The Multipliers Framework: Are You Growing Talent or Shrinking It?

Introduction

Nolan: Hello everyone and welcome to the Talent Equation Podcast, sponsored by Infopro Learning. As always, I’m your host, Nolan Hout. My guest today is Liz Wiseman. She spent 17 years inside one of the world’s largest tech companies, maybe you’ve heard of it, called Oracle, doing a lot of things, but a big part of what she was doing was managing and running their corporate university. After that, she walked away to study a question that I don’t think many leaders ever think to ask.

Why do some leaders make everybody around them sharper, while others seem to make them quiet, and maybe smaller? Her research became Multipliers, one of the most widely read leadership books of the last 20 years. And the framework inside it has changed how a lot of organizations think about what leadership is supposed to do. I looked at it before. It’s a truly phenomenal insight, especially today, when everybody’s looking to multiply everything.

What better way than to read a book called Multipliers and figure out how you can multiply the results of your team. I’m thrilled to have Liz with us today. Liz, welcome to the podcast.

Liz: Well Nolan, I’m so happy to be here.

From Classroom Dreams to Corporate Leadership Research

Nolan: So, before we get into the questions and we learn a little bit more about the concepts you apply in the Multipliers book, tell us a little bit about your background. I know you spent quite a bit of time at Oracle. Was talent development, leadership, always in your focus, or did you kind of zig and zag along the way?

Liz: Probably like most people, I zigged and zagged along the way. But here’s the crazy thing about my career: now, I might be pushing 40 years into my career, and I am finally doing the job I wanted to do out of college. I’m finally in this entry-level job I wanted out of grad school, because I came bursting out of grad school, I guess in hindsight very arrogantly, wanting to teach leadership and teach management. I went to a company called Zenger Miller. I didn’t go to work for them; I went knocking on their door trying to get them to hire me to be a management trainer.

I talked to Ed Musselwhite, the president of the company at the time, and he said, you seem great, but if you want to teach leadership, why don’t you go learn how to lead first? It sounded theoretically smart, but I thought he didn’t understand what I’m passionate about. Which, in some ways, I don’t think any manager should be too concerned about what people are passionate about. I think people should take jobs where they can be passionate about the work they’re doing. But that put me on a very different path. My backup job at the time was going to work for Oracle, which turned out to be this phenomenal experience because it was a high-growth company, and I just got dropped into this environment of smart, sharp people. The company was growing like crazy, so there were opportunities in abundance, and opportunities to lead in abundance. I went down this path of managing the learning function, and I did that for almost two decades. Now, instead of managing the learning function, I’m helping people learn how to manage, which is the job I really wanted.

I guess this is very T.S. Eliot-esque: the end of all our wandering is to get back to the place where we started and know it for the first time. After getting punched in the face and making a bunch of mistakes, I’ve kind of learned what good looks like. And I’m glad they didn’t give me that job I wanted, because I would have been terrible at it.

Nolan: Yeah, I think there’s just been so much talk about lateral progression and lateral movements along the way, and now entire companies are being built off of it. This whole skills marketplace is enabling people to laterally work on all these things. And I’m a firm believer in that idea, you don’t necessarily always take every step along the way that maybe you planned, but if you have some intention about it, and some purpose, I think a lot of it is, if you’re inherently passionate about it, it finds its way back to you. What’s that book, The Alchemist? Have you read The Alchemist?

It’s kind of an interesting thought, where it all comes full circle at the end. I remember my first job, I don’t even know if it’s a real job, I was an intern at Target, in the store. And the only reason I took it was because I live in Idaho, and the minimum wage at that time was six dollars an hour, it’s now seven, so good on them. Target said their internship was paying fifteen dollars an hour. I was like, I don’t care what I must do for fifteen dollars an hour, I’m in, I’m doing it. I’m going to buy all the drinks for my friends. And I took it.

