John Jantsch (00:00): This episode of the duct tape marketing podcast is brought to you by the female startup club, hosted by Doone Roisin, and brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network. If you’re looking for a new podcast, the female startup club shares tips, tactics and strategies from the world’s most successful female founders, entrepreneurs, and women in business to inspire you to take action and get what you want out of your career. One of my favorite episodes who should be your first hire, what’s your funding plan, Dr. Lisa Cravin shares her top advice from building spotlight oral. Listen to the female startup club, wherever you get your podcasts.

John Jantsch (00:47): Hello, and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Jan and my guest today’s Paul Roetzer. He’s the founder and CEO of marketing AI Institute, founder of PR 2020 HubSpot’s first partner, agency HubSpots and sponsor of this show. As many of you know, he’s also the author of the marketing performance blueprint, the marketing agency blueprint and creator of the marketing AI conference Macon. So guess what, we’re gonna talk about AI, but he’s also got a new book coming out co-author of marketing, artificial intelligence, AI marketing in the future of business. So Paul, welcome back.

Paul Roetzer (01:27): It’s so good to be back together, John. It’s good to see you.

John Jantsch (01:30): So, so we’ve been, we were laughing before we started the show. We’ve been talking about AI and now maybe for five or seven years, but I still think there’s a lot of, like, what is that, you know, is that Hollywood? Is that, is that sci-fi, you know, how do you, when somebody just asks you, what is AI? Is there a simple answer?

Paul Roetzer (01:44): The definition I always give is the science of making machine smart and actually comes from de SaaS. Who’s the co-founder and CEO of Google deep mind. And what I love about the simplicity of the definition is the software we use every day, as marketers, as consumers, the hardware we use the phones like your iPhone, they’re incapable of doing things on their own, unless they’re told how to do them. So machines being software and hardware with AI, those machines get human bilities to understand language, to generate language, to see, you know, with computer vision. And so that’s really what they’re doing, and they’re able to learn from data and get smarter on their own. And so we’ll talk, I’m sure we’ll talk about some use case, some examples. Yeah, but that’s the key is rather than just software, that’s all human rules based AI enables vendors to build software that learns and evolves and makes predictions and recommendations to you to augment what you’re capable of as a marketer.

John Jantsch (02:44): So let’s start with the dystopian view, sure, uh, of, of, you know, which I’m sure you hear all the time, right. That, you know, it’s taking over, there’s no thinking there’s no feeling, you know, like, you know, content marketers are, you know, like, yeah. I just put in a couple keywords and boom, I’ve got great content. You know, I don’t have to hire anybody anymore. Uh, where does that view intersect with reality?

Paul Roetzer (03:08): AI’s not that smart. So I think the key is there’s definitely this nature one, you think it’s abstract and it’s, it is just the sci-fi thing. You’re not actually using it. Two is it can seem overwhelming and highly technical. The reality is that AI isn’t that advanced today. What, what happens is it’s trying to do these very specific tasks at, at a very high level. And it’s normally applied to things that are repetitive and data driven for us as marketers, things that we don’t want to have to do a bunch of times anyway. Yeah. So you kind of look at these things in your daily life where it’s repetitive, there’s a defined process for it. That’s a lot of times where AI being applied, it’s augmenting what you do. It’s intelligently automating pieces of it is not taking your job away. It’s not replacing you as a writer. It’s just there to be an it’s easiest to think of it as an assistant. And so that’s in the book we go into like these different levels of intelligent automation, and we’re not going from zero to fully autonomous. We’re just trying to get that little bit of support from the machine.

John Jantsch (04:05): Yeah. And I think some people can make a case for it actually frees you to do the creative work. And I think the argument probably 25 years ago when robots came around was, oh, it’s taken, you know, these people’s jobs, but like, do you really wanna put that bolt in 3 million times? , you know, over the next two weeks, is that a really satisfying job? Right. So that’s a lot of what you’re saying is it takes the repetitive stuff out. And, and so clearly if, if you’re counting on having a job, that’s based on repetition, I mean, you’re probably, you probably are looking about at being replaced, aren’t you?

Paul Roetzer (04:36): Yeah. I mean, the way I explain it is if your job is simply to AB test landing pages that is fundamentally all you do 40 hours a week, then yes, it will replace you like you. That is not gonna be something humans need to do. If you are looking at data and trying to figure out audience targeting for media buying AI is really good at that. It’s really good at finding patterns and like being able to predict, you know, behaviors and outcomes. So it’s just tasks. But if your entire being is doing those repetitive tasks, then yes, it would be a good time to start looking for other areas where there’s uniquely human traits needed, like strategy, creativity, empathy, like those relationship building, those are machines not doing those things really. Yeah.

