David Rendall has helped many people embrace what makes them unique. He is a leadership professor, non-profit executive, stand-up comedian and keynote speaker to clients such as Microsoft, AT&T, the US Air Force, and more. He is also the author of four books, including The Freak Factor, The Four Factors of Effective Leadership, and Pink Goldfish.
In his second appearance on the show, David returned to the Elevate Podcast to discuss his approach to leadership, how leaders can help people embrace and unleash their unique abilities, and much more.
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David Rendall On Embracing What Makes You Unique And The Freak Factor
Our quote for this episode is from James Broughton, “Trusting your individual uniqueness challenges you to lay yourself open.” Our guest, David Rendall, has helped many people embrace what makes them unique. He’s a leadership professor, nonprofit executive, standup comedian, and keynote speaker to clients such as Microsoft, AT&T, the US Air Force, and many more. He’s also the author of four books including The Freak Factor, The Four Factors of Effective Leadership, and Pink Goldfish. David, welcome back to the show.
I’m happy to be back.
We talked about your background and your work a little bit on your first appearance in the show. That’s way back to Episode 70 from 2019.
It’s been that long.
That’s pre-COVID vintage. The year 2020 has seemed like a time warp. We talked in depth there, but I thought it’d be helpful to introduce yourself to the audience who have joined since then by asking you this. What are you most passionate about in your life and work? What is your why, since it’s pretty well-defined?
I’m trying to help people find out who they are, and find the best way to use that in the world. In a society where we are oftentimes taught to fight that, try to change that, work against that, or those kinds of things, we get a lot of bad advice about how to be successful in this world. For example, “They call it work for a reason,” or “You can’t expect a job that makes you happy,” or “If you don’t like it, that’s why you should spend more time on it,” instead of building on your strengths, understanding who you are, and understanding who other people are. I’m trying to help people figure out better who they are, appreciate it instead of fighting it, and then find or create a life and work that matches who they are instead of constantly being in a battle with themselves and a battle with the world around them.
Flawed Education System
One of the challenges for a lot of people is the education system that tries to create an assembly line and have everyone conform and do the same thing. I know there are private schools and there are schools that dive into what makes everyone different, but I can understand how it’s hard. You’re trying to build a repeatable system. You build a conveyor belt. I have to think that does not do a lot to help people figure out that Dave and Sally are completely different, and John must be taught in different ways and express themselves in different ways.
There’s a quote I use in all my talks from Ken Robinson who has some great TED Talks if you want to check them out. He also has a good book that I’m rereading called The Element. It used to be a phrase people were more familiar with, but you still hear it like, “Are you in your element? Are you in the right situation? Are you in the zone of genius?” He says, “Many highly talented, brilliant, and creative people think they’re not,” because the thing they were good at school wasn’t valued or was stigmatized.
The terrible thing about that is it’s present tense, “Still thinks they’re not.” The 30, 40, or 50-year-olds still think they’re not brilliant, talented, and creative because the thing they were good at school wasn’t valued or stigmatized. Let’s not pick on schools. We do that at home mostly because we’re trying to help the kid succeed at school. We think school success predicts work success. We’re also concerned about a very narrow definition of work success.
Parents are trying to help kids succeed at school. Schools are trying to help people succeed at work, but everybody has a stereotyped false view of what work is. When you look at 21st-century society, you can get paid to play video games online while people watch them. It’s not even to play the game. It’s not like the company is paying you. It’s not even eSports, and that has become a thing. Colleges have scholarships now for eSports. You’re telling your kid to get off the video games, but if they were shooting baskets outside, then you wouldn’t tell them to stop shooting baskets. You’d say, “Look at the discipline.”
There are many ways to make money. There are many ways to be successful now, but we tend to have a very narrow view of that. Parents push educational success. Educators push a relatively narrow definition of intelligence that usually revolves around math, reading, and maybe science.
It’s almost inherently biased against creativity.
I’ve talked to many educational audiences. If you’re the art teacher, you don’t see the same students as everybody else. You go, “This kid is great in my class.” “He is terrible in my class.” He’s different in art class because art class is a fundamentally different environment, just like a lot of the high-performing academic kids do badly in gym class, “I don’t want to dress for gym. I don’t want to get sweaty. I don’t want to be physical. I don’t think this is a good use of my time.” Meanwhile, the other kids who are struggling in every other class are killing it in gym class because they can finally be active and move.
I was speaking to an entrepreneur’s organization group in Calgary. The lady who hired me loves this message. She was like, “My kid goes to an art school.” They teach art more than other places do, but they also teach everything in the context of art. We’re going to learn about math in the context of maybe mixing these colors and the proportions and the ratios of the way we’re going to mix these paints, for example.
Suddenly, math is relevant to you.
We’re going to teach history through the lens of the art that was created during those periods. You’re going to learn about the Civil War while you’re learning about the art that did or didn’t happen during the Civil War. You’re going to learn about this European battle or this European queen in the context of paintings that were made during that time. We’re going to tap into what you’re interested in to teach you the things. That’s one of the things that I tell people who let’s say have a son or daughter with autism. One of the key definitions of autism is that usually, people with autism have some special interest area. They have a hyperfocus. A classic one is trains for example.
What we tend to do in psychology is when somebody has hyperfocus, we try to get them to stop hyper-focusing on that, “That’s weird. That’s not normal. That’s not what regular people do. You need to let it go. You need to leave it alone. You need to stop being obsessed.” We have this narrow definition of what good is. What I tell them is, “No, you teach history with trains. You teach science with trains. You teach math with trains. You have them read books about trains.” You tap into the fixation. You tap into the obsession.