At the end of that internship, the director comes in and says, here’s this form that tells us how you did. There are two checkboxes. One says I’m sending Nolan on; he meets qualifications to progress. The other is, he’s not fit. And he wrote, not fit. He said, listen, I only have two options here, I’m writing not a fit truly because I don’t think you’re a fit. Has nothing to do with you, I just don’t think this is the kind of job you will excel in, it’s not your thing. I cut that out, took it home, and it lived in my wallet for a decade. That little box that he checked. It was so stupid, because at the end of the day, it wasn’t the right fit, it absolutely wasn’t what I wanted to do, and it wasn’t my thing at all. It was just, I grew up poor.

Liz: This is not your thing, yeah. Why? Yeah, why?

Nolan: I saw money and I was like, hey, stability is all I care about. My passion comes so far down the road for me, I just need to make money. And this guy’s not allowing me the chance to make this money. That was so frustrating to me. It just lived in my wallet for so long. At that point I’d been promoted so many times and done so many things I wanted to do.

But I think it’s one of those things where I kept it originally because I was so frustrated, that I knew if I saw it enough, it would continue to make me push harder to be good. But then that little piece of paper meant something different to me at different stages. After I felt like I agreed, yes, this wasn’t the right gig, it was a reminder for me to say, work hard, if you do need to work hard at this and get better.

So just remember how it felt to be fired. It wasn’t fired, it was just, you didn’t get to go on to the next thing, but remember what that was like, and you don’t want to feel that again. But then, the end of maturity, and I’m not mature at all, but for me, the end of maturity was more like focusing on the things that you are a good fit for. And that is where you should be. After that point, where I felt like, for me, that was peak maturity, I came to the end of that destination, and I then threw it away. I said, I now firmly believe I am doing these things I’m doing; I’m living my purpose or whatever it is. So therefore, I don’t have the purpose for this anymore.

Liz: So that “not a fit” became kind of like a badge of maturity, of yeah, I’m not a fit for this. And I could see that you probably weren’t fit, because you know what I know about Target, there’s a thing that they do, and we don’t need to get into that. They were one of our research sites for my book, Impact Players.

Nolan: I think so.

Liz: So, I know a little bit about their culture and their philosophy, but if you’re coming at it like, okay, this is the best-paying job I can find, they’re like, well, maybe we’re trying to do something other than that. Realizing that’s not where you needed to be or wanted to be is a real progression. That’s a wonderful story. I love that it was in your wallet, because of course that means it’s sort of in your head too, these things we carry around with us.

Nolan: Yeah, and that’s when you paid with cash, so I saw a lot. Now I still open the wallet. Anyway, believe it or not, I’m not on your podcast, you’re on my podcast. Thank you for allowing me to suck up the air to tell my story about my paper. But I want to get back to the topic of what we really want to discuss, which is Multipliers.

The Question That Became a Bestselling Book

Nolan: There’s a whole philosophy, for those who don’t know, can you tell us a little bit about this book that you wrote, sixteen years ago? Is that right? Sixteen years ago it came out as a bestseller. For those that haven’t heard of it or read it, tell us a little bit about the book. What is it, and why did you feel so compelled to write it?

Liz: When I finished it and it had come out, somebody in the learning and development field said, wow, it must feel so good to have made such an important contribution to the field. And I said, yeah, sure, of course that’s why I did it, to make an important contribution to the field, of course I did this with noble purpose. But the truth is, I did it because I had a question that I didn’t have an answer to. There was a bee in my bonnet, and I didn’t do it to write a book. Sixteen years ago, that wasn’t really the path people are like, I must figure out how to write a book. I had a burning, nagging, aching kind of question. It was an observation I had first at Oracle. I kept finding this dynamic again in the coaching, and this was what I saw: a lot of smart leaders would suck the intelligence out of a room.

I was really lucky to have joined Oracle when I did, because they had a very distinct hiring profile: hire people who were smart, raw intelligence, achievement orientation, driven like crazy, type A plus plus plus kind of people, and then people who are nice, like a little triangle, and I can tell you which one they compromised on. I was in this sea of smart, capable, hardworking people, and I noticed these people I deemed so capable, I watched them perform under different leaders.

