The following transcript is provided by YouTube. Mistakes are present. To hear the podcast episode, click HERE.
[Music]
as an industrial water treater you have to do so much you have to know about so many things
chemistry physics environmental electrical and the list goes on but did
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[Music] welcome to scaling up the podcast where we scale up on knowledge so we don’t
scale up our systems my name is trace blackmore certified water technologist
lead ap o m and some other credentials nobody cares about
nation i am so pleased to be bringing you this podcast the scaling up h2o
podcast the number one podcast for the industrial water treatment industry and
of course it’s the number one podcast because we have the number one audience that is the scaling up nation if you are
listening to this podcast congratulations you are a member of the scaling up nation
and i want to thank you for letting people know that we have a podcast for
industrial water treatment the next time that you are speaking with somebody in our industry
mention this podcast maybe they don’t know about it i just met somebody just a
few weeks ago at a conference that i was at and they had no idea for the last
five years that there was a podcast they stumbled across it
because they were googling i love it when nouns become verbs
they were searching for something about a question that they had and my incredible team at the scaling up
h2o podcast they don’t only put my voice before you
they do a transcript of everything that we talk about on this show and what that
allows the internet to do is search through every single one of
our episodes and what they were searching for found one of our episodes
and he couldn’t believe that there were 200 plus episodes out there that he didn’t know anything about
and he has been binge listening to the scaling up h2o podcast and i’ve
heard so many people having similar stories just think if that person learned about
this podcast from one of their friends somebody that they worked with they
would have had access to it even sooner and folks that’s how we get the word out
there the more people we have listening the more ideas we’re getting in the more
ideas we’re getting in the more shows that i can bring to you now i haven’t run out of ideas yet
but i know i will without your help one of my favorite shows out there is dirty
jobs with mike rowe and for those of you that didn’t know the discovery channel has a brand new
season of dirty jobs so new dirty jobs are coming out but at the
end of episode one of dirty jobs mike rowe and his team were out of ideas
everything they thought that they could do they did in season one and then they started asking the
audience for help well it wasn’t because they needed some more ideas it’s because they had no ideas and they had a renewal
for season two the only way they kept that show on the air i believe for nine
seasons and now it just came back i want to say 10 years later for a 10th series
is because the viewers gave them ideas so
mike’s one of my broadcasting heroes i’ve learned a lot listening to his podcast and of course watching his shows
and following some other things that he does day to day so i’m learning from him
and the only way he stayed on the air was learning from his viewers well i’m asking to learn from my listeners if you
have a show idea go to scalinguph2o.com and leave us a show idea or leave us a
voicemail and we will be sure to get those questions answered or if you have
somebody you want me to interview let me know who that is and how to contact them and i will definitely make sure to reach
out to them so we have lots and lots of lots of more episodes and more years to
bring scaling up h2o straight to you hey uh one of the things that we
started doing back during the lockdown of the pandemic was we started doing a
monthly hang and the hang is where we as industrial water traders get together
and we meet each other we talk about things that are going on we get some ideas and we help each other we call
that the hang and the next hang is going to be july 14th at 6 pm eastern time
super simple go to scaling up h2o.com forward slash hang reserve your spot and then log on at 6
pm on july 14th i’ll let you know about a couple of current events that are going on and then i will quickly get you
in a small breakout room that breakout room will have probably four to six
people in it and you will introduce yourself they will introduce themselves and then you will work whatever you
decide to work you might say i have this issue with a water softener and i don’t
know what to do somebody might say well hey that’s my forte all i do is water softeners you
guys can exchange numbers and you now just solved that problem i have heard of
dozens of these issues getting solved right there on the hang i’ve heard of
friendships starting right there on the hang i’ve heard of people being in each other’s home towns
on certain trips and because they met on the hang they actually got together while they were in that person’s
hometown folks do not deprive yourself of that opportunity again mark your
calendars july 14th for the next hang scaling up h2o.com forward slash hang
something else you might want to be aware of is the national association of clean water agencies is having their
leadership conference july 24th through 27th in seattle
washington this is a conference that provides the tools that prepare utility
leaders for the future of clean water exploring topics like workforce development
innovative financing rate setting community engagement advances in
technology and how to get customers involved in the water
space so this is something that you practice the type of water treatment that you practice go to our show notes
page we’ve got some more information for you something else to mark your calendars for is august 29th through 31st in san
antonio texas that’s going to be the smart water conference and this is a hands-on
experience where utility executives interact with each other and also
leading vendors and analysts and federal agencies in the industry
all around making sure that water is here for all of us and
we’re constantly enhancing our ability to be able to provide clean water this is something sounds
like of interest to you go to our show notes page and we will have information
for the smart water summit scale up nation it is amazing to me
that i have such an amazing podcast with such an amazing audience
and so many people that listen to the scaling up h2o podcast it just allows so
many privileges for me as you know i love to read i love to learn new things
i love to ask myself what don’t i know i don’t know and when i ask myself that
i then ask myself how am i challenging myself to know that i don’t know something and one of the things that i
do is i try to join organizations that teach me things that i put myself into
that i’m uncomfortable with because maybe i don’t know everything that other people do i always want to be the
dumbest person in the room because that ensures that i am going to learn something i also read a lot of books how
do i know what i don’t know well let me read something i want to learn more
about and i also make sure that i’m aligning myself with people that are
challenging me well one of the people that i align with on a regular basis challenged me by sending me
a ted talk and i love ted talks because normally they’re relatively quick
and they allow a lot of thought after the person gives their presentation so
quick and informative you just can’t ask for more when i facilitate meetings i normally
have some sort of activity where i try to get everybody rallied around a particular topic and then engaged in
something that we can discuss explore and then grow on so they can
continually make themselves or the team better and the ted talk that we are
going to talk about today is something that i have used for years with
leadership teams that i have worked with to try to get them to realize that we
put too big a tag on leadership and nation if you are listening to this
podcast you are a leader you are in charge of something regardless of what
it is maybe you don’t own the company but i guarantee you are leading somewhere in that company
