A CEO's Masterclass in Finding Value in Others

Anita Brick: Hi, this is Anita Brick. And welcome to CareerCast at Chicago Booth to help you advance in your career. Today, we're delighted. Actually, I am thrilled because I've wanted to have this conversation with Douglas Conant since I read an article from Northwestern about him. So I'm really delighted that we're able to speak today. Douglas Conant is an international renowned business leader, New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestselling author, keynote speaker, and social media influencer with over 40 years of leadership experience at world class global companies. For the past 20 years of his journey, he has honed his leadership craft at the most senior levels. First as president of the Nabisco Food Company, then as CEO of Campbell Soup Company. And after that, the chair of Avon Products. In 2011, he founded Conant Leadership, a mission driven community of leaders and learners who are championing leadership that works in the 21st century.

And Doug, clearly, we need leadership the way you describe it with your head, heart and hands. In your book, Touch Point, that you wrote a long time ago feels as relevant today as it was then. Thank you for making the time. I know you're really busy person.

Douglas Conant: Thank you for having me. We're actually contemplating doing another edition of the book touchpoints, because we believe it's even more relevant today than it was when we wrote it in 2011. Fundamentally, we're having more interactions every day on average, and they are happening in smaller amounts of time. So we sort of have to be fluent in those small amounts of time, and that just takes a bit of a paradigm shift, which is what Touch Points was really all about.

Anita Brick: Agree. So maybe we can start off, tell us what a touchpoint is and how does someone find positive value in another individual when you may have a brief period of time?

Douglas Conant: Well, let me take a quick step back and talk to you about how this concept actually was generated and came to life to write a book about it. I was running a SEO institute where I would I would take 25 high potential on a two year leadership journey. While I was CEO of Campbell Soup Company, one of my teaching partners, Mette Norgaard, who was the coauthor of this book, and I had just finished a tremendous session in the Pocono Mountains, very scenic setting, and we were wrapping up after two amazing days and getting ready to go back to civilization. And we were walking around this lake debriefing on that two days, as we were getting near the end of our walk, she said, how in the world can you go back to the chaos of the office? Look how lovely it is here and how quiet, peaceful. And you got back to all the interactions and all the phone calls.

Isn't that draining? I looked at her and I said, actually not, all those small interactions are opportunities for me to influence the agenda in a way that works for the people I'm interacting with. I can't imagine not being able to wield that kind of influence when I get back. And I love it. I love the engagement. She looked at me as if I was crazy because she was an individual contributor who likes her apartment in New York and likes to go off to places like the Pocono Mountains.

But for me, these small moments where you interact with people are a goldmine of opportunity. People actually want to talk to you when you're interacting with them, and it creates a platform where you don't have to have an hour-long conversation. You can have a two minute conversation and have an impact in a positive way. I look at it as what a blessing, what an opportunity. It's only getting more challenging if you choose not to view it that way. It gets even harder. Touchpoints to get to. Your question is an interaction with someone. Typically, we focused in the book on saying is it issue oriented. If there's an issue and someone comes up to you and says, you know, I just encountered this and Tom said that, Mary said this, what do you think I should do?

But I could argue that any interaction has an issue embedded in it, and every interaction creates an opportunity for you to build trust with whoever you're engaging with and to begin to build a relationship. If you think about, gee, I have an opportunity to build a relationship with this person, how cool is that? Now, it may or may not lead anywhere, but you have an opportunity and and you get 400 of these opportunities every day. Now, if it's an issue, if you're at work or you're trying to get a job, you're trying to get an interview or trying to get ideas and advice for your job search, we suggest the way you think about conducting this interaction is you lead by listening. First of all, the framework for a touchpoint is listen. Frame advance. Listen to what's being said or not said. Importantly what's being not said. You got to be maniacally focused on being a good listener, and then you frame the issue in a way based on that conversation and say, okay, so I think this is where we're headed with this, right? And then you've worked hard to advance it and advancing it. You don't try and solve it because that creates rabbit holes that you typically don't have time to deal with.