I would watch someone in one meeting, and they’d be smart, sharp, witty, funny, quick with the facts, introspective, all the kinds of things I knew about this person. And then I’d watch that same person in another meeting under a different leader, and I’d notice something very different. Why is my buddy holding back? I know he’s got an opinion on this, why are they going quiet, why is nobody stepping up, why is nobody arguing, what’s going on here?

I saw this dynamic play out again, and I started to see it’s not a difference in the person’s ability or intelligence or even effort, it’s a function of the leader. I saw these two very different kinds of leaders. When I left, I was still wondering about this. Some people say Multipliers was my post-Oracle therapy. After working in such an intense environment for as long as I did, I needed something to do.

I coached so many executives who were struggling with the same thing, they were all brilliant, but they had a way of diminishing their talent around them. They were struggling to empower their teams. There were big gaps, like, we’ve got a capable leader but a weak bench. Well, is the bench weak, or have people learned to just sit on the bench? It was in a conversation with an executive I was coaching, who was absolutely brilliant, who was struggling with his team, that I was describing this, and he said, okay, I get it, I think what you’re describing is leaders who have this viral intelligence, other people got smarter around them. And that’s when we were like, he said, yeah, they’re amplifiers. I said, yeah, kind of like amplifiers, but sort of multipliers.

Then I went out looking for some academic literature, because surely someone had studied this, it was so obvious to me that this was going on, that surely it had been studied rigorously. And it hadn’t. I think because of the position I held at Oracle, I hired so many academics to come in and lecture or consult, that I thought, how would Jim Collins do this? How would Clay Christensen or C.K. Prahalad, and so many of the academics I had worked with, how would they tackle this? So, I got C.K. Prahalad signed up, who was this incredible strategy professor at the University of Michigan. I’d sort of been a mentee of his, and I convinced him to be my academic advisor, and did the research. That was a long-winded way, Nolan, of saying: I had a question, I couldn’t find an answer, so I set out to answer it.

Nolan: And it seems like it was obvious, which is interesting, like you said, when you don’t have to scratch very deep and the answer is there. Your question is there, of why do these leaders not do that, how do people become multipliers, but there’s nothing else out there. I can see how that became a beacon for you to say, well, this is a fix that is there, but nobody’s giving the fix. The problem is surface level, but the solution is not out there.

And I don’t know if the problem’s surface level, but obviously you were able to dig into it, and you weren’t able to see anything, so then you ended up writing this book. When do you feel like it really landed? What was the turning point where you said, I think I really did strike a chord, or did you know before you even published? Were you just like, this is it, I know this is it, I remember what it was like at Oracle, hoping to have a blueprint, I’ve done it, this is going to take off. Or did you write it thinking, nobody will ever read this? Or somewhere in between?

From Oracle Insight to Global Leadership Standard

Liz: Well, when I wrote it, I was hoping that someone other than my mom would read the book, let me start with the basic aspirations. I grew up in Silicon Valley, spent my career in tech, so I had a sense that tech leaders would find it useful. I think maybe I got a sense that this idea had implications broader than tech was when we kept getting calls from medical institutions. I think it was a call wanting me to come out to Yale Medical School and teach physician leaders who were running the residency programs at Yale New Haven Hospital.

I thought, do they know I don’t really know anything about medicine? I understand leadership and tech, but I don’t know what this looks like for physicians necessarily. We just kept getting all of these inquiries from hospitality, hospitals, manufacturing, pharma, tech, biotech, education. That’s when I really got a sense that it’s fairly universal.

It’s interesting, when I wrote this book, I was very clear I was studying a very specific issue: the effect of a leader’s intelligence on the intelligence of people around them. I thought it was fairly narrow, but what I found started to look to me like a blueprint for good leadership. I never set out to try to write the manual for leadership for the next decade, but I think it became that.

