 Hi, I'm Michael Kossler and welcome back to the leaders room brought to you by the Ecliffe Leadership and Governance Center. I am delighted to have with me today Mr. Mark Thompson, Marcus CEO and co-founder of Virgin Unite Mentors, Sir Richard Branson's Network for Executive Coaching and Entrepreneurial Innovation. Prior to Virgin, Mark served at Charles Swab's former chief of staff, chief of customer experience, chief communications officer and co-founder of the Schwab Foundation. He has also served as executive producer of Schwab.com with assets in excess of 1.4 trillion USD. Forbes magazine called Mark one of America's top investors with the mightest touch. He served on the board of directors for Best Buy, CoronFerry International and Interwoven, which is now owned today by HP. Mark, welcome to the leaders room. It's great to be along with you. Thank you so much for the invitation. Thank you, sir. I have five questions I'd like to ask you, but it's going to delve into who you are. I'm going to start with one of your books, Success Built to Last and in that book you mentioned that every high achiever that you interviewed had three definitions of success that helped them produce long-term or the 20 years, you know, an impact on their profession. You said it was purpose, passion, and performance. Tell us about that. It was fascinating because often when we get excited about an idea, someone will think entrepreneurially or they'll be coming up with a new innovation, they'll think that maybe it's just the idea that works or maybe they'll be looking at it from the standpoint of making money or changing careers. And what we found is that the leadership more than ever is a very personal thing and then those people who had achieved in their field of profession for 20 years or more had a sense of purpose, almost a driving cause. It might be the market, it might be customer, it could be community, but something larger to themselves that you might even define as legacy, something that's going to outlast you. You're a part of it, but it's more than just you. Secondly, they had a sense of passion. In other words, something that drove them from the inside out. Right. Often we're driven by fear, but passion outlasts fear. It's hardly great at something that you're afraid of. Right. So being connected to your own passions, we found that it was just as important to be connected to the cause. And then the third area was performance. So it's nice to be passionate and purpose driven, but you've got to deliver. You've got to produce the results. So those that were able to have long-term achievement have those three things going for them, those three definitions. You could be successful short-term within one of them. Okay. Okay. So what's your personal purpose and is a change of time? Let me give you a context. Okay. Please. At each lift, we say that there are two sustainable sources of leadership energy. Values and purpose. You hit a roadblock. It's your values and purpose that's going to help you get through that. Right. But frequently when we're talking to other executives, they say, well, you know, how many purposes should I have in my lifetime? And so that's my question. What's your purpose and has it changed over time? You know, I think it has, although it started early because for me, I came from difficult circumstances. The family had a tough time. We were on the verge of bankruptcy. I had severely learning disabilities. And so early on, I mean, it's amazing to think I could be with you today because when I was in middle school, I couldn't read. Right. And so... Are you not reading your mind of dyslexia or something like that? Exactly. So one of those types of issues that really made you humiliated and held you back. Right. And so what I learned at that time, the way we coped was we pulled together as a little ragtag team. Maybe we thought we were all individually inadequate. But I realized if we worked together towards a common cause, you could do the impossible. And so I feel that that's driven all of my obsessions. All of my purposes through life is that I feel driven to gather a team that the job of the leaders to recruit and develop other leaders is what Peter Drucker said. So it seems to me that everything that I found myself obsessed with or passionate about in terms of my purposes had been to try to heal that wound and try to turn that wound into wisdom and try to help pay it forward for other people. How can we as a group try to create something greater than any of us as individuals? Okay. My next question is, you're an executive coach with a fairly well-known organization. Yeah. And the picture on your website, you're paired up with a couple of really impressive characters like Marshall Goldsmith and Alan Mulally. What are the challenges and the opportunities that you find currently on the surface in your work with senior leaders? Well, they said that they're asking for help on. And what guidance are they looking for? You know, I think the most important thing is that in leadership, especially as we grow in responsibility, there is this almost paradox of needing to be so driven and results-oriented and so ambitious that you won't take no for an answer. Certainly if you're in a big job or you're an entrepreneur, you'll get a lot of resistance. So you'll have to lean in and you'll have to be pretty ambitious. But to be a level five leader as Jim Collins would say, I'd say it's really the primary difficulty that we see with large firms and executives trying to run the work now. To have at the same time that ambition is necessary, a sense of humility. The humility to do a few things. The humility to know that in order to survive and prosper in today's market, you've got to continue to change and grow and learn and rally around the customer experience. Because the customers are changing and the pressures