out with. We got a really good vibe. He's just he's really good. I like Jacob a lot. But I'm not sure if Jacob is the right person to be leading this team because Jacob hasn't demonstrated that he has what it takes to lead this team. He hasn't demonstrated that he's good at his job. He's not able to bring in the deals. He's not able to grow and get us moving in the right direction. So again, you need both of these things. If you only focus on vulnerability, people will view you as being incompetent. And if you only focus on competence, people will view you as a robot. Neither one of those things are good for you as a leader. So this is why you gotta combine both, leadership and vulnerability, competence and connection.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:01) Dude, you should write a book on this. This is good.

(Jacob Morgan at 00:38:04) I am thinking about it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:07) That is so good. You've really thought this through, and that's new information for me that I have never heard of. And it is exactly right because these people, when you ask them those questions, like, what do you think of? They don't necessarily see that underline—they don't have the ability to articulate that underlying description how you did it, but it's 100% accurate. Yeah. That's that's good.

(Jacob Morgan at 00:38:31) Yeah. I mean, think about it. Right? You if you lead a team and somebody on your team is vulnerable all the time, at a certain point, you as leader are gonna say, what, what is going on here? And to put it another way, one of the CEOs I interviewed, um, um, his name is Steve Bilt. He's the CEO of Smile Brands. They have around 8,000 employees. They're a dental services provider. And he gave me this great analogy. And he says, if you are in sixth grade and you keep showing up asking about fourth grade math, eventually your peers and the teacher are gonna look at you and they're gonna say, hey, we noticed that you're in sixth grade and you keep asking about fourth grade math. You're probably not in the right class. Now similarly, if you're in fourth grade asking about sixth grade math, but now you add leadership. Now you say, hey. I know that I have a couple questions about fourth grade math, and I'm in sixth grade. I get that I'm a little bit behind, but here's what I'm gonna do. I've actually hired a tutor who's gonna come after school and help me out. I'm gonna stay a little bit later with the teacher so that I can get some extra tutoring and help on my homework. And going forward, instead of just doing five problems that are gonna be assigned for homework, I'm gonna do ten. And that way, I'm gonna get to where I need to get to, and I'm gonna get there soon. That's the leadership with the vulnerability. And again, that is what—

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:57) You have awareness for that.

(Jacob Morgan at 00:39:59) You have to have awareness. Yeah. I mean, one of the concepts—

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:01) How do you get that?

(Jacob Morgan at 00:40:03) Yeah. So one of the concepts in the book, I have these eight attributes of vulnerable leaders, and one of them is self-awareness. It is self-awareness because if you do not have that self-awareness, it becomes very hard to, um, to even know what to say, know who to say it to. You're just not aware of how your actions are impacting others, and you're not aware of what your strengths are, what your weaknesses are. And so, uh, it is an absolutely critical aspect of leading with vulnerability. It's one of the eight is having that level of self-awareness.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:37) Do you talk in the book at all about toughness in relation to vulnerability and in a positive way? For example, like, finding—one of the things I like to do is I like to figure out where the limit is of a team member's knowledge and then encourage them to get outside of that limit. And it's, you know, a little bit of a painful stretch. But if I wanted them to just like me and have a good whatever, then they're gonna stay stagnant and then, woah, but we never have to have any conflict or it never has to have, like, any toughness or any awkward moment. But if I put them in a situation where they have to go and expand and grow, they'll stretch and then they'll come back, you know, and say, wow. I'm so glad that you made me do that, that I learned a lot.