There were indications, like when Thinkers50 picked it up as an important new idea. Thinkers50 is a bit of a watchdog organization that tracks thought leadership, they’re producing a new book on the 25 ideas that changed management over the last hundred-plus years, starting with the pyramids in Egypt. Multipliers is one of those 25 ideas they said have changed our management thinking. I suppose it has. One of the indicators was one of the endorsements that came in early on, which said it’s a subversive book.

I thought, yeah, I guess it’s really challenging the norm, because up to that point we’d really subscribed to this idea that leadership is about a set of characteristics of a leader, kind of the great man theory of leadership, here’s what a great leader looks like, here are the characteristics and competencies of a great leader. And I came in and said, leadership is in the eye of the beholder. Part of that came from something my boss at Oracle said, Phil Wilson, who was this amazing head of HR, had been a professor of literature at Princeton, very erudite, amazing boss.

He used to say your employees are the customers of your leadership. I think Multipliers came out of that sense: a leader is measured not about who they are and what they do so much as the effect they have on their team. What impact are you having on others, rather than who you are. Because who you are ends up having a diminishing effect on other people. What you really want is you don’t want one smart person; you want ten smart people. The math is obvious.

Once You Speak, You Lose Control of the Message

Nolan: Yeah, somebody said to me recently, the second as a manager, you’re saying something to your team, the second the words are out of your mouth, your control of how that’s perceived is done. It’s already out, it’s done. Now they’re going to perceive it however they want to perceive it, and you don’t get to control that.

Liz: It’s so true. It’s so true.

Nolan: To me, one of the core things, and it was honestly a tough thing for me to admit, there’s a really cool survey on your website, thewisemangroup.com, for those that want to go, and it talks about what kind of leader you are, and I fall into this group called the accidental diminisher. I don’t want to try to define it because I don’t think I’d do a great job. Can you talk to us a little bit about it, because to me that was the eye-opening moment: I felt like these things I’m doing as a leader are great.

I’m setting the pace for the team, I’m leading from the front, I’m like this beacon, everybody can see, wow, Nolan’s so far ahead, we must race and catch up to him. I thought all these things I was doing were the thing to do. But then, as you mentioned, from the perception of my people, my customers, it might not be.

The Research Verdict: Diminishers Get Half the Talent

Liz: So, the first big surprise of the research was seeing how much of a diminishing effect the diminishing leaders were having. What I found is that the Multipliers were getting virtually all of people’s capability, insight, know-how, talent, creativity, etc. I wasn’t measuring effort, I was measuring, of your gray matter, how much they are using. And then I found that the diminishing leaders were getting less than half. I knew it was less, I could see this play out, but half, half.

Because I came into my work as an academic researcher from being an operating executive, managing headcount and big budgets, I thought, that’s a pretty big waste. Every time I went to my boss, the CFO, and begged for headcount, I probably should have been first looking inside my own team to say, the 300 people who are already working here, how fully are they utilized? And I don’t mean how hard are they working, I mean, are you getting access to all of that intelligence and capability and know-how, before you go shopping. To me the ultimate metaphor is blueberries in my refrigerator.

My husband likes to grocery shop like a European, he has to go every day, fresh, that’s his thing. He’s always coming home with a big thing of blueberries, and I’m like, hey, we’ve got blueberries already, we’ve got three of those. And he’s like, well, I got new blueberries. And I’m like, we’ve got other blueberries, going soft and molding in the refrigerator. I think so many corporate leaders are like this, how do I go get fresh talent in, but we are not really using the talent that already exists in our organization.

So that was the first big insight. But the bigger insight was that most of the diminishing happening in our workplaces was not coming from tyrannical, narcissistic, bullying, controlling, micromanaging, toxic bosses. I mean, that exists.

But the big insight was, wow, most of the diminishing is done with really good intentions by good people trying to be good leaders, maybe getting out ahead of their team, leading from the front, showing people what they want, setting the standard, or by leaders who are super big-hearted, loving on their people, they care about them, they’re quick to rescue them when they’re struggling, they’re protective, like, let me be a buffer so you don’t have to deal with all the difficult personalities in this organization, I’ll do the hard stuff, you do the easy stuff. And so much well-intended leadership behavior that just seems good actually has a diminishing impact. Despite the fact it’s well-intended, it still has a pretty deep diminishing impact.