and we think that we’ve got to do this huge gesture in order for us to call
ourselves a leader and that is not the case you are a leader you are in charge
of something you are leading people you might have to think about what that is but i guarantee that you are a leader
that’s what this entire interview is all about and the reason that i was able to have
this ted talk presenter award-winning ted talk presenter
and new york times best-selling author on this podcast is because of all of you
because of the clout that all of you listeners give this podcast
people are willing to come on the podcast and talk more about what they do
i want to thank you for allowing that to happen and with all of that let’s go straight in to our interview
my lab partner today is wall street journal’s best-selling author drew
dudley how are you drew i am amazing my friend how you feeling today i am feeling great i am so excited
to have you on the scaling up h2o podcast i facilitate meetings and i have just
enjoyed sharing so much the ted talk that you did an inspiring people to think differently
about leadership oh that’s awesome well i mean we are on the same page in that particular case i
will say this uh these days after two years in the pandemic scales aren’t something i usually
fully embraced so you’re pretty much the first one i haven’t gone running from in quite a while so i’m i’m thrilled to be
here scaling up here as i stare stare at the one just outside my bathroom door that’s scaring the crap
out of me right now well this this is the fun scaling up this is where we scale up on knowledge so we don’t scale
up other things so i know we’re going to have a great conversation today uh before we get started do you mind
sharing with the scaling up nation a little about yourself sure i’m drew uh drew dudley i for 10
years i ran the leadership development program at the university of toronto and
started engaging at the very end and some well this sounds a little dark social experiments that were driven by a
senior group of leadership students where we were trying to figure out a way to close the gap between the people we
wanted to be and how we were behaving because that gap is just inevitable but my students were really struggling with
it the discovery that many of us make far too late in life that sometimes you
have two options get what you want or be the person you want to be and they’re mutually exclusive and i had watched a
lot of my students go through their first real adult experience of coming to
that realization and so we started engaging in some experiments to see how do we close that gap how do we live up
to the stuff we claim to stand for is one way that we put it and developed a process that’s rooted in behavioral
psychology on how to close that gap how to make it more likely that the stuff we want to do every day we actually do
and for 10 years i’ve traveled around and tried to explore with organizations how they can do that because we figured
if we look at leadership as existing in individual moments of interpersonal impact not just positions and titles and
power which is how we’ve been traditionally taught then leadership opens up for a lot more people and so
i’ve been writing and speaking about that idea as well as teaching a process on how to make it a reality ever since
so i travel pre-pandemic about 200 days a year to share that idea and been broadcasting out from the side of a
mountain and hotel rooms and various places over the last couple years as well well i’m just delighted to hear that
there’s colleges out there that are teaching leadership yeah i mean that’s one of the challenges
is how they teach it because i think we have to realize that one thing i learned in education is whatever examples you
give someone first to explain a concept whatever the first examples you give not only does it
shape how they think about it forever but it limits how they think about it and so one of the challenges isn’t
whether or not we’ve got schools teaching leadership it’s how they’re teaching leadership and specifically
which examples they’re using because kids for generations like you and i we
were hearing when we talked about leaders the examples they gave us were giants presidents and scientific
groundbreakers people who conquered empires straight white dudes supposedly straight white dudes and so that has
shaped how generations have understood leadership and then how they’ve proceeded to teach it to other people
it’s a very limiting definition of leadership especially when i’m talking to young people and when we’re
discussing leadership and it’s all about power and influence and prestige and you’re 19 years old and your life is run
by other people profs telling you what you got to do teachers telling you what you have to do part-time bosses parents
so how is that connecting with young people and so when we start to couch leadership in
these individual moments that people can relate to because they’ve had teachers and they’ve had parents and friends and
strangers do things for them that have changed the way they felt about their day people understand that as a type of
leadership to which we all can and should aspire now so in many ways one of the things i was trying to do at
the university one of the reasons they hired me as opposed to some theory-based academic was that very reason is that
leadership is taught to young people as if it’s something they get to do one day and i wanted to talk about how they
could do it now what i didn’t expect is how that would resonate with people well beyond universities when i started going
out and talking to companies but it’s a message i don’t change much it’s just a question of how early can we get it into
people’s minds and you turn that message into a very well received ted talk and by the way
that is something that i aspire to do so i want to know how do you turn a message into getting it on stage at ted
oh man okay i think the first thing on any kind of presentation ted or
otherwise and this was a really brilliant guy i interviewed once and it stuck with me forever when he said the story is the
basic unit of human understanding and so i think the key to any talk ted or otherwise is what’s the story and i
think one of the mistakes that gets made sometimes i made it myself is that when you have a good story you also have to
take the extra step of making it about the audience so i think yes this is an amazing story like i’ve heard several
speakers talk about climbing everest and they’re all amazing stories there’s no story about climbing everest that isn’t
amazing but the ones that stick with you are the ones where they tell their story
of climbing everest and at every step they try to stop and relate what they learned to what you might be
experiencing because most of us aren’t going to climb everest there are remarkable storytellers but the story is
about their experience on everest the great speakers are the ones who take their story on everest and try to figure
out what lessons you can use to climb whatever your version of everest is and
usually that’s a social or emotional one as opposed to the actual physical mountain so the first thing is what’s
your story and i think that’s what’s key and then as you tell the story it’s what specific
stories in the lives of the audience am i interested in having them access as a result of my story i told a story you
know that ended up getting called the lollipop moment but it was about a moment in life where somebody let you
know that you had had a bigger impact than you were aware i wanted to tell that story because yes
it happened to me but i wanted everybody in the audience thinking about oh yeah how about that time someone did this for
me or i have an opportunity to go tell someone or man someone did that for me and i never thanked them for it so i
think that’s the first key is i think a lot of people believe that to get a platform for a message you have to
be inspiring or motivating and i think if you try to be inspiring and motivating you’ll often miss because
what inspires and motivates people is different for me it’s all about how are you useful
i think if you go on stage or on a podca or whatever it is the goal is always how can you be useful because i think useful