That’s why there’s engagement.
That’s not what we do. We have a narrow definition of normal, so then we want people to be normal and we push them away from these things that make them unique and make them different. We tend to see those things then as bad, wrong, or unbalanced. That’s where you learn three things. We usually tell people to correct them. We want them to moderate it. We tell them, “I love your intensity, but you need to dial it back a little bit.”
We have a narrow definition of normal that we push people away from things that make them unique and different.
We don’t straight out criticize you, but we’re always encouraging you to make sure you can balance it, and then sometimes we don’t even do that. We go, “Robert, you got to do a lot less of that. You’re doing way too much of that.” We try to get people to reduce it and then other times, we straight up go, “That’s terrible. You can’t do that at all. You got to stop that.” When most people look at success, the key things they’ve heard are to moderate it, reduce it, or eliminate it. They very rarely hear to turn up the volume, lean into it, do more of that, get after trains, art, or whatever it happens to be. You got to still go to English class. It’s not necessarily in the same way.
You’ve talked about doubling down on what makes you unique. I’d like to hear your own experience in that, like when you realized it, how you doubled down, and leveraged it. There’s also this same thing around sports. Until you pick up something, you don’t even know if you’re good at it, like it, or otherwise. There’s this tension in in schools and the workplace of we need enough reps around things to have a baseline knowledge or analysis, or even figure out what we like. It’s okay to double down and that seems like a little bit of a difficult seesaw.
Assessment And Experimentation
The first step in the process I teach is always awareness. I have a new assessment called Amplifi, which is designed to help people discover their uniqueness, tap into it, and stop trying to fix, moderate, reduce, and eliminate these things that are their best qualities. Experimentation is or at least can be an important part of that process. A lot of this assumes that people know what their strengths are. They know what they’re not good at. They know what they don’t like or whatever.
What you’re saying is sometimes we have to at least do a certain amount of this to discover it. That’s not always true though. Some people are smart enough like you probably. People have two kids. One of them learns from experience and the other one can learn from the experience of others and watching what’s going on around them. For example, every time we asked my oldest daughter if she wanted to sign up for sports, she said no all the way through sixth grade. She would look at sports and she looks at herself and she says, “No.”
At some point, we asked her for the 100th time because it was signup time. We weren’t pressuring her. We’re like, “It’s soccer. The school is wondering whether you want to do that?” Let’s give the kids experiences. Finally, she says, “I don’t think sports is my thing.” She could articulate it. She wasn’t very coordinated and she knew that. She didn’t like big groups, loud noises, and chaos. She didn’t like the prospect of being hit or being hurt. She assumed all those things were going to happen to her. She didn’t need to do it to then go, “That’s not for me.” She could look at it and go, “Based on what I know about myself.”
Sometimes we don’t give people enough credit for that. In sixth grade, teachers started a swimming team. Swimming is on your own. It’s quiet because your head is in the water. It’s repetitive motions. You’re not reacting to a bunch of other people. You’re alone. You’re in your own lane. Other people can’t even be in the lane. There’s no ball. On and on it goes, then she’s writing essays in high school about how the pool is her happy place. Even that, the fact that she said yes to swimming because she could look at it and go, “There’s a high likelihood that’s going to be a good thing for me.”
She had that self-awareness. She was able to articulate probably because she’s your kid too. These qualities about herself and I know that you’ve given them the flexibility to do that. That’s probably an important part of that equation.
Do kids feel safe? Let’s keep that analogy going when it comes to figuring out what some parents do. They do, “Sports was good for me, so sports is good for you.” They don’t even say, “Sports was good for me.” They say, “Sports is good.”
They say, “I was a marginal athlete and I’m going to live my fantasy of you being a better athlete than me.”
Sports teach you discipline and teamwork, especially if it did that for me. Instead of personalizing it like, “It was a good fit for me,” we say, “It’s good.” I know some parents have a one-sport rule. You have to do at least one sport each year because it’s good for you. They also want kids to learn teamwork and they have a no-quitting rule. If you start it, you have to finish it.
You don’t have to do it again. This was Angela Duckworth’s rule, which I thought was great because we do want to teach resilience. I tell my kids all the time that you should not spend your time doing things you’re not good at or otherwise but sometimes there’s a requirement. You have to sit through a speech, a wedding, or something where you don’t want to. I always think you can get through a season. That’s a reasonable rule.
My perspective on that is it reduces experimentation because if I’m afraid that I’m going to get locked into three months of this nonsense because I said, “Sure, I’ll go to day one,” then I’m more likely in the future to say, “No, thanks,” because it’s safer to say, “No, thanks.” The way to encourage experimentation is if you try it and it’s not for you, okay.
I could argue this with you or against you. I’ll choose to play devil’s advocate because these go through my brain. To me nothing is that fun the first time you do it or when you’re not good at it. I do think there’s some baseline requirement to try to get through something. I don’t know what the right increment with. Maybe it’s not a season, but hey we’re going to stick. Are you going to go through four practices or else people are likely to repudiate anything that has discomfort, which is most things when you start, other than if you pick up a guitar and you’re natural at it?
You can make arguments on both sides. What I’m saying is that most of the arguments are on the other side. Even if you think about a season, a kid can get a lot more experimentation. I tried a week of soccer and I didn’t like it. I’m going to go in and I’m going to try whatever sport is happening at that time. I’m going to try golf. I discover for example that golf is an individual sport. Soccer is a team sport. I enjoy golf more because I like the individual nature of it. I like the setup. I like being outside. I’d rather be walking than running.
