Building the Brave Habit

Todd: Sometimes the bravest thing we can do is to plant our feet and say, "Not yet, not yet."

Drew: CMOs don't necessarily get the longest runway as anyone. In fact, they have the shortest runway of anybody in the C-Suite. You really have to make some bold bets, often with incomplete data.

Todd: Don't think of bravery as boldness or bravado. Think of it as, "I am measured in that I understand the potential cost, but I'm going to act anyway because there's something that matters more to me than the potential downside of failing at this."

Drew: Hello, Renegade Marketers! If this is your first time listening, welcome. If you're a regular listener, welcome back. You're about to listen to an expert huddle where our flocking awesome community, CMO Huddles, gets exclusive access to experts, including the authors of some of the world's best-selling business books. In this episode, Todd Henry, author of The Brave Habit, makes the case that bravery is less about bravado and more about building the habit of acting with clarity when certainty is nowhere to be found, and I'm sure that's the environment for many CMOs listening today. He gets into why bold action is not always the brave move, how leaders can create more courage on their teams, and why playing it safe can be especially costly when the clock is already ticking. If you like what you hear, please subscribe to the podcast and leave a review. You'll be supporting our quest to be the number one B2B marketing podcast. All right, let's dive in.

Narrator: Welcome to Renegade Marketers Unite, possibly the best weekly podcast for CMOs and everyone else looking for innovative ways to transform their brand, drive demand, and just plain cut through, proving that B2B does not mean boring to business. Here's your host and chief marketing renegade, Drew Neisser.

Drew: Todd Henry has spent years helping leaders do their best work under pressure, and as the author of The Brave Habit, yes, and several other leadership classics, his work matters deeply to this community, and I'll tell you why. And Todd, this may be news to you, but CMOs don't necessarily get the longest runway as anyone. In fact, they have the shortest runway of anybody in the C-Suite, and so you don't have enough time to play it safe. You really have to make some bold bets, often with incomplete data. So we've got this world, it's being reshaped by AI, and safe answers certainly feel abundant. What I like about this is Todd's focus on practice: bravery may be the ultimate competitive advantage. And you know, one last thought is this whole year we've been bringing in lots of leadership experts. Why? Because at a time of transformation, you have an opportunity as a leader, whether you're sitting in the marketing chair or another one, to help drive the transformation at your organization. With all of that, hello, Todd. How are you? And where are you this fine day?

Todd: Drew, it's good to see you. I am blessed to actually be in the office today. I've been on the road for about two and a half weeks straight doing events, and so it's really nice to be here, sitting here talking with you in a nice, comfortable office chair. So I love it. I'm in Cincinnati, Ohio, is where I'm.

Drew: Cincinnati, okay, Ohio. Okay, right there in the middle of the country, home of Procter and Gamble.

Todd: Yeah, we do a little marketing here in Cincinnati, just a little. Yeah, just a little bit, and of course the

Drew: famous Reds. So, all right, just in case, and this is something we do on all of these, just in case our audience needs to leave early or we need to convince them to stay, could you sort of give us three mistakes that you see leaders make when it comes to bravery, and if you could try hard to just list them, and then we'll go through them one at a time.

Todd: Yeah, I think the first is that we believe, often as leaders, that the answer to uncertainty is certainty, and that's a mistake, which we will discuss later. The second is that we often believe that bravery is always about action, but sometimes it's actually about inaction. And the bravest thing to do is to not act, which we're going to talk about hopefully as well. And I think the third, and this is a little related to another book that I wrote a handful of years ago, but I believe that we often think that everyone on our team is motivated by generally the same thing that motivates us, and we homogenize and flatten team motivation to the point that we aren't able to elicit from them the kinds of actions, the kinds of maybe strategic risk-taking that we want. And so, I think those are the three big mistakes that we make.

Drew: I love it. All right. Well, let's break them down, because the first one is so interesting: the notion that in order to sort of deal with uncertainty, you have to get to certainty. I love that sort of contradiction. Talk a little bit more about that conceptual problem, and then let's get into what the alternative is.

Todd: So when we are uncertain, leaders have a tendency to become very fuzzy in how they communicate their expectations, very fuzzy in terms of how they communicate about the future. Or they tend to go the opposite direction, which is that in order to inspire what they believe to be trust from their team, they speak with a kind of certainty that their team knows isn't real, and so we think that that will elicit trust from the people on our team. But in actuality, what the people on our team need to know is that we are recognizing the nuance, that we're recognizing the risk, that we understand the potential trade-offs in the actions that we might take, and that we recognize that failure is always a possibility when we're doing difficult things. So what our team needs from us is not certainty that we're moving in the right direction, but clarity about expectations, clarity about how the resources are going to be allocated, clarity about what it will look like when we get there if we succeed, clarity about what each person's expectations are to contribute to the effort, whatever that might look like. The antidote to uncertainty is not certainty; it's clarity. Your team is smart enough, if you hire well, to know that when we're doing difficult things, we are going to fail. There's always risk involved, so our team needs to understand very clearly what the stakes are, what our expectations are, and what the potential consequences are for not hitting them, but also what the potential rewards are if we do get where we're going. So, okay,

Drew: that was a lot, and I got some of that. That's a lot, and it's all valuable, and it's so interesting in the context of where we are right now, which is this AI transformation. And what I heard you say, when you talked about how leaders either are fuzzy or they get to this false bravado, right? "We got this, people. Here's where the hill is. We're gonna go take it, and we got this." And the clarity is not expressing certainty: "We're gonna go do this, this, and this, and the outcome is gonna be this." The clarity is, "Here's what we are, here's the plan. We think it's gonna work, but we need you to... we're gonna have to pressure test it," and all that. I want to make sure I just got that right, that we're not pretending to know what we don't know as leaders.