John Jantsch (05:17): So, so how, how are you talking to marketers specifically about the impact of this in their jobs? We, you kind of almost touched on it right there a little bit. Yeah. But how are, you know, how does it really, how will it, uh, impact the marketing

Paul Roetzer (05:31): Profession? So at a high level, we talk about this intelligent automation. We’re under the working assumption that within three to five years, at least 80% of what marketers do will be intelligently automated to some degree, meaning tools, software you’re using is going to have AI in them, but that’s not unlike your consumer life. So you don’t think about AI all the all day long, but every time you use Netflix and it’s recommending shows and movies, Spotify learns, you know, your music and predict shows, Google maps routing you from a to B in the, in the fastest way. Anytime you talk to a, a virtual assistant like a Google or Siri, all of that is AI. And so your life is made more convenient, more personalized by AI. And that’s, what’s gonna happen in business, whether you’re in advertising or email or communications or SEO, AI is going to be infused into the software and make it smarter. And in many cases, you’re not even gonna notice it or even care. Yeah. But we’re not there yet. And so what we tell marketers is you can get there now though, you can go find smarter tools to do what you do. It’s not about buying AI. It’s about buying smarter tech. You already buy this tech find tools that are getting better and making you better at your job.

John Jantsch (06:43): Yeah. And I think one of the, well, let me back up a little bit, cuz you, you alluded to a point I was gonna ask about is I think the AI’s been with us a lot longer than people realize and it’s in everyday stuff that we, you know, we don’t realize. I, I wrote my last book exclusively in, uh, Google, uh, docs at somewhere along two, three years ago, you know, they started adding AI to Google docs to where it’s actually, I could start writing a sentence and go, oh, I wasn’t gonna say that. But that’s pretty good. I mean, it would actually, you know, and I don’t know if it’s purely learning one to one with me or if it’s just saying, oh, people commonly finish sentences with this word that start that way. So, so talk a little bit about some of the really everyday uses you started talking a little bit about ’em, but going to some examples of everyday uses that people are experiencing AI and, and maybe don’t know it.

Paul Roetzer (07:35): Yeah. So the, we talk at a high level categorically and there’s, I think it’s chapter two of the book is, is broken into language, vision and prediction. And so it talks like these parent categories of different applications of AI. So language in particular is of interest to all marketers, right? And that is mainly around the understanding and generation of language. And so that’s like what you’re talking about Grammarly is a great example of AI embedded within a tool that many people use every day. Um, so zoom is another, like they use outer.ai to transcribe audio, right? So speech to text, text, text to speech is another one language generation with any, whether it’s video or audio or written. So like all these Twitter out there, like copy.ai and Jasper and hyper write. And you know, you hear all these names, you probably see the ads for, and what they’re doing is using a, the tool called G PT three or an underlining platform called G P T three, which is made by open AI.

Paul Roetzer (08:27): And that is a language generation it’s using, what’s called a large language model to generate language in all these different disciplines. And so you can go in and give it a sample website and say, okay, write me ad copy, or write me social media shares based on this. And it’s doing it now. You’re not gonna grab it and hit publish. But as a social media pro or an ad person or a blog post writer, you’re going to take these almost as drafts and improve on them and then publish them. And so I think again, anywhere where you write, you’re seeing it all over and that’s gonna continue to become a part of your life. And then again, you just go disciplined by discipline, whether again, your communications, SEO, and just find ways where there’s repetitive processes, predictions being made or language being read or generated.

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John Jantsch (09:57): So if somebody came to you and said, yeah, we we’re an agency digital agency and we know about AI, but we haven’t really been aggressively or intentionally trying to bring it to our clients. Where would you say, well, here’s the starting point. Here are the five things that every digital agency should be diving into that it’s gonna give them AI or it’s at least gonna give ’em some advantages using AI.

Paul Roetzer (10:18): Yeah. So there’s two ways we teach it. It’s called the piloting. AI is that there’s a chapter dedicated to this, too. What I tell people is take a spreadsheet, make a list of all the activities, the tasks that you do individually, or as a team each week, each month make a comment that says how many hours a month you spend doing it, uh, what software you use for it and how much that software costs per month. So you’re basically getting a cost structure for each activity and then just apply of simple rating and says, well, how valuable would it be to intelligently automate this task? And so let’s say you’re a content strategist and you spend 10 hours a month on the editorial calendar, figuring out what to write, looking at past posts, trying to predict what work, what you should republish, what you should create new.

Paul Roetzer (10:58): Then that might be an area where you could say, wow, if AI could help me do this and cut it 80% of the time spent on it and be better at predicting, what’s gonna work. That would be huge for me as a content strategist. There you go, AI for content strategy, go Google it, find three tools that do it, go demo those tools. So I always tell people is start where you’re already spending time, where you can make a business case for the value it could create for you. And you’re gonna know real quickly whether it’s working or not. Cuz at the end of the day, AI is just designed to make you better at your job and make it cost less to do the job. And if it’s not doing that in improving performance, then it’s a waste of time.

John Jantsch (11:38): Yeah. I think that’s a really great point too, because I think a lot of people look at this and say, oh, we can do new things and maybe start by by just getting efficiencies. Yes. I mean you could probably generate a tremendous amount of profit to the bottom line by just get, I mean, everybody that, by getting more efficient. So if you looked at these as efficiency tools alone, that would be a great start, wouldn’t

Paul Roetzer (11:58): It? Yeah. And I know of companies that have, I have friends whose jobs and companies is to try and reduce the need for 15 new headcount down to five. Yeah. And they’re basically just looking at not, they’re not their job isn’t to fire people, but it is to say, as we scale, how do we do it without having to hire more? And so they’re looking at inefficiencies and work productivity and they’re finding things that AI can do to at least some degree without the need for human involvement or minimal human involvement,

John Jantsch (12:25): Who are some companies that you think are doing this really well. I mean that are maybe kind of ahead of the curve and, and it might just be in their own operations or in their own marketing.