Three Habits That Quietly Kill Team Potential

Nolan: And you said it’s like a two X, so if you’re doing that, you’re diminishing, it’s not like ten percent, you’re saying it’s fifty percent less, these people are giving you fifty percent less. So it’s a really big thing. What do you see when you’re interviewing leaders and working with these large organizations? At this point you have mountains of data. What are the top two or three things that are the most common examples of these accidental diminishers, the big mistakes you tend to see the most?

Liz: Yeah, here are the biggies. Pace setting, you mentioned that, and it’s so easy to do in an environment of rapid change. Just look at AI, it’s descended on the scene over the last few years, and as organizations try to help people utilize that, so many leaders are like, okay, look what I did, I built this with Claude, and look, I’ve got agents going. Showing people what they want them to do. But what happens is the leader gets so far out ahead of their team that a gap forms. When you lead by setting the pace, you’re more likely to create spectators than followers. People are watching you do your thing, like, look at my boss.

You’ve got pace-setter tendencies if people on your team describe you as amazing, not as an amazing boss, but as amazing. Because somehow you’re the showcase, you’re the one on the vanguard, the one who forges for new technologies and brings them back to the team. People become reliant on you and are waiting for you to do those things, rather than a leader who says, okay, what can we do with this new technology, what could we do with it, what kind of work could we automate with it, what would it allow us to do. But again, it’s well-intended. So pace setting is one of the top three.

Also in the top three, the rapid responder. This is the leader who is quick to address a problem, quick to jump on an opportunity, quick to answer a text, an email, a Slack, whatever. What they want is agility, they don’t want to be a bottleneck for their team, they want a team that can move fast, jump on things, pounce on problems and keep up.

But what happens when a leader is quick to respond: think about this, we’ve all been in this situation where we own something, it’s our area of responsibility, our initiative, and the email comes in, but on the CC line is the name of the rapid responder, who’s going to answer that email in a minute. What do we tell ourselves? It’s mine, I own this. But I’m almost sure that person is typing, and they’re going to hit send before I have a chance to think about the question, gather some data, and respond with a thoughtful, informed response. So, we just let them do it. And what happens is the rapid responder moves really fast, but everyone around them moves really slow.

Liz’s 24-Hour Rule: The Day-Old Donut Strategy

Liz: I took that same quiz I wrote, the “are you an accidental diminisher” quiz, and did it in kind of a 360, gave it to some people I was leading and said, hey, what do you think? I found out, okay, yeah, I’m an idea fountain, I knew that. I’m an optimist, I know that. I didn’t quite see the rapid responder one until someone pointed it out, they said, Liz, you are quick to jump on things. So, I put a little rule in place for myself: a 24-hour hands-off rule. When something comes in that’s someone else’s responsibility on my team, I don’t touch it for 24 hours, I just sit on it so that person has a chance to jump on it themselves.

For me, I think of this as the day-old donut strategy. I’m the daughter of a donut maker. My father had a Winchell’s donut franchise in Cupertino, California, and we always had a lot of donuts growing up, we were very popular in our neighborhood. But they were day-old donuts. So, what I tell myself is: don’t solve fresh problems, let the people on your team have the dignity of jumping on fresh problems, I will solve day-old problems. The customers got fresh donuts, the family, we got the day-olds. So let your team have the fresh ones, you take the day-old ones. That doesn’t mean you jump on it and solve it, a lot of times when I jump in, it’s, hey, so-and-so, this one’s yours, why don’t you take this, or if you want to talk this through I can, but this is your call, or I’m looking to you for a response on this. That’s how I’ve kind of solved that one myself.