Todd: Yeah, and sometimes that is, and this is something I wrote about in my book Herding Tigers as well. Yeah, I got tired of the phrase "leading talented creative people is like herding cats." No, it's actually more like herding tigers, right? These are powerful, solo, majestic creatures who are capable of doing great damage if you don't lead them properly. But in that book, we talked about stability and challenge being the two primary things that talented people need, and we often mistake, when we're leading, we often mistake the action of playing the superhero, pretending like we have the answers, closing our team out of our decision-making process, as something that will inspire trust. But in reality, talented, ambitious people need to understand not just what's expected, but why it's expected. They need to understand not just where we're going, but why we're going there. And they need you to invite them into your decision-making process. And so this is part of the clarity-giving element of being a leader: it's not just laying out a strategy and saying, "Let's go execute," but helping, walking people through the why behind the what. "Here's why we're making these decisions. Here are some other things we considered. Here's why we didn't think those were the right direction, even though they might be. They might be. We don't know for certain, but we believe, based upon the available evidence, this is the right direction. So here's why we're making these decisions. Here's what the potential risks are. Here's what we're going to do to mitigate those risks. But there's always a chance when we make a leap, something might not work, and we'll adapt if necessary to get where we're going." That kind of communication, it seems contradictory, but that kind of communication counterintuitively actually inspires more trust in your team because they can see you're not opaque. They can see inside of your decision-making process, and frankly, that also inspires bravery in a maybe strange way, because people have something they can actually latch onto. They understand, "I'm not... you're not asking me to charge headlong into an enemy ambush here. I understand what the risks are. I understand what the potential trade-offs are, and we're going to go through this together. We're going to make these decisions

Drew: together." So I think that when we think about leading, primarily about defining the terrain, helping people understand where we're going, why we're going there, the decision-making process behind our strategy, and then helping them understand their unique role in helping bring that about, and what we're going to need them to risk themselves in order to bring it about, that's when people are more likely to respond with brave action. I love it. Okay, so, one thing, you know, I just... I hope none of the folks listening are pretending to be a superhero. That's just such a great way of thinking about it. That is not what you need to be, and it's hard. I know this is a complicated task, but I want to make sure we get to the second and third points that we started with. The second one, and again, you had this: uncertainty, it doesn't mean certainty; action, bravery does not mean action. It can sometimes mean inaction. Can you put a little more meat on that framework?

Todd: Yeah, we often conflate bravery and bravado, or bravery and boldness. I don't believe that they're the same thing. I believe that there are people who take stupid risks in the name of being brave, and I don't believe that that's actually bravery. I believe bravery always calculates the potential downside, calculates the costs before action. And there are times when maybe we don't yet have a clear... and we haven't talked yet about the two elements that tend to lead to brave decisions, but those two elements are an optimistic vision of the future, meaning we have a clear, optimistic vision of how things could be better, versus a pessimistic vision, where it doesn't matter what we do, the future is bleak anyway. This relates to our conversations about AI, which we can have as well. And the second element that tends to be present is a sense of perceived agency versus a sense of perceived powerlessness. So when people on our team perceive not only an optimistic vision of the future, and they can see that vision clearly, but they perceive their agency in helping bring that about, they're more likely to act bravely, versus when they have a sense of perceived powerlessness: "Well, I can see an optimistic vision, but what am I going to do? I don't understand how I could contribute to that." So when I say that bravery isn't always about action, what I mean is there are moments when a CMO, when any leader of an organization... I just did a C-Suite advisory last week at Adobe Summit, a room of C-Suite folks from some of the biggest companies in the U.S. And you know, there's tremendous pressure right now to rush in on AI, to rush in and to adopt and to let a thousand flowers bloom, but the reality is we don't always have a clear vision of what that will look like or where we're going with that. We just feel the pressure to move because everybody else is moving, right?

Drew: Hey,

Todd: and we don't necessarily yet understand what our specific role is in helping roll that out or bring that about. So we don't understand even how I play a part in helping roll out this nonexistent strategy that we have related to AI. In those moments, sometimes the bravest thing we can do is to plant our feet and say, "Not yet, not yet. Yes, there's going to come a time when we need to move. There's going to come a time when we have to be aggressive, and we're going to have to take a risk. But we don't yet have a clear vision, and we don't yet understand what agency even looks like. And so, to just rush in because everyone else is rushing in is, in some ways, a form of cowardice." And I know I'm applying this to the AI conversation, and that's a very nuanced and difficult one to have, but it applies in a lot of other areas as well, and we've seen this. I mean, a lot of organizations follow trends; they just jump into something because everybody else is doing it, and you have to be brave enough to say, "Hold on, we're going to plant our feet, and we're going to think strategically about this, and we're going to make sure it's the right move before we just jump in." And we've seen a lot of companies who are actually really effective at this, and we've also seen companies kind of follow the leader of the herd, and they follow them right off the cliff because they're acting with bravado, not with bravery. So that's why I say sometimes it's an act of cowardice to act, sometimes, because it's the safest thing to do instead of planting your feet and saying, "I have a point of view, and we're going to follow my point of view."

