MARTIN DUBIN

>> Craig Gould: Marty Dubin, thank you so much for joining me today on the podcast. Marty, you’re a clinical psychologist, a serial entrepreneur, a business coach and advisor to C Suite executives and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. And you’ve founded several companies, including a successful healthcare company where you also served as the CEO. But you recently wrote a book, Blind Spotting how to see what’s holding you back as a leader. I just completed reading your book. I have lots of questions, but the. There’s one question I like to ask everybody who comes on the podcast, which is, Marty, what are your memories of your first job?

>> Marty Dubin: well, I guess it was the first job and the first real job, first job was mowing lawns. So I don’t remember too much other than I needed to be on time and it needed to look good when I was done. but, my first job actually, was as a mental health worker in a private psychiatric hospital, while I was in college and did that kind of through, college and a little bit after college. and, I guess one memory is the people on the inside didn’t seem that much different than the people on the outside to me for much of the time. And I think that kind of curiosity, probably stayed with me. Like, what, what really is going on inside our heads and, how we show up may be different than our own internal life. so I think that’s probably the big question that that’s in this book, too.

>> Craig Gould: You probably have the same perspective of walking into a C suite and having a similar realization.

>> Marty Dubin: You know, the challenge often in coaching is, I did a lot of family therapy as a psychotherapist, and, you know, you get different perspectives from different. You know, it’s like everybody sees the world a little differently. And so walking into the C suite, maybe, maybe I have some lead in from a board member or HR about, quote, what the problem is or what the opportunity for growth is, and then I’ll sit down with the leader and maybe the Venn diagrams overlap, you know, 20%. And so the real challenge is trying to figure out what, you know, these are people that want to make a performance improvement. So what should we really talk about? There’s a lot we could talk about, and some are more on target conversations, than others.

>> Craig Gould: So you spent quite a few years practicing psychology. Not too many psychologists wind up running a business, you know, of the scale of a healthcare company. Can you talk about that unique path that you went down and how that uniquely equipped you for the second act of coaching and having these conversations?

>> Marty Dubin: With folks in C suite, just a biographical note. I didn’t think about this until later in my life, but my, you know, on one part of my family kind of professionals, healthcare. My father was a physician, my mother’s side of the family, business owners, for several generations back. And I think I didn’t really think about that. Those two things were part of who I was. And, and I talk in the book about identity and I think it’s a really core issue, but those are probably two of my identities and it took me a little while to find out how to kind of weave them together. when I was seeing patients, I loved the work, but I didn’t like sitting in an office all day. and I was finding ways to get out and do other things and then saw this opportunity, when healthcare really was struggling with how to manage care, both cost effectively and from equality. And I was intrigued, intrigued by that. So, you know, found ways to kind of bring business and psychology together. And then in this last chapter of my life doing that as an executive coach, it was a perfect mix of the. What I’d learned about how people, what makes people tick and what motivates people and how to really, and how to help people make changes and then bring that into the, into the world of business and business performance.

>> Craig Gould: You know, reading the book, it sounds like a lot of the engagements, at least the ones that you, you refer to as examples in the book are where the board has reached out to you to, to assist them in assessing either a performance issue or assessing a secession plan that’s in place and trying to, to help figure out is this person everything we we thought they were, or we think we’re seeing a deficiency or we’re running into some sort of relational roadblock with trying to interact with this leader. And is that engagement informational or is it sometimes help us gather information, but other times can you help that person work through an issue that we’ve already identified?

>> Marty Dubin: I think you really hit, hit it right? sometimes, sometimes it’s work with this person and help them be better or they’ve asked me hey I, you know, can you do a 360 interview with everybody works around me and just, you know, nobody tells me the truth at the top and so, tell me how I’m doing and then, you know, help me be better. So there are, there are those and then there are sometimes where as you said, there’s a roadblock or a conflict, and that occurred, you know, that Occurred a little more probably in the Silicon Valley, vc, startup world environment, a little more where things are moving fast. and often the leaders of these startup companies many times don’t have much leadership experience. and even the VCs are kind of, some have actually run companies, but a lot come in from the finance world. And so there is a different perspective on what does it take to run this company. And so sometimes it is asking for a recommendation or a consultation, tell us, help, help us think about this problem in a different way because we’re stuck the way we’re thinking about it. And so I think it’s those two things. Make a change, help somebody with a change, or help us really think through a problem and give us a perspective on that.

