Latest / Success Story with Scott Clary / Lessons - 44 Decisions That Make or Break Leaders | David Siegel - Ex-CEO of Investopedia

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Lessons - 44 Decisions That Make or Break Leaders | David Siegel - Ex-CEO of Investopedia · Success Story with Scott Clary

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  In this lessons episode, explore how effective leadership relies on transparent decision-making
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  and aligned incentives. Discover why most choices are more reversible than assumed,
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  understand how leaders enable success by supporting teams through clarity and trust,
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  and uncover how open communication reduces misalignment and strengthens organizations under pressure.
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  You've been in so many different CEO roles and positions, and this is sort of how you've
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  built up this framework, I guess, and I want to understand like when you when you wrote
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  decide and conquer, what is that what is that meant to be? Who's this book for? What's it trying to
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  teach? Is it for another CEO? Is it for somebody who's up and coming in their career,
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  wants to maybe do due diligence on the company? They could be joining. Who's that? Who's the reader?
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  Great question. The reader is for both leaders and aspiring leaders, is what I would say. If you
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  don't have an interest in ever being a leader, it's really not a book for you. And what I found
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  is that there's a number of principles that exist out there because as a leader, you're making
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  hundreds of decisions every single day, even deciding not to make a certain decision and to
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  empower someone to make a decision, is definitely a decision, right? So you're making 100 decisions
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  day, and what I wanted to is I always wanted to write a book. I teach a Columbia, so I love
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  teaching and education, and it was always been important to me, but I didn't want to write
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  in this boring textbook kind of books with just like the five principles of this, the six
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  principles of that, whatever kind of stuff. I wanted to be a story where that was riveting,
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  and through the storytelling, you end up kind of learning a ton around kind of smart decisions
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  that you could ultimately make to become more successful. So it's for that audience. And things
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  like how do you think about whether a decision is a trapdoor decision, meaning you can't change it,
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  which most people think many decisions are trapdoor decisions, when in fact you can change,
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  you can't change like whether you're gonna have to have a kid, like that's a trapdoor decision,
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  but most decisions are incredibly changeable and people are so fearful of oftentimes making
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  decisions because they think they're trapdoor decisions when they're actually not, and just
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  other elements of decision making. So you know, that's that's what we did, and the story under
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  we work was so insane and such a roller coaster experience, it made for just some pretty crazy
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  material. I was gonna say, so I feel like, and like obviously you're on the inside, so I'm just
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  gonna speak like as a layman on the outside, I feel like we work as not the epitome of great
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  leadership decision making. You learn from what we're not to do, just as much as you learn what
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  you do, yes. So you've been, how many, how many like chief executive roles have you held over
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  your career? So I would say this is my third president, CEO or CEO role, and if you include general
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  management positions, then it's my fifth. So what is out of, obviously you have some experience,
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  so what is, what is the definition of a leader in a business context, and what is the most important
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  trait for a leader? Oh wow, okay. So let's go backwards. The most important trait for a leader
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  from my perspective is understanding that your role is to enable the success of everyone around
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  you, is to think about the reverse organizational chart where like the leader is on the bottom of
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  the chart, not at the top, your role is to support and enable the success of all the executives,
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  and the executive role is to support and enable the success of their managers and manage
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  role to enable the success of individuals. My role is not to succeed myself. I don't need to
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  succeed myself. I need to enable the different people on my team to succeed, and guess what,
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  that I succeed. But that's my job is to enable everyone else to succeed around me and do whatever
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  is necessary. Sometimes it means letting go of people to enable them to succeed actually.
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  To me, that is the most important role of a leader. Support the success of those around you.