Paul Roetzer (12:33): Yeah. Most of as big enterprises, they don’t talk about it much. But when you look at retail eCommerce or huge ones, just go to the top 10 eCommerce companies, top 10 retailers, um, CPG financial services. Those are healthcare. What you look for is companies and industries that have a lot of data and a, and a huge need for personalization. And there’s a really good chance they’ve been doing this stuff for five to 10 years, not if not in marketing and sales and service across other areas of the company. But I mean, just like Mike, my co-author just put one on LinkedIn last week about like 15 retailers that are doing awesome things with AI. And it was the obvious ones. Walmart Starbucks McDonald’s bought, bought AI com like they’re buying AI companies, they bought one to customize the drive through screen for you based on the weather data and based on behavioral data of like what people are ordering that day. So it actually tailors what you’re seeing. So I mean, it’s just, retail was a huge one that, yeah, there’s just tons on.

John Jantsch (13:29): So that’s why that pumpkin spice shows up that day. Huh?

Paul Roetzer (13:32): Yeah. Well if it’s in the middle of the summer. Yes. Because otherwise it just shows up in the winter, but yeah,

John Jantsch (13:38): That, yeah. So, so taking this back to non-enterprise yeah. Level companies, uh, which a great deal of our listeners are what’s the, what’s been the stumbling block. What’s been the hard part, you know, of doing this.

Paul Roetzer (13:53): So we asked that question in our state of the industry survey we did with drift, like what are the obstacles to adoption? Number one far and away with 70% of people said, lack of education and training. They just didn’t know where to go to get the information. And then in the 40 percentiles you had like lack of awareness, lack of team, right? Like talent, lack of strategy, lack of vision. My base assumption is the vast majority of marketers still have no idea what it is. So they can’t explain it to you. They, if like, let’s say you’re at a, you know, a 30 person agency and you listen to this and you’re like, this is kind of cool. And you’re gonna walk into the CEO’s office and say, I think we should start doing more AI. And the CEO says, why you’re gonna say, I don’t know, just, it sounds like we’re just really cool. Like

John Jantsch (14:32): Everybody else is.

Paul Roetzer (14:33): Yeah. If they really say, well, what would be the business case for it? What exactly is it like most marketers can’t give a basic definition and they don’t know the main use cases for it. So I think it, it is just a lack of understanding across the industry. That’s slowing adoption rates down,

John Jantsch (14:47): You know, I loved one of the filters. I think that you used for this, you know, when a lot of new social media platforms would come around and you know, clients would be saying, should we be doing that? You know, should we get on Twitter, this, you know, circa 2007 or something like that. Um, and, and I always did use the filter. Uh, would this help you serve your existing clients better? You know, if you make a case for that, then go all in and we’ll get crazy with it. But, and I think that’s probably a great starting place for looking at AI. Isn’t it?

Paul Roetzer (15:15): Yeah, no doubt. I, I actually published something recently that wasn’t in the book and it sort of came to me, uh, little later on, but the, what I think’s gonna end up happening is, and again, keep in mind, I owned an agency for 16 years before I sold it. Right. So I, I live in the agency world and we work with lots of companies. So SMBs all the way up to, you know, fortune 500 companies. Um, I think in the not too distant future, there’s three types of organizations. There’s AI native. So they don’t exist without AI, they’re in an industry and they find a smarter way to do that industry, do the products and services in that industry. And they build from day one as an AI company, then there’s AI emergent. Those are companies that exist today that look to the future and say, while there’s smarter ways to do product and services, marketing sales, and then there’s obsolete.

Paul Roetzer (15:58): And, and I don’t think there’s anything in between. So the way I look at it is AI is going to be so essential to the operations of every business. And so intertwined into the marketing sales and customer service, that if you don’t find ways to adapt and evolve, someone else is going to build a smarter version of, of your business. That is way more efficient than you are without AI. And over time, I’m not saying like three years from now, we’re all done. Like if you don’t evolve saying, but over the next decade, like it’s going, you’re just gonna become less and less relevant if you don’t find a way to become more efficient at what you do and deliver better results.

John Jantsch (16:34): Yeah. And I think some of that’s very consumer driven too. You know, one of the things people always point to is Amazon changed the game because consumers got used to yeah. The way what they got to experience there and everybody else had to up their game or, you know, get left behind. And you know, what ways are you seeing consumer behavior change? Because whether they know it or not, they’re being served this way.