>> Craig Gould: Why do blind spots grow as leaders become more successful? Or is that even something you would agree with? I mean, do you think blind spots actually become bigger or they just become more impactful? the more impactful the person is?

>> Marty Dubin: Yeah, I think it’s the latter. you know, blind spots are kind of like, if you’re using the computer analogy, it’s just you know, not even bugs in the system, just the way the system’s constructed. I mean they’re just errors in our, in the way we perceive the world and the way we react. But successful leaders, and that’s mostly who I’ve worked with, are successful because they’re successful 80 or 90% of the time. Every encounter we’re in, it’s a mixture of us and the situation. And I worked with some leaders that clearly were successful when they kind of who they were, matched the needs of the situation and the challenges that they were encountering. And then situations change or it’s a new problem. And now the 80, 90% of how their default personality works isn’t meeting the needs of the situation. And so that’s when the blind spots become bigger. And as you indicated, working with people that are at the top levels of organizations, the impact is much greater of getting it wrong. And so the stakes are much higher. And it’s much more important for those people to gain the self awareness that hey, I need to pivot who I am this time. I need to think about my emotions. I talk about six different areas to kind of focus on in the book, where you can think about where there might be a mismatch about why the results are not happening this time.

>> Craig Gould: I think in the book, like you just said, you kind of go into like six big Categories. But it just seems like there are so many different possibilities. But probably the most accessible one, that we kind of kick off with is identity. You know, and when a leader says I am blank, what should they be listening for beneath the surface?

>> Marty Dubin: Yeah, I think for any role you need to have your identity and your role need to be aligned. In a simple, example that, you know, that first leadership role, when somebody goes from being a subject matter expert in marketing or finance or engineering and have their first, you know, move into leadership and management, if they’re still holding onto that previous identity of I’m a subject matter expert, that’s an obvious example of where there’s a misalignment. but as you climb the pyramid, it gets more and more sophisticated in terms of what is the requirements of the role. And one thing I, There was an article by the CEO of Procter & Gamble in the early 2000s, AG Lafley. And he. The title of the article is what can only the CEO Do? And it’s a pretty good article, but it’s a phenomenal question. And I found as I would ask CEOs that I would get this kind of blank stare for at least a little bit, which is unusual for CEOs not to know what to say. And it was like I never really thought of the question that way. I thought of what I need to do or what’s on my agenda. But really when you’re at the top, you have so many degrees of freedom of how you use your time. And so that identity can, can be the prioritization filter of what you do and it may not be what the requirements of the job is. and so thinking really clearly about what can only I do in this role, and it’s not necessarily what I’m good at, it’s what is this role requirement? And being really clear about that. So that would be the first question is what is the role requirement? and that changes at times in companies depending on where the company’s at and its growth, in the industry and so on. And then trying to align, you know, who am I, do I fit that role or what little pivots or changes do I need to do and especially what do I need to prioritize so that I’m really prioritizing who I am and it fitting what the role needs.

>> Craig Gould: Are. You know, you think about how executives trajectories change and maybe what got you to the top isn’t necessarily what’s going to keep you at the top, thinking in terms of, you know, my time in Silicon Valley. Maybe you got to this place because you are excited about technology, you’re excited about innovation, excited about building things. Then one day you wake up in your leading an organization and you’re no longer in the skunk works. Right? I mean, you know, so can, can you talk about how, you know, executives can kind of wake up and find themselves not doing the things that provided the success that got them.