But you try and help the person who's owning the issue advance it one more step so they can come away feeling fulfilled by the interaction and not overwhelmed by it. And then ultimately, you check for understanding at the end of the conversation and say, well, how did that go? Does that meet your needs? So this notion you come in, what the how can I help attitude? Every interaction everybody you talk to and this goes whether it's an issue or not. How can I be helpful here? And then listen from advance. And then you ask how did it go. That's so simple that even I can remember. So I have a lot of confidence that your friends at Booth can remember it too.

The key here is that it's not about you. It's about connecting with the person. It's all about connection. It's very important if you're approaching people and you have the agenda. Really be thoughtful about how do you want to articulate that agenda? I typically encourage people to keep it very general and to keep it at a high level, and then see where it will naturally travel. When I was out of work, when I’ve been fired from a job and I had a horrible interview, I really had a think about this so I could have my act together and be marginally proficient.

I landed on words that related to my job search that said, you know, so-and-so suggests that I talk to you to get ideas and advice on my job search. That was sort of my collection of words. After taking that up, I just went with the flow of the conversation. I listened very carefully to how the person responded. I had a mindset going in that I was trying to get eyes at this enterprise, and that I was going to very deliberately not want to inconvenience the person who was responding to me.

And what I found was that most people were willing to give me the time of day. Even people that I never would have imagined. What I took was being referred to them by someone they know. The next piece was by having an agenda that was so high up, it was almost inarguable, and then listening intently to how it was going to go with an intention of not inconveniencing them.

Anita Brick: What does it mean to not inconvenience them? Because some people get annoyed if someone is introducing them? I'm like, oh, why do I have to take time? Yeah, I feel obligated to do this. But how do you make it super easy for them to say yes and to actually have that conversation?

Douglas Conant: 9Well, look, if they're going to have the conversation with you or not, I can guarantee you they're not going to have the conversation with you if you don't approach them.

Anita Brick: Of course. Yeah.

Douglas Conant: So look, you have a choice. You can either not approach them or you can approach them if you approach them. For some people, it can be awkward. You approach them in a gently structured way if they're going to choose to not follow up on it. Well, I'm not sure how helpful I can be or something like that.

You can say, well, I'd love to get a few, any advice you might have? And then you read the situation and you and you thank them for whatever advice they give you and you move on. Most people will give you the time of day, but you have to be referred by someone they know of and respect. If it's a cold call, you can't count on it and you have to operate at a very high level with hopeful expectations.

But you also have to be a realist. I'm not talking about this as a CEO. I'm talking about this as a 33 year old man who had been fired from his job, had a wife, two small kids and a very large mortgage, and was desperate to find work. At the time, I found that I'm going to make up the numbers. Two out of three people were responsive to my inquiry. Okay, nobody said this was going to be easy. You know, if we had the answer with Touch Points, that was the magic elixir, we would still be on the New York Times bestseller list 11 years later. Yeah, but this is a manageable proposition. Now, what I do find when you get into building relationships with people who ideas and vice you do value, you sort of have to have the courage of your convictions. You have to sort of know who you are and what you stand for. I must say, a lot of people that I deal with who are out looking for jobs today are, saying what they think they're supposed to say in order to get along. And that's tends not to be the best platform to grow from. What you want to do is you can't be doing this by the seat of your pants, which sadly, too many people do. You have to show that you know who you are and what you stand for. As I like to say, it's hard to manifest the courage of your convictions if you don't know what your convictions are. Too many aspiring managers and leaders aren't really well anchored in how they want to show up with people. We wrote a whole book on that too, called The Blueprint, and we touch on that in Touch Points as well. Really knowing how you want to show up. It sets the table for you to have even more productive conversations when you're trying to chart your career journey.