Drew: In your book, there's this wonderful notion of personal agency that really came clear to me. You talked about the World War II bomber pilots, and how they had a fifty-fifty chance of coming back after every flight, yet because they were in the pilot seat, they had a sense of agency. I thought that was such a great and fascinating story.

Todd: Yeah. So this was a research study that was commissioned in the wake of World War II. What they discovered was that the people who were fighter pilots, or who were flying planes, were much, much, much more likely to die in the course of duty because their job was just so much more dangerous. People who were in the infantry were much, much, much less likely to die just by virtue of the role that they were in, unless they were on the front lines or something, but the odds of that, even, were pretty slim for most people. Yet, if you asked people which role they wanted to be in, which they would prefer, the fighter pilots said, "I would 100% rather be a fighter pilot than be in the infantry, and I feel much safer, in fact, as a fighter pilot." And the reason had nothing to do with death rates. The reason was because they had their hand on the joystick, right? They were the ones who were controlling what they perceived to be their fate. And so that speaks to how a sense of agency creates this belief in us that we are the author of our future, and inspires our ability to act bravely in the face of uncertainty. Even though the odds might be against us, we tend to discount statistics when we perceive that we are in the driver's seat, which is why speaking agency into your team is such an important element of encouraging brave action.

Drew: I love it. Okay, let's get to the third one, about motivation, and I've heard this a lot, actually. "I can't get my team to..." it just doesn't think about this the right way. It comes out as, "Well, why aren't they working as hard as I am?" And so you hit on something that I think is really, really interesting: the leader's assumption that everybody feels the same way they do. Talk about that, and some thoughts on how they can identify the fact that they're doing that, and then, what are the workarounds? Do we need to be Myers-Briggs experts and know what quadrant to put them in and have plans for those, or how do you deal with the fact that they're not all motivated by the same things?

Todd: So everyone on this call has probably heard at some point about intrinsic motivation, extrinsic motivation. You know, extrinsic motivators tend to be things like pay raises, promotions, prestige of some sort, so, corner office and better title, and so that's what we tend to think of as extrinsic motivators. Intrinsic motivators tend to be things like esteem, or mastery of craft, or teamwork, collaboration, right? Just a sense of camaraderie. There's been a tremendous amount of research put into those two silos of motivation. I was part of a research team a couple of years ago and wrote a book called The Motivation Code, that was part of a company that we ended up selling as part of that. But what we discovered through that research is that intrinsic and extrinsic motivation are not discrete, that they actually modify one another. Meaning, you give me a pay raise, and yes, that motivates me, but it might motivate me very differently than it motivates you, Drew. If you got the same pay raise, we're both motivated, but we're motivated for different reasons. For me, it might mean that that pay raise signifies a mastery of my craft, or it signifies that I've had some kind of influence over the organization, which is an important motivator for me. Or it could signify that I have proven myself to be excellent above everyone else, and I've proven that I'm a winner, that I'm someone who dominates the competition, because competition is a motivator for me. For you, it might be for very different reasons, but we tend, as leaders, to assume that everyone on our team has the same core motivators that we have. We actually discovered 27 of them, core motivators. But we tend to assume that everyone has the same motivators that we do, and so we tend to reward people on our team in a way that we would want to be rewarded if we were them. Instead, what we have to do is have the conversation with them about: "Tell me about the time in your life when you've accomplished something meaningful to you. A time when you felt alive in your work. A time when you felt like you were on top of the world because of something that happened or something you were a part of. What was it that you did? What did you specifically do that made you feel so gratified with that work?" And, "Is there some way in which you would like to see that exact same motivational aptitude play out in your current work?" Having that conversation with people will illuminate all kinds of things. So, for some people, when we're speaking agency into them, they're not going to go solo. They're not going to take hold of something on their own and go out and do brave work. They need to be paired up with somebody else, because collaboration is one of their core motivators, and they need somebody else as a pair to help them continue to stay motivated, to continue to take agency over their work. For somebody else, you need to set up a little competition for them, and they need to see, like, "Hey, I'm pitting you against four of your other teammates. We're gonna have a little fun competition to see who can deliver the best idea, or the best work, or whatever it is," right? Because you know that they're motivated to excel, they're motivated to outcompete the competition. So we have to understand what uniquely motivates the people on our team, which is very inconvenient, Drew, which is why most people don't do it. And this is the thing, and I wrote about this in Herding Tigers, and I just taught a workshop about this a couple of days ago: leading is about the people. People sit at the center of everything we do. Yes, the work is important, we have to deliver the work, but at the end of the day, our role as a leader is not just to get the work done, it's to develop talented people who can do new and more interesting kinds of work over time. We need to increase the capacity of the organization.

Todd: If you're not about people, then you're not about leadership. Leadership, ultimately, is about the people and developing the people, which means we have to take a special, vested interest in the people on our team and understand what uniquely motivates them, in order to get the best work out of them, to position them to do the best work that they're capable of doing. That was a long way of answering number three, sorry.