Paul Roetzer (16:57): Yeah. I, I think the key for me is as consumers of consumer products, but also in our B2B world, you come to expect convenience and personalization. Like if I’m, let’s say I’m shopping for new social media management software and I’m the entrepreneur of a five person company, or a 20 person agent, whatever it is, there’s a good chance. I’m not doing that at 10:00 AM on a Thursday. There’s a much better chance I’m doing it at 10:00 PM on a Friday after my kids go to bed. And I finally have a minute to look at that thing. That’s not critical to my business, but is important to the future. So if I’m on a website for social media management software and it’s like call us between Monday and Friday from nine to five, and there’s no intelligent chat out there that actually helps me get what I’m looking for or understands that I’ve been on the site previously and kind of can predict my behavior and my intent, like I want personalization and convenience in my shopping experience, whether I’m on Amazon or I’m on some social media management software site. And so I think as consumers, we just come to expect convenience and personalization, and there is no way to do personalization at scale, without AI in the future. Like I’ve heard software CEOs talk about personalization as though AI, or as though it can happen without AI. It can’t, like, we’re not that good as humanist writing rules that apply to thousands of people.

John Jantsch (18:17): Right. Right, right, right. Right. So, so let’s talk about the relationship between AI and your data, because I think that’s what you’re really in a lot of ways where, where people are starting to personalize without AI is because I know customer X has bought this product and I can cookie him or her. And so then I can serve a more relevant, personal experience perhaps, or relevant email newsletter perhaps. But where does, where do you see AI then? You know, must be applied. You know, if we can use these JavaScripts and we can use our own data, you know, where does AI come into play with that scenario?

Paul Roetzer (18:55): Yeah. So data is the foundation of AI. It’s what it gives its predictive abilities, cuz that, that you almost every case AI is just making predictions about behaviors and outcomes. That’s what machine learning is. So you hear machine learning thrown around is like synonymous with AI. Sometimes it’s a subset of AI, but machine learning is all about the machine learning from data to improve its predictions and actions. And so that’s what the data does is it gives you the ability to actually build these predictive models about customer retention, customer growth, churn rates, lead scoring, to predict who’s likely to be a new customer. Who’s gonna open emails. Who’s gonna click on it’s all predictions. And so data is at the foundation of that. Now you can be a small business. You don’t have to have, you know, hundreds of thousands of records because what you can do is benefit from anonymized data. So if you’re a HubSpot customer, they have 150,000 customers over money. They have, they can anonymize all that data targeted like, okay, this is a lump of cohorts. That’s in this specific industry or this specific size company. And they can anonymize that data to improve your predictive ability. I’m not saying they’re doing that, but that’s what’s happening. MailChimp is a good example. Hundreds of millions of records. They can use all that anonymized data to predict when you should send your emails, who you send ’em to subject lines, you should use things like that.

John Jantsch (20:07): Yeah. So let’s, let’s end by talking a little bit about future careers. If you were talking and you probably get asked to, to a group of college students that were in marketing, uh, what would you be? I know when I talk to ’em, I, I tell, ’em look, forget all the stuff you’ve been learning. This is what you actually should be focusing on. You know, what are you, what would you tell, uh, a group of folks that are just now getting into marketing, where they should be putting their attention?

Paul Roetzer (20:31): One, I think it’s an incredible time to come into the profession because as you said so much of what got the rest of us, where we are, is going to evolve in the near future. yeah. And so the ideas to, to, to drive digital transformation, to evolve an organization, to, to do smarter marketing, that saves time and money and produces better outputs. It can come from the interns because a lot of executives don’t understand this stuff and they’re maybe even a bit intimidated by it because they don’t understand and they think it’s gonna be really hard to learn. So they just kind of avoid learning it, keep putting it off. Yeah. So I think that the people who take the initiative to go learn it and don’t go and try and sell AI and machine learning like you, if you walk into the CMOs office as an intern and say, I think we’re gonna, we do some machine learning.

Paul Roetzer (21:17): We could cut a hundred hours a month of productivity and like get outta my office. Like I . But if you go in and say, Hey, listen, I analyzed our email marketing activities and we spent a hundred hours last month doing these five things. I think there’s a way to shave 50% of the time off and actually produce twice as much quality work now. Oh, talk to me about that. What is that? Okay. Well there’s these two tools I’ve been testing and here’s what they do. You don’t ever even have to say AI. Yeah. Yeah. But you know, to go find smarter tools to do the thing and you identify opportunities to drive efficiency cuz you understand what it’s capable of doing.

John Jantsch (21:51): All right. I lied. I’m not gonna end yet. Tell me where tell me, tell me where, what are you can need to say? Well, here are my favorite places to find AI tools or here are a handful of my favorite AI tools, either one, either way. You want to answer that.

Paul Roetzer (22:03): So in, in the book, there’s 10 chapters in the middle that are piloting AI chapters and it’s AI for advertising AI for communications. Each of those chapters just follow the same pattern. It explains the opportunity with that category of marketing. It goes into tech and then it goes into sample use cases or vice versa, use cases and tech. So there’s about 70 different vendors featured in the book that are a good starting point on the marketing AI Institute blog. We regularly published lists of vendors across different categories and different things. Like we did 36 tools for AI co or for copywriting last week that, that sort of stuff. So yeah, we just follow along the newsletter or, you know, grab a copy of the book.

John Jantsch (22:39): And the, the fun thing is that like everybody’s copy of the book will be different. Right.

Paul Roetzer (22:44): That would be awesome.