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  Now, I agree with what the role of the leader is, and I want to understand your opinion about how
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  to do this tactically when there's interests of other parties that are that may be prompt different
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  decision-making. So for example, when you were acquired at Investopedia, obviously stakeholders,
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  there were certain stakeholders that were making that decision because they thought it was for
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  the benefit of those stakeholders or even shareholders. But in a business environment, how do you
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  align that leadership principle which I agree with with the expectations of shareholders, for example,
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  or owners or whatnot? Because that's the fundamental thing that I think I always see
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  causing conflict. Everybody agrees what a good leader is, but nobody knows how to do it when
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  they're bored and their owners feel the need to do things differently. For example, that obviously
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  drive ROI or whatever that metric is, right? Good. Okay. So to me, the golden rule is all about
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  transparency, meaning if I am told by my parent company or by my board, transparently, you're not
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  doing a good enough job. You need to focus on this, not that, et cetera. Or I transmit that
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  information to someone else. It aligns interests in a lot more in effective way than if information
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  is withheld. The biggest challenge oftentimes and why there's a lot of misalignment like you're
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  referring to Scott is because a board will have access to certain information like, oh, a company
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  wants to go public or whatever the, we want to sell this company, whatever the incentive is for
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  the board. And the management team or the employees have a completely different incentive.
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  And then there's tension and there's problems because people have missed, there's asymmetrical
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  access to information. The more that a leader can ensure that there's as consistent information
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  as possible. So the most junior person and the board member knows the same thing, the better. And
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  you could say, oh, David, that's unrealistic. We share all of our financials with every employee.
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  Our board does not know any information that every single employee does not know and get access to.
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  Is there a risk in doing so? Can that employee take screenshots of like our financials and
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  post them on wherever? Read it. Yeah, they can. And there's a risk. But the reward of having
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  alignment and incentives and priorities because your brutally transparent is, you know,
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  the way to go and it goes with managing someone. You need to be transparent. Someone's not doing a
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  great job. It's not nice to them, not kind to them to like say, don't worry, keep it up. You know,
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  everything will be okay. And then surprise them later on kind of the kindest thing you could do is
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  give very critical transparent, maybe overly blunt in order to be clear information in as respectful
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  a way as possible. So transparent to me. See to me is like the end all be all.
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  This is like this is like radical can. Yeah. Yeah. That's true. Yeah.
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  At our company, we have like a book. We had a book club. And radical was one of the books in
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  the book club. Yes. Yeah. I have no doubt it was. It's a great, it's a great leadership philosophy.
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  So and this is what you're doing. This is this is one of the principles.
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  And it's got to tell you one other thing about it. Yeah. You don't mind. Yeah. So no,
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  it's your show, man. You say whatever you want. It's your show, dude. It's not my show. But like,
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  I'm still going to like say it. So go for it. Um, the there's one of the most famous managers
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  leaders ever. In fact, he won time magazines manager of the century for the 20th century,
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  it was Jack Welch, the CEO of GE General Electric for 20 years at the time that he left the
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  highest market cap company in the world. He was on IEC's board. And I got to sit down with him
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  and me with him one on one. And I said to Jack Welch, you were the manager of like the century.
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  What can you teach me about management like on one foot? And he's like, just focus on transparency,
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  focus on trust. If you build transparency, you'll have trust. And if you have trust,
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  you could have anything. Make sure you have trust of your employees, trust of your board,
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  trust of your team. That's all that's, that's the most important thing. So that had an impact too.
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  It's amazing because it seems like that runs counter to almost every company operating out there
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  that seems to hide everything from their employees. So there's always like the large companies
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  that have probably been around for a long time that operate the way that they feel like they have
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  to hide everything. And you don't even, you don't know what the next person in the cubicle beside
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  you is making, let alone what the company's financials are like, unless they're public. But outside
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  of that, you also have the startup that's worried about sharing information because they may not have
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  a run rate longer than six months. So it's very, it's a very, very, very scary feeling. But
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  there go ahead. No, go ahead. If you're a startup and you don't have a run rate more than six months,
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  I know that's scary. So you get the team together and you say, okay, who do you know? What angels do you
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  know? Or let's be aligned, we got to reduce our costs. How can we focus on our hosting costs?
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  What do we need to do to reduce costs? Just get everyone aligned or else people are like, why are
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  they asking us to reduce our people to start jumping to conclusions? And frankly, usually those
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  conclusions that they jump to, those assumptions that people are far worse than the actual truth that's
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  actually going on, except when we worst case, the truth was actually worse than we work. But for many
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  companies, it's not. Thanks for tuning in. If you found this valuable, don't forget to hit that
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  subscribe button so you never miss an episode. And if you want to dive deeper into this conversation,
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  check out the links in the description to watch the full episode. See you in the next one.