compelling ideas are inherently motivating and in my specific case about getting a
ted talk and this is why i sometimes feel useless to people when they ask like how do i
get a ted talk or how do i build a speaking career because what i did isn’t actually
necessarily repeatable because i had a couple of pretty big breaks that other people don’t naturally get and my
students nominated me for a tedx event without my knowledge and so the first thing you need is the belief that you
actually deserve to be on that stage which i didn’t and then you need friends who won’t let you let the opportunity
slip by and i think that that is a really key piece is i happen to have a group of
people who believed in me more than i believed in me and so here’s my attempt to spin it back to the stories of the
people listening you have a friend who musically or with their writing or with their dancing or with their community
organizing is extraordinary and they aren’t leaning on that or they aren’t putting
that out into the world because for whatever reason they become convinced it isn’t what they’re meant to do all of
us have friends that are holding back for whatever reason i think a real key piece why i talk about my ted experience
is because i want people thinking about who are their friends that with a push could get the kind of cool experiences
that emerged from my friends and students pushing me because i would have missed out on so much if i’d actually
listened to myself and so now because i didn’t listen to myself other people have to
do you mind letting the audience know in a nutshell what your talk was about
yeah so i used to run a charity and i actually got into it to impress a
girl uh because it’s a great reason yeah it’s a great reason i think that’s the start of march of the penguins isn’t
it like every great story begins with an act of stupidity so that’s how i got involved in fundraising and for the
first time my life when i got involved in what was called shinorama students fighting cystic fibrosis it was a
reminder for me that the world’s more interesting to engage with than to write papers about because my whole life had
been about looking good on paper up until that point and what happened is over the years i ended
up rising up through the ranks of this particular charity i was a volunteer at the school we raised some money locally
and then you know i became a regional and then national chair and what we found is our volunteers
would come out to our conference and they’d be amazing and they’d get excited and they say we’re going to raise x
amount of money let’s say five grand and then they’d raise two and they’d treat that as a failure and
then they wouldn’t return our calls even so we could say thank you for the work that they did because they felt they’d failed and so what i would do
every year is tell a story at the end of the conference that i hoped would get to the heart of the fact
that it’s not the money you generate it’s the awareness that you do because i’ve seen people make 2 000 and then
10 years later it’s 15 it’s 20 it’s 25 because of their work but you don’t see it that’s legacy right so often you
don’t see the outcomes and the story was that when i was running the campaign when i was in
their position i had my site set on a certain amount of money we had to make this amount
and during the course of doing that apparently i did something i don’t remember a girl came up to me on my last
night at the school she told me that the first time she met me she was standing in line on her first day of school
but was so overwhelmed that she had already decided to quit and she was turning to her parents to
tell them that and i guess i came out of the nearest building and i had a bucket full of lollipops
which was kind of a thing for our charity we gave them away at bars in return for donations
and i’m going up along the lineup and i know a captive audience when i see one right these are all brand new students they can’t go anywhere so i was handed
out these lollipops trying to make them laugh trying to get them to get up at 7 am on a saturday to shine shoes and i
guess i stopped at this girl and i saw that i don’t i guess i saw that she looked upset somehow
so i guess i stopped and i held out a lollipop to the guy next to her and i said hey manic you’re next to this beautiful woman it’s two and a half more
hours in line and you got your eyes on the ground come on break the ice give her this lollipop which i now realize
was one heteronormative two incredibly disrespectful of her personal space but
in this case we play it to the end and i guess i held out the lollipop and said man give her the lollipop
and he took it and then i guess i just looked so upset when she took it out of his hands
because he looks so embarrassed right so she’s nice she takes it from him and i guess i turned to her parents and said
look at that it’s her first day away from home and she’s taking candy from a stranger like nice parenting
and i was i was i i just was trying to make people in that line laugh i remember doing that type of thing where
if you can be engaging to people they they remember you and they say oh let’s support what that person’s supporting i
was just trying to move towards the big goal of making the money and four years later this girl walked up to me
and you know told me that when everyone started laughing after i made that joke she decided not to quit
now that she heard i was leaving she wanted to wish me the best of luck and tell me how important a guy had been in her life because she didn’t quit
and then she told me i’ve been dating the guy for four years and then a year and a half later they
invited me to their wedding it’s amazing and i don’t remember it like that’s the story is that i don’t remember it but
that might be the biggest impact i ever had on another human being right and it was all in service of the big goal of
leadership right making the money makes me look good but it made me realize and this is what i was trying to get across
to students and to everyone when i tell the story is that it’s not the goals you set it’s not the goals you reach it’s
how you behave in pursuit of those goals because when you act like that in pursuit of those goals you set up money
for the future you set up relationships for the future you set up a culture on campus to support your campaign so i’d
always tell my students that story and students just really responded to it and
when i got the opportunity to speak at ted another example of how you gotta you gotta push your friends is i called
my best friend and said i got six and a half minutes at ted toronto like what should i talk about and he
said the lollipop thing you idiot and i said ah it doesn’t have enough gravitas this is the ted event and he
was having none of it man he was just you gotta get over yourself you talk about how leadership is something we
should all embrace but we make it into something bigger just because we want to sound more impressive and now you have
the biggest stage in your life and you’re not going to do it you’re not going to tell your best story because you think it doesn’t make you sound
smart enough like live what you talk about they didn’t book you for what you might say they booked you for what you
do say which was such a great thing to hear from your friends right earlier in my life i had a friend tell
me you’ve got to give your friends more credit we don’t care about you because of the guy you might be one day we care about
you because of the guy you are now i love that and it was just that yeah it always stuck with me because so many of
us work so hard because we want i don’t know not to let people down and we realized that like nobody in my
life has got me as an investment you know what i mean like all right we’re gonna put some time in on drew and maybe
he’ll turn out to be something like we’ll put him in double a and hope that he manages to actually break the
like they care about you now and i think we got to give our friends more credit for that so that’s the
lollipop story this idea that leadership our biggest legacy will often be in the
moments that we’re to which we’re not paying attention and that i think that when we recognize that we get more