People can have quick epiphanies. You can start to see patterns early. Experimentation is important and you certainly don’t want to foreclose on things too soon. Different people have different levels of self-awareness. Some people can read a book and learn a bunch of lessons and go, “That’s going to help me live my life.” Someone else is going to read that same book or more likely not even be interested in reading that book and in their mind, “Until it happens to me, it’s not true and it’s not real.” Some people have to go try soccer and other people can take a look at it and go, “That’s not for me.”
Leadership
We’ll do a deep dive into Amplifi assessment of strengths and weaknesses. Let’s go with this thread for a little bit and flip it to the organizational context. Some of the best people I’ve seen in business and leaders know what they’re good at and what they’re not good at. With that said, if you don’t have a little bit of knowledge of what you’re not good at, then it’s dangerous.
If you’re a sales-led CEO and you don’t understand accounting at all, those are the people I know that get scammed and you don’t understand marketing. There is this juxtaposition even for adults of, “I need to know enough about this to ask the right questions to be dangerous, but I’m not going to spend all of my days doing it.” if you totally pigeonhole yourself, most CEOs I know who have no financial acumen have been stolen from or a lot of them. It’s a tricky thing.
There are two ways to handle that. You need people you can trust and sometimes even if you do know you can still be taken advantage of.
How do you know they’re good if you don’t understand any of them? That’s what people struggle with.
My Master’s is in Counseling Psychology. I wanted to get a Doctorate in Management and Leadership. They’re like, “You don’t have any business coursework and this is technically a business thing.” I had to take a few prerequisite classes. I had to take graduate-level marketing and graduate-level accounting. I took Advanced Financial Accounting as my first accounting class. What it teaches you is not how to put the debits on the one side and the credits on the other side and how to do an expense report.
It teaches you that when your accountant tells you this ratio about your business, here’s what it means. When you see this number on the P&L, that’s what that means. What you want to look for is this stuff and what you want to watch out for is that stuff. At the same time, at some point, the big thing I teach is alignment, the match between who you are and where you are. You could say if you’re a CEO, you have to have a certain amount of fill-in-the-blank. What I take a step back to is then, “Do you want to be the CEO? Should you be the CEO?”
A lot of people need to ask that question. They need to ask it every time their company doubles and it’s a different job.
That’s a huge one. I was one of the highest-rated speakers at an event in Berlin for scaling up. The only thing people were paying for is I’m here because I’m excited about scaling up my business. My message is maybe you shouldn’t. Maybe you’re a small company person. Maybe you’re a mid-size company person. Maybe your goals or even who you are don’t fit with running this massive organization. Maybe you’re not any of those things. Maybe you’re a startup person and maybe your job is to build things for 2 or 3 years and keep handing them off to other people who like the ongoing management of stuff versus the creation of stuff, and you don’t like the ongoing management of stuff.
Those are important questions to ask. Even somebody as successful as Bill Gates, for example, he always had an operational CEO person. At some point, he is the chief technology officer or something. I’m sure he had the accounting knowledge, but he’s like, “I’d like to play with software.” He certainly wasn’t selling and he certainly wasn’t motivating anybody. He had these other people with better people skills and all these kinds of things. Even when alignment is difficult, you have to be careful you don’t get scammed, but at some point in organizations, you have to put your trust in other people, primarily people who have skills and knowledge you don’t have.
In a Meta way, you need to understand other people’s strengths and weaknesses.
How they complement ours. One of the big mistakes is we hire copies of ourselves and now we have eight people who don’t understand accounting and we keep building it.
Should a leader who’s hiring an executive assistant hire someone with the opposite strengths and weaknesses, in your opinion?
That’s what Amplifi recommends. We call that affiliation, partnering with people who are strong where you’re weak. For example, CEOs tend to be global big-picture thinkers. That tends to be the opposite of a meticulous and perfectionist person who’s all about the details.
Partner with people who are strong in areas in which you are weak.
Make sure you show up to the meeting on the big ideas.
I heard it the other day and they were talking about marriage. He said, “You always have one partner who’s in the cloud and one partner who’s in the weeds.” If you’re in the clouds, you want that person. What we tell them with Amplifi is you’re going to dislike that meticulous perfectionist because they’re always asking you detailed questions. They’re going to dislike you because you’re always living off in your own world, but you can intellectually understand the value of partnering with that opposite person. I was working with a company on the Amplifi assessment recently, and that’s exactly what happened.
This guy was about to hire an assistant. He said, “This is helpful. I was thinking about hiring an assistant, someone to help,” or whatever that means. He’s like, “I need to be looking for somebody who does things and enjoys things and gravitates towards things that I don’t, and that is going to be undone if I don’t hire somebody like that. I don’t just need someone to answer the phone and to make appointments and things like that. I need somebody to have these complementary skills so that together, we’re stronger than we would be separately.”
Amplifi
Let’s jump into Amplifi. I have one question before we do that. One thing I’ve noticed a lot and I’ve said is a lot of times, a weakness is a strength overused. When you take it past 100 degrees. I’ve heard you say a person’s weakness could be a strength. How do those two concepts connect?
There’s a great concept in psychology called negativity bias, which means that we tend to see what’s wrong instead of what’s right in any situation.
This is what drives the news. This is why you do dangerous headlines.