John Jantsch (22:46):

Paul Roetzer (22:47): There, there are a lot of things we tried to do with AI to do the book, but personalized copies for everybody. I don’t think the publisher would’ve let me get away with

John Jantsch (22:56): That. No, no, that’s a tough one. So speaking of an industry that, uh, maybe needs to come into the future, sorry. Uh, sorry. I’m not picking on your publisher,

Paul Roetzer (23:04): But my publisher’s very open minded. I actually love what they’re thinking of. We’re doing some cool stuff with synthetic voice potentially. We may actually

John Jantsch (23:11): Do some stuff, so. Oh cool. Awesome. We’ll tell people, you’ve mentioned a few things, but if you wanna invite people where they could connect with you and obviously the book will be available everywhere.

Paul Roetzer (23:20): Yeah. And so marketing, I institute.com. You can get to the book site from there. There’s gonna be, uh, there’s a couple of free downloads that actually the piling AI workbook that we talked about of how to figure out what to start with, that’s gonna be a free download as part of the book. So you can go there and actually get that spreadsheet. And then there’s a guide that has about 30 sample questions to ask AI vendors. So to help you assess them, it it’s kind of a cool guide. So those will both be available there. So yeah, marketing institute.com is best and I’m really good on, uh, LinkedIn and Twitter. If you wanna reach out to me personally, I’m, I’m really responsive on both of those platforms. I am not a Instagram TikTok or Facebook guy. And if I’m missing anything else, I don’t really do those either too much.

John Jantsch (23:56): gotta stay focused. Right. Awesome. Paul, it was a great catch up for you. I appreciate your stopping by the duct tape marketing podcast. Hopefully you will see you, uh, soon, one of these days out there

Paul Roetzer (24:05): On the road. Thanks so much, John.

John Jantsch (24:06): Hey, and one final thing before you go, you know how I talk about marketing strategy strategy before tactics? Well, sometimes it can be hard to understand where you stand in that what needs to be done with regard to creating a marketing strategy. So we create a free tool for you. It’s called the marketing strategy assessment. You can find it @ marketingassessment.co not.com.co check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today. That’s just marketingassessment.co I’d love to chat with you about the results that you get.

John Jantsch (00:00): This episode of the duct tape marketing podcast is brought to you by the female startup club, hosted by dune Roen, and brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network. If you’re looking for a new podcast, the female startup club shares tips, tactics and strategies from the world’s most successful female founders, entrepreneurs, and women in business to inspire you to take action and get what you want out of your career. One of my favorite episodes who should be your first hire, what’s your funding plan? Dr. Lisa Keven shares her top advice from building spotlight oral. Listen to the female startup club, wherever you get your podcasts.

John Jantsch (00:49): Hello, and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guest today is Edward Sullivan. He’s been coaching in advising startup founders, fortune 10 executives and heads of state for over 15 years. His clients include executives from Google, Salesforce, slack, and dozens of other fast growth companies. He holds an MBA from Wharton and an M PA from the Harvard Kennedy school. He’s a CEO and president of the renowned executive coaching consultancy velocity. And he’s also the co-author of a book. We’re gonna talk about today leading with heart five conversations that unlock creativity, purpose, and results. So Edward, welcome to the show.

Edward Sullivan (01:31): Thanks so much great to be here.

John Jantsch (01:33): So let’s start with leading with heart as opposed to leading with what’s the opposite.

Edward Sullivan (01:41): Well, leading with heart is when you’re being open and curious, and I guess it’s leading with fear leading with ego is how a lot of people go about it, unfortunately.

John Jantsch (01:50): Yeah. And in your research, of course, I’m, I’m guessing that unfortunately that’s how a lot of people were taught or that’s how a lot of people have been led. Isn’t it?

Edward Sullivan (01:57): Well, you know, I think a lot of people when they don’t know better, yeah. They go back to maybe what they saw when they were coming up. And I think a lot of leaders today came up in the eighties and nineties and a lot of high pressure environments. And they were led by people who led by fear, who led with ego and they’ve learned to do the same. So our research indicated that the leaders who actually get the best results out of their employees lead with heart. And we explored that in the book,

John Jantsch (02:28): You know, a lot of entrepreneurs maybe didn’t go through any kind of formal leadership program or were mentored or . I mean, they just started a business and like, poof, now you have to lead people, right? I mean, what does it, what does it take for that person to start saying, oh, I’m a leader now, what do I do? Yeah,

Edward Sullivan (02:45): You’re right. A lot of our, our clients come to us because they’re really good developers. They’re good engineers, right? They’re good product designers. And they built something. People liked it. And now suddenly they have to build a company around it and they never took that class at school. You know, the how to lead people class. And the first in instinct is to try to control everything. Yeah. When you’re the founder, this is your baby. You know, you wanna control everything from the font to the color, to the, how people talk about it, to potential customers. And we’ve learned that people need a little bit more freedom than that. They need to feel some, some sense of owner. Should they need to be able to show up as themselves at work. And it’s really incumbent upon leaders of these firms to give people that freedom and give people that support. So they do feel themselves.

John Jantsch (03:37): Yeah. And I tell you just personal experience as a leader, it’s exhausting trying to hold onto everything. You’re trying to think you have all the answers. Right. And so I, I think it could be very freeing once people go, oh, they actually did it better. Or nobody died here. Right. I mean, so exactly it really. So, so tell me, I mean, leadership books, that’s a huge category of books, probably growing every year. You did some pretty exhaustive research to come to the conclusions you came to. You wanna explain that research process a little bit?