>> Marty Dubin: There? This, there’s an example, and what you just said is that was the kind of, the most tragic one that bothered me in my work in Silicon Valley when a founder of a company that had, grown the company well, you know, the product and the market, fit, and all of a sudden they’ve got a real company. and then all the challenges that, that kind of come along with that over the years. And you know, I get some form of the call from the board of. I think we think it’s time for a real quote, real CEO, unquote. And they struggle with it for good reasons. I mean, there’s all that embedded institutional knowledge from that founder of why they did what they did and why they didn’t do other things and all of that. So they’re reluctant to move that person out, but at the same time they’re frustrated that the person is not kind of behaving in the way that they think they need to where the company is at that point. And I see that that’s a perfect, to me, an example of those identity challenges some entrepreneurs. I think I kind of see it in three broad stages, of identity. The first stage is the innovator identity. You know, break ground, do something new, change the world. All that’s involved in all of that. And then if there is traction and there’s a fit and the company’s growing, then the identity needs to shift to being a business builder. Not like you’re no longer an innovator, but you need to start to see the world through the filter of what do I need to do to build the company, not just create my product and make it even better. and then if that really gets traction and the company really becomes, more like a traditional company and, the existential threats aren’t as great, then you really need to be a leader. And what is more similar to, the identity of leaders that go through traditional trajectories and if you don’t make those changes, so that leader that isn’t moving from innovator to business builder and the board is frustrated with that. Too often they haven’t had the conversation of who are you really and who do you want to be? And maybe you’re really the kind of person that should be a serial entrepreneur and you know, go on and go found another company and we’ll help and all of that kind of thing. And let’s, let’s have, have a nice parting rather this painful parting that can be just a terrible blow, for the founders that’s almost like PTSD for quite a while of, you know, can I ever do this again? And you know, I’ve lost my company. And so I think those, those kinds of transitions could be better handled up front in advance. Say, hey, guess what? You know, when this company goes well, you’re going to need to start to shift who you are and what your role is here. And you know, and if that doesn’t feel right, let’s talk about it. So, yeah, I think that’s those kind of trajectories, you know, and then there’s points in between, but that’s kind of the broad, broad brushstrokes you have.

>> Craig Gould: Just chapter after chapter of these, these wonderful kind of firsthand anecdotes about people that you tried to help, helped assess. You know, some of the more interesting ones were where you could really see someone’s insecurity and how that insecurity, they were putting a moat of insecurity around them. And it in particular, you know, you, you told a story about one executive who was having problems with the, the CEO because he felt like the CEO wasn’t recognizing his intelligence enough, that he wasn’t lauding his intelligence, in the same person. You know, when you’re having a one on one conversation with you just happens to drop out of the blue. By the way, I got a perfect score on my sat and it’s just like, I guess we all carry insecurity with us. But you know, it, it becomes even more magnified in these.

>> Marty Dubin: Cases. Yeah, I mean it, I focus on it in terms of what kind of motivates people. and you know, that’s kind of the engine in the system that pushes us to do what we do. And under stress, you know, the, it’s kind of like the fight or flight at that point. You know, our motive is very clear. It’s only survival, nothing else counts. and in the example you’re talking about, it was a succession situation. You know, so highly stressful about who’s going to get the top spot. and it Brought out this, as you said, kind of insecurity, this, motive this guy had about really being acknowledged and patted on the back and said, aren’t you smart? and, you know, which was probably always there as he went up the, hierarchy. But it wasn’t as. I’m sure it came out at other times, but he was able to move past it. But now it was. Everything was on the line. And so that was driving his behavior so much. and he was so unaware of that. And, I mean, I talk about one thing I learned from my psychotherapy practice is that the first thing that people say to you often when they’re not necessarily the very first words, but in that first interaction, how they describe themselves, becomes really powerful. And he had dropped that kind of, line about, you know, his SAT scores, you know, like 30 years ago or something. It’s like, why are you even bringing this up? It is telling me something about who you are. And so I always pay attention a lot to those, those early comments. And he was very unaware that this is what was driving his behavior. And he was getting, you know, basically he was looking to the, CEO, the current CEO, that he was trying to, succeed, you know, for the pat on the back. and the CEO was, you know, was not wired to do that on his own and certainly wasn’t going to do that, you know, just to meet this guy’s needs. and of course, he didn’t make the final, selection for good reason, even though. And the board couldn’t quite articulate it. But they knew, you know, they were just talking about. He just doesn’t feel right sometimes. And I’m, you know, I don’t understand these. These conflicts he gets into. And they knew in their own kind of interpersonal sense of who he was, that things weren’t, you know, things weren’t quite right. You know, he wasn’t motivated for the right reason. You know, he needed to be motivated at the core to make the company better, and be the leader and really, revel in that kind of, kind of.