conscious about creating those individual moments of power because they are power they’re the only source of
power on earth that is accessible to everyone on earth moments of interpersonal impact every
other source of power it has got systemic barriers between that power and most of the people on earth but those moments we can create
and we got to give ourselves credit for it and be deliberate about it as i said everybody i’ve shared your ted
talk with immediately gets it it’s so well done i’m curious what are some of
the results that you’ve received what are people telling you about what your talk has inspired in them
it’s six to that well i mean it’s eight minutes but i crammed it to six and a half like i can’t watch that talk because as someone who tries to speak
professionally it’s so poorly executed on a technical level drew i have to tell you i think that’s why it’s so endearing
i mean i you you do start off very quickly and then and then you something happened and i didn’t want to ask you what happened because you do calm down
you do slow down a little bit i’ve had so many people tell me i think i can get up and do it because he did what he did
so i think it’s awesome you did it just the way you did it well i was scared man i was really
scared i’d done a lot of talks but i was terrified that those big red letters there was only like 10 tedx events in
the world at the time so it was a and the people were running it we’re running it as if it was a massive deal which it
was it was the talk of a pretty major city in canada all day long stuff was trending nationally so i was terrified
and i think the response mostly has still been a little shocking to me because i still get them
and that thing was done 12 years ago and yeah it kicked around the internet for about a year and then ted picked it
up almost actually almost two years after it was originally done so it went live on ted two years after it was
originally done in toronto and over the course of a weekend it exploded and i think the response mostly has been
people letting me know that it inspired them to go out and reach out to someone who
did that and i mean if people haven’t seen the talk i don’t want to dwell too much on it but in the talk the question
that someone posed me once i got a text from a friend of mine who who teaches it in a leadership class and said one
student asked an interesting question you say that we need to make leadership about lollipop moments how many we
create how many we say thank you for how many we pay forward except which is the lollipop moment was
the lollipop moment when you gave her the lollipop and broke the ice or was the lollipop moment when she told you
what resulted and it’s interesting because you say you really like the talk and what goes into creating it
i don’t remember like i don’t actually know if i ever considered that question
which is the moment of leadership when i accidentally did something
that she needed in that moment or when she took the time to walk up to me and let me know that it had happened because
if she hadn’t done that nobody else ever hears the story and nobody gets to process it however they
do and i think that to me there’s a lesson there i don’t remember if i had a decision on which of the two it was
but both creating a moment that could change the way someone feels as well as
telling people when they’ve done it those are both moments of leadership and i love the fact they asked the question
and i think it’s so important to ask questions because i had no idea and i made the damn talk
right so that’s i think the biggest thing is that when i get feedback from people the ones
that i really love are when they tell me who they reached out to because that’s the whole idea what is your lollipop
story who told you unexpectedly that you would matter to them or who can you
think about creating for for that for someone else who in your life five years ago created an individual moment that
you haven’t yet let them know where it led and i think to me that’s that’s what i love when people say
it led me to go and do that if you were to come into our office right now you would see right in the
middle of our conference table is a bowl full of dum-dum lollipops
and this is to remind us of exactly the mystery flavor is the best right you never know what it’s going to be by the
way you know the story behind the mystery flavor totally useless nonsense so when they switch from say rootier
flavor to grape flavor there’s a bit in the run that’s mixed so that now becomes
mystery see you have to love that somebody sat back and just went yeah let’s not throw
that out i think it’s the same person who’s like business brilliance yeah like oh we gotta throw this uh this um pot of
coffee out it’s been sitting here for however long well why don’t we throw it over ice and charge four bucks for it
who’s gonna buy that like like when did coffee go from being cold coffee to being iced coffee because when i leave
it out on the counter for three hours it’s cold but you stick it in some ice for a while
it’s great so there’s some genius that goes on there in the world and i always tip my hat to the people who who create
those moments totally agree with that well uh i showed your ted talk to my team
and we challenge each of our team members in every meeting what lollipop moments did they
create in the last week and the whole goal is you know we’re trying to be successful as a company we’re trying to
be successful as being leaders in our own right but what are the little touches that
really make the difference like you explained in your talk that we are now being cognizant of that we’re now paying
attention and just like you said we’re letting people know when they’re doing that for us and it’s amazing the stories
people share yeah it’s a transition uh like it’s a little bit of a transition
from random acts of kindness to conscious acts of kindness like we celebrate random acts of kindness a lot and cool
you know what i mean but i really do believe that the whole idea of the work i do is okay yeah random
acts are amazing the lollipop moment was a cool leadership moment but it was an accident and so how do we do it more
consciously that’s what you folks are doing is it’s not a oh when you get a chance live your values when you get a chance let
someone know it’s planning to actually do it and there’s a big difference between those two things for sure so
that’s what’s awesome is that it’s not about random acts it’s about conscious acts and that is a big difference in how
we approach things one of my mentors encouraged me years ago to send out so many thank you cards
every month and after you do that for a while you’re thinking well who the heck can i send a thank you card to but but
you had us look at things a lot differently and it’s so easy to fill out those cards now and that’s awesome
because you said like what are the small or what are the little things that we do and i think we’re taught that and that’s
cool like there’s so much in our language that we do without thinking and i think it’s important that we’re identifying someone else for instance
i’m trying really hard not to say guys when often the room to which i’m speaking is mostly women but it’s just a
thing that we picked up along the way same with the little things oh it’s little stuff that we can do because i don’t think they’re little
they’re the biggest things we do in terms of impact but they’re simple and i think what we’ve done is we’ve
intertwined simple and little the fact that it’s a simple act with which you engage each day to recognize someone
else’s leadership or to create an individual moment of impact they’re simple to do or easy as you just said
but that doesn’t mean they’re little and the idea that we’ve equated doing something simple with being little i
think it makes it more likely we skip over it because when we diminish stuff we’re less likely to do it it’s why
i tell i used to tell my students you can’t use the word just around me because we always use it as a diminisher right i
just i’m just a student i just have to get through this meeting i’m just a receptionist bus driver just a
fundraiser and every time you use the word just to describe who you are what you do
