The Grant Williams Podcast: Robert Glazer

Grant Williams (00:00):

Before we get going, here’s the bit where I remind you that nothing we discuss should be considered as investment advice. This conversation is for informational and hopefully entertainment purposes only. While we hope you find it both informative and entertaining, please do your own research or speak to a financial advisor before putting a dime of your money into these crazy markets. Now on with the show.

Welcome, everybody, to another edition of The Grant Williams Podcast. Joining me this time out is author, Robert Glazer. Robert’s books on leadership, Elevate, Rethinking the Two Weeks’ Notice and Friday Forward are all New York Times bestsellers.

This week he’s back with his latest work, The Compass Within, another terrific read which focuses on core values, but does so in a unique way. During what I found to be a fascinating and hugely inspiring conversation, you’ll hear Robert and I discuss his Core Values course. At the end of our conversation I’ll share a link with you which will enable you to download a free copy of that course if you order a copy of The Compass Within, which I feel sure you’re going to want to do once you’ve heard what Robert has to say. Without further ado, here is my conversation with Robert Glazer. Robert, thank you for doing this and joining me on the podcast. I’m thrilled to get the chance to talk to you about this phenomenal new book of yours.

Robert Glazer (01:33):

Thanks for having me, Grant.

Grant Williams (01:34):

When I read the book, your publisher sent me a PDF copy. It’s fascinating and it actually echoed with me and resonated with me through a lot of the things that I’ve actually been going through personally in the last couple of years. There’s a ton of stuff I want to talk to you about, but perhaps before we get into the book and the journey of writing that, just give people a little bit of your background personally so we can understand how you came to be in the place to write this.

Robert Glazer (01:55):

I have this disease called serial entrepreneurialism, meaning I’m not very employable to other people. I’ve started a bunch of different businesses, the largest of which of one is called Acceleration Partners. It’s a global partner marketing firm. I’m the chair in that business, but I don’t run it day to day. As we were building that business, I tried to do a lot of things differently. I learned a lot about myself and why I wanted to build the business and how I wanted the company to be different from places that I worked.

As part of my own leadership journey, I ended up tripping over this core values’ topic, figuring it out. It really started changing everything for me in the business and what I wanted to do. We started training our leaders on it too. When I saw the impact it had on other people, that was impetus to think about how I could spread that further in the world. But yeah, I’ve been building businesses for the last 20 years a lot in the marketing space, and I ended up… Because one of my core values is to find a better way and share it. A lot of the stuff we tried and tried to do better and figured out, I ended up open sourcing that and having a newsletter and people who followed my ideas around that.

Grant Williams (02:58):

Let’s talk about The Compass Within because it’s something that came to you organically and it really resonated with me as something you instinctively know but you don’t necessarily think about.

Robert Glazer (03:07):

It’s a very good description.

Grant Williams (03:08):

I found it fascinating. I don’t want to steal your thunder. Let’s talk about premise-

Robert Glazer (03:13):

No. I think that describes how a lot of us… I think we understand core values when we get into danger zone. It feels there’s some alarm system that goes off, but there’s nothing that told us to stay away from the electric fence or there’s no sign there. As I mentioned, back to my story, I went to this leadership training. It became very clear, and it was like, “Look…” The first two days were pretty heavy around a big mirror. Like, “Who are you and what do you value?” But they didn’t leave us with how to figure that out. I spent three to six months being like, “I’m a very values-driven person. I need to figure this out.” The resources were terrible. I went around, they’re like, “Keyword list.” I built a process that I thought, I didn’t have the terms at the time, actionable core values. As I said, we turned it into a leadership training thing for up and coming leaders at our company and I was like, “Look, if you’re going to lead, you’re going to lead a line to these things. That’s authentic leadership.”

Once I helped 10 classes of 10 do that, and I was like, “This really helps people.” I wrote this book called Elevate, and I talked about this concept of spiritual capacity. That spiritual capacity was really understanding your core values, your strengths, what you cared about, what you’re good at. People are like, “This is great. I am in on this. How do I figure out my core values?” I have this training thing I did. I sent them some resources. I ended up sitting down and turning that training program into a course. 2000 people took the course, and people are sending me notes all the time, “I took this job instead,” or, “It changed my life,” or whatever. I was like, “All right. We need to get this to more people. It’d be a great book.” But honestly, I was like, “I think it’d be a boring book. I’m not sure that people are going to go read a book on values.” I had this vision, I’m walking by a Barnes & Nobles and I see a book on values or core values, I’m not going to pick it up.

I’m a huge fan of Pat Lencioni’s work and Bob Burg and Parables. My daughter was challenging me around writing fiction. She’s like, “You only live in the nonfiction world. You read nonfiction. You write nonfiction.” I was like, “This actually… This feels I could show it, it would be better.” Look, it’s interesting. You’ve read the book. A bunch of people have read early in podcasts. Jamie’s just a mirror. He’s very reflective for people because I’ve had people be like, “Oh my God, that so reminded me of this conversation with my partner or my job or my…” He just acts as a mirror to bring this to us. Then obviously the framework that underlies the book I lay out explicitly in the last chapter in terms of how you can discover what I would say are actionable core values. Not one word platitudes, but things that you could use to make decisions in your life and the hardest decisions as we talk about the big three in the book.

Grant Williams (05:37):

We’ll come to that in a second and we’ll get to Jamie Hynes and his story because I thought that was a unique way to frame a book like this because there’s been a real surge in these motivational self-help ideas-driven books. Since Silicon Valley became such a big thing, there’s been so many of these books have come out.