What’s wrong is small. What’s right is big. Most people are never going to kill anybody. Most people are never going to start a war and those kinds of things. Yet every day we read about wars and murders, and 0.001% of people will ever murder somebody, yet we hear about it every day. What’s interesting is if you do a Google search for, “Could my strengths become a weakness?” You read about it all day long. If you do a Google search for, “Can my weaknesses be strengths?” You get, “What?” I’ve been speaking about it for 50 years and people go, “I’ve never heard this before,” yet every single day someone is going, “Be careful. Those strengths might turn into weaknesses if you overuse them or whatever it happens to be.”
Partly, we are saying somewhat of the same thing except we’re doing it in a negative way, like beware even of your strengths. Let’s be afraid even of the best things about us. The key here is in the overuse. I don’t think it’s overuse. That’s why the assessment is called Amplifi. That’s why that’s one of the steps in my framework. I’m telling people to turn up the volume instead of turning it down. I’m telling people to go farther instead of moderating it, reducing it, or eliminating it.
The real thing isn’t overuse. That’s maybe sometimes what people are getting to. It’s not overused. It’s used in the wrong context. It’s thinking that this works everywhere all the time. What I teach people is that weakness is a strength in the right situation. An example I used on my podcast is Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. If you watch the Claymation, but even if you know the song, has a red shiny nose. In the movie, the parents are upset.
Santa is upset. I lost a little respect for Santa in that situation. All of the other reindeer used to laugh and call him names. They never let poor Rudolph join any reindeer games. In the movie, he starts talking to this girl who is willing to accept him for being different. The dad comes along and screams at him and tells him to get out of there and, “No freak is going to be with my daughter.”
We learn real fast that you can’t be like that, and then the whole thing changes all of a sudden one foggy Christmas Eve. Santa came to say, “Rudolph with your nose so bright.” Now we’re using a positive adjective for a seemingly negative characteristic, but only because the situation changed. If you put me back in school and I can’t sit still be quiet and do what I’m told, I’m going to go back to being in trouble. The only reason I’m successful is because I’m in situations that reward me for standing up talking and running my own business. I haven’t changed. The situation changed.
You learn the right context to put yourself in.
There is no such thing as an always strength or an always weakness. It’s the way it’s even perceived by other people. I’m 6 foot 6. If you put me on a submarine, my height is a real negative. You put me in the goal in a soccer game or a basketball court, 6 foot 6 is a strength. If you take me to a horse track and try to make me a jockey, 6 foot 6 is a weakness. Is it good or bad to be 6 foot 6? There’s never one answer to that. It’s situationally dependent.
The only thing is you can’t change your height.
All you can change is the situation and that’s what you have control over.
All you can change is the situation. That is the only thing you have control over.
Alignment And Relationships
Let’s talk about the real detailed person. You’re super detailed and you’re a planner, your spouse is not and it’s their birthday. What they want is a day to go walk around. That’s a case where you need to learn to turn it down if it’s going to not accomplish the goal that you want for another person. This is not what you want to do all the time or maybe you don’t go. There are some situations where I’m with you 99% of the time, but there are some times when I know I have to turn down my strength. If it’s height, I can’t do that, but I know that it’s not helping my family, my employees, or otherwise.
There’s a bunch of stuff there. Relationships are also about alignment. There are a couple of other steps earlier on in the process, which are acceptance and appreciation. In long-term relationships, we have to decide if we’re going to accept who the other person is except that the other person is very detail-oriented and not just, “Are we going to accept it? Will we then appreciate it?” Stop trying to fix them, change them, and try to get them to calm down, relax, be more easygoing, not worry about the details, not have an Excel spreadsheet for vacation, or whatever it happens to be.
That acceptance and appreciation should be mutual so you know maybe the person doesn’t want a detailed schedule for the day and you maybe don’t create one. In an ideal situation, both parties value what the other person brings to the situation. Part of it is I tell people both are true. You can either accept it and appreciate it or you can be frustrated about it, but it’s still there. It’s still the same thing. We spend so much time at work and in our careers that if we can get the careers to align and we can get our day-to-day work to align, then we have the mental and emotional energy that it takes to throttle that when necessary.
To make it the exception and not the rule.
That’s the key. The problem is as soon as you say start throttling it, then we want to throttle it here and throttle it here.
The advice you should never take in a job is, “You’d be great in this job. If you change everything about who you are, then you’ll succeed in this job.”
Somebody marries somebody and sees them as a project, “I’m going to get this person to grow up. I’m going to get this person to stop being spontaneous. I’m going to get this person to plan more. I’m going to get this person to be cleaner. I’m going to get this person to be better in social situations. I’m going to get this person to moderate their drinking.” You don’t like this person.
That doesn’t like a marriage. That’s like a reclamation project.
That’s what some people do because they see the potential. I’ll give you a wild example that I got. My daughter was in gymnastics and her friend’s mom was getting her doctorate in occupational therapy. She sent me this story she found in her research because it fit perfectly with what I do. There was this guy with a disability who was living in a group home with other people with disabilities. One of his quirks was he loved to break and shatter stuff. He loved things that would shatter windows, plates, glasses, and anything that could be smashed and destroyed. He loved it. You can imagine living with somebody like that is very disconcerting.
Unless he has a man cave.
He doesn’t. He’s in a group home and he is with a bunch of people and they’re sharing everything. It’s easy to see that as a weakness. Certainly, there’s no strength there and that behavior is unacceptable. If he wasn’t living with other people, now it’s less of a problem because it’s his stuff and it’s his life. Even there, there is some alignment, but it took a couple of years, but somebody took a totally different approach.