you’re giving people permission to expect less from you so there’s power in that word and we teach our kids to do it too because we use it all the time
but guess what i said when the students came in and said we want you to get nominated for tedx toronto i said i’m
just a part-time speaker and that’s why i think why it’s so important to be open about your principles because
then the students were like we we’re having none of that and so looking at just as a diminisher
leaders of all anybody listening one of the most simple but profoundly
impactful little traits you can pick up or mantras as a leader is
never allow someone who you know is a person of worth to diminish themselves in front of you and it happens all the
time and we don’t have to be inspiring and we don’t have to be motivating but when we hear that we gotta shut it down
and i did ted because my students shut that crap down i told the story that impacts people apparently ten years
later because my friend shut that diminishing crap down like shut her down
simplicity is not a bad thing but one of the things the simplicity that we
need to change or simple thing when you change is the words that we use to describe our leadership because we call
it little we call it random we call it everyday leadership like we qualify it no it’s leadership full stop it’s a form
of leadership to which we all can and should aspire i’m not saying everyone can or should or wants to be a ceo i’m
really not or or a senior executive or should be like there are some people that put in charge it is a disaster but we all can
create those individual moments we all can and we have been educated out of believing it and huge portions of our
world now we just created this world where most of the leadership on the planet is coming from people who won’t call themselves
leaders and we taught that i think we could i think we can unteach it what’s a good way to transition somebody
to better language because if i don’t set that up right it might seem condescending it might seem like i’m
judging them what’s the best way to do that i think one of the best ways of doing anything is to explain to people how it
makes you feel because when you say to somebody i mean this is the old eye messaging thing but the way it was
explained to me isn’t just that it’s a trick it’s that if you present how you feel about something you can’t it can’t be argued
with factually no one can say you’re not upset by that or you’re not bothered by that they can say you shouldn’t be but
they have to accept the premise that this is impacting you most people don’t want to upset people they care about and if you’re in a position to tell someone
what you just described you’re probably in a relationship where there is a level of care between the two of you and i
think that it’s simply a matter of explaining the why all right like look when you say you’re just something all i can think about are
the ways that you’ve contributed to this organization or the ways that you contributed to my life all i could think about is that time that i was feeling
this and you told me to go home and you picked up the slack like when you say just that’s how i feel
like and the thing is you’re not just saying to them oh you’re doing it wrong you’re
saying hey like i don’t like seeing you be diminished because you matter and for
me when you start with a i don’t love hearing that because it makes me feel
like my friend is or my colleague or someone i respect is being diminished
people don’t want to know that they’re doing that they don’t realize that they’re doing that there’s all kinds of
reasons we diminish ourselves psychologically which i found really interesting is that most of the stuff we
do that hurts us there is a sound psychological reason we do it we’re not stupid all right we feel anger not
because we’re stupid or we’re weak but because for most of human history anger kept us alive so did fear so did
jealousy for 10 000 years most of our emotions that we’re taught to suppress now
were the only reason we survived in a world where our primary threats were physical right now we live in a world for those of us
blessed to live in the developed world right most of the threats to our well-being are social and emotional now right
but we still have these minds that are hardwired for a world where our threats are physical because the social world
evolved a lot faster than our brains did and so i think it’s really important to recognize that
we’re all like there’s a humanity to all of us as we try to navigate this right and that i think is really essential to
remember however we want to change how we see ourselves but i think the key is
to when you leave in with people to let them know don’t use the word just or don’t minimize yourself explain how it
impacts you and i think that people genuinely respond to that hey when you say this all i can think of is this
and i think that’s how i’ve always tried to approach it because if you’re just like no no don’t say just i mean you can do that eventually like once you explain
the why once you explain that you see it as a diminisher once you see it as beneath them
i think then you can joke about it but at first i think it’s just about explaining how it impacts you when i see someone i know is being like an
extraordinarily brilliant caring amazing person beat themselves down it genuinely upsets me it accepts all of us when we
see the people we care about do that right i think the key is to say hey like when you do that man all i can think of is
this and then list off all the things that make that person awesome i love it you started doing this with students now
you’re doing it with businesses if a business like mine were to get you
to come in and speak with us what could we expect i think it always depends on what it is that people are looking for
generally my biggest focus is on taking through people through a presentation that’s about closing that
gap between who we want to be and how we’re behaving specifically i want to teach them the process i call the day
one process which involves something called operationalizing leadership values i want to teach the step-by-step process
on how to actually do that i want to talk about redefining leadership of course that’s the key it’s always about
making people realize they’re ignoring a lot of leadership but it’s about how do we be conscious how do we go from random
acts of kindness to conscious acts and so i walk people through the step-by-step process that we developed
at the university that says here are the values we want to stand for every day and then here is a process that we use
we call it the leadership test to actually go about living at least three
of the six core values we’ve identified every day that’s the idea is that
we present a test and the idea is that in order to earn another day at work another day on the
planet you have to get three questions out of six every day but you know what they are ahead of time and behavioral
psychology says that if you have a question in your head that’s expected of you each day that your brain actually
goes through quite a bit of psychic discomfort until it gets it answered so if you can leverage that discomfort
and create these questions that in order to answer them you got to do stuff your brain will look for opportunities
to do that stuff well that’s a technical way of saying it your brain will look for opportunities to do those things in
order to relieve its psychic discomfort and so make the questions action-driving questions that drive things like courage
and empowerment and self-respect so what we do is when people come in we talk about that because the research shows
that the more people in an organization that understand their own personal values and can live them every day the
better the organization’s going to be and that’s a much bigger predictor of
organizational trust success and retention how many people understand their personal values then how many people
understand the corporate values but corporate values get all the money and all of the focus and all the consulting
i come in and we start talking about okay how can we identify and live our personal values every day because the
research shows that’s more effective at creating a culture of of a culture that has continuity that