>> Craig Gould: Identity. There’s another story you told in the book, about a young woman who had really been on the fast track to get to the executive suite. But one of the things that was providing a stumbling block was kind of a narrative that she had in her head that she wasn’t even quite aware of about her mother’s struggle trying to get to the executive suite. Do we all have these narratives in our head that, you know, about who we are and what we’re up against in the.

>> Marty Dubin: World. Yeah. You know, and, these two cases, one thing I want to make clear is, I mean, I’m not doing psychotherapy, you know, in the executive suite. and by that, I mean I’m not trying to help people change who they are. and really we don’t need to. I. I, can’t. You know, I really have a adverse reaction to all this discussion in leadership around transformation. It happens in companies too, you know, transform the company. I mean, like, let’s get real, you know, we’re not transforming. and people can’t change. They can change. Certain. You can change how you show up, and you can change with your awareness of how you show up. The guy that, you know, was getting caught up in trying to prove his worth and get patted on the back, if he really had understood that at a deep level, you know, he could have said that, I got to watch that need so that it doesn’t come out, and find other ways to get that, satisfied and just kind of, you know, dial it down a bit. and the woman who was, really trying to live out the legacy of her mother, that she started crying in an interview with me when she started to tell me about her mother as one of her heroes, and as we explored it, how it was showing up for her is she was looking at people in her life as either blockers or supporters, because her mother had been blocked from achieving what she could have achieved. And that was a very unconscious thing that she was doing. And she was. Not that she was wrong about the people necessarily, but she was overemphasizing it. Nobody is a pure blocker and nobody is a pure supporter. And so she would have rose colored glasses about the supporters and not see their faults and the opposite for the people that she thought were blocking her advancement. And with that awareness, I mean, it became kind of fun for her and almost like a, you know, a little story inside her head that she could play with and not get so carried away with. So she still had that, you know, we all have these kinds of things about who we are, but it didn’t have to interrupt. And her life and her career in a way that, could, you know, derail her from her.

>> Craig Gould: Success. I guess a similar line to both of these stories that I’ve already mentioned was there was another one where there was a CEO who I think he got it in his head that the board wanted to fire him. It seemed like everybody was an adversary because he, he felt like there was a target on his back. But the board reached out to you. They didn’t say they had a target on his back. They’re like, why do we have problems dealing with him? And again, I mean, is that coming from a place of insecurity or just because you’re on top of the mountain and there’s not room for other people to be there when you’re playing king of the hill, that, that you feel like everybody else is an adversary. I mean, I feel like our longest tenured executives are ones who are able to find collaboration and relationships in. Utilize relationships all around.