They spent two years doing it and they finally found him a job at a recycling center. His job every day was to smash the glass and smash that stuff to get it ready to be recycled. He was an employee of the day, week, and month over and over again. He never missed a day of work. He was always early and he was always on time. More importantly, he never broke anything again at home because he could break all the things he wanted to all day. Even at night, he knew he was going to have another chance the next morning.
A lot of this is energy management. When I have to moderate, reduce, and eliminate who I am, it’s not that I can or can’t or that it’s good or bad. It’s “What does it do to me?” What it does is it exhausts me. When I get to do it, it fills me. It fuels me. The more opportunities I have to be in alignment, the more ability I’ll have to say, “That child that I have needed this from me. That’s not who I am, but I can suck it up and adapt for them because that’s what they need from me right now.”
It’s important at some point to even have those conversations with your kids, “Dad is about high performance and I have high standards. I want to see you hit your peak potential. All the time, I’m going to push and look for growth with you. Even if I’m not communicating it, that’s the way I’m feeling. I want you to know that. I’m 50 years old and that part of me’s not going to change. That’s not perfect, but that’s who I am. I hope you can accept me and appreciate me for who I am. I want you to know that on a day-to-day basis, I’m doing my best to understand and accept and appreciate who you are.”
At some point, in different maturity levels, you can choose different ages for that. Kids can learn that their parents don’t have endless flexibility to be whatever they wish they were, and parents can make sure kids know that they’re getting that same respect in reverse. That’s a mature opportunity for kids to go, “My parents can’t be everything all the time. My parents have personalities, strengths, weaknesses, and that stuff.”
I can think of a lot of places where that conversation would be beneficial.
My new podcast is called The Imperfectionist Podcast. One of the things I’m going to do is not fix those things, then an audience engagement thing is to find the mistakes in each of the episodes and then write about them because people love to find mistakes.
There are people who with glee write me emails about typos that I’ve made or whatever. I’m like, “I think you have a problem. The fact that you wrote me a three-page thing about this may say more about you than my typo.”
That’s in one of my books. John Grisham is a very famous author, starting with The Firm which became a movie, and then The Pelican Brief. He has been writing books for 25 years. I’ve read them all, but I don’t know why I was looking all the way at the end or maybe the acknowledgments. At the end of one of his books, he goes, “Every time I write one of these, people write me notes about how I was wrong about this part of the law or about how this city isn’t near this other city and about how this job isn’t called that. I want you to know that I don’t care. I put a lot of time and effort into this, but I am not a lawyer and I’m not a geographer. Good, you can do all of that you want. You’re making a mistake if you think I’m attempting to make this flawless and perfect and whatever. It’s a good book and you can enjoy it. I’m not trying to fix these problems.”
Development Process
You talked about Amplifi. There are a lot of assessments out there. Maybe not a lot that they’re more under the realm of personality or preferences or communication style. I don’t think I’d seen one on strengths and weaknesses. What did you feel like the market was missing? What was the tack to say, “We can figure out your strengths or weaknesses?” What did that development process look like?
I’ve had a simple version of the assessment for years. In all my workshops and The Freak Factor book, there’s one where you pick from a list of strengths and weaknesses, and then the last page tells you that your persistence strength is also a stubbornness weakness. It’s the same thing. You’re organized and that’s exactly what makes you inflexible because being organized is precisely about saying there’s a right place to put things, which means there’s a wrong place to put things, which is anywhere else you put those things. There’s an inflexibility that comes with organization.
There’s a book right over my shoulder called Messy: The Power Of Disorder To Transform Our Lives. There’s also creativity that comes with messiness. That’s all the farther it went, then we had the Freak Factor Framework about acceptance, appreciation, and alignment. Once you know that one of your strengths is also a weakness, you could accept it, appreciate it, stop trying to fix it, amplify it, align it, stay away from things that don’t fit, and partner with people who are strong where you’re weak. What Amplifi does is it automates that whole process. Instead of having to go through the book after you discover your strengths and weaknesses combinations.
It’s like a digital.
We call them defining features. You go through and take the assessment about strengths and weaknesses and you can slide your level of agreement with different statements. It’s a forced choice. You can’t choose, “I’m flexible and I’m organized.” You have to either say, “I’m more organized. I’m more flexible,” for example. When you get to the end, like a strengths finder, we take the top five scores that you have on any of the particular dimensions and then we give you these two-page PDFs that walk you through how to accept that strength and weakness quality. We call them Defining Features. How to appreciate that, how to amplify it, and how to align it.
For example, there’s a list. Find situations like this or avoid situations like this. We then pair you up at the end with the person who you should affiliate with. You’ll get five of those. The reason I know there’s a market for it is because, for years, people have been like, “Holy cow.” What I was trying to do was provide that additional support. Instead of you having to figure all this out on your own, I’ve been doing this for years.
How about if I tell you directly what alignment might look like? What kinds of situations you should probably stay away from, and show you who to partner with. Also, give you some encouragement to amplify that particular quality that if you’re messy, we live in a world where organization is key and it’s important. You’ll be criticized and there are TV shows about how to clean up, yet I have two huge books that I’ve read and shared where messiness is a huge part of creativity and organization is not perfect, sometimes not even necessary, and sometimes counterproductive.
The other thing it does. The book list for your defining features is not how to fix it. It’s how to go even farther. It’s a book about being messy for the person who’s Amplifi would be a chaotic creator. It’s a book about how to go farther with that and the upside of it, instead of that classic moderate, reduce, and eliminate. I tell people that any assessment is good in helping you understand yourself. That awareness is important. Take a DISC, MBTI, StrengthsFinder, Culture Index, Unique Abilities, or whatever it happens to be. What makes Amplifi different is instead of you taking a DISC, they’re like you’re a D, but you need to have a little more I, and sometimes your business is going to need some C from you.