has happiness that has motivation and then the test that we offer
is a sample there’s one i use it’s the one our company use it focuses on impact growth courage empowerment class and
self-respect the idea is okay well what are your values what can your test be
but also what we like to do especially since the pandemic hit is we had all of those six values and i try to talk about
one or two in the keynote but what we started to realize that people wanted more of a deep dive all right you
want to talk about how to live self-respect great can you do more than five minutes well in the book there’s an entire chapter on
strategies for living self-respect strategies for answering the self-respect question every day what
have i done today to be good to myself and so what we what we’re doing with a lot of groups now is we introduce the idea of the leadership test and then we
do full deep dives on you know five strategies you can use to live courage five that you can use to live
empowerment which gives me a chance to for the first time kind of dive into the how piece cause
look if you’re a speaker you usually get 60 minutes and over 10 years the amount of stuff that
you’d like to cram into that 60 minutes continually grows but the time allowed doesn’t and so
now it’s an opportunity to say okay let’s just stop trying and instead give people the opportunity to pick what they
want deep dives into so honestly it’s really about
showing people that we’re ignoring a lot of leadership around us and instead of waxing poetic on we
should change that i want to teach a an actual process that’s rooted in something
tangible that has outcomes that are demonstrably beneficial to an organization if in the meantime it makes
people feel energized and empowered and changes their lives hopefully positively
on an individual level that’s a cool job and it’s why like even now just talking
about it you can hear me getting more and more excited even through my jet lag so that i think is is what we look for is i
want people at the end to have a tool they can use to say this is what i want to stand for and here’s how i’m going to
prove i actually stand for it because look the phrase i’m the type of person who is
almost always followed by a lie like that as soon as someone starts saying i’m the type of person who i
think all of us should just be like who’s about to lie to me because what’s true about your character
doesn’t get announced right it gets demonstrated through behaviors but i realized i’m as bad as anybody and
saying i’m the type of person who lives courage oh when was the last time you did that oh well crap instead of trying to
convince people by saying it how about i show myself by doing it and once you start doing that you realize it’s not
really that important how many other people see it because the individuals you impact you get to see that and it changes how you
feel about yourself and that changes how you feel treat other people the more you don’t like yourself the bigger a dick
you are to others yeah it reminds me of a stephen covey quote you can’t talk your way out of
something you behaved your way into yeah covey has a way of saying really smart stuff i know right like yeah we’re
the only creatures with a gap between stimulus and response although that actually wasn’t him that was a quote no
one that can actually attribute that specific quote although he did popularize it he he acknowledged that wasn’t his quote i thought that was him
it’s interesting when you dive into you know these quotes or these uh pieces of wisdom how how they evolved even the
student who taught me you know it’s a lot easier to stand up for something than it is to live up to it for a year i thought i was so proud
that one of my students came up with that genius it’s a former chief justice the supreme court that said it so
in leadership you know this man you never steal anything you benchmark a best practice so i think
that we were just benchmarking the best practice on that one and i’ve also heard that r d stands for rip off and
duplicate i think sorkin said that good writers borrow from other writers great writers
steal that right there you go we can probably still go on why you mentioned your book because i reque i’m required
to my publisher hates it if i don’t well you can you can tell them that you definitely did your job wall street
journal bestseller tell our audience if they were to get the book what are they going to find in there
it’s the step-by-step process of how to identify your values and create your own leadership tests the subtitle is a
practical guide to leadership that matters and for me it was a big it was all about practicality and so it’s that
attempted combination of how do we do a step-by-step process and provide as many
insights on how to engage every day with a set of non-negotiable behaviors you’ve
identified how do we mix that with what i love to do which is tell stories and
so it’s how to go about creating your own personalized leadership test based on your own values and then sort of
as many leadership insights as i could fit in there based on the interactions and the
experiences and the insights i’ve been given i’m really lucky i love to share ideas like i love doing
this i love public speaking most people don’t and so i have this cool platform where i get to talk to
really smart people they give me great insights about how to deal with uh business challenges how to deal with
things like silos or creating culture how to you know foster courage and innovation in an organization how to
foster self-respect when you’re a high performer and i get to talk to these people they give me great insights and
they would never step up on a stage and share them but i get to do it for them
and for me the book was an opportunity to take the fact that i now had 10 hours of onstage material
and put it into a place where if people liked what they heard the piece that they heard they could go and find out the rest of
it as well but mostly at the end of it you’re going to have your own leadership test based on your own values and a
process you can use every day to give yourself evidence that you’re the type of person you claim
to be or that you want to be mostly i want people to have evidence every day that they matter because i ask
people in every speech why do you matter i pick someone out of the crowd and 95 of the people to whom i pose the
question can’t give me an answer and so to me i wanted to write a book where at the end
it showed people how every day you can recognize that you matter because i think we assume we matter based on how
we achieve over blocks of time where’s my career at what’s my title how much money have i made how am i taking care
of my family these are all things to pay attention to but ultimately it’s not a measure of your leadership
drew what is the best way for us to go out and get your book drewdudly.com has a link or honestly
always it’s always amazon however if you want to go and support your local bookstore give them a ring
and just tell them you want to order it anytime i can get someone to support a local bookstore i will but let’s face it
the fastest and most efficient way to get it in your hands is to go online and order it on amazon
well we’re doing this interview remotely and i’m really looking forward to meeting you in person you’re going to be
at the association of water technologies convention in vancouver in uh september so really
excited about that oh my gosh i didn’t know that okay well i knew i was gonna be there i didn’t realize there was
gonna be a connection there that’s awesome and that’s like that’s really cool i usually don’t get to meet the my podcast like partners or your lab
partner today yeah so uh the president was so enamored with
uh the content of your ted talk which i happened to show him he reached out to
you well we i owe you uh i owe you a meal i owe you a beverage
uh you owe me nothing you have given me so much for taking
an idea and packaged it in a way that i’ve been able to share with so many people that are in my life and motivate
them not just to do something for the end result but to do it for all the steps that are