Edward Sullivan (04:05): Sure, sure. So my business partner and I are practitioners, we’re executive coaches. We run velocity, it’s a firm with 25 coaches around the world. We’ve got hundreds of clients. And over our combined 40 years of, uh, working with top executives, we were kind of performing the research on along the way. Right. We didn’t even know it. So our research process was actually going back through our notes, going back through files and saying, what is it that really ties all these great leaders together? What’s that common? We’re not journalists, we’re not researchers by trade. We’re more practitioners who backed into doing some research about this. And we found that there are five core conversations that great leaders are having, that enable them to lead with heart that enable them to have these connected conversations. And they’re conversations that we’re not used to having in the office. Yeah. Right. Because they’re about what do we need as people? What do we need to feel creative and resourceful? What fears might be holding us back, right. It’s about what are the, uh, desires that we have that really motivate us, but can also derail us if we take them a little bit too far,

John Jantsch (05:10): We also talked about, I was just gonna say, I wanna unpack those each or the five conversations I, I kind of wanted to, I wanted to frame it a little bit though, in, in what’s what’s very topical right now is, you know, we’re calling it all kinds of things, a great resignation and whatnot. I mean, is that a bit of a, is that a bit of a, an indictment on leadership? I mean, are people leaving because they’re not getting these things or because they’re not getting, you know, even basic respect.

Edward Sullivan (05:36): I mean, that is exactly right. And research has been done recently that showed that we think people are leaving because they want more freedom or they want more money. They want more equity, but 10 times more important is that they’re leaving toxic work cultures. Yeah. Right. They feel burned out. They feel unappreciated. They feel unseen. Obviously doing all of our work over zoom. Hasn’t helped much in the last couple of years. Right. But there are things that leaders can be doing to create this, these connections with people, even over zoom. And they’re simply not doing them. We get on a call and we say, great, what do we have to talk about today? Let’s do our work. Okay. Enough. And then we get off the call as quickly as possible. Right? Yeah. We’re not creating that connective tissue anymore. And that’s what people are missing.

John Jantsch (06:22): Yeah. I, uh, we have a client that, you know, like a lot of people are trying to hire people and, and trying everything, you know, running ads in all the places. And, you know, we just, we actually we’re testing ads and they add that. We ran that today for two years now has been by far and away the winner, it just, the, the title just says respect wow. And then it says, are you getting, you know, are you getting the respect you deserve in your current career? And I, we can’t beat that ad you know, so it really does say something doesn’t

Edward Sullivan (06:50): I’m gonna write that one down here

John Jantsch (06:52): Do, go for it. So, so you started to unpack the five conversations and you talked about, you used words, like what people need, the fears that are holding them back. We’re gonna get to the P word purpose eventually. Yeah. Here’s the thing that not enough people say is that I don’t think you can do those things as a leader until you clean up your own house. I mean, you get rid of your own fears. You get, you understand your own purpose. Right. And I think a lot of books try to a lot of books, try to say, here’s the roadmap, you know, but not enough say, uh, self, it starts with self-awareness. So, you know, how do you balance that, that thought? Or maybe you disagree with it?

Edward Sullivan (07:27): No, don’t I, I don’t disagree at all. I fatally agree. Yeah. In fact, we, we call the book basically a, a 250 page coaching conversation with one of us, right. With both of us, because really in Le in reading the book, we’re asking you these questions, you need to do all the work yourself. Yeah. And be comfortable answering these questions yourself with your employees, to be able to have those conversations. You can’t just go into it into a room with someone and say like, what are you afraid of? right. that doesn’t really make someone want to open up. But if you start the conversation and say, you know, I don’t know about you, but I’ve been feeling a little bit triggered into some fear recently. There’s a lot of uncertainty in the market. Things are happening abroad where, you know, we’re the country, the world’s at war right now. Yeah. Um, times of uncertainty make me feel a little uncertain, make me feel fearful. What’s coming up for you. Right? Yeah. Suddenly the leader has opened up themselves, created that vulnerability, the V word, right? Yeah. That allows other people to feel comfortable being vulnerable as well.

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John Jantsch (09:15): So let’s, let’s just pretend that the person that’s reading this book has, uh, dealt with that themselves. You know, just give me maybe gimme the 32nd. Here are the five, and then we can kind of come back and go, well, how do you do that?

Edward Sullivan (09:27): Yeah. Yeah. So the five questions that we found in our research and you’ve, you’ve outlined them as well are around needs. What do you need to be resourceful and creative? Yeah. Fears, what fears might be holding you back desires. And this is like, what do you really want out of life? And how could those core desires potentially derail you? We also talk a lot about gifts. What are the gifts you have that are unrealized or unexpressed in this current role? And then once we’ve had those four conversations, we’re ready to have the conversation around purpose.