You’re going to focus on aligning the world outside to what the answers are.
They’re always trying to moderate, reduce, and eliminate your qualities, so why did we take this test? If there’s a right way to be or if the good people are a good balance of all this stuff, then why don’t we start with that? We don’t ask you who you are. We go, “These are the targets. Get more of all this stuff and be all of these things, but never too much of anything,” which misses the point that a lot of situations reward you for a lot of something and not much of anything else.
The unbalanced people, obsessed people, whatever, are very successful in certain kinds of situations that demand an extreme form. My grandpa was a farmer even before a lot of telecommunication. He spent all day in a tractor and when he wasn’t in a tractor, he was in a semi-tractor trailer driving his stuff to the Del Monte plant.
He spent 98% of his life completely alone. He was a huge introvert who didn’t have much to say. That was the perfect fit for him. He was happy and good at his life, but it wasn’t as if he was well-balanced and well-rounded, he’d been going crazy by the end of the day because he had nobody to talk to and nobody to interact with. He needed at least a moderate amount of human interaction.
He needed very little human interaction. He’d come home and wouldn’t talk to anybody. He didn’t need any of that he was in the perfect situation, a moderately balanced person would’ve been very frustrated in that environment. There are a lot of environments that reward us for having a significant amount of something, which means we’re missing something else. That’s what’s missed by the focus on balance and that stuff.
There was a great story I heard years ago that you probably would agree with a tactic, but it was someone working with someone. They were creative and messy. People at work perceived them as disorganized and whatever because they left their stuff crazy. The person was like, “This is my creative process.” What they ended up doing was getting a case that opened on one side and a roll-desk. At the end of the day, they could roll it and close the case with all the stuff. It solved a perception problem without having to change what they did.
There was a movie called Cheaper by the Dozen that was a remake, but this navy Admiral marries this lady who designs fancy purses for high-end department stores. She goes on a trip and he organizes her workshop for her because things should be structured and organized and put away. What she explains very eloquently when she came home and was furious instead of appreciative is that creativity requires oftentimes the combining of things that normally people wouldn’t think of combining. This is called by association, but there’s a technical term for it.
Creativity often requires the combination of things people would not normally think of combining.
She says, “When everything is out in my workshop and I’m working on something, I can look around and all of a sudden, I’ll see something that I wasn’t looking for or expecting that gives me an idea that causes me to go in a direction.” What you did was put everything away and now I have no inspiration. I have nothing to see. I have nothing to connect with, and so I can’t be as creative.”
That’s another great example of where someone is like, “Look, I made it better,” and the other person is like, “No, you made it worse,” because we have different definitions of good and bad based on who we are. That’s one of the things I’m trying to teach people with Amplifi. I do this thing in my talk called Two Kinds of People. I talk about people who wash, dry, fold, and put away their clothes, and other people who sometimes wash them, and then wash them again because they left them in for two days, and then they dry them, and then they work out of a pile on the couch or a chair for weeks at a time.
If you’re one kind of person, you want other people to be your kind of person. If you’re a pile person, you want to tell somebody about the advantages of relaxing and living out of the pile. If you’re a put-it-away person, you want the other person to start putting it away because that’s the right way to be. Instead of saying, “It’s laundry, this isn’t a morality issue.” We have a hard time doing that.
Part of this is acceptance and appreciation. Some people are laid back and easygoing and when they can’t find what they need, they wear something else. Other people want what they want and they want to know where everything is. They might even have it color-coded in the closet and all these kinds of things. I folded my daughter’s clothes once thinking I was being helpful. She goes, “Now I got to refold it all,” because it turns out she’s specific. She rolls her clothes. She doesn’t fold her clothes. She rolls them because that’s a way to reduce wrinkles or something like that.
She was so particular. Even though I folded them, I didn’t even fold them in her way. Instead of me telling her to relax and loosen up and not worry about it, I was like, “That’s great. Now I know that it’s not helpful to do it for you and I’ll take your stuff to your room and you can roll it because I know that’s how you prefer it.” That’s acceptance of somebody else.
If I take the assessment, I look at these answers, and I say, “This is clear to me,” I’m going to ask, “Is it as simple.” I know it’s not as simple, but is the next step the main focus on getting the environments aligned with you and seeing your weaknesses as strengths? Are there other things that a person needs to do to maximize their unique self in an environment that’s unaligned, or maybe some things that won’t change? Certainly, your partner could change and your job can change, but the family you were born into or your family of origin is not going to change. I could see someone having a whole bunch of different revelations, “I now see myself. Now how do I align this to the world?”
those are the main things. Those are the biggest things. Do I have a better understanding of who I am? Can I accept and appreciate even myself, and then find and create alignment? The bigger one is, “Can I do this for other people? Can I give my spouse permission to be who they are?” I’ll give you an example. I’m a professional speaker. I know a lot of speakers whose wife is their manager.
She makes the appointment, does the schedule, and helps manage the podcast. She might even end up co-writing some of the books. She might even work with them on some of the projects. They’re a team and their business isn’t him or her. It’s them. That’s very attractive to me and I would love for that to be the way it is in my relationship, but my wife has no interest and/or any particular ability to do any of those things that would be complimentary to what I need.