>> Marty Dubin: Them. Right, yeah. there was a, there was a lot of things kind of going on with that guy. And I didn’t. He didn’t disclose enough for me to know all of what was going on. but I mean, you can imagine that, you know, I’ve certainly had a lot of. I had one CEO, a guy who got promoted to CEO, of a very big company. and the, he walked into his, his C suite for the first day and the, and the chairman who had been the previous CEO was in there to kind of welcome him for his first day of work. and he told me the story, and he said, when he left and you know, you know, ceiling to wall glass and you know, the 18th floor of a big building. And he said the first thought, as crazy it is, was don’t jump out. and he was feeling just the awesomeness of the responsibility. And I think some people do do that. And maybe that’s a, you know, a story that’s a fable that’s in their head. If you, if you make it to the top, it’s all on your shoulders. You can’t make any mistakes. You know, you should have all the answers. You don’t really need anybody else. And I think this one particular guy was carried away with a lot of that and as well as some other personal things, and wasn’t willing to, and probably had never been willing to kind of admit mistakes and admit failures. That’s one question I always ask in assessing leaders. You know, tell me about a failure you can learn a lot from. And I specifically use the word failure. So it allows them to say, well, maybe not quite a failure, but this. Or say, you know, I really, I almost was. Went bankrupt or I did go bankrupt or whatever it might might be. And you know, allowing to your point, the more longer tenured and the more probably well rounded people and executives are ones that see themselves as having flaws like all the rest of us and, and see their rise to the top as a mixture of both their gifts as well as luck and opportunity, timing, just being right and a lot of things. And so they can, you know, open up some sense of you know, admitting mistakes or letting other people in. You know. Another important question, you know, I always ask who are your advisors and mentors? And you can really tell a lot how open people are to feedback. I have a little two by two diagram in the book about you know, knowledge acquisition. you know, kind of in the top quadrant is the you know what you know. And in the bottom, you know, the very bottom right quadrant is you don’t know what you don’t know and you, we all have, we don’t know what we don’t know. And when you’re at the top there’s all sorts of things that are being kept from you. And, and so how do you find out those things? And you have to be somewhat naive and ask questions and not be the, you know, the know it all for people to tell you things that you don’t know and for you to be open to that and for that data to be really important for you to be able to solve.

>> Craig Gould: Problems. I’ve had some conversations along the way here about just how ineffective it seems like the, the role of CO CEOs are. And, and I see in the book that you share that sentiment. It, it happens sometimes where organizations choose that methodology. But I think even more common is secession planning where the current CEO is migrating out of the C suite by becoming an executive chairman and maybe they maintain an office, maybe they’re maintaining this role and responsibility and the lines of authority and who’s responsible for what. It gets really muddy. Can you talk about some of the challenges that come up when there isn’t a clear definition of who’s in.

>> Marty Dubin: Charge? Yeah, a lot can be handled with structure. You know, a lot of times those co CEO things are because certain people have certain skills and the other person has the other skills and you say by got together they’re the perfect CEO. So let’s make this happen. and so starting and that’s a good start actually. I mean it’s an acknowledgment of you, you take care of, you know, you’re the inside CEO and I’m the outside CEO or whatever the, however the structure happens around those things so that, that helps. and then that you know, you can have an org design that kind of fits all of that. But no matter how well you do that, there’s still going to be the overlap, there’s still going to be the, the points where the boundaries are gray, and they have dotted lines. And so to me, the only time that works is when the two people have just a really good relationship. It’s like being parents. You know, you can obviously we co parent our children all the time and that works because we have a solid relationship with each other. and that’s what’s behind it. Which means one person at times says, I think I’m right, but you know what, I’m going to let go this time. The long term relationship that I’ve got with this person, I don’t want to ruin that. we’re both not going to be co CEOs at some point and we’ve got a great relationship with the other and I don’t want to destroy that or I clearly don’t want it to affect the company, affect our family in the, in the marital situation. So you know, I’m, I would be more comfortable with the CO CEOs if somebody said these two guys have worked together for 20 years. You know, they’ve worked out so many conflicts with each other and you know, they play golf together on the weekends and their families are, you know, or you know, vacation together. That tells me, you know, they’re going to work out those gray areas versus what happens oftentimes in Silicon Valley. They put together two, you know, founders, co founders because they come from two different skill sets and they say these guys are great together and they’ve never even worked together, they have no relationship. There’s all sorts of opportunity for conflict to happen and personal agendas to come out and those things never work.

>> Craig Gould: Out. Well, just, just in the last few years I identified a blind spot which is, you know, I, I guess I grew up in a generation where I, I was never diagnosed as add, but now as an adult in the, the back half of my career, I can see that I have all of those classic traits. And now I look back at my career and things that, you know, I was deficient in, things that, where I had problems. They were like classic ADD behaviors. Right. You know, I was prone to like, really dive deep on places where I had an interest, while avoiding things that were, weren’t of interest to me. Because, you know, with my add, I’m looking for these, these hits of satisfaction, right? And I could see some of those in some of the anecdotes that you, you shared in the book, how, you know, sometimes you have a CEO get and get to the suite. And again, there are these five things that should be the core business. But you know, they’re still wanting to spend time on the things that really give them joy. And that could be to the deficiency of the, the things they really need to be working on.