in between and that’s so awesome like i appreciate that there’s not a lot of new ideas a friend of mine we were talking
about what it is as a speaker we’re like it’s our job to take ideas that exist and wrap them in velcro like that’s what it is the idea that
leadership exists at individual moments is not some earth-shattering thing i came up with in a think tank but it’s
that thing you can wrap it in velcro start with why that’s not a new idea he wrapped it in velcro dare to lead is not
a new idea brene brown wrapped it in velcro because brene brown everything she says is genius and so that idea is
and i think the key for everyone listening is that your story is velcro to somebody like something that you put
up with something that challenged you something you’re afraid of that’s velcro to somebody else please tell your story
share them with people all the research shows that vulnerability leads to extraordinary connection but i
think we’re still getting people past the idea that vulnerability is weakness it’s openness and we’re seeing more and
more that when people are open about the stuff that challenges them they’re giving other people permission to do it
so you just i think we’re taught that we’re supposed to be like make people look at us and say oh wow i
can’t do that that’s how you’re impressive honestly the way to be impressive i think is to make people
look at you and say i thought i was the only one you know i thought i was the only one afraid of that i thought i was the only one hurt by that i thought i was the
only one hiding that so whatever you’re hiding out there because you want you think you need to be seen as strong to
motivate other people man you motivate people a lot when you open up and you say this is this is what’s scaring me and
especially when what’s scaring you is letting them down i think most people would tell you that that’s a stress that they don’t want to
be putting on you i love it well drew i ask all my guests lightning round questions so the point
values are double are you ready i am ready all right here we go so if you
could go back to your very first day where you became a professional speaker
what advice would you give yourself i would give advice that uh
okay i’ll give you several pieces of advice very quickly one if you live by the powerpoint one day you will die by the powerpoint all right dwight true
said powerpoint is boring uh i would say every time that you are
speaking every time that you’re sharing an idea imagine someone you highly respect standing in the front row sitting in the front row
and screaming why do i care because it makes sure that as a speaker what you’re doing isn’t about you it’s
about how it can be useful to the crowd so if i’m telling a story about a lollipop moment always be thinking why
do i care and to go back to one of the things that you said about when part way through the
ted talk every time you walk onto a stage in front of people before you start take a
minute take a deep breath and just think to yourself if this isn’t nice what is
because what you’ve been given is the gift of other people’s attention
and what you’ve been given is the opportunity to change minds and i think that that’s not a gift that
we should ever forget we got and as a speaker i’ve done many times where i
walked on stage and didn’t take time to appreciate what that meant the trust that it meant
and i would tell myself never ever go through a speech and don’t take that moment because it’s once you realize
that you see something change in a speaker and they start to realize how great that is in the last two years reminded me of that and i guess the last
thing that i would say is just get comfortable with uncertainty i think i tell myself that not on the
first day i was a speaker but on the first day that i was old enough to understand the concept is that maybe the
greatest skill or talent you can develop for yourself is comfort with uncertainty
the ability to be decisive in your life when you are not certain with how it will turn out and i think if i could get
myself less focused on how i can get my life in order and more how i could become the type of
person who thrives in the disorder that is inevitable i think i’d be better off so i’d like to
tell myself that on the first day just don’t forget how lucky you are to do this
i love it what are some of your favorite books oh my gosh
okay i love everything jim collins does good to great built to last also because it is original stuff right he did all of
that research there too but the energy bus wasn’t his the energy bus uh or the
uh the bus reference wasn’t his it was from a book called the energy bus and now the author is escaping me so once
again rip off and duplicate yeah but i will say this the research on like the good they did do that stuff i
love patrick lencioni stuff and he really is management stuff but in terms of the best crossover between what i do
and your sort of pure management theory stuff patrick lencioni’s great i like everything he does the five
dysfunctions of a team silos politics and turf wars in particular great reads i’d like a lot of daniel pink’s stuff so
drive the surprising science of what motivates us i found really interesting and i especially like the fact that it
counteracts some of the conventional wisdom and i love books like that he wrote a book called a whole new mind
which i think should be essential read especially for anyone trying to be entrepreneurs and his sentence mean
meaning is the new money like anybody who’s a speaker or who trafficks in ideas i think realizes what that means i
like uh linchpin are you indispensable by seth godin uh i think you should read that at the same time as cal newport’s
be so good they can’t ignore you because they have totally different messages but i think they even
give like reports on on each other i love one called leadership reinvented which i am reading right now by one of
my former students this is an amazing experience and for fiction if you want to laugh there’s a great book called
let’s pretend this never happened now we’re not in leadership stuff but that’s by jenny lawson which is a wonderful
wonderful experience as well just to laugh your butt off i think that’s a really special one everything is
horrible awful as well which is a memoir from a woman who lost her brother to a heroin overdose he was
one of the producers of parks and rec and you know if you see his picture you’ll recognize him a very very
brilliant comedian and she talks about what it was like to lose him and that to me was a really powerful uh memoir as
well man search for meaning i mean a lot of but a lot of us like people have still been sat down and read that either
right so um yeah all of those are are great books that i think are uh really helpful i the
leadership test has such great stuff in it it’s a little denser than the others though um that’s kuz’s imposer they’ve
got some really transformative stuff there and most of brene brown’s work is such a wonderful exploration of what i
think are a lot of the themes that are important now uh in in leadership now
and that whole idea of encouraging the heart from from kuzam posner that’s a really essential piece as well
victor frankel man search for meaning wow what an amazing book i think it’s like 90 pages it’s not even 100 pages is
it there it’s just another one of those examples where words are in the meaning not in the number of them you know what
i mean like because it isn’t the like the gettysburg address is what was three and a half minutes long and yes like
that book there’s a power to it that is very hard to find anywhere else and let’s hope
that not a lot of we wish with books couldn’t be written like that because in order to create that kind of message you
had to go through what they went through and i it’s it’s so frustrating to see it trivialized now by being having it
compared to things that aren’t even in the same realm and so i encourage people to go back and reread the book to be
reminded what people are talking about when they say this is like the blank or this is as
bad as the nazis or this like let’s be reminded of what we have
and uh the comparison between the two experiences is is upsetting to say the least right now
when they make a movie about your life who do you want playing you who do i want playing me or who are they going to