Robert Glazer (05:52):

Now they’re into drugs.

Grant Williams (05:53):

Yeah. Exactly right. You’re exactly… Now they’ve done all the books, so now they’re more open about drugs. But this idea of core values, it’s become a bit of a trope that we have to identify a company’s core values. But there are the core values that happen on a corporate level that people try to instill into the people that work with them. Then there are these core values that you talk about, this inner compass within us, which is much more organic, much more real, much more authentic. I’m curious to talk about the difference between the two because taking those internal ones and turning them into a corporate structure feels difficult to me.

Robert Glazer (06:29):

I’ve written a lot about corporate core values. I do consulting work with organizations around it. This book is about personal, as you said, but 98% of companies are full of shit with their corporate core values. I actually didn’t believe in them until I started to see the companies that really, it wasn’t just what they said was different. It wasn’t trust and respect and integrity. They had hiring systems around it and they had awards around it and they had actions. A lot of that is garbage. I would actually say that companies have core values. They may not be what’s on the wall. There’s a difference between what does the company actually value? It’s simple. It’s like we’re training a dog. What are you rewarding and what are you punishing? What are the behaviors? You might say integrity, but you value speed or cheating. But how you lead is very tied to your individual core values. If I think of Jim Collins, Level 5 leadership, deeply authentic.

We all lead from this place. It’s a matter of whether you’re driving the wheel or there’s someone with an extra wheel on the side like when you’re learning how to drive because these are real formative things. I don’t like the word trauma and I’m not a psychologist, but having done this work with so many people, there are real formative events in our life that forge these core values. They’re with us as an adult, and so we need to understand it. We’re not going to change it, but we got to understand that if you’re a trust person and you had probably a big violation of trust somewhere in your life, and I’ve seen this, and your default way of leading is you sort people into people you can trust and not trust. If you can’t communicate, that has some huge problems for your leadership strategy. Your HR team will be like, “What the hell is going on with Grant? Last month he was firing these people. Now he’s promoting them.” Because it’s just your orientation on can I trust people or can I not, and if you can communicate them.

Look, in a perfect world, we would want the things that we care about to resonate closely with the company. Obviously if it’s a big company, it’s got to be loosely. An entrepreneur, their core values should probably rhyme with the company’s core values, but they’re not a carbon copy. Our company’s values synchronize with my personal core values or they’re related, but they’re not the same. They’re not the same words because we agreed as a group to live by those things. What I care about personally is different. Yeah. It is… As you said, it’s a trope. This is the most… I always have a little hesitation because people are like, half the people are like, “Values.” I’m like, “I promise the way I talk about this and the way I help you, it’s different.” It’s just about making it actionable. Same thing we do with companies, I don’t care what’s on your wall. We go around and interview all the people and they tell us what the behaviors are that the company values. We either say, “You got to fix what you’re saying or fix what you’re doing.” One of the two.

Grant Williams (09:03):

This is the idea of these core values being non-negotiable principles that come from within and to try and impose those onto a business, as you say, because not everybody has the same principles. From that ground up organic level with all the individuals that you have in a company, there is a 0% chance that they’re all going to be aligned in their core values personally. But the fact that they have core values means I guess you can do something with that. There is something there because if they had no value system, where do you stop?

Robert Glazer (09:33):

We’re all here. If you’re bringing people together for a mission or whatever, what are the non-negotiables that the group all agrees on? It’s probably some combination of their values. Look, each group has a different purpose. I give an example in the book. Whatever your religion is, if you have a Sunday morning religious group, you do not want an atheist in that group. A lot of people talk about how this is a pretext for discrimination or… You can have a couple of shared values in organizations, not mean people are carbon copies. I may be really good friends with the atheist. We play tennis together and we hang out. We do a lot of stuff, but I don’t want him my religious study group telling everyone that there is no God. That’s just not the right fit. Again, you should have a lot of different people in organizations, but you can either have a lot of rules or you can have a few values, the combinations of which take the place of a lot of rules.

Grant Williams (10:21):

It’s interesting because you talk a lot about how important it is to use lived experience to understand and generate these principles, which is, again, it’s very easy to say these are our core principles and this is what we’re all about and this is what we stand for, et cetera, et cetera.” It’s very simple, but if you can find a way to do this, as you say, through learned experience, there’s an authenticity to that is just simply missing in trying to project a set of values that you believe are correct onto a whole lot of people.

Robert Glazer (10:50):

There’s some things that are the same. This exercise that is in the book in this framework and the same in corporate. It is not aspirational. It’s not something you want to be or something that sounds good. It’s actually figuring out what’s already there. My analogy in the book and the one that seems to resonate with people is if I put your nice sports car in a tunnel and I turn off the lights, you’re going to drive down. You’re going to hit the right side. You’ll be like bad noise scraping.

You’re going to back to the middle, other side. You’re probably going to get out of the tunnel, but your car is going to look terrible and it’s all beat up. We know when we’ve crossed our values. It feels horrible. It’s that door grinding on the wall and our car gets a little beat up. The difference is let’s turn on the lights. Let’s see the walls, the yellow lines and say, “Look, I’m a person, one of my core values is include all perspective.” I just know that environments where people can’t give their perspective, can’t talk, unilaterals, those are my electric fence and I need to stay away from that.