Anita Brick: You're absolutely right. Some people really are afraid to be themselves, and they go to go through an MBA program like this, or like Kellogg, like you did. How do you be yourself when you're not sure it's going to be accepted?

Douglas Conant: I'm encouraged by this next generation of leaders that are standing up and being counted, and are more authentic than ever before. Yeah, I think we're on the right path, and I think authenticity will never go out of favor. Part of it is just having the mindset to do what Bill George did when he wrote about authentic leadership in True North and True North Now for Emerging Leaders, his most recent book, where he says, you know, you got to get anchored in who you are, how you want to show up, and then you have to find ways that work for you. Just show up that way. And to do that, you've got to be a little more intentional and you have to be a little more prepared.

Sort of the cost of doing business now. Yeah. And what's beautiful is places like Booth and Kellogg. You have people around you who can help you find your way. Really need to take advantage of it to go out looking for a job in a way where you feel like you're having covering conversations in every interview. It may help you get a job.

It's not going to help you keep a job. The people that you have a booth are so gifted. We have to find a way to help them be comfortable in their own skin, and to present themselves in a way that people will listen.

Anita Brick: I totally agree with you. I think what happens, though, in the midst of conversations, whether they're networking, conversations, whether they're interviews, I would say probably more with networking conversations, they end up collapsing into a transaction because the person wanting to have the conversation and wanting something wants to get as much as they can during that conversation has an agenda they want to forward.

It ends up being transactional and disappointing. How do you keep a relationship building where both parties benefit rather than in a transactional and it's a slog because you have to start over again each time.

Douglas Conant: Well, I'm going to introduce you to a model created by a friend of mine who's passed away, Blaine Lee, and he wrote a book called The Power Principle. He said, look, there's three ways you get power in a relationship. Fear and intimidation is one, and it works in the short term. But when you're not in the room, there's a reservoir of ill will that is probably not going to help sustain that relationship.

The next one is to have a transactional relationship, which is what we're talking about, which sadly, in too many ways is how our free enterprise system and our democracy works. It's you do this, I'll do that. One hand washes the other. It's pay for performance. If you do this, I'll pay you a little more. It's transactional and it works, and it's pretty neutral. And then you think about the people who you really respect and admire, who have had an influence on you and your life. And I could ask you, well, how often did they use fear and intimidation to build that relationship with you? And you'd say, well, never. And I'd say, well, how often did they have a transactional mindset with you? And you would say, well, that's not really how it worked. And I'd say, well, why did that work? Blaine Lee's word was, well, they honored you. They were on the high ground. They honored you. They cared about you. And you'd say, did they have high standards? Absolutely. They had high standards. Did they care about you? Absolutely. They cared. What Blaine would say, which I've taken to the bank many times over. He would say, well, you need to be more like that with the people with whom you live and work. And I would say you need to be that way with the people with whom you're doing your career journey.

Ultimately, and people who have a scarcity mindset will not buy into this. I'm telling you, the high road is the only road. If you respect the person you're talking to and you demonstrate that respect, they will respect you. And if they choose not to, that's their loss, not yours.

Anita Brick: A good point. How do you operationalize that?

Douglas Conant: You're very respectful of their time. So if you're going to be going for an interview or you're trying to get some ideas and advice on your job search, you have your act together before you go in the door. You know exactly what you want to ask and how you want to ask it. Done your homework on them. You're going to make the most of those five minutes, which may become a half an hour, which could become a lifetime relationship.

You have your act together before you go in the door, and then you'd endeavor to show up as yourself. It gets much easier if you know the questions you want to ask, and you're prepared, as opposed to just doing it by the seat of your pants. If you're not comfortable with a situation and you take an unstructured approach in leadership, you're at risk. You want to bring a structure or approach to us, an ambiguous situation that is respectful of the other person.