Drew: No, no, it's great. I just, you know, "if you're not about people, you're not about leadership," it's such a moment. And I think we can go in a lot of directions from there. And I mean, I think inherently every CMO understands that they're only as good as the team that's working for them, and I know they get that. What's so interesting right now, and I guess this gets us to the AI conversation, is we're in a moment, in my humble opinion, that is sort of industrial-revolution-like, in the sense that humans are going to be empowered in a way that they've never been able to before, and can do more — not necessarily better, but they can definitely do more than they ever could before. And leaders are struggling, in some extent, because not everyone on their team is sharing that perspective, that augmentation is sort of a future. We can get to strategy later, but nonetheless, it's almost impossible to imagine a world with white-collar workers, or professional services, or whatever you want to name them, knowledge workers, where they're not augmented.

Todd: Correct.

Drew: Right. And so you have adoption challenges, you have training challenges, you have thinking challenges. Not everybody's a systems thinker, right? And so it's a really interesting leadership moment, and it is at the crux of why you're here right now talking to us. And so we do want to build great teams. There's no doubt we want to build great AI-augmented teams. Those are different things. Ten years ago, you didn't think about that.

Todd: Yes, I would argue there's a little nuance there, though. I would argue it's not so different from what we've always been doing. And the reason I would say that is, who, Drew, gets the most, who is the most capable user of any AI, of any LLM? It's the expert. The expert gets more out of these tools. The person who understands, who has context, the person who gets the nuance of responses that they're getting, and maybe can correct or shape the responses, those are the people who get the most out of these tools. And so in some ways we can think of them kind of like an exoskeleton, which I think is a useful analogy, right? Somebody, maybe I'm wearing like an Iron Man suit, and so I can lift up a car because I've got this exoskeleton on me, and I couldn't do that before. But I like to think of it... I have a colleague, Andy Crouch, who was on our podcast last year, and he described it in three terms. He said we have tools, we have instruments, and we have devices. And he said a tool is great because it augments a human capacity. So, for example, if I wanted to hammer a nail with my hand, I certainly could do that. It would be very painful, it probably would be very ineffective, and it would take a long time. I'd have to develop a callus to be able to eventually hammer that nail. I maybe could do it eventually, maybe. But if I have a hammer, that tool augments my human capacity, so it basically gives me the ability to do something better than I could otherwise do it. An instrument is similar to a tool, but an instrument allows us to do things that we can imagine but we can't personally do. So think about a musical instrument. I can imagine the sound of a violin, but I can't make that sound unless I have a violin to help me make that sound, the sound that I imagined in my mind. So it gives me the ability to do things that humans can't do, we can imagine but we can't do. And then there are devices. Devices replace a capacity and make it so that we don't have to engage in that capacity any longer. So, for example, I don't know about you, Drew, but it has probably been 20 years since I've done any kind of hard math in my head, maybe even longer. Why is that the case? Well, because I carry this little device around in my pocket that can do that hard math for me, so I no longer have to do hard math, I can just use my calculator. Well, because I no longer have to, now I no longer can. So I don't know about you, but when I try to do math in my head, I'm like, "Ah, it's not worth it, I'll just go back to the calculator." Right, I'm talking about like hard math, I can do simple math, right, hard math I can't do as easily. Well, because I no longer have to, now I have to use my calculator. Now I'm dependent on my device. I'm dependent on this little thing I carry with me to do math. I think a similar dynamic could play out with AI, and I think we have to be very wise about how we leverage AI with our teams, because if we choose to use it as a device, we are going to supplant human capacities. We're going to become dependent on it, and some of the early research is showing that some of those capacities atrophy. Those who rely on AI to do all of their writing for them... well, writing is thinking, and over time we lose our capacity to think, we lose our capacity to express ourselves through writing because we become dependent. But if we choose to use it as an instrument, as something Kevin Kelly told me, he calls it an "alien brain." If we use it as an alien brain that thinks differently from us and augments the adjacent possible, and allows us to pursue much faster possibilities we couldn't pursue before, so we use it as a thinking partner,

Todd: we might be able to explore five ideas in our own capacity as a human, but we could explore 50 ideas using generative AI and then choose the most promising paths. But you need an expert to do that, an expert using it as an instrument. So I think that's why we still need to focus on developing humans, because an untrained, unsophisticated, non-expert human using an AI is not going to be sufficient for us to be able to deliver the results that our company wants. But a sophisticated, developed, free-thinking, creative human using AI is going to amplify their productivity, who knows how many times. So that's my subtle challenge.

Drew: Yeah, no, and we had Geoff Woods, who wrote The AI-Driven Leader, and Geoff’s CRIT format is brilliant because it forces you to use it as a thought partner. It forces you to ask the questions, and again, I do think that CMOs are getting their teams and training them, and hopefully teaching them a similar process, so it's not just use it to write, but use it to think as a partner. But nonetheless, you're going to have people on your team, and we're looking at this, and other companies are now measuring it from one to five, and they have less than 5% who are way up here at five, and then they've got a good 20 or 30% who are ones who are not even trying to use it as a thought partner. They're just, for whatever reason, not, and that is creating a real leadership challenge for them because, you know, let's say you offer a concrete training program and a buddy program and a hackathon and all these good things to build the team around: "Hey, this is what success looks like, this is the positive outcomes that these teams were able to achieve," and they're still not, they're resisting. Yeah, it would be the equivalent of an employee 10 years ago saying, "I'm not going to use a computer. I'm sorry, I'm just going to do handwritten things. I'm not even going to use the phone or my SMS." Right, that's where this is going. 