>> Marty Dubin: Right. Yeah. You know, when I moved from being a psychotherapist, and you know, and then I ran a business and then became a coach, my psychotherapy, colleagues would say, what is coaching? You know, what are you doing? and I had some long explanations about it at first. And then I realized I’m doing the same damn thing I did as a psychotherapist. And what I’m doing is helping people become more self aware. And you know, for you with your adhd, you know, being aware of that, you know, earlier in your career, it, you know, it was a, it was a boon to you in some ways. You know, I’m sure you zeroed in on things and got to a level of depth and concentration and you learned so much that you were, you know, a savant about certain things. so the idea is not to change you, but it’s for you to say, oh, darn, you know, this is one of those situations where I shouldn’t just do my deep dive right now and I’m, I should pay attention to these other things that I’m ignoring. and, and so it’s really about self awareness and we all, whatever, you know, labels we want to put on ourselves. you know, our, whether it’s a diagnostic label like ADHD or it’s just the label of a trait, I’m extroverted or I’m introverted or whatever it might be, it’s just realizing those things and being able to. I don’t talk about strengths and weaknesses. There’s no word weakness in my book. I talk about gifts and gaps. And so it’s just, you know, have a kind of a sense of, acceptance of yourself and a sense of gratitude about who you are and a comfort level and, and, and then, but not an arrogance about it. So you can kind of figure out how best to leverage your gifts. And maybe for you the gap would have been, I, need some, I need an assistant or a co founder or somebody else who’s, who, who picks up on all those things that I just can’t do or nudges me on the shoulder and say, you know, hey, Craig, you’re not paying attention over here. Let’s. Let me have you take a.

>> Craig Gould: Look. What are the most difficult blind spots to fix? What do you.

>> Marty Dubin: Think? Well, so I, m. In my model of these six, I say there’s two that you can become. Two of these six areas you can become the most aware of. And it’s the things that are the easiest to fix, which is the identity and behavior. So the other four are hard to fix. Your traits are pretty well hardwired. Your motives, as we talked about, the guy that, you know, needed a pat on the back, you know, that’s not going to change. Your, emotional makeup is pretty. You know, you can become more, sophisticated, more developed in all these areas. but they’re hardwired. But you can at business. The one. This isn’t, you know, trying to change who you are. This is just changing how you show up so you can get better business results. it’s very similar to sports. you know, you got to just get that extra 5 or 10%, you know, on this particular day for you to win the game, or for this particular quarter for you to do well. So, I really help people think about, you need to dial some things down and dial other things up, but the real change happens in your behavior. And let’s just focus on how you need to show up to get better.

>> Craig Gould: Results. There’s some really interesting stories in there in terms of maybe the. The person had the right mindset and was doing all the right things, but wasn’t aware of some of the communication signals that they were sending to the people around them. Right. They were, they were, you know, they weren’t communicating a particular tone. There was one terrible example where a person had, been the founder of a company, the company had become successful, and now he was. He was all about his own indulgence and not really caring about how that communicated to his employees. Can. Can you talk about kind of the role of how we project ourselves in the C suite and how that affects the relationships with those under us and around.