John Jantsch (10:00): Yeah. O obviously I shouldn’t say obviously in many cases, uh, people have had that relationship. Maybe somebody’s been there for a long time. I mean, they just know each other they’ve unpacked over the years, but a lot of times somebody’s just, you know, managing somebody, they do, they get their 30 minutes a week, you know, with them. I mean, how do you really start getting into areas that maybe both parties are uncomfortable with, but probably the, you know, the superior, you know, perhaps seen as the superiors less uncomfortable with, I mean, you know, how do you start? How do you start creating a culture, I guess, of this openness that has maybe if it hasn’t existed.

Edward Sullivan (10:37): Yeah. You know, we talk a lot about culture and our work and in the book and it is, it is a great challenge. And it’s also an incredible opportunity. Yeah. Um, if you have a culture that’s really shut down where people don’t share anything about their personal lives coming out suddenly and talking about everything you’re fearful of yeah. Will be, will come as a shock, right? Yeah. You need to build up some, some trust there, right? Yeah. You need to approach some of these topics slowly. You need to build an environment of safety where people feel like we’re starting to connect to human beings as opposed to colleagues. And that feels pretty cool. Right. And it’s that connecting that, learning about each other, where you come from, what have you done, what’s going on at home? Do you have siblings, all those basic questions that we kind of take for granted with our friends, we often don’t know anything aside from like the names of spouses and maybe the names of children with our, our colleagues. Right? Yeah. We start having those baseline conversations, then we can go, go a few layers deeper. Yeah. We can start getting into what are you really? Maybe what you’re fearful of. Right. It builds upon itself. Yeah.

John Jantsch (11:40): Yeah. Trust is what we’re talking about. Really trust .

Edward Sullivan (11:43): Yeah. I mean, yeah. It all comes down to trust when people say like, what’s the two second summary of this book, it’s how to build trust in a work environment. Exactly.

John Jantsch (11:51): So, so do you advocate making, you know, like a lot of people will hear this and they’ll go, okay. Uh, we got 25 minutes, I’m gonna spend five minutes asking you about yourself and then we’re gonna get into it. I mean, is that the approach or do you actually want to have like, let’s have a company lunch once a month and we’re not gonna talk about work. I mean, which approach is better

Edward Sullivan (12:13): In your, uh, it’s actually both, right? Yeah. You need that regular drip of like connecting, uh, just like, Hey, what’s been going on. Yeah. And as opposed to just like the cursory what’d you do this weekend, right. We also want people to be giving the giving each other, some praise. Yeah. Like, so we start in our company, we start all of our meetings with shout outs. Mm-hmm and we say like, does anyone have anything great to say on anyone else on the call? You know? And it’s like, I really wanna thank Mike for, you know, in this meeting we had last week, he did this. That was great. Public praise makes people feel good. Yeah. We don’t get enough of it. Right? Yeah. We might get praise, um, privately or over email, but you really wanna be sharing that praise in real time. And as, as much as you can in front of other people,

John Jantsch (12:59): How much of the work, like, I, I, I would venture to say that if we filled a room up with 50 people and said, please explain your purpose, you know, about, yeah. Two of them, you know, could come up with anything that they thought really resonated. So how do we actually help people understand what their needs are, what their fears are, because I think that’s a lot of the challenges they don’t know. We could ask somebody, what, what are your fears? But they don’t know.

Edward Sullivan (13:26): They don’t know you’re right. You know, we try to explore some different themes in the book of needs that we’ve seen. Our clients have fears. We’ve seen our clients have to give people a language, but it’s really through the conversation that we start exploring. I don’t even know what I might be fearful of. Yeah. Right. You know, do I get to say that I’m fearful in this office environment hate to say it, but like men especially are trained to be fearless. They can’t show any fear and to work in a, in, in a, in a tough work environment, women then show up and think that they can’t show any fear either. And it’s this creates this really negative feedback system. So we’re trying to break that by saying, it’s actually, it’s not just okay to have these conversations. It’s better if you do right. You actually get better results. If you’re able to talk about these things and have that connection,

John Jantsch (14:20): How, how could you bring this work earlier, uh, into somebody? So somebody joins an organization. Could this be part of the hiring process to some degree, or is it just too hard to do that? Because there’s no relationship because you know, when you start talking about people’s desires and gifts, mm-hmm

Edward Sullivan (14:36): ,

John Jantsch (14:37): That might actually direct the path , you know, that, that they would go or the role that they would fill, you know, how could you do this without, you know, the relationship part? Or can you,

Edward Sullivan (14:47): Yeah. I mean, some environments, some organizations have a culture where as soon as you walk in the door, you feel at ease. Yeah. You feel relaxed. You can tell people genuinely like each other. Yeah. Right. And in those companies, and we, we, we’re lucky enough to advise a handful of ’em that are like that you sit down for the interview and you already feel at ease with this person. You already it’s like, we, we we’ve been friends for a long time. Right? Yeah. So the people who are just coming in are almost inculturated into this idea of it’s cool to just be yourself. It’s cool to show up as you are and bring your gifts to the table, bring your needs and fears to the table and we’ll work with that. Right. Cause it’s very human to have needs. It’s human to have other environments you walk in and it feels cold. It feels like, you know, they’re giving you like an intimidation interview. I don’t know if you’ve ever had ever interviewed at McKinsey, like they’re famous for the intimidation interview where they try to see how you respond when someone’s almost really rude to you in an interview situation because the client might be rude to you someday. Yeah. Yeah. That’s fine. And all, but how about have that conversation about, you need to steal up and be ready for people to be an asshole towards you rather than just be that way towards them in the interview.