Todd: Right. Yes, it is. And again, to the point about clarity of vision, so an optimistic, clear vision of the future and agency. I think this is where we need to be really clear with people on our team, people who are resistant, and say, "Listen, I'm not paying you to show up between 9 o'clock and 5 o'clock, or eight and six, or whatever you're typically online. I'm not paying you for those hours. I'm paying you for the value you create." And so, yes, your manager, but also as somebody who cares about you and cares about your career, I just want to help you understand that those who are adopting these tools are going to be creating disproportionate value to you, and over time that gap is going to widen. And so this isn't, I'm not doing this because it's just in the company's best interest. I'm doing this because it's in your best interest to figure out how to use these tools. And if you don't, I don't know how else to say it other than you are going to be left behind, because this is where we're going, and this is what it's going to look like when we get there. And so you're going to have to do some uncomfortable things. There's a growth,

Drew: yeah. Either you do it here, or you're going to have to find another place where you're going to do it. It's going to get harder and harder to get a job if you can't demonstrate you do it. So

Todd: 100%. I mean, and it's also, by the way, I want to be really clear because I have colleagues and friends, and conversations with people all the time are saying, "You're not using, you don't have your own Claude server running on a Mac Mini with like 17 mini agents running your life and running your business, and you don't have a CFO." You know, I don't think we need to get crazy and think that if we're not there, we're completely behind. I just think we need to be adopting these tools in a way that makes sense for us now, and make sure that we're experimenting and playing around, so we're not left behind. I mean, my 85-year-old father-in-law, he's a Vistage chair, and he's constantly reaching out to me with questions about AI because he's pulling in. He's like, "Okay, this model gives me this. This model gives me this. How can I do..." You know, and he's constantly playing around with these tools because he recognizes, he has, you know, 50 years as CEO of companies and stuff. Now he's advising. He recognizes, "Hey, even at 85 years old, I need to be understanding these technologies because I've seen this play out before. I saw what happened when the personal computer came on the scene. I saw what happened." You know, so he's like, "I need to be aware of this stuff," and I think that's the mindset we need to have. Not that we need to be at the front edge of it, but we have to understand how we can use it. We need to be using it to augment our capacity now.

Drew: And so there, you know, when we start to look at employees that have the curiosity and the interest in continuing to develop their skills as a leader, it's going to change. And there are things that you could anticipate from a structural standpoint where you do have these folks that are really good critical thinkers and can use this as thought partners who can do a lot more than they might have been able to do. We're going to take a quick break. We'll be right back.

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I want to get back to bravery and make sure we get folks to understand some of the clear things. One of the things that you say is bravery is a habit, not a trait. And I think that'll be surprising for some folks. It certainly caught me. I had to pause on that because I think of bravery as a trait. You know, this is obviously an inherently brave individual. So, what does building that habit look like this week for, you know, a time-strapped CMO?

Todd: Yeah, so I believe that every day we have the opportunity to follow one of two paths in any number of ways in our life. We can choose the path of bravery, or we can choose the path of cowardice, and we often know what we suspect we should do in relationships with our organization in terms of developing a strategy, in terms of how we're deploying resources, or hiring, or firing, or any of these things. We know what we should do, but so often we default to the more comfortable path, and we rationalize it sometimes by saying, "Well, the timing's not right," or "This is going to be, maybe, maybe if I ignore it, it will just go away," or "Maybe they'll get better if I just, you know, sort of give them a subtle nudge. Maybe they'll improve," even though they've proven in the past they're not going to get better. So there are things that we know we need to do, we suspect we need to do, but we're not doing. So my encouragement to people is, and this is kind of a formula or a method I lay out in the book, it's B-R-A-V-E. Actually, you know, block time every week to take a look at your calendar, look at your commitments, look at your relationships, think about your upcoming decisions, the tensions that you're experiencing in your leadership. Leadership isn't about resolving tension; it's about managing tension. So think about the tensions that you're experiencing in your relationships right now, or in your leadership, to block time to do that. Review each of the conversations that are coming up. Review the projects you have going on. Ask yourself, what do I suspect to be true, but I'm not really confronting right now? Or what do I know I need to be acting on, but I'm not acting on? Where am I experiencing that tension? Where am I tending to default to comfort as opposed to doing what I know is the right thing, even though it's the uncomfortable thing? And then the next two are A and V, right? Which is, where do I need to claim agency in a place where maybe I'm abdicating agency? So is there any place in my life, in my leadership, in my tasks, in whatever I'm doing right now? And by the way, this isn't just your work. This is in your life as a whole. You sit at the center of everything you do. So often, when I'm engaging in this exercise, I realize, "Oh, this is actually about my family," or "Oh, this is about some volunteer thing that I'm doing," or "Oh, you know..." So where do I need to claim agency? Where maybe I'm abdicating my responsibility is the first question. The second one is reaffirm the vision that you have. What is my optimistic vision for this relationship? What's my optimistic vision for this team? What's my optimistic vision for this person on my team? Right, and then the final thing, of course, is just to plan to actually engage, to actually put that into practice. So, to ensure that you are not just thinking about this as a thought exercise, but you're actually putting tasks on your list to engage in some way with bravery. I'm going to have that conversation. I'm going to share this strategy. I'm going to, you know, put this person on a performance review plan. I'm going to, you know, whatever it is, ensure that I'm putting those things into motion and not just letting them sit undone. And so that's really kind of the practical five-step thing we can do every week. And I encourage you to do it every week to make sure you're not just slipping into the default comfort.