>> Marty Dubin: Us. Most everybody that’s risen to the C suite and on the way up, I mean, you realize what a fishbowl you live in. Everybody’s looking at you all the time, and they’re looking at you, for signals, quite frankly, because of their own sense of need for security or they want to talk to you that day and are you, quote, is the boss in a good mood or whatever it might be, and you can’t control that and they’re going to make misperceptions of who you are. You know, you know, you showed up and, you know, you dress casual that day, and they’re making all sorts of interpretations about it. so, but being aware of all that, and being able to, have kind of these, the antenna up about, about people, maybe being able to, misperceive that so that you can, you know, as much as possible talk about and help them be clear about who, you know, what you’re trying to communicate. one technique is meta communication, which is communication about the communication. And so, you know, if you’re in an interaction and you feel like, you know, people are, picking up some cues from you that aren’t right, you can just quick and stop it. Or maybe it’s a difficult conversation and you just simply say you do this meta communication, we’re going to have a difficult conversation. And so you begin to kind of talk about it and you give permission for the other person to share what their perceptions are. And you can, and you can correct them. Because, you know, all of this is, at the end of the day, to me, one of those five things that I say, see, only CEO can do is the CEO really does own the culture. now they don’t. You know, they have HR and other people help them with culture initiatives, but how they behave is the culture. That guy that had been in a scrappy startup and now was living the life of luxury and, was behaving not, was counter to the culture that he’d helped create and that he was proud of. and he kind of was aware that there was this disconnect going on inside him, but he couldn’t stop how he wanted to behave currently. and that was where the discussion needed to be. Like, your job is culture. Like, what are you doing right now? You’re, you know, look how you’re dressing and the limo takes you to work and all these other kinds of things. And, what’s the message? You’re not, you know, so either you need to change that or you need to change your role because, you know, you’re, you’re not, you know, behaving in terms of the, you know, the culture messages. And I think that’s where CEOs and senior leaders can, you know, they can, they can still be who they are and say, you know what, I need to behave differently at work, you know, this week, or, or. Because this is who the, this is what I need to do for the culture of the.

>> Craig Gould: Company. You know, just hearing that answer, it just, I think a lot about humility and the, the role that humility has to play. And it takes a certain amount of of brashness and type A personality to get to the top. But you’re only going to stay there with a certain m amount of humility and.

>> Marty Dubin: Openness. I had one leader that I was, that I did a 360 interview about everybody, with him and he was described as both humble and arrogant. and at first I was like, wait, which is right? Or you know, is this the people that think he’s arrogant? Is it really their issue? And then, and as I got to know him I realized they were both accurate perceptions. and he, he, I think at this core level he, he really was both. I mean there was a wonderful genuineness, humbleness about him, but at times when he felt like it was his responsibility to have the answer and then he could become very arrogant, and very stubborn and really cut people off. And so the key for him was own both of those, you know, because sometimes the arrogance is the right thing. It helped you, helped him be very decisive and stick with what he needed to stick with. but if he misused the arrogance at the wrong time, he was sending the wrong image and the humility. At times people said he’s not acting like a CEO and it was the times when he was like overdoing the humbleness and when he really needed at those times to be the authority and step in and that’s what people wanted. And he was really not kind of attuned to those two parts of him and how to use them both kind of strategically. And so there isn’t really like who is the person really? We’re all very complicated. but the more you’re self aware, the more strategic you can be about how you show.

>> Craig Gould: Up. How do I lean into that self awareness? I mean how do I self assess if I’m not already at the C suite and say I’m in the middle of my career? Do I need to engage with a coach to try to identify this or are there exercises, a framework that you provide that can kind of help in that self.

>> Marty Dubin: Assessment? Yeah, I’ve got two answers for you. I mean one is somewhat self servingly I guess, but it’s read my book. I mean part of that is by that I mean it’s really a chance to in a more relaxed and kind of thoughtful way to think through different aspects of who you are, and be able. And each chapter in the book I’ve got exercises at the end to kind of help bring those things out. So kind of like your example with yourself, you could say, I think this ADHD is part of who I am and I need to think more about when, you know, when I show up, what way, and when it works for me and when it doesn’t. so I think you can have a greater self awareness in that more thoughtful, contemplative kind of way. and then the other approach is, you know, just what’s not working. And think about that. Like, boy, I certainly get into conflict with this one person all the time. Or these particular kind of meetings really drive me nuts. or, you know, the end of the quarter with all the stress and, you know, and I’m not doing well then. And those kind of moments when, as I said earlier, that 90% of the time you’re doing well, that 10% of when you have conflict, it’s probably telling you that there’s something you need to learn about yourself here. Because how you’re showing up isn’t working for you and for the results. And so you need to figure out, you know, what, what is it? What’s my opportunity for some change here, for some self awareness. So I guess those two approaches would be, how to do it. A real quick one that I tell people, around their traits, is, our traits are the adjectives we use to describe ourselves or people describe us and, and those things that really have made you successful. I’m hardworking, you know, I’m, you know, really intelligent. I’m creative, I’m organized. And add the modifier T o o in front of it. What happens when you’re too organized? What happens when you’re too ambitious? What happens when you’re too creative? So those are some clues of. Those are the times when your typical part of who you are could be getting in your.