Anita Brick: How do you get past the fear and being intimidated by someone? Maybe, who is more advanced in their career in a field you want to enter? How do you get beyond some of the fear? Sometimes people call it imposter syndrome, actually have a connection, and rather than a monologue, I ask a question, you answer it. We're just really not connecting. But we exchange information. How do you get past the fear?

Douglas Conant: I think every person is different, so I don't want to. This is not a turnkey process. This is we're in search of excellence for key relations, building in a key right situation. But here's what I would do. I would say, you know, I'm a little uncomfortable asking you these questions, knowing all that you've done as you know, I'm right. This is where I am with my career situation, because you received a note from me before I showed up, which they should also do, and they should also in that note, should probably be no more than a paragraph because they won't read it, but they should set the table for the conversation and you just tell them that you're uncomfortable. Look, I've sat down with five presidents. They all put their pants on one leg at a time. They're all human beings, save all had ups and downs. They've all struggled and had enormous challenges that they've had to overcome. They get it. They were all once at the beginning of their career. I think you sort of have to own the discomfort and say, when I became a CEO, I thought I'm supposed to be superhuman. When I became a CEO back in the dark Ages, Jack Welch was still a CEO. You just had to have this level of bravado. I discovered that for me, that was such a false narrative, I couldn't sustain it. I'm introverted, and I found that I just needed to say, hey, listen, this is going to be a little awkward as a CEO because I'm shy and you're going to see me standing off to the side and in a room, and you're going to think there's the aloof CEO.

Well, the reality is, I'm just shy and I've forgotten everybody's name, and I don't know how to start the conversation. The more frequently I owned my behavior like that, the more frequently anybody and everybody would come up to me and say, are you being shy again? You know, I'm talking about receptionists and executive assistants or anybody, or they point out to their spouse, oh, there's our CEO over there. He's being shy again. No, that's no big deal. It's no big deal. It's about performance. Ultimately, this whole journey is is about people and performance. The performance is on the backs of the people. You're on the journey with us, including you. I find you got to be very human here in a way that's approachable for whoever you're talking to.

Some people are going to be not comfortable with that, in which case you probably have to steer the conversation very quickly to the career conversation. I got to tell you, I'm a little intimidated here. You've done all this stuff, and here I am asking you. But, you know, so-and-so suggested that I get some advice from you because they thought you could help me.

I'd love to get whatever I could. Well, I have these five minutes and then you see where it leads. Always asking at the end of the conversation, is there anybody else you would recommend I could talk to?

Anita Brick: I want to jump in there for a second because I have mixed feelings about that. Some people feel that it's okay, you got whatever you got from me, and now you're looking around the room for someone better. Does it work that way anymore, or do you need to take a pause and ask after the conversation? I know everybody has an opinion about it. I'm curious because I hear both sides of it.

Douglas Conant: Look, there are two mentalities you can take when you do this work. You can either take a scarcity mentality or an abundance mentality, and a scarcity mentality would say, there are only so many resources, and if you want to talk to me, you talk to me, but I'm not going to help you with anybody else. An abundance mentality would say, look, there are lots of fish in the sea. You want to talk to me? Great. If you want to talk to somebody else. Based on this conversation, I would suggest you talk to Professor Cod at Kellogg. Because he, he was when I was there. The guy of marketing. And you're interested in marketing, you understand?

The point is I do you get the conversation you could tee it up. In my case, I was in marketing. And so I would say, well, this is really helpful, is given that my focus in marketing, is there anybody that you think could help me continue to strengthen my search process? If not, that's fine, thank you very much.

What I found when I was doing this work years ago, and I anecdotally, I hear it to this day, is that people, by and large, are willing to help out as long as you're respectful of them in terms of time and thoughtful questioning. If they have somebody, they'll tell you. If they don't, you won't. But I'm telling you, it's highly unlikely they're going to tell you anything if you don't ask. So yeah, and you got your five minutes.