Nolan: Before that, there was something, I don’t know where I saw it, but I think you maybe talked about it in a video, and I thought it was smart, I actually was like, I have to figure out how to do this. You said, on your phone, correct me if I’m wrong, you’ve configured your email where, if you’re on the CC line, it doesn’t hit your phone, doesn’t make it an alert or a notification. I thought that’s a really good idea, to split my inbox to what’s addressed to me versus what’s addressed to somebody on my team that I need to give, within a day. I thought that was smart.

Liz: Well, it is really smart, it wasn’t me who said this, but it’s a really good strategy. Whoever did that, I think they’re thinking, maybe they were just doing it from an efficiency standpoint, but I’d encourage people to do things like that from an ownership standpoint, because when the boss jumps quickly on something they’ve already delegated and given ownership to someone else, it’s going to confuse that ownership.

You get leaders who are like, why isn’t this person acting on this, why are they sitting on it? Well, I’ll tell you why: because you’ve taken back the ownership. If you’re quick to respond, it’s like you’re saying, you don’t really own it, it’s really me. So people go, okay, well the boss seems to be into this, I’ll let her.

Nolan: Yeah, I’ll let her do it. Cool. So those are the first two, the pace setter, the rapid responder. What’s the third one?

Why Rescuing Your Team Actually Holds Them Back

Liz: The rescuer. Again, a super big-hearted leader who cares about their people, loves their team, wants people to be successful, a well-intended leader. They don’t have to be emotional, sappy kind of leader, they just legitimately want people around them to be successful, a decent human being kind of leader. And when they see people struggling, their logic is, I can help. It doesn’t even have to be a big heroic rescue where you sweep in and take over, it’s just when you extend that hand of help too early or too often.

Certainly, people in the learning and development community know what happens when a leader is helpful too early or too often, what happens when people don’t have to fight through it themselves is the leader harvests the learning, but the person they lead doesn’t. They never had to cross the finish line. Rescuers often take that prime learning space, in a lot of pieces of work and projects, the hard work is usually getting it off the ground and getting it done. It’s like an airplane: takeoffs, landings, hard stuff, you want good pilots, everything else is a little bit autopilot. Often what leaders with big hearts will do is, let me get you started, or let me help you get this across the finish line. That’s the part where, when we rescue people in the struggle, we think we’re saying, I got you, I care about you, I want you to be successful, that’s the narrative we think we’re projecting. But what are we really projecting when we step in at the eleventh hour and offer that hand of help?

It’s, well, I don’t think you can do it, I don’t trust you to get it done, I don’t think you can do it without me, which is the very core of diminisher logic. It’s a real insidious form of diminishing, because we think we’re being so generous and kind and loving and noble, and we’re telling people, you’re small and weak, and I’m big and strong, so don’t worry about this, I will do this for you.

Breaking the Cycle: How Leaders Can Multiply, Not Diminish

Nolan: So, what’s the inverse of this then? We have a leader who never responds, who lets his people fail all the time. I feel like this message gets sent to many CEOs, or whoever these leadership teams are, and I’d assume the pushback is, well, I want my people to respond within twenty-four hours, I want my leaders to step in, and if a project’s going off the rails, I need them to come in, that’s why I brought them in. So how do you convince them that, by doing that, you don’t need to save your person?

A lot of this, to me, comes back to slowing down a little bit and being more intentional with what you’re doing, versus just solving a problem, solving a problem, solving a problem. So how do you get past that thought of, no, I don’t need to save my person, I don’t want you to go save these people if they’re failing?

Liz: I do think it involves being more intentional. I think the multiplier approach to leadership is in so many ways a much easier way to lead, but there’s a cost, and it’s usually an upfront cost. It’s about being more intentional, about communicating with your intent, being clear, saying, I’m not going to respond because this is something you own. It’s being intentional, saying, if we want a twenty-four-hour turnaround, we need to establish that as a norm. But I do think there’s also a piece of slowing down to speed up.