>> Craig Gould: Way. But I mean, it’s, it’s tricky because I mean, if, if these things were obvious to us, they wouldn’t be blind spots, right? And you know, and I think a lot of times, tricky for those who have climbed their way to the top, they might think, well, you know, if I had this fatal flaw, I wouldn’t have made it all the way to the top. And there’s a point again, going back to humility, where you almost have to engage those around you. It reminds me of this movie from, from the late 90s, High Fidelity, where John Cusack’s character decides that he needs to for whatever Reason do a post mortem on all of his failed relationships and he calls up all of these old girlfriends and sort of one by one ask them, you know, hey, we broke up. It was your fault. Right? And like, no, it was all you. And just slowly he starts realizing, you know, exactly who he was and why he was at the, the core of all these breakups. How do you get there unless, you know, unless you engage other people around you because, you know, a lot of times we, we exist in our own, our own fictionalized version of, of our world and kind of, blind to the.

>> Marty Dubin: Realities. Yeah. I mean, so you’re, I mean, you’re begging the question of doing that kind of 360 interview process of some way that you get a rapport of. You know, here’s the different ways other people see you and here’s the gifts that they see in you. Sometimes you don’t see those either. That’s just who you are. You’re just doing what you normally do and people are just astounded by it. And sometimes there’s some good feedback there. You need to even lean into that more than you do sometimes. but, and as well as those, opportunities for improvement.

>> Marty Dubin: The, you know, my book and my own philosophy is, you’re never going to get rid of your blind spots. I mean, that’s who you are. You can narrow how big they are, you can become more aware of when they show up. You can dial things up and up and down, but, you know, we’re going to die with the same blind spots that we’ve got. so the idea here is becoming self aware of those so that you can function better. And it is a fatal flaw to think that, all my gifts got me to the top. And so I don’t need to worry. I mean, I start the book with, with a very, you know, all the stories are true. and this was just an astounding one up, you know, unicorns, huge, company that got, phenomenal results. And here’s here, he’s on to his third product and total disaster and loses everything. and same guy, you know, and it was a different situation, a different, problem he was trying to solve. And he was, you know, gifted enough to get it pretty far. But, his own blind spot, spots that, that didn’t show up in these other, you know, just a matter of circumstance and timing and everything else showed up in this, you know, in his third. His third.

>> Craig Gould: Round. Well, Marty, I, I really appreciate your time today. And, I’ve. I’ve really enjoyed our conversation and I enjoyed your book. If folks wanted to keep track of you, the book, if they wanted to pick up a copy. Where. Where’s the best place to, to point.

>> Marty Dubin: Folks? Well, the book is. It’s published by hbr, Harvard Business Review Press. So you can get it through hbr. You can get it through Amazon anywhere. and, I’ve got an author’s website, martin dubin.com and I’ve partnered with some, others to kind of help broaden the reach of what I’ve done. And we have a website, blindspotting.com and you can find all this as well as we have a blind spotting test and other resources. and I look forward to people communicating with me about it. I kind of feel like I put something out there that, a lot more can be developed from it. So I’m looking forward to kind of seeing where all this.

>> Craig Gould: Goes. Wonderful. Well, I really appreciate your time today, and thanks for being my guest.

>> Marty Dubin: Marty. Thank you. I really enjoy the conversation.