Anita Brick: You're right. But you said something that was nuanced to me that changed the game for the better in terms of the question, what do people just say? Is there anyone else I should talk to? But you said something different. And the key phrase that you added, which I think is very, very important to help me strengthen my process because it's not just like we I want to talk to somebody else, but I have a goal in mind.

You help me strengthen my process, and then you're asking to add on to that. Yeah. I mean, I think that that changes that a little bit because not just like, hey, who else can I add to my LinkedIn? Here's the other side of this. There is having the conversation, but what you are famous for is expressing appreciation to others. So when you have these conversations, what do you advise people to do to actually share genuine appreciation?

Douglas Conant: I'm going to preface this and I'll answer that question. Feeling a little closure on the last part of the conversation. I think you want to show up as being the most thoughtful and respectful person this person has talked to in a long time. You want to be thoughtful and respectful. They want to say, okay, this person has their act together. They've been very thoughtful about this. And Shakespeare had it right when he wrote The Importance of Being Earnest. If you show up prepared, thoughtful and earnest, you will get a response, more often than not, that is thoughtful and earnest. If you approach it as a transaction, I guarantee you the people you're dealing with will treat it as a transaction.

So elevate the conversation to something a little more personal with great humility, thoughtful, and showcasing that you're prepared to have the conversation. More often than not, people will be responsive. Stephen Covey had a concept called the emotional bank account. He always asserted that if you were dealing with individuals or groups that you always ought to be celebrating the contributions of people, what he would call making deposits in their emotional bank account, knowing that someday you were going to have to make a big withdrawal, something's going to go wrong. You always want to be in the black. You don't want to be in the red. I sort of have approached life that way. I didn't know the concept, but that's basically how I was living my life. I looked everywhere around me and I see these amazing things being done. What I found in organizations and in business schools, we tend to become because we're really good at it. Brilliant problem solvers, right? So what do we look for? Problems. And then we can solve them. And then we feel good about ourselves. Well, the reality is I've been in some of the most broken companies in the last 50 years. Even in those broken companies, eight out of ten things that were being done were being done right, but nobody tends to acknowledge it.

We tend to just focus on the two things that are being done wrong out of the ten I think about as a parent or when you were a child, if you don't have children, if you had a parent that was just critiquing and fixing all the things you were doing wrong, I would not want to be you. Ideally, a parent is going to have high standards and everything else and is going to challenge their children, but they're also going to love them to death, and they're going to show they care, and they're going to celebrate when something goes right.

What I found in work, in the world of work is we've gotten so good at finding what's going wrong. We've lost our way in terms of finding what goes right. So I celebrate contributions of significance. I built the emotional bank account. But then when we make mistakes or something needs to change, I'm more than willing to make a call and in Campbell, I gave the top 350 basically three years to get with our turnaround program, and I said, if you can't get with it within the next three years, we'll either help you find a job in the company or we'll help you find a job outside of the company. But we have to be all on the same page. And at the end of three years, we had turned over 300 of our 350.

But I would say all along the way I was building the emotional bank account of the entire organization. We had a process in place. I would call it due process, so nobody could say they hadn't gotten the message. What I found was it it worked just fine. Interestingly, employee engagement went up every year. We made those changes because everybody else in the organization knew that what was required.

Of course, I didn't know that at the time. I was a new CEO and quite frankly, didn't know my ass from my elbow about being a CEO. I never sat in a chair before, but I did know we had to make significant changes in the workplace if we were ever going to be successful in the market. We had created a spring in the step culture that was performing at a high level.

Anita Brick: The 30,000 handwritten notes that you wrote to employees probably helped, too.