get to play me you can answer it both ways drew carey is going to play me well honestly meryl streep because she
could play anything one of my favorite things ever said about meryl streep was that someone commented if he was redoing
jaws he would cast her as the shark so let’s say meryl streep because i’m
absolutely certain she could do it and she’d be great as me i love that answer
yeah last question you now have the power to talk to anybody throughout history who would it be with and why
my late girlfriend uh i would really really really like to have another dinner with her and so i i know that
usually that question is about famous people or whatever but i would be more interested in finishing some
conversations with her than i would starting new ones with some big names throughout history
well drew i want to thank you for coming on the scaling up h2o podcast i want to thank you for the information that
you’ve put out there as i mentioned it’s helped me it’s helped me help other people it’s helped get them to just
realize that it is the little things that get you to where you need to be that matters
i love it man this has been such a pleasure at every step of the way keep doing what you’re doing because when we put ideas out in the world we have no
idea where they’re going to land and so this is this is amazing
nation that was a fun interview it was so cool to be able to talk with drew to
let him know how much his ted talk has helped me help other people and just
fostered some really really deep discussions about leadership on a leadership team or
within a company and it was just so good to talk with him in fact our mastermind
is reading his brand new book which is called this is day one and it’s all
about looking at your career like it’s your first day and there’s so
many great ideas baked all around that we’re reading that in the rising tide
mastermind as we speak drew was kind enough to come and introduce that to the rising tide
mastermind and in the rising tide mastermind we don’t just read books we
challenge each other to do something with those books we don’t have time to just check a box how are we going to
make our day-to-day lives better our businesses better our families better
all of our relationships better we’re constantly challenging each other to do the things that we learn in what we read
in our day-to-day lives and it has just been a tremendous resource for each
other i’ll have an affiliate link for drew’s book on our show notes page if
you want to learn more about that and of course he also read it on audible i love
it when authors read their own book because they know what they wrote and a lot of times they will add things that
aren’t in the book because they just simply didn’t have time to put it in there or the publishing company asked
them to make it shorter so if you have the ability to go to audible and
download drew’s book this is day one i highly recommend that and if you don’t
have audible i can get you that book for free and a free month by going to
scalinguph2o.com forward slash audible so again that’s scaling up h2o.com forward slash audible
and you can listen to that book and find out why so many water traders out there
after they finish listening to the scaling up h2o podcast are now reading again because they are using audible
nation if you have not seen the ted talk that drew and i talked about by all means go to our show notes page and we
will have a link for that ted talk for you and you can see drew at the
toronto conference give his ted talk and i’m sure that you will want to share
that with your leadership team or maybe another team that you are a part of when
i share this with other people i normally ask them to give me examples of
somebody that was a leader to them and there are so many inspiring stories
out there and it allows people to realize you do not need to be
president of the united states you do not have to be the ceo of an organization
you are a leader in what you are doing right now and you can make a difference
in somebody’s life by leading them leading
is making sure that you are coming across in a way that others want to
follow you that you are guiding people you are leading people that is the true
nature of leadership and ask that i have of all of you
is identify a leader that has been there for you a leader that’s asked you to do
something to step out of your comfort zone and that has allowed you to do something else nation i know this is
unheard of but find a thank you card there’s these devices out there that you
can actually write notes on put an address on put a stamp on and mail it yes the mail is still a service
and send them a thank you card let them know that you are extremely thankful for what
they did for you and i promise that will be the equivalent of a million dollars
to them it doesn’t take a lot of time but you do have to be intentional about it so when
you get back to your respective offices or homes today
think about who you’re going to write that letter to it could be two sentences and you will definitely make that
person’s year somebody that’s always making us think throughout the entire year is james
mcdonald and here is a brand new installment of thinking on water with james
[Music] welcome to thinking on water with james the segment where we don’t give you the
answers we give you the topics and questions for you to think about drop by drop
now let’s get to it in this week’s episode we’re thinking about the shelf life of industrial
strength sodium hypochlorite or bleach how long will a drum of sodium
hypochlorite last what factors can impact its shelf life
do heat and light have an impact will contact with certain metals have an impact
what is chemically happening to the sodium hypochlorite to reduce its shelf life
what are the possible consequences of feeding it after it is beyond its shelf life how does understanding the shelf life of
sodium hypochlorite impact the volume ordered when usage rate is considered
take this week to think about the shelf life of industrial strength sodium hypochlorite and what it may mean to you
be sure to follow hashtag tow tow22 and hashtag scalinguph2o share your
thoughts on each week’s thinking on water i’m james mcdonald and i look forward to learning more from you
well james thank you for that and james i would be pretty sure that you are
going to be getting some of those gratitude cards that i just mentioned thank you for all that
you do for the industry and thanks for all that you do on the scaling up h2o
podcast nation we start off every episode with things that are going on in
current events different conventions different expos different trainings
i would love it if you went to our show notes page and you picked out something
that you could attend in person or virtually that gets yourself out of your
comfort level and ensures that you are going to learn something new maybe even
do this in tandem with somebody in your company and you can attend two different
things and then you can come back together and share with each other what you’ve learned we’re now getting back to
a normal course of life where we’re having face-to-face conferences again
so i urge you to take advantage of something because when you immerse
yourself into a conference whatever it is it is almost impossible for you not
to learn something and as you’ve heard me say on previous episodes whenever you learn something put yourself in a
teacher’s position as quickly as possible and figure out how you’re going to teach
what you are currently learning it will make sure what you’re learning is going to stick and it will help
other people and that is leadership nation i will see you with a brand new
episode next friday in the meantime have a great week folks
[Music] nation where do you want to go what is
the next step for you and how are you going to get there those are tough
questions and they’re even tougher when you’re trying to answer them on your own
that’s why i’ve created the rising tide mastermind because you don’t have to be on your own anymore we all take value in
you reaching your next level to success and we will help you get there go to
scaling up h2o.com forward slash mastermind to find out more