Grant Williams (11:45):

The device you used through the book, which I found fantastic, was Jamie Hynes and this parable. You touched on it briefly. Talk a little bit about how you went about doing that because…

Robert Glazer (11:55):

I talk about the big three in your life. If core values are the ultimate decision-making rubric, then the ultimate decisions are who you choose as a partner, the vocation you choose or the place you choose to work and the community or communities that you choose to be in. If those decisions are not core value aligned, they have very little chance of being successful. I think we forget about the community one a lot. It’s funny, not in a lot of UK podcasts, but if somebody in your family had a health scare and you’re really focused on health and activity and that is a core value for you, probably don’t want to live in Newcastle. You’re probably going to want to live in Park City or somewhere in a mountain town in Italy where the activity base is not going to the bar at three o’clock. And I understand, that’s hard.

Jamie, he’s a up-and-comer mid-twenties and he’s going through some consternation about his job and his employer, his fiance for whom they have some conflicts and they’re trying to settle down and pick a community. They moved into this community that seemed to have all of the right things from the outset. Someone’s asked me recently if it was my town. I was like I turned up the volume on all of these things a little bit to make it a little obvious, but through him some of these interactions, and we’ve all had him where this person just doesn’t feel right or being asked to do something that’s not right. In the end, Jamie’s got to make some hard decisions, but he meets a mentor who coaches him through his core values using this framework that was the basis of the course and that I figured out over the years. Then, again, you’re just given the framework at the end. But I think for a lot of people, seeing it in action will be as helpful as being given it.

Grant Williams (13:32):

That’s what I found so interesting because I firmly believe and have done for a long time that stories are the best way of getting anything across because I think from a very early age, we’re conditioned to how a story structure works. We know there’s a beginning and middle and end. We know once we’re hooked, we’re going to follow that. We want to know what happens to character. When you’re trying to share ideas that can be dry, if they’re just as you say, and just one of those standard core value frameworks. Here we go, this is how you do it. To your point about walking past Barnes & Noble, I know a lot of people go, “Yeah. Yeah. I don’t like wading through those books.” That story structure, I think it’s just such a brilliant device to get these ideas across. I think it works really well.

Robert Glazer (14:10):

My guess is someone’s having consternation over one of those areas of their life and they’re intrigued. If they hear me speak or they hear the presentation, they talk about it. They inevitably come up afterwards. One of the things I realized with this book, I’m going to have to be careful. I’ve given a couple of speeches and people are coming up to me and, “What do I do if my kid doesn’t have the same core values?” I was like, “I’m not really in the psychology…

Grant Williams (14:32):

The therapy business…

Robert Glazer (14:32):

The therapy business. It brings up a lot of stuff for people. I’m like, “I’m going to have to figure out where I have those conversations and not.” But this stuff is deep. I think once people realize, oh, I really value this because it was something they were doubling down on that it was really important to them or that they’re running away from. I was working with a group recently and one guy, he has such a “work hard”… And that was just what his dad instilled with him.

He will just outwork anyone. Look, there’s a lot of downsides to that. The other person was in a family business and they were basically like, “All of my core values are the opposite.” This was so all-encompassing in my life that I wanted space and I wanted flexibility from it. Generally I found people are running towards something or running against it. When you can see that and make that connection, you understand that it’s real and why it’s important to you, and that actually if you’re a 40 or 50-year-old, it’s baked at that point. It’s there. You might as well have the manual to know-how make decisions with it.

Grant Williams (15:32):

By the time you’re that age, whether you know what they are or not, you have your principles. I think a lot of people don’t spend any time thinking about what they are. We drift from decision to decision. Some of them sit well with us. Some of them don’t. Some of them work out. Some of them don’t. A lot of times the reason they don’t work out is because they’re not in alignment. But again, the way you do this through Jamie’s story. Give us if you can without giving too much away?

Robert Glazer (16:01):

Jamie is engaged, but… We’ll deal into the hard one because I think relationship’s are interesting. Again, similar to what we’re talking about in companies these days. I didn’t understand this when I was 20 years old, but you don’t have to be the same as your partner. Different interests, different styles, different activities. People may overly focus on those, but you need to be aligned around the big things. When you’re talking about your family and your kids and these things and religion or not religion or these things and the importance of these things, they have to be aligned on them. I think Jamie’s… He and his partner are different and their activities are a little bit different. He’s seeing some clashes in that. I think he’s trying to discern whether this is just a regular thing or there might be a deeper problem.

They’re going through the classic getting married. His fiance is a middle child and a people pleaser, and her parents are being a little controlling about the wedding. She’s not willing to tell them it’s not what they want. This is all relatable to a lot of people, and he’s frustrated that she won’t speak up. That’s the thing. Again, as he goes into the core values and has that discovery, he’s able to look at that relationship through that lens and when he’s shared some stories with him and say what matters and what doesn’t. Similarly, I think the one a lot of us forget a lot is the community. In this book, he and his wife, there’s this community called Westville. It is outside of Boston. It’s being redeveloped. There’s I guess the equivalent of the Tube would’ve gone in, a train that made it accessible to Boston.

Lots of young people are moving there and it’s beautiful. On the face it seems to have everything that they really want. However, there are some things that they start to discover about the people that live there and a lot of them don’t seem to really be able to afford themselves and have a little bit of a invisible hand helping them. It’s different than their friends and where they lived before. Again, it’s surface versus deep and taking a look at does the pretty dog park matter or the fact that half the people don’t seem to really work and live in really nice houses that they can’t pay for that they keep going over and meeting. That’s where the rubber hits the road on some of this stuff.

Grant Williams (18:17):

But again, coming back to that as a device. What I was thinking as I was going through it was that it’s easy to lose yourself in the story because it is just an interesting story.