on them are changing. So how can you be other-oriented enough to not get complacent and arrogant, but to be humble enough to learn and ask questions and pursue and realize that's a never-ending cause? And then humble enough to know that nothing gets done alone. That you have to do this with and through other people. That's where you get scale, as we say at business school. You can only grow if you delegate decision making. Right. And so that seems to be the primary thing. Often the same sort of silver back that takes the jungle is not the same person who goes, I need to stop and listen and hear and touch and be caring. And so that's really the rare bird that I think requires the three keys I talked about before. Okay. So when you're coaching somebody to be more, to demonstrate more humility, how do you actually do that? I mean, you should go back to the three keys or what do you help them look for? You know, one of the most terrifying things is to get feedback and be willing to actually listen to that. But one of the big challenges in life is that once having become ambitious, we have to win at everything. We end up having to win at which dessert that we choose at the restaurant and which movies that the family goes to. So to start to be more selective about our impact and start to listen and hear how much influence you can have on others. When you recognize what their values are, we did one piece of research for the last book about the most admired where we looked at what's it that really drives people around these values in terms of being the most admired. And we found that we asked people, do you feel like you're appreciated and valued and respected and they gave it scores of less than, way less than 10? Then we asked them, but do you really understand the values of the people who you'd like to be admired by? The scores were even lower. So one of the things we'd like to show leaders to understand and be humble is realize that it's a mismatch between the expectations of being appreciated and how much we've actually stopped and appreciated people who we want to be valued by. And so if we can hear that and feel that, that can be transformational. Thank you. The next question is, in today's world, networking, social media, you know, it's almost everywhere and everything. But in a recent blog posting of yours, one on March the 15th, you described five, quote, awesome ways to win or lose the most valuable relationships. You know, when you think about those ways of winning and losing relationships, the most difficult thing about social media today is that it's starting to train us not to have this eye contact. Remember, Mr. B, our mom said, look at me when you talk to me. That connection, a great piece of research back when I was at Stanford and Cliff Nass, where he was looking at how there was this transformation that people were going through. They were learning to lose their ability to connect with each other socially. It's a team sitting together on the bed texting to other people. And so being able to make that direct connection to other people is absolutely critical to your success, making that eye contact. Because it's easy to opt out once there's pressure on you, right? As soon as there's difficulty in this conversation, oops, I've got to take a call, I've got to take a text. And so being able to learn the social cues of being interactive with each other is something that's going to be covered in building or losing relationships going forward. So would you for networking advocate more like what you and I are doing right here or not paying as much attention to, I won't mention those other LinkedIn type of organizations, but you know, where's the best way to go and network with people? Well, the research is actually pretty clear on this that we discovered is that having a face-to-face connection first and then following it with the online learning environment or the social environment and anchoring it. And then using that social environment actually to listen and support. So one of the things I find most valuable about social media as a person who would be at the tail end of the baby rovers is that I'm actually able to reconnect, reassure and ratify and show appreciation for what people are valuing to put on their website. I never would have thought that they might have been interested in this particular hobby or this aspect of their life that they're exploring. And now I'm able to like it, comment on it and support it. So I think the combination of first always having that personal connection and then using this like being a pen pal. Using it like we used to have letter writing and then served a role. This is more immediate. Use it for appreciation, not just pontification. Okay. All right. So last question for you. An individual comes to you and he says or she says I want to be a really effective leader in the 21st century. What would you advise him or her to focus on? I would focus on understanding why are you called to what you do. I think that leadership is more personal than ever. And that it's so important to do something before you set goals. Offer this push to set goals, track those goals and deliver. In business that's necessary. But first we have to ask ourselves why are we getting up in the morning? What are our values? What is the driving purpose in our life at work? Because that's what's sustainable. And today there's no way you're going to spend a few hours of work. Is it even going to be just 40 hours of work? What's worth trading your life for? Let's make sure that this is a great trade and that it even allows you to have a richer deeper contribution to your view of the circular planet at the same time. Mark. Thank you. Thank you. It's a real honor to be with you. This is Michael Kossler signing off from the Leaders Room brought to you by the EECLIF Leadership and Governance Center.