At the same time, my wife is an amazing and intuitive interior designer who went and got a certification in it, but only because she was already doing it and getting paid for it, and thought she should put some certification on it. When people come to our house, they go, “This is amazing. I wouldn’t have thought to do things this way, but this is nice.” I accept and appreciate who my wife is instead of saying, “How come you can’t help run the family business?”
I accept and appreciate who my kids are instead of telling them they need to be entrepreneurs or they need to help run the family business. I don’t care what you want to do, what I need as somebody to ship books in the garage. I’m not interested in who you’re trying to become. I’m interested in having an employee and you’re in this family and you’re benefiting from this business.
It gets broad quickly. If someone is a business owner, I’m not just taking the assessment for myself. I want other people to take the assessment. I want to help them find alignment because I probably have a high degree of control over what people are doing and not doing. I have the ability to give some people alignment and to give them permission to avoid certain things. I have the ability to partner people up in certain ways that they may not be able to choose on their own.
You probably need to start with yourself to understand it, but it does become a family thing, an organizational thing, “Am I willing to give to others these same things that were valuable for myself? Am I willing to help other people find alignment? Am I willing to accept and appreciate people? I want to be accepted and appreciated, but am I willing to accept and appreciate people who are different from me?” Once you’ve done it personally, it does become an interpersonal challenge as well, “Am I willing to give other people the same freedom to be themselves as I’d like to have for myself?”
One thing you said that made me think, there’ll be less of them because of the change of pace in the world, but family businesses. You see all these problems and you think about these kids who are artistic or whatever and the family business is not a fit for them, but there’s an obligation to go into it. I see this generation of leaders a little more aware of that. It can be a blessing and a curse.
Look at it right now. We’ll see what happens. LeBron James’s son is shorter than him and smaller than him and way less athletic than him. LeBron James came straight out of high school. He never even went to college and by tenth grade, people knew he was going to be the next great basketball player. LeBron James might get drafted, but he scored five points a game in college.
He’s going to get drafted because LeBron said he wants to play with his son.
He probably won’t and maybe he’ll hit a growth spurt or maybe he’ll be a Steph Curry person, but he certainly isn’t right now. Maybe he felt like, “I’m LeBron James’s son and maybe this is something I need to do.” You’re going to see right there that even something like that, even when you come from that genetic lineage, it’s not a guarantee that a child is going to be into what the parents are into or have any ability for it or whatever. That’s a huge mistake.
If I’m Tom Brady’s son, I’m not playing quarterback. Maybe a different position.
Look at the Manning family. There’s Peyton and there’s Eli and then the brother.
Achie, Texas.
It’s the same with the Hemsworth. There’s Liam and Chris and then there’s another one who has never been in anything and has had a couple of things. It’s not automatic. I have three daughters. Let’s go all the way back to education. This is one of the things I’m the most proud of. This is an example of what do you do with this. I have three daughters. All three of them went to different high schools because the question isn’t, “What’s a good school?” The question is, “What’s the right school for this particular person?”
The oldest went K through 12 at this private religious school that we started them all at. The second one when she got to eighth grade, said, “Can I be homeschooled?” I thought, “I have an unconventional work life. Why can’t she have an unconventional school life?” She did an online program through a university that ultimately got her a two-year college degree while she was still in high school, which enabled her to only go to two years of college and get her four-year degree.
The youngest one went from there to a college prep school where you start writing your college essays and practicing your college essays like in ninth grade. We sent her there because it was the right people to be around. She had some friends there who cared about academics and success. At the other school, they didn’t. She’s very influenced by what her friends are up to.
That’s an example. We spent a lot of time and a lot of money helping to personalize and customize each of their education. Instead of going, “School is school. The public school is free. You have to do what you have to do to be successful in that environment. I don’t want to hear you complain about it. This is the way life is.” We’ve put a lot of resources, time, and energy into driving them to school because there’s no bus and all this stuff to help them see. That’s a lesson the kid learns that it’s okay to try to craft a life that fits me. Instead of saying I have to constantly change myself to fit the world around me.
Organizational Context
Flipping again, I’m thinking back to the organizational context because I assume there are a lot of quarterly reviews going on. I know a lot of leaders like to talk about weaknesses in these reviews.
Sometimes, they require it. Sometimes people say, “You have to have at least one negative about the person that they need to improve on and stuff.”
I was thinking of this as I was asking the question. It’s about what you’re doing well and where you can improve. I assume you would argue that the manager and leadership lead into their strengths and mitigating weaknesses. There are some things like your self-awareness is low and people comment that you say things inappropriately. They’re probably not going to fix that, but it is probably a problem in the workplace. How do you suggest managing something like that?
Alignment means that sometimes people don’t fit. This sounds like I’m saying, “Everybody is awesome and we should all give them a hug,” but it’s not. Sometimes you should let people go. You go, “This isn’t the right spot for you. This isn’t the right place for you.” I’ll give you an example. It happened with Steve Jobs at Atari. He smelled bad. He was on some weird diet that made him smell bad. He didn’t wear shoes. He didn’t wash his clothes on a regular basis. He had a lot of fixations throughout his life, At one point, he only ate fruit for a long time.
What that guy did is he put him on the night shift by himself because he knew his interpersonal skills, plus his body odor and other things. He knew he was a valuable person to have, but he couldn’t have him interacting with too many other people. He put him on the overnight shift and got them away from everybody else. That’s one example, I call them side effects, of if somebody has enough benefits that they’re worth the side effects. There’s another example from somebody who runs an IT company, and I use a couple of his examples in my Amplifi presentation. He’s like, “We have somebody good on projects. The problem is he can’t handle interruptions. If he gets interrupted, he loses track and he also gets upset.”