Robert Glazer (18:26):

Or see yourself. Right?

Grant Williams (18:28):

Or see yourself. Exactly right. But you are almost invested in Jamie’s outcome rather than yours, but the way you take these breaks to actually just bring people back to actually what we’re trying to learn here, was that in your mind from the beginning or did you find that as you wrote this story out, you needed to snap people back out of the story and say, “Look, this is a parable here. We need to get back to the reality of it”?

Robert Glazer (18:52):

I think it was the Pat Lencioni structure of it’s great to tell the story, but then you want to sit as the coach and review and say, “Let’s make it clear what the moral of the story was. We don’t want to miss this.” I am curious, and as more people do it, then I give them the exercise, whether it is more helpful for them to read the rules at the end or it is to just go follow Jamie talking to his mentor and the coach. But no, I think the story is meant to get their wheels going. But then it’s like, “Hey, this is not about Jamie. You might be invested in his story, but he’s really you. Hopefully you see yourself in him somewhere.”

Grant Williams (19:29):

You talk in the book about this discovery of core values. Was there a moment for you that a particular either a decision or an event or something that you have as a watershed where you had a before and after?

Robert Glazer (19:42):

Yeah. The watershed was at six to 12 months. I really came back after I figured that out and I started making changes in my company, making changes in relationships, doubling down on certain things. We always give everyone my bio. They were reading my bio and it starts with, “Robert is the founder and was the past CEO of Acceleration Partners.” Then it goes into the books and the speeches and the podcasts and a whole bunch of stuff. I was like, “Huh. Every single one of those things after saying my title, that I founded the company, was actually after that core values’ moment.” That was the watershed for me. I was doing okay, but really everything that mattered or that I would use in my bio came after that moment. Look, I’m very honest with this. We’re all chasing these childhood demons in some case are good or bad. For me, I was a very late bloomer where it didn’t click.

I was a ADD kid and didn’t love school and all that stuff. I was just always told report card after report card that, “He’s not living up to his potential. He’s just not capable. He seems capable.” I share my report cards when I speak, and my sixth grade teacher goes, “He seems really capable, but I just can’t do anything to motivate him,” and she gave up. This is a familiar story, but it’s not surprising that this is… I got in and wrote a book about capacity and saying, “Look, having seen how much my life when it clicked at 30 something years old, I want for people to figure that out sooner because then I spent a decade overachieving to try to compensate for decade underachieving, then I almost burned myself out.” We’re all trying to be what we needed in some way. It been so meaningful that I… How can I…

I’m really pushing the book with early 20 year olds and groups around that and say, “Look, before you go out in the workforce, we are very tribal.” The world is very tribal right now. It’s being stoked by fear and online and people joining and doing things that don’t make sense and are incongruous and frankly being manipulated by people I think that don’t have their best interest at heart. Part of that problem is if you had a clear sense of values, you’d have this anchoring to be like, “I’m not the type of person…” When Malcolm Gladwell studied people who were not Jewish who helped hide people during the Holocaust, their answer was, “My parents brought me up to take care of all people. How could I not choose that?” It was like a universal values anchor, and somehow we’ve lost that in the last generation or two. I’m hoping we can bring it back.

Grant Williams (22:19):

You talk about this in the book about the confusion between aspirational traits and core values. You talked a minute ago about chasing things and this idea of aspiration and things that people think either sound or feel like core values, but they’re actually not. What advice can you give to people to figure out which is which and determine what are aspirational traits, what are core values and how to steer clear of the former?

Robert Glazer (22:45):

Well, they should do this process. If you don’t read the book, you can go to robertglazer.com/6, and you get the six questions that get you started on the core value discovery on that. But it’s really being honest with yourself. For example, if you think that you’re supposed to say kind, but really… That’s what these questions invoke. They invoke when were you really in flow and doing well? What did people come to you for? What can’t you stand? Because you may be like, “Kindness.” It’s really not kindness. You’re honest. I don’t mean honest in the truth, but you’re the friend people come to you when they want to know that you’ll tell you that the dress isn’t pretty when everyone else says it’s pretty, right? Then actually what you value is being direct. When you throw out kind, you think being direct is kind, but this is when you get to the root of these things and really understand why.

Again, to take this through, I have found. Let’s say someone has a real always be direct as a core value. Be direct or don’t beat behind the bush or whatever. If that was core value, Grant, and you and I really got into a discussion, I would find that you had a super passive-aggressive parent. They were constantly never telling you the truth. You gained 100 pounds and they told you you look fine. Then at some point in your life you got old enough to realize that, and then that was such a formative thing for you. That became I am not going to do that and I am not going to be that. By the way, there are a lot of great scenarios for someone who’s direct. There’s also some situations I wouldn’t put them into if I knew that where you need kindness and bullshit in a situation.

Grant Williams (24:22):

That particular one I find interesting because in many cases… I won’t say all because that’d be unfair. But in many cases people who pride themselves on being direct, it’s a great excuse to just be an asshole. It’s just… Because you say, “Did I offend you? I’m just direct.”

Robert Glazer (24:38):

This is Kim Scott’s radical candor versus obnoxious aggression. Look, I have a core value of respectful authenticity, which is a unique combination on that, which is, look, tell people the truth. I believe that they deserve that, but you should never not be kind or respectful or you should never offend them, but it’s kindness combined with that honesty. In fact, I wrote this book called Rethinking the Two Weeks’ Notice, and I had a TED Talk on how do we change people leaving companies? That was all about having real conversations that allow for better outcomes. That whole program was a direct dotted line to a personal core value of mine.