(Jacob Morgan at 00:41:17) Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. That's a big aspect of this. In fact, one of the CEOs that I interviewed, he's the CEO of a company called Synopsys. And you'll appreciate this because he's an engineer and he has a PhD, and his name is Aart de Geus, A-A-R-T D-E G-E-U-S. Um, and the company's Synopsys. They have I can't remember exactly. I think around 10,000 employees. And he's an engineer by trade, mind you. And so I was asking him about this concept of leading with vulnerability and why he believes in it, and he gave me a very engineer scientific answer. He's like, today in your life, you are v n. You're version n of you. Right? How do you get to version n plus one? How do you get to version n plus ten or a hundred or a thousand? By leading with vulnerability, you allow other people to come to you with feedback and suggestions. You focus on learning and on growth and on development and on embracing mistakes and learning from them and going forward. If you don't do that, what ends up happening is the world around you changes and you stay at version n of yourself. But really, if the world around you is changing and you're staying at version n of yourself, really what that means is you're becoming the version n minus yourself. So you're actually becoming a previous version. You're going down as the world around you changes. So the goal is how do you become version n plus of yourself? Maybe it's n plus one. Maybe it's n plus 500. Right? Whatever it is, but that's the ultimate goal that you should be thinking about. And I love that analogy and I love that visual because even a few years ago, I did a video where I said think of yourself as the killer app. We update our apps and software on our phones all the time. New features, new bugs that need to be eliminated, uh, new releases, things of that nature. How often do we think of ourselves as the app? How often are we thinking of how do I update myself? How do I create a better version of myself? How do I do something tomorrow that I wasn't able to do today? How often are you releasing those features, those new versions of yourself? Not that often. So especially, you know, I again, I really love that visual of how do you become the version n plus of yourself, and that's really what leading with vulnerability is all about.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:43) Those are some good interviews you had, man. Yeah. Some good people in there. Do you have, like, a best of list? Do you have a best of list on your website or anything?

(Jacob Morgan at 00:43:51) No. No. That I should maybe one day put one of those out there. But, yeah, I mean, a hundred CEOs, you get some really good stories from people.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:00) Yes. I like the I like the n plus. Because you're right. You there's no such—you're either, you know, going forward, and if you're standing still, you're going backwards because things are just moving around you, or you're going backwards. And understanding the direction in which you're headed is incredibly important. Um, it is. And and the it's interesting that you—how you talk about this too—because often people who are earlier on in their personal development, um, maybe they haven't even gotten to that stage yet where they're interested in understanding how people work and things work. But they'll look at individuals driving x car or having y house, and and they'll say, wow. They must just hang out all day. They've got all the money. They don't need to do anything. Their life just—they're probably watching network. And that is so—you know how many—when I was growing up, we weren't wealthy, particularly my family, but my mom had some wealthy friends. One businesswoman I learned a lot from. And one of the things I learned is she had a beautiful house, like a mansion. Right? And perfectly decorated and everything. And the chairs were, like, super uncomfortable because we went to stay at their house once. Right? We went to visit. And I was like, why are these chairs? She goes, oh, because I don't sit on them. She's like, we don't we don't sit around. We don't sit around. We we go do stuff. I run this business. I go here. She goes, I'm not even at this house that much. And she's like, they're always doing stuff because if they don't, you can spiral. I'll tell you something briefly. Um, when I got to—I did episode, like, around four or 500, I believe. I had gotten to interview pretty much everybody I'd want to enter. I did the—I remember specifically I did an episode with the creator of the Internet. And I was like, wow. After that, I felt so depressed. Like, so because because I had done, like, as I kept getting bigger and bigger interviews over the course of five years, I finally built up to this one. And then like, well, well, what's now? And then I kinda started to spiral because I had achieved financial independence. I had achieved a goal of, you know, getting to interview everybody I wanted to interview. And then I had some, like, personal life coach type people on the show as guests, and I was like, help me with this because that's this one of the superpowers of a podcast. Right? Consulting.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:12) And I was like, help me with this. And they made an argument similar to the N plus one situation where you achieved all this through the act of doing these difficult things to grow yourself. And so if you stop doing that, you're not even gonna like the person that you're gonna become, and everything's gonna get real bad real fast. Like, that's the catch. You have to keep improving yourself.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:36) You can't just roll back four versions. All your users are gonna be mad.

(Jacob Morgan at 00:46:41) That's right. Yeah. You can't do that. And that's why the whole V N plus version of yourself, I think, makes a lot of sense. And so I always encourage people to think of yourself as the app, and what are you doing to update and upgrade yourself?

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:53) Yes. The call to action, buy the book. What's the domain name again?

(Jacob Morgan at 00:46:57) So people can go to leadwithvulnerability.com. I mean, of course, it's available on Amazon and wherever people wanna buy a book. We're actually releasing some of the interviews and some of the behind the scenes stuff on our Substack as well, which is greatleadership.substack.com, if anyone wants to check that out. And I hope people find value in the book and in the content.

(Jacob Morgan at 00:47:22) And people can also email me if they have any questions. And my email is [email protected].

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:28) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you'd like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn, or send me an email [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.