Drew: I got block, agency, vision, engage. What was the R again?

Todd: Block, review.

Drew: Review. So block—

Todd: time, review, updated commitments, relationships. You know, decisions, tensions that you're experiencing right now, and then agency, vision, and engage.

Drew: And I know that everyone listening here will have a moment that they can think about. In the last five years or 10 years, there was perhaps a problematic employee or a relationship with a peer that was not where you wanted it to be, and you just let it simmer. You just let it, you know, stew until it got to the point where you broke, or they broke, or it became ugly, instead of just dealing with it in that moment. And so it's such a good... and that is the difference between bravery and cowardice, I guess, is that the coward just avoids, right? You put it off. Now I want to get to another idea, because this one, I really tell you, I kept thinking about this a lot: that bravery is not taking stupid risks. Because honestly, in hindsight, and speaking personally, I feel like I look at some bad decisions, and they look really reckless in the rearview mirror. How do you know, in the moment, that this is just a stupid risk?

Todd: Yeah, I don't think you necessarily... I don't think you do know necessarily, which is the difficult part, right? So I think it's about understanding true risk versus perceived risk. I think the part of it that is important is recognizing the risk involved versus turning a blind eye to the risk. Thinking about not just the first-order consequences, but what are the potential second- and third-order consequences of my decision? Because it's often not the first-order consequences that get us in trouble, it's the spinoff from something we do. And so I think it's really just a matter of understanding true versus perceived risk, which is why people shrink back, which is why they don't act. There's a guy named Neil Fiore who writes about procrastination, and he'll often bring people into a room. He'll put a wood plank on the floor, you know, six feet long, six inches wide. He'll say, "Could you walk the length of that plank if I asked you to?" And they'll look at the plank, they'll say, "Of course, it's a wood plank on the floor. You'd have to be drunk not to be able to walk the plank, right?" Then he'll say, "Now imagine I take that plank and I suspend it 100 feet in the air between two buildings. Now, could you walk the length of that plank?" And they'll look at the imaginary plank, look at him, and say, "No way! Are you kidding? I'd have to be drunk. No way am I walking a wood plank 100 feet in the air." Well, what's changed about the technical skill required to walk the plank? Absolutely nothing. If you could do it on the ground, you could do it in the air. What's changed are the perceived consequences of failure, which in this case is plummeting to your death. So I kind of get it. I do, Drew, right? Yeah, yeah. But listen, I think many of us, as leaders and also as team members, we go through our days artificially escalating planks, artificially escalating the perceived consequences of failure to the point that we don't act, to the point that we shrink back. So I think it's less about, you know, "is this a stupid risk," and more about just understanding the true consequences, the true risk involved in making this decision. We may never fully know what the true risk is, but at least doing that calculation before we move. Some people are like bulls in a china shop, and they just go. They just say, "I'm just going to make everybody react against me, and I'm just going to go and see what happens." And that's not a responsible way to lead an organization. You might get some results. We tend to have survivor bias, right? Where we look at, "Oh, look at the amazing things they did," but you don't look at the trail of broken china behind them, because of what they did and what are the potential consequences of that. So that would be my encouragement to people: just make sure that you are calculating. Don't think of bravery as boldness or bravado. Think of it as, "I am measured, and I understand the potential cost, but I'm going to act anyway because there's something that matters more to me than the potential downside of failing at this." The outcome matters more than the potential downside of getting it wrong.

Drew: And right, it's like... is it correct to say, "I can't live with myself if this doesn't happen," or "if I didn't take this action, I didn't have this conversation, I will struggle"? And you do talk about, you know, true bravery is, there are consequences of the action that it could end up, you know, blowing up in your face. It could result, you know, in losing your job. There's also this part where the absence of it could also cut, particularly with... and again, I'm going to go the CMO route: the average CMO who works for a PE firm has 17 months, which is a ridiculously short period of time. Like, it's stupidly short, and that's a whole different conversation. But boldness is required, whether that's bravery or not. They need to make some really important decisions pretty quickly, have a plan, and execute it, and, you know, go down swinging, as they like to say. So, you know, I just wonder, from your standpoint, when time-constrained like that, it sort of elevates the importance of the brave habit, I would think.