Grant Williams (25:15):

It’s interesting you bring that up because that moment leaving the workplace, I’ve found over the years, it’s always interested me that you can work with people and become really good friends, spending all your days together and accomplishing things and going through trials and all this sort of stuff together. Then when people leave that company… It’s always fascinated me how people who don’t necessarily have a major stake in that company, for example, can take someone leaving personally. When you talk about values, someone who’s a great friend of yours and because they’re betraying the company.

Robert Glazer (25:49):

It’s cognitive dissonance. They can’t reconcile that they’re a good lad, but that’s a better job. The other thing, I just published an article on this theory I have called relational dissonance when you need to… Someone works for you and you really like them and they suck at their job, you have a dissonance problem. What you start doing is distancing yourself from the person and making them into a bad person. You make it easier to do what you need to do rather than being like, “Grant, love you, man, but you’re 50% quota for three quarters in a row. You and I know that this can’t continue. Let’s talk about what else we can move you into or can I find you a different job? Because that’s not going to work.” People have a harder time doing that.

Grant Williams (26:29):

The big three, these are partner, vocation and community. As you’ve gone through this, if you talk to people in your experience, is there one of those three that tends to cause people more anguish, more struggle?

Robert Glazer (26:43):

It’s a toss-up for people I think between on the partner and the job, right?

Grant Williams (26:47):

Okay. Yeah. A partner makes more sense to me just because you’ve got that human element that you-

Robert Glazer (26:50):

You’ve got that human element. Interestingly I was helping someone do their core values from a leadership development standpoint. We finished them. They’re going through a divorce. They said to me, “Huh.” I said, “What?” They said, “My partner, my ex is just the opposite of these two values.” I was like, “That’s hard.” You can imagine, I don’t know who can see this, but if I have five fingers and five points of contact, you can have a little that are misaligned and then you come together on these. If it’s like polarized magnets, the opposite… Let’s say one partner lives for the day and the moment, and the other is all about saving and deferred gratification, and one is about generosity and the other is about being super thrifty. That’s going to really grate day after day. It doesn’t matter if you both play tennis. When you go to make a decision about the kids, it’s going to be like, “No. Give them money.”

“No. Don’t give them money.” When you go to make a decision on the house, it’s going to be like, “Let’s wait for the big one.” “No. Let’s get the thing. Let’s travel. Let’s not…” If you have three or four of these points where you have an opposite core value as someone, that’s fricking hard. This woman who came up to me after I spoke last week was like, “My son has a total opposite core value of me.” I was like, “That’s really hard, but maybe he developed it because it was a counter reaction to that.” But I’m like, “You are you. He is him. If that’s one thing, then you guys with awareness maybe can navigate around it a little bit.” But look, she just recognized how hard it was with her own son. Something that she really cared about deeply he just did not care about.

Grant Williams (28:23):

Is that something that’s on the rise? Because it seemed to me, I’m a Gen-Xer-

Robert Glazer (28:27):

They just forget about us in all the books. It goes right to millennials from the greatest generation. We’re the ones who worked and didn’t whine and went home by ourselves.

Grant Williams (28:39):

That’s it. As I look at that, my generation, it feels we just naturally took on the values and the traits of our parents. That was just what you did because that’s how we were raised. It doesn’t feel to me as though I sense a lot of friction between Gen-Xers and their parents’ generation. I have a couple of millennial kids, and I see the drift in how they see the world and what they prioritize and what’s important to them. I see that drift even further with Gen Z. How do you think about that drift over time in terms of trying to snap things back into alignment on the personal side of things?

Robert Glazer (29:19):

One of the more interesting things, and not to get in to a political… One of the best articles I’ve read was Ryan Holiday wrote an article years ago when Trump was running the first time around, “Dad, I really need you not to vote for Trump.” Basically the point of the article was that everything that Donald Trump was saying was stuff that his dad as a kid told him were not the family values. He’s like, “This is breaking me. Either everything you’ve told me isn’t true or not.” It was a really heartfelt from a place of pain. Like, “What you told me a decent human was and berated me my whole life, this not this. Help me reconcile this.” Look, I think to the extent that in social media and parents are doing things or making mistakes that they’re undermining the values that they told to their kids. If you tell your kid to be modest and then you post yourself doing affluent things on Instagram, they’re not going to be modest. I just think that fewer and fewer people are living, are emboldening those principles.

I had a mentor who said, “Look…” I’ve heard some incredible… General Stanley McChrystal was on the pod. He’s like, “I think about living my life in a way that I would never ever embarrass my children or grandchildren.” That’s a different standard. That’s not what the average person does. I think that values are usually right in the long run, often in the short run they look wrong or they have a cost. Social media is all about you better run into the building when everyone’s running in because running out feels super dangerous. But I have documented story after story of people who ran out when people were running in, they made a total values-based decision. Everyone told them they were idiots, whatever. As you added some time to that story, they were on the right side of history. People remembered that and it was the defining moment of their career. I don’t know. We don’t celebrate those stories as much because what we celebrate is someone got canceled in the moment. What happened three years later? Sometimes that’s more important.

Grant Williams (31:12):

It’s interesting because in the world of investment, which is the water I swim in, this is an object lesson in this idea of sticking to your principles. If you have a way to value companies, stocks, whatever it may be, sticking to your principles when everybody else is going crazy and buying monkey JPEGs for example.

Robert Glazer (31:28):

It has a cost, right?