The image I usually get is riding on a high-speed gondola up a mountain pass. You’ve either ridden one when you ski, or if you’re hiking, or if you’ve visited one of these high peaks. Before the high-speed gondola, people were taken up the mountains on low-speed chairlifts, anchored to the cable, going up at a medium pace. But when you load onto one, it’s a violent experience, you get smacked in the back, they go at a steady speed, which is too fast for loading and too slow up the mountain. That’s a technology they had. It was actually a Polish engineer who invented this high-speed gondola, a two-track system. They’ve got these big carriages, and they come into these stations at the base of the mountain, the carriage that can load up ten people comes off the track, the doors open, you casually get on, put your skis, brush the snow off, it’s very calm, you get on, the door shuts, and then it goes back onto that high-speed track and flies up the mountain. It takes so many more people up the mountain so much faster. But it’s this two-track system.

I think this is kind of how the multiplier does this, they take people offline a little bit. Okay, we’re going to make an important decision, offline for a debate. Instead of telling people what to do, they ask them, what do you think, which is going to slow down the process for a minute. But we tend to commit to ideas we’ve generated. And then people move very fast.

I think it is about being intentional, about talking about your intent, why you’re not responding, why you’re entrusting other people with things. I think if there’s one thing someone can do to really maximize their multiplier presence, it’s to talk openly about their accidental diminisher tendencies. This is magic. It took me a while to figure this out. I thought, because I came out of the world of learning and development, this was a skill issue, building multiplier mindsets and skills, and all of that is helpful, don’t get me wrong.

But the magic comes when leaders talk really openly about their accidental diminisher tendencies. For example, hey everyone, I’m a big rescuer, I don’t like to see people struggle, and when I step in to help, it’s because I want you to be successful, it’s not because I don’t think you are. Then later, at the eleventh hour, you step in to help someone out of the goodness of your heart, and it now gives that person permission to say, hey boss, love you, but I’m okay, I got this, the report will be on your desk tomorrow at eight o’clock, or I’m ready to go. It allows people to quietly, non-confrontationally, defend their space a little bit.

I’m a huge optimist, and everyone on my team knows this, and they’ll call me on it. I’ve learned to say, okay, let’s talk about what’s hard. I’m also a big idea fountain, and people on my team know it, and I’ll be spouting off ideas, hey, we could do this, what do you think about this. I did this just a month ago, I got myself into idea fountain mode, we were in a team meeting, and somebody texted me a great little AI-generated image with my head superimposed on a fountain.

They said, you’re doing your thing, and we laugh about it, and they say, Liz, do you want us to stop what we’re doing and work on that, or are you having an idea party? I’m like, it’s an idea party. It’s such an easy way for teams to help leaders correct well-intended diminishing behavior. I love it because it doesn’t put all the onus on the leader, it shares that vigilance with the team, because after all, who really cares about that person being a great leader? It’s the team.

Closing Thoughts

Nolan: Yeah, their customers too. And that’s a great way to end this, for those who’ve listened, I really encourage you to go check out Multipliers, and specifically, if you just want a little flavor, go to the website, The Wiseman Group, look at their survey they have online, it’ll tell you which of these sins you’re committing, if any, and maybe just share that with your team. What a great, easy, simple thing to do, it’s ten questions, takes five minutes, and you can say, look at what this is, let’s laugh about this and I’ll try to get better at that. So, a super simple thing people can go out and do just to get a sense of it. And if you love it, obviously buy the book, reach out to Liz, she’d obviously help you out a lot. Liz, thank you, go ahead.

Liz: Can I just add one thing to that? It doesn’t have to be just something the leader does, have the whole team do it. Maybe that’s what you’re implying, because whether someone’s in a leadership position or not, they’ve got accidental diminisher tendencies, and it makes it fun for everyone. It takes more pressure off the leader.

Nolan: Yeah, that’s true, that’s a good point, a very good point. So, with that, Liz, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast. It absolutely flew by. I appreciate you coming on, and hopefully we can cross paths again in the near future.

Liz: Very nice to talk to you, Nolan. I could talk to you forever, very good. Thank you for inviting me.

Nolan: Thank you.