It sounds like me.
Instead of trying to fix that, he said, “We shield him from interruptions. We get him the time and effort he needs to knock out these important projects because he does a great job on them and it’s beneficial to us. We protect him instead of saying, ‘Interruptions just happen.’ We keep him from being uninterrupted because he produces such a valuable service for our company and our organization. We adapt to get the best out of him instead of telling him he has to find a way to get over this.” They have another person who he says is pushy. He said, “We give them opportunities. We give them jobs where being pushy is a plus. We need them to be pushy with a customer, with another employee, with a vendor, or pushy with a product.”
They put them on collections.
People say, “Our business is too small. We don’t have the flexibility for that.” If you’re small, you have maximum flexibility. That’s exactly the time to do it. “Our business is too big. We’re too standardized for that.” The beauty of big businesses is you have tiny little slivers of jobs. Somebody can be just the collections person and for accounts that are over 90 days past due and over $10,000. That’s the job you have in a big company. You can be a total specialized player where you only need one skill and the the rest of the skills don’t matter.
That’s where quarterly reviews and that’s the company that’s doing Amplifi right now. That’s the way they do them. They ask two questions, “What are you liking that you’d like to do more of? What are you not liking that you’d like to do less of? Let’s have that conversation and see how we can get you more of the right fit and less of the wrong fit?” I call that alignment and avoidance. That’s one of the big sticking points for people tuning in to this. People love the idea of build on strengths and almost anybody nods on them. The problem becomes if the person is going to spend more time on their strengths, they’re going to need to stop doing these things that don’t fit them. That’s where it all breaks down.
You have to do that. That’s part of the job. It’s like alignment can only happen with avoidance. In order for me to have more time and energy for the things that I’m good at and that I do well, I need to be putting less time and energy into the things that don’t. That’s where it starts to get tough because who is going to answer that phone call or who is going to run those meetings? There are some great examples with the company that I’m working with. It’s a small tech company in the Boston area.
There are two people with ostensibly the same job, but one person loves to run these customer meetings that they have where they talk to their customers in groups. They call them round tables. She loves to facilitate the customer round tables, but she hates paperwork and documentation. It matches her profile. She’s an interactive interpersonal person. The other person’s very meticulous and has all of those accounting qualities. She loves the documentation.
The one person has been moved into more of a documentation role but is still within the same job, but she handles more of the documentation. She doesn’t do anything with the round tables. The other person does less of the documentation and handles the round tables. Even within a specific role, people can handle more or less of these certain kinds of pieces. You can give people a lot more satisfaction even within the role that they have if you’re looking for that as a solution versus suck it up and do what needs to be done. That’s what I hired you for.
That’s great advice for managers and leaders. If you have a performance review coming up, take that into account in terms of how do you get the things you want and avoid the parts of it that you don’t want.
People say that there are some things that nobody wants to do, and that’s never true.
I’ve been in these delegate and elevate exercises. People give up half their stuff and the other person wants it. It’s fascinating if you’ve ever done one of these things.
We say one man’s trash is another man’s treasure, and that applies at work. The example I give that I love lately is I was talking to this guy and he goes, “When I have a bad day at work, I’d like to go home, pour a glass of wine, sit down in my favorite chair, and crack open my laptop.” I said, “I don’t need to hear the rest of this.” He goes, “I fire up some spreadsheets.” I was like, “That did not.”
What I do with my audience is I say, “Raise your hand if you have to do Excel as a significant part of your job.” Almost every hand goes up in every audience. I then say, “Raise your hand if doing Excel fuels your soul,” and then four hands go up, but hands go up. That’s the thing. One man’s trash is another man’s treasure. Some people are like, “If I never had to open an Excel spreadsheet again for the rest of my life, it would be better. Other people are doing it voluntarily as a way to de-stress at the end of the day.
That’s what I teach people. You can try to force people to do things that don’t fit, but they’re never going to do it at the level of a person who is fueling their soul. That exists for almost everything that somebody could do. What you want to start doing in the organization is to start divvying this stuff up differently. Instead of saying that’s the job, you say, “Given the people that we have and given what their strengths and weaknesses are, how do we constantly be in the process of giving people better alignment and do it on an ongoing basis and make it 1%, 2%, or 3% better?”
You can try to force people to do things that do not fit them, but they will never do it at a level that will fuel their souls.
That’s something that Amplifi will do in the next phase. We’re in the first phase now, but because you’re going to get things to align and things to avoid, the next phase is going to have a follow-up assessment where then you go in and you tick the things that currently align. you tick the things that you have to do that you wish you were avoiding, and then you get a score like in school out of a 100 and we go, “You’re 62%, 94% or 47% aligned. If you want to be more aligned, here are the things you already saw them. These are the things you need to do to find that alignment, and these are the kinds of things you have to do less of.” Giving people the goal of this is to give people more customized and personalized direction on how to use their defining features, and use those matching strengths and weaknesses.
Episode Wrap-up
If people want to learn more about you, your books, and Amplifi, where do they go?
DRendall.com. It has a short version of the Freak Factor talk. It has that original assessment we talked about that you can download a PDF form. You can find all about Amplifi at AmplifiTest.com. You can read all about it and see some of the sample reports and things like that. If you’re interested in taking it, you can contact me and we’ll see about getting started.
Thanks for returning to the show. I always love this topic and enjoy our conversations. Thanks for stopping by again.