Grant Williams (31:30):

It absolutely does. But it’s interesting how in the world of investment, these ideas of principles and value are very well-understood things, but they have definitely been chipped away at over the last 10 years to a meaningful degree I think in many cases.

Robert Glazer (31:46):

There are some investors that have thesis… You may have heard. I heard one yesterday, he said, “We didn’t do a deal for five years. It didn’t pass our test and our value.” That’s really sticking to your values. We’re just going to sit out of the market and take the beratement because we don’t want to change our standards.

Grant Williams (32:04):

But that’s not easy to do. I’ve spoken to people who’ve done that, and as you say, it’s been very expensive for them. They’ve lost a lot of investors.

Robert Glazer (32:10):

Yeah. Investors ask for their money back.

Grant Williams (32:12):

You have to have enough of a runway to be able to do that. You either have to have some kind of tenure or you have to have enough money. There are things that preclude you being able to stick to your value sometimes. That’s got to be an interesting decision to take because if… That particular example is a perfect one. If you couldn’t find a deal for five years and everybody was going to pull their money unless you did something, how do you deal with a problem like that whereby sticking to your values means the end of your business?

Robert Glazer (32:43):

For some people, they’re like, “I don’t want to be in this business.” My newsletter next week is about a gentleman named Yvon Chouinard and there was a book just written about him, and so he was a climbing enthusiast. He invented these climbing things that people could use to climb rock. It was the most popular product that he had, and it was 90% of his revenue. Then he discovered that these things were destroying rocks and leaving metal everywhere. He decided to stop selling them, and he didn’t have a replacement product. It forced him to innovate and he built a whole thing with clips in rocks and a whole system of clean hiking. That company became Patagonia. He just couldn’t live with himself. His dad said, “You first do no harm.” That was literally like a childhood rule. There was another thing where a sporting goods store found out that a kid who shot up a school had purchased a gun from their store.

Interestingly, it wasn’t the gun he used in the store, but they decided they were getting rid of all the high magazines, they were changing their rules to 21 and they were going to get rid of all this stuff. Everyone’s like, “You’re going to lose $250 million.” The CEO, he did not invoke a company value. He said, “My dad always said you take care of the community that you live in.” A month later their stock price was up 10%. 10 years later it’s up 500%. They’re the only ones standing in the industry. I’m sure there’s stories of people who stood by their values and they lost it all, but Yvon Chouinard would’ve been like, “I would’ve rather lost the company that built a product that destroyed the environment when that goes against my core ethos.” Remember, in the old days in the “Braveheart”, these were… People were very happy to die for their values. What was life worth living if you had to go against that? I think social media has made everyone so performative that it feels like we’re a long way away from those days.

Grant Williams (34:30):

You talk about this clarity of values in the book. You write about this and the importance of that for authentic leadership. When you’re working with individuals, how do you advise them if they reach that point where their personal values don’t align with a company culture?

Robert Glazer (34:47):

I speak a lot on culture and company culture. I’ve had people come up to me after my speeches and, “Can I talk to you for a sec over in the corner?” That would be on company core values and what do you do when you’re interested in this stuff and whatever, but the leadership team and the company has no interest or otherwise? One time it was really awkward because his dad was the leadership team. I’m like, “Look, here’s the truth. You can run a little counterculture in your team. You can do all the things I’m talking about, but unless the company or the leadership really believes in this stuff, nothing is going to change.” You probably already know that, and it’s just a question of whether you want to take that pain or that cost. There are realities in life.

You may ironically have a core value of take care of those around you, and so quitting a job and putting your kids hungry violates one of your values. But there’s something I talk about in leadership, what you don’t want in a company is people that quit and stay. That’s the most dangerous versus the people that quit and leave. The right way to handle this to me is actually to be a quit and stayer where you say, “Look, actually I’m super clear that this company doesn’t live my values, and I have made the decision to leave. It might take me six months or 12 months, and I’m going to give myself that grace because there’s other things that it would cause and harm. But I’m clear in my mind about this, and so I can fake it for the next six to 12 months because I know that.”

That’s different than just going along with it and pretending. Look, if you work in a place that doesn’t align with your values and you really ignore it, two things happen. One, it either kills you a little bit each day because you know that you’re doing that, or you subjugate that and you bury it really deep and you throw yourself in and then it explodes. It all comes out in one eruption two to three years down the line because you just feel horrible because you know that you’re literally doing stuff you don’t believe in and don’t even recognize yourself anymore. We all can’t be Jerry Maguire and drop the mic and everyone knows movie…

Grant Williams (36:54):

Take the goldfish and walk out.

Robert Glazer (36:55):

I understand there’s some realities, but first it’s get clarity and then start making some changes. A woman who took the course wrote me a story about how it was something in her core values came out around education and service. It was really strong and she didn’t realize that. A month or two later after she had done that work, someone put out something about head of the school PTA. She just had never thought of it in her life before. She ended up running because of that. She was doing it and she got a lot of satisfaction out of it. Maybe she couldn’t switch her job to education right now, but she took a part of her life and she started aligning it to one of those values.

Grant Williams (37:32):

This idea of taking a deliberate and intentional journey to discover true values, to actually sit down and go through the exercise and work out what your true values are. I can imagine a lot of people might be quite hesitant about that because potentially you could find there are some almost painful changes to make. Have you experienced that? If you do, how do you help people through to get over that hump?

Robert Glazer (37:55):

I haven’t experienced that a lot yet as we scale. My friend, Philip McKernan, actually who’s a clarity coach for all these teams around the world. He has a joke. He says, “People fly thousands of miles and spend thousands of dollars to come to me for the clarity they don’t really want.” They know they’re in a crappy marriage. They know their business isn’t working. They know it and they’re trying to avoid that mirror.