Todd: It really does. And I do think that decisiveness—mention making quick decisions—I think that is a really important element of all of this. Indecisiveness trickles down in the organization. And when you're working on short time frames, and to your point, we can argue about whether the expectations of PE are reasonable, and whether the timelines are reasonable, but it doesn't matter, because this is what we're doing. This is the task we've adopted and we've accepted. And so what's going to look like a good strategic decision to one person is going to look like reckless, unthinkable behavior to someone else. But the reality is, we have short timelines, we're trying to accomplish something. And so that's why, again, clarity becomes so important. It's important that we be honest with everyone on the team. It's not fair to tell people, "We're going to take our time, and we're going to craft the most excellent culture, and we're going to become a place everybody loves to work." I mean, that's not reasonable when you have 18 months to turn a ship. That's not a reasonable thing to say. You're going to say, "Hey, we're here to accomplish a mission. This is what the mission is, and I am going to ensure that we're doing everything we can to align ourselves around that mission. And we're going to be a place where we respect one another. We're going to be a place where people are called out for their talent, they're given opportunity. But if you don't want to move fast, this may not be the place for you," right? And we have to be really honest about that, because I do think that everyone is optimizing for something. This is an important reality. Organizations are optimizing typically for efficiency, for speed, for profitability. There are people on your team who are optimizing for craft. They're optimizing for culture. They're optimizing for fit, right? They want the right fit for what they like to do or what they want to do. And when you have people who are optimizing for different things, there's a lot of tension. That's where a lot of interpersonal conflict comes into organizations. So we need to make sure that we understand what we need to be optimizing for. And it's okay if you have a person on your team optimizing for craft, it's okay to say, "Hey, there are going to be moments when I'm going to ask you to deliver what you consider to be a subpar product because we've got to move fast, and there are going to be times when I'm going to see an opportunity to let you really shine and really do what you do best. But just understand that in those moments when I ask you to move fast, I need you to trust me that we're doing this because there's a mission we're pursuing, and that there's going to come a time when I let you have a little more space, a little more time to be really proud of your work, right? Of the work that you're delivering." We just need to make sure we're keeping those lines of communication open.

Drew: Yeah, it really goes back to the clarity. Now, in the book, you encourage readers to take your Brave Index survey. For those listening right now, we're putting that survey link in chat for listeners on the podcast. It's toddhenry.com, and then you scroll around and you find the Brave Habit book, and then you'll get yourself to the index. But so I took the survey, and I was shocked. There I was in the courage quadrant, which was nice, but I certainly wouldn't describe myself as someone who has the brave habit. So, it's not something like where I could just say, "Oh, I'm there, so I could stop, never mind." Yeah. So

Todd: I guess this is not a one-and-done thing, right? No, of course not. No. And we're going to find ourselves in different places over the course of our life and our career. And it is interesting, because I will do this with organizations. We'll take them through this survey, and there will be people in the exact same role, on the exact same team, in completely different places. And sometimes it's because they don't necessarily feel like they're getting clarity from their leader, right? And so they don't have, they don't understand the vision, they don't know where they're going. And so they might feel agency, but they don't necessarily have clarity about what they're doing. Or other people have a lot of clarity about the vision that's been reinforced, but they don't see their role in doing that. I think you are probably in a uniquely good place where you have a lot of autonomy in your work, and you probably also have a very clear vision of where you're taking the work. So it doesn't surprise me that you would find yourself in that place. But I, personally, I'm in a similar role, right? I basically dictate the work that I focus on. I dictate my research. I dictate the clients I work with and the companies I work for. And yet, I have found myself sort of being, almost by induction, being pulled into work sometimes where I'm like, "Oh, I have just been pulled into work that I don't understand. I'm not very clear about what I'm doing here." And so I found myself playing it safe, reverting to old patterns, looking for old ways to explain new things. And I realized, "Oh no, I need to... I need to adopt some new muscles here. I need to be brave enough to step out and learn some new skills," which is a big thing, frankly, also for CMOs. Listen, you've got enough career behind you that you've probably become known for a thing at this point in your career. You know, early on, you're copying everybody else, and you're kind of doing what everybody else does, because that's how you learn the basic platform. At some point, you begin to find your voice as a leader. You become known for a thing. That's a great place to be. It's also a very dangerous place to be, because the moment you become known for a thing, what happens? You begin to protect the thing you're known for, and you stop growing. You stop learning skills. You stop developing. And that's where a lot of people, I think, find themselves right now. We need to develop new skills for a new age. We can't get comfortable. There's no such thing as stasis. Eventually we begin the gradual decline if we're not growing. So that would be my encouragement: are you at crisis phase? What new skills do you need to learn to keep growing?

Drew: You know, I think I really appreciate the honesty of the author of the Brave Habit, who thinks about bravery all the time, saying, "I'm not always in the brave quadrant." And I think that's important. So you can all give yourself a little grace if you take this and you're not in it. But one of the things that you talk about, and this is one of probably the last questions before we wrap up, but you talk about, so a lot of times CMOs are not in control of everything, like their budgets just get slashed, their goals are set by someone else. But you talk about owning the nine square feet around you and creating a culture of courage on the team. Can you talk about that? Because there you do have agency, there you do have control, and why that gives you a fighting chance of achieving what you are being asked to do.

Todd: Yeah, Stephen Covey, I don't know if it originated with him, but he came up with this idea of the circle of concern and the circle of influence. The circle of concern is all the things we worry about. It's all the things in the world that could go wrong, and obviously we're living in a time of tremendous economic, geopolitical, business upheaval. You know, I think a lot of uncertainty, and I'm concerned about a lot of things. I don't know about you, Drew, but I mean, there are a lot of things that really concern me right now that is going on in the world. And at the same time, I have no influence over those things, other than I can go vote. I can vote with my vote, my electoral vote, but I can also vote with my dollars, you know, and support what I want to support. But I have very little influence over those things. But there's also a sphere of influence, so sphere of concern and sphere of influence. I need to focus in more on the things I can actually influence: owning the relationships in my life, getting involved directly with organizations who are doing great work here in my community that I can be involved with, working with clients who I know are doing good work in the world, and maybe sometimes making compromises in order to work with those clients. You know, whether those be financial compromises or compromises of time or whatever it is. But there are things I can do to have influence on the world around me. And I think if more of us focused on the world around us and focused less on the things that we're concerned about that are out of our influence... I think that's how society becomes great. I think it becomes great when individuals begin to focus on their direct sphere of influence and becoming the kind of leader that they wish they had had, or the kind of citizen that they want their neighbor to be. I think if we all focused more on that, I think our society would change from the inside out. So that's really what the nine square feet principle is about.