John Jantsch (16:04): So talk a little bit about some of the tools, because obviously you do this work with organizations, you teach people, you give them tools to, to train the, you know, folks inside their organization. So talk a little bit about the work, I guess that is that, you know, that’s more than just, you know, five conversations it’s daily work.

Edward Sullivan (16:22): Right. Right. I mean, our work is predominantly one on one conversations, like coaching conversations. And then we facilitate a lot of conversations for our clients. So you might, uh, not be surprised that right now with everyone starting to go back to the office and COVID feels like it’s mostly over, everybody wants to have a team offsite. So we’re just completely booked out through the summer in dozens of team offsite for people who wanna have these conversations. Right. They’re they wanna buy the book and have everyone that will have a workshop about the book or they just wanna get together and have a joyful experience of learning about each other. They’re they learned half of our employees. No one’s even met before. Cause we hired them in the middle of COVID. Yeah. What’s your name? You know, don’t tell me what you need yet. Just tell me what your name is. and in, in those facilitated experiences that we engage with clients, that’s where the real work happens, right? Yeah. It’s one thing to like play the games and do the trust falls and these kinds of things. It’s another thing to have a facilitated, really hard open conversation that gets people cracked wide open and gets them sharing things that they never thought they’d be able to share, let alone, I mean, with their friends, let alone in an office environment and suddenly it feels very natural.

John Jantsch (17:39): I suspect one of the tricks to this work is that, you know, even though you’ve got a nice tidy framework, you know, people are, people are all different. Sure. Some people respond differently. Some people love to talk about how they feel. some people, some people that’s like the worst thing that could, you know, that could be involved in the day. Exactly. So, you know how what’s the art or what’s the balance of being able to use the framework, but use it appropriately, I guess. Yeah.

Edward Sullivan (18:07): I mean, the important thing with all of this work is to start where people are, right. We can’t have forced vulnerability. Yeah. You know, people need to feel safe. It needs to feel natural. And it should often, it often comes after the leader has created an opening for it. You know, the leader who calls a meeting and says, great, everyone’s gonna share their most painful childhood story. starting with you. Right. Doesn’t really work. Yeah. Right. But if over time we’re building rapport, we’re making people feel safe. And the leader is the one who is handing out praise, making people feel good, making them feel psychologically safe. Yeah. Right. And that’s definitely a term of art in that when people give feedback, when they have ideas, when they push back against the conversation and what we’re doing, and the leader says, that’s really interesting. Tell me more. Yeah. You know, so really creates

John Jantsch (19:04): So really in a lot of ways, you’re, it’s not, there’s actually a risk in proclaiming. This is how we’re gonna do it or mandating, this is what we’re gonna do now, as opposed to just doing it.

Edward Sullivan (19:13): Yeah. Sometimes you just do it. Yeah. And you say, there’s no obligation to join the conversation. There’s no obligation to share something. You don’t feel comfortable sharing, but we’ve learned in this organization, whether it’s through the book or through it’s following the research that teams and organizations that share what’s really going on for them. Yeah. Build trust. And then ultimately have more honest conversations about the work itself. Yeah. Right. It’s this virtuous cycle. If you tell me what’s really going on for you and I build trust, then when I push back against you on an idea when we’re debating, you know, we’re really trying to get to the truth of the matter. Or we’re trying to get to the best idea. If I can’t push back against you, we might ship a flawed product. Right. I mean the, the, the challenger exploded because a scientist wasn’t able to say, oh, this O ring might be bad. Right. Things go wrong because people don’t feel safe pushing back. And I

John Jantsch (20:09): Think this

Edward Sullivan (20:10): Whole artist is about up in the build that safety.

John Jantsch (20:14): Yeah. I was gonna say, I think you make a really great point. I mean, some of the best organizations are ones where people feel, uh, enough trust that they can argue that they can, you know, debate things like that. Yeah. Yeah. As opposed to feeling like, oh, well doesn’t matter, you know, , I’m just gonna go. Exactly. Can you repair trust? Do you think? Because I’m thinking there are a lot of organizations out there that they just were, the leader was being who they were being and, you know, woke up one day and realize this isn’t working, you know, is that something that you can repair or is it again, just one of those things where you’ve gotta demonstrate through your actions, that things have changed,

Edward Sullivan (20:49): You know, they say trust comes in on two feet and leaves on a horse. Yeah. Right. So it is something that is earned slowly and can easily be destroyed. That said humans are naturally forgiving people. Right. We can always earn trust back. We just have to do the work. Yeah. And we have to be consistent.

John Jantsch (21:11): Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. Lots of work for lots of us to do so, Edward, thanks for, so by the duct tape marketing, uh, podcast, you wanna tell people where they can find out more about your work or anything else you wanna share.

Edward Sullivan (21:22): Absolutely. The book is@leadingwithheartbook.com and thank you so much for the opportunity.

John Jantsch (21:29): Yeah. Well, again, as, as I said, thanks for stopping by, and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Edward Sullivan (21:34): Hope so. Thank you much.

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