I think this is a little different because I don’t know that people are avoiding it because they know it’s going to come up because I think a lot of people haven’t really thought about it at all or thought about it in that way. But yes, Jamie has this epiphanous moment in the book. What say constantly is when you figure them out, it’s like someone handed you the stencil and you start looking and you’re like, “That job. Loved it. That’s why that job, hated it.” It just explains so much. Yeah. I could imagine that forces some pretty hard decisions for some people. I think that’s part of it. I say that in the book, the core values decisions are the hardest.

Grant Williams (38:56):

As you said at the very top of the show, at the end, you do include a framework and a series of ways to walk through. Let’s talk a little bit about the framework, about how you go about doing this?

Robert Glazer (39:05):

We’ll do the speed date version.

Grant Williams (39:06):

Exactly right.

Robert Glazer (39:08):

It starts with these six questions, as I mentioned. I’ll mention a couple of them. If you want the whole list, it’s robertglazer.com/6. In what nonwork environments have you been highly engaged? When are you super happy with your work? What are you doing? What’s the advice or quality he’s come to you for? You would take these six questions. There’s one about what would people say in your eulogy, and sit down with a cup of coffee. Just answer these six questions and see what it brings up for you. The process there goes, you take them through this filter, this thing I’ve created called the core validator. What you’re trying to do is then take those lists, circle all the things that are of similar themes because it’s asking you the same question in different ways to try to invoke similar stories. You take all the same themes and you’d have a red theme and a blue theme and a green theme, and those are probably the base foundation of a core value.

You then run it through this thing called the core validator to help figure out the right theme, and then is it actionable? It’s these four questions. This is what’s pretty unique about my framework. Can I use it to make a decision past or present? To me, that’s the ultimate rubric of a… Take one of my core values of long-term orientation. I can look at a decision and I can look at it through that lens. That’s where it’s helpful. This is the big one. When you imagine the opposite of it, does it strike a nerve? Is it like kryptonite and drives you crazy or is it like, “Ah.” Because the definition of a value is that when it’s broken, you really does not feel good. This anti-value test is a really good one. If we talked and I determined one of your core values was always try a little bit harder or something like that, and I was like, “Grant, you’re at this party and you’re talking to this person, I make an opposite avatar and they’re like, ‘I don’t want to put in any more work…’”

The person starts tensing. I’ve done this where I make an opposite avatar in one person. I’m fast enough now of all of their core values, and they look like they’re going to puke. They’re like, “I need to get away.” I’m like, “They’re bragging about their trust fund and they’re talking about this other person,” and the person just starts tensing up because it’s like a violation of their values. That’s the do you have the right theme? Then is it a phrase rather than one word? Very few cases I’ve ever seen that one word core values can be effective. Family is a big one. Integrity. We can talk about both of those, and I’ll tell you why they’re bad core values. But the last thing is can you objectively rate yourself on it? Could you say, “Yeah. I’m doing this,” or, “I’m not doing this,” because that gets to that actionable part.

Grant Williams (41:38):

I can’t let you dangle that out there and not fold this one up. Explain to me why family is a bad value?

Robert Glazer (41:44):

Family is a bad value because, again, values are universal for how you show up everywhere. How does that help you at work? What I actually find is if I ask some hard questions to people, the thing that’s really helpful is what sits below family? Tell me what does it? They’re like, “Look, it’s about always being there. It’s about being a trusted member for my family.” Whatever that is about is actually the core value that they show up with the same with their friends and in the workplace. If it’s always be there when it matters. If they realize that’s the core value sitting on their family. Now I can go to personal and I’m really busy and I found out my friend’s mother died.

I could probably make the funeral, but I really don’t want to. But I should go to the funeral, right? Because I’m going to regret that because that violates my value. Or as a leader, I think it’s really important to just be there and support the team. Again, family is a priority. It’s not a value. It wasn’t with you when you were 16 or 18. It just fails a lot of that stuff. Similarly, integrity, we’ve got at least 10 different definitions that people have told me of integrity. I want to know how you describe integrity. For some person it’s to tell the truth. The other is your words match your deeds. The other is live your life to the fullest.

Whatever sits under that, as Jamie does in the book, it is actually the value and is much more helpful to you than saying, “Was I integral last month?” Again, if that means lying, I didn’t lie, but it means was I doing the things that I said I was going to do? Were my actions… Someone just told me his definition of, can’t remember, it was integrity or family, but it was like your words match your deeds. I was like, “That is so clear and it’s so clear for me how that would show up in other areas of your life.” He was really upset at himself when he went through a period of work where he kept saying his wife was the most important thing and he wasn’t acting like that. He realized he was violating his own value.

Grant Williams (43:45):

It’s interesting. You touched on it just back then when you were talking about the trust fund and stuff. As I thought about this, I realized that I can identify my values by the things that I can’t stand.

Robert Glazer (43:54):

That’s true for most people.

Grant Williams (43:54):

I come at it the wrong way around. Yeah. I come it the other way around.

Robert Glazer (43:57):

It’s not a surprise though because that’s the electric fence. Give me one, let’s put this out…

Grant Williams (44:01):

The perfect example. People bragging about this. That lack of humility is I find just so obnoxious.

Robert Glazer (44:08):

Okay. A guy comes over you in a bar in a green velvet… This is actually a partially true story from a conference, in a green velvet sport coat with a dollar sign on it and a cigarette and starts talking to you. I don’t know if you can see Grant’s face, but he’s already getting hives, right?