Douglas Conant: If you're a leader, if you aspire to be a leader, you have to lead from in front. If you're saying, let's celebrate what's working, you ought to be showing up that way. I wrote 10 to 20 notes a day, six days a week for a decade. They were short notes, but they were celebrating contributions of significance. I would read everything that had happened the prior day, and I had a 2.5 hour commute into work every day, and I would write 10 to 20 notes. I would say, hey, I saw you. You delivered above plan this quarter in your earnings or sales or hey, you helped advance our community project for habitat for humanity. Thank you. I just saw you. You've made a special contribution to the Women of Campbell Program. Great. Appreciate your support. Little notes like this. But I was focusing on things that were strategically important to us. I was signaling that, hey, I'm paying attention and I care and I appreciate it. After a while we were in 38 countries. You could go anywhere from Fairfield, Connecticut, and our Pepperidge Farm operation to Papua New Guinea or Paris or Germany and find notes on cubicles from me to virtually everyone. Sort of crazy. I never started that way. It was just 10 to 20 notes a day. It added up.

Anita Brick: One of the things that you said earlier is that it's a demonstration of honoring the other person, caring about the other person, and respecting the other person. We could use a bit more of that. So the kind of thing that you did also, it was very consistent. As you said, you're an introvert and shy. Writing a note was a way that honored who you were too.

Douglas Conant: Well, first of all, these people were all around the world. I wasn’t going to see them if I didn't write the note.Second of all, I liked having the quiet time in my car to really think about what I was saying. And for an introvert, that's something that is a treasured time, and I couldn't think of a better way to do it. Interestingly to me, I arrived at work every day with an incredible sense of gratitude because I had just celebrated like 10 to 20 cool things that had gone on the day before. Yeah, it was, it gave me energy to go look for more things that were going right.

While the organization was built to find all the things that were going wrong and to fix them. And I think that's true for your booth folks. They ought to be looking with gratitude for the opportunities they have and then showing up with a positive, thoughtful attitude as they do these, their search. I don't know any effective leader that has had an enduring level of success that's a pessimist. Or, you know, I know there are some leaders that have a scarcity mentality. I honestly don't believe that's an enduring proposition. I look at the corporate leaders today that I have held in high regard, like Satya Nadella at Microsoft or Tim Cook at Apple, or Beth Ford at Lambda Lakes, some amazing people who are always looking for and finding the upside to things and and charting a course in that direction.

And I think that's the kind of mindset you want to have when you do your job search. That being said, I was out of work for a year and I was desperate.

Anita Brick: I think that when we think about the audience that listens, some of them are looking to advance. Some of them have launched a startup endeavor, some of them are, you know, looking for a new role. But what you're saying applies to all of that. I know you're busy. Do you have time for one more question? What are three things you would advise someone listening that they can do today to create those positive interactions and results?

Douglas Conant: Well, the first thing, I would say is know yourself better than you do today. Get a little more anchored in who you are and how you want to show up, because you're going to be tested as you go through your career. Each successive job, whether it's lateral down over, is going to have new challenges, and you're just going to need to be a little bit better. Dig into who you are and how you want to show up and be a little sharper about that today than you were yesterday. That's the first thing.

The second thing, if there was a mindset to bring to it, a language I use is to be tough minded on standards and tenderhearted with people. It's not one or the other, it's both. You have to have high standards for performance, or else you don't have to drive very long. At the same time, you have to be tenderhearted with people. The people with whom you are working have to know you care about them. If you want them to care about your agenda as a contributor, you damn well better be demonstrating that you care about their agenda as a person. You don't have to go down the rabbit hole on this, but you have to care. There's a cost to this. You have to care. That's the second thing.

The third thing is don't overthink it. If anything, over feeling, feel your way into these situations, be organized with them and showcase the real you and do it in a caring way. And I believe you'll carry the day. If you don't, it won't be on you, it'll be on the other person and there's nothing you can do about that.

Anita Brick: Well, thank you Joe. I really, really value and appreciate the sensibility that you bring to leadership, to building relationships and and more. So thank you so much for making the time.

Douglas Conant: Happy to do it.

Anita Brick: And thank you all for listening. This is a Anita Brick with CareerCast at Chicago Booth. Keep advancing.