Drew: I love it. So you talked about, and I want to get two more things in, because you suggested one brave action each week, and I'm just curious, I mean, for again, think of a CMO who's probably listening to this, what's that look like?

Todd: Yeah, I mean, I know that may sound like a low bar for some people who this is reflexive for. But for those who are trying to build the muscle, build the habit of bravery, if you're waiting until the moment when you have to make a decision, then you're going to be much more likely to default to the comfortable path. But if you're blocking out time ahead of time to consider all of the tensions, all of the things going on in your life, rerooting yourself in the principles that matter to you, consistently reinforcing your leadership philosophy and the principles by which you make decisions, then when you get to those unexpected moments, you've already rehearsed it in your mind so many times, right? So that's how bravery becomes a reflexive habit versus a reactive instinct, which is how we often think of it. No, because I have so reinforced in myself... and I tell the story in the book, we were going to go rappelling as part of a camping trip, and I've been scared of heights since I was really, really young. And so as we're doing this, there are about 25 people in our group, and I'm holding the door for people, letting everybody in front of me, and I'm thinking, "Oh, I'm going to be the last person in line, like maybe I won't have to do this." And my daughter was right at the very front of the line, my young daughter, and she was so excited to go. And our guide said, "You know, we can't have a child go first, we need an adult to go first." And she turned and looked straight at me, and I was like, "Ah." So I raised my hand. I'm like, "Okay, I'll go. I want to die quickly and with honor, right?" That's how... but here's the thing, here's the important thing. The reason I was acting cowardly is because we have been reinforcing in our kids: we do brave things, we go first, we do what's uncomfortable even when we don't want to do it, we're the ones who volunteer to do it. And so that's why my daughter was at the front of the line. So when she turned and looked at me, she reminded me of all of these principles that we've been teaching that I was not following. That's what this weekly review will do for you, as you look at how you're behaving in your life, relationships, your leadership decisions, and you think about the principles that guide you. It will remind you of the places in your life where maybe you're not acting according to what you say you really believe. And so, in that moment, I stepped to the front of the line and I went first. But it was because my daughter led me. She reminded me of those principles. She called out of me something that was already in me, but I was ignoring. So we have the opportunity as leaders to do the same thing for our team each and every day.

Drew: Oh my God, I have so many takeaways from this. I'm going to quickly summarize. One is, you know, bravery is seeking clarity, not certainty. Bravery is a habit that you build. We didn't go into this a lot, but the opposite of bravery is cowardice, and I think it's important to just take that to heart, because none of us like the idea of being cowards. We might say, "I'm not a brave person," but you don't want to be a coward. And if you put those two, you know, opposites for a second, you say, "Well, I'd much rather be a brave person than a coward," so than a cowardly one. Don't pretend to be a superhero. Your job as leaders, it's, if you're not about people, you're not a leader. And I think that's really important in this moment more than anything. And then this notion of don't assume that employees are motivated the same way you are: great reminder and really important. So, Todd, how can people find you?

Todd: Yeah, the best way to get me is toddhenry.com. You can find my books, you can find my speaking events, and everything else right there. I have a podcast called Daily Creative. I have another podcast we're just relaunching called Herding Tigers, which is named after my fourth book about leading talented people. So you can check that out as well. We just released a new episode yesterday for the first time in three years. We're releasing Daily Creative, however, has been, for 20 years, has been releasing weekly episodes. You can find that podcast wherever you listen to podcasts.

Drew: Well, and I mean, the notion of Herding Tigers feels really relevant right at the second, because that's what all of the folks listening in, that's what they would love to build: a team, a tiger team, if you will. But it's funny, they often think of tiger teams as a thing that goes over here to do a test and then goes away. But imagine if everybody on your team was a tiger team. So I love that, and I'm going to have to subscribe. Todd Henry, thank you so much for joining us. It's been really, really an honor and a pleasure.

Todd: Thank you so much. Thanks for the great work that you do, and thanks for the great work that the people and listeners do as well. You're making a difference, so thank you.

Drew: Yeah, I appreciate it.

Drew: If you're a B2B CMO and you want to hear more conversations like this one, find out if you qualify to join our community of sharing, caring, and daring CMOs at cmohuddles.com.

Show Credits

Renegade Marketers Unite is written and directed by Drew Neisser. Hey, that's me! This show is produced by Melissa Caffrey, Laura Parkyn, and Ishar Cuevas. The music is by the amazing Burns Twins and the intro Voice Over is Linda Cornelius. To find the transcripts of all episodes, suggest future guests, or learn more about B2B branding, CMO Huddles, or my CMO coaching service, check out renegade.com. I'm your host, Drew Neisser. And until next time, keep those Renegade thinking caps on and strong!