Grant Williams (44:26):

Yeah. It is, but it’s not even that. It’s even simple stuff like someone who will, I don’t know, on social media, talk about some award they won.

Robert Glazer (44:35):

You love the humblebrags. Those are the worst. Those are the than the outright brags.

Grant Williams (44:39):

That stuff just drives me insane.

Robert Glazer (44:41):

I’m so humble to announce that… I’m humble to announce. Yeah.

Grant Williams (44:45):

Exactly right. That stuff just, it drives me nuts.

Robert Glazer (44:48):

If you can see Grant, this is exactly… Grant has proved my point. His blood pressure is higher. His face is-

Grant Williams (44:55):

The vein in my forehead, you can see it.

Robert Glazer (44:58):

This is exactly what I’m talking about, how you know you’re on the right track. Look, it might be have some humility or stay humble or keep yourself grounded. How you word that for you, but it’s probably what you tell your kids. Again, it’s probably pretty consistent for you across different disciplines.

Grant Williams (45:17):

Towards the end of the book, there’s a course in there and there’s ways and means of applying these lessons. Have you had any communications people have gone through this that were just extraordinarily either transformative stories or surprising outcomes from the people that have done this work?

Robert Glazer (45:34):

I have a bunch of people that have written me notes, and I’m trying to not be responsible for any relationship breakups, but I’m sure there’s some in there, yeah, where they had a big decision. They don’t ever make decisions anymore without looking at this. They took a different job. They rethought it. That’s what kept me doing this is getting all of these notes and people being like, “Wow. This was…” Once you see it, you can’t unsee it. That was really behind my desire to try to figure out a way how to expand this from the course because the course was super effective, but a lot of people just won’t jump into a course.

Grant Williams (46:07):

Absolutely. What’s next after this? I don’t want to get you down the road of your next book already. You must be exhausted with this one.

Robert Glazer (46:12):

I’m pretty committed. I’m on this my five-year BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal) is to help a million people figure out their core values. I think it’s what the world needs more than ever today. I think particularly a lot of youth, as I said, are being pulled into different causes without really understanding, “Oh. We love all people except for these people. Well, that doesn’t make sense.” Go back and think about what you’re saying, and are these really your words or someone else’s words? I’ve got a next book that’s mostly done. It’s going to be a couple of years. I love the subject, but this has been such a marathon. But what has confounded me for a long time, and it’ll end up tying to this because it does get to values, is having been in the leadership realm where we’re super clear about behavior that is productive as a leader and unproductive and it would land you on a performance review or otherwise.

That same behavior, the stuff in the workplace that everyone would be like, “That’s horrible,” is showing up as a dominant form of parenting. That has fascinated me about why we don’t look at parenting through a leadership lens. It caused me to research. Turns out there’s a 100 years of research. The same framework of what makes a good parent is what makes a good leader, which is super high support and super high standard and challenge. Probably because we’re flipping from an authoritarian parenting regime, it’s gone so far the other way of just super permissive with no standards. Our outcomes are horrible. We have the most depressed, anxious generation in history despite awareness of mental health at levels and treatments that we’d never had. Obviously something we’re doing isn’t working. I’ve decided to take a look at this with a lot of hard data through a leadership lens. I hope people that lead and are parents might examine where they aren’t being consistent.

Grant Williams (48:05):

That makes so much sense to me intuitively. I loved this book and I will definitely read that book when it comes out. Robert, thank you. This has been a really interesting conversation. I’m really grateful you’ve taken the time. Before I let you go though, just let people know where they can find out more about your work and give the book a proper plug. I’ll plug it myself, but give them a plug in your own words for me?

Robert Glazer (48:24):

If you go to compass-within.com or look up the book and you purchase it through the launch week, you can get that course for free. It’s a lot more money than the book. I just want everyone to do the work. Go to compass-within.com. If you pre-order the book, definitely fill out the form and register, and we’ll send you the course for free. All of my stuff and everything is at robertglazer, G-L-A-Z-E-R, .com. You can sign up for my Friday Forward newsletter on Substack, which is where I talk a lot about these things. As I said, if you just want the questions, go to robertglazer.com/6, but look forward to your listeners doing that work, sending me one of those letters, having that epiphany. It’s just really fun for me to see when it clicks for people, I get a deep sense of satisfaction from that.

Grant Williams (49:07):

I completely understand that. Robert, it’s been tremendous. Thank you so much for doing this. I’ve really enjoyed chatting to you, and I thoroughly enjoyed the book.

Robert Glazer (49:13):

Thank you for having me.

Grant Williams (49:14):

Well, there you have it, folks. I thoroughly enjoyed that conversation with Robert and his wonderful new book, The Compass Within, which is available now at all good bookstores. I always wanted to be able to say that. Plus Amazon, of course. If you are going to buy yourself a copy, then if you do so by visiting robertglazer.com/compass-grant, you’ll also be able to download a free copy of Robert’s Core Values Course, which I can’t recommend highly enough. All the links will be in the transcript, so download that and you’ll have everything you need. My thanks to Robert for joining me today, and that’s it for another show. I’ll be back again with another great guest in the not too distant future, but in the meantime, as always, thank you so much for listening.

Nothing we discussed should be considered as investment advice. This conversation is for informational and hopefully entertainment purposes only. While we hope you find it both informative and entertaining, please do your own research or speak to a financial advisor before putting a dime of your money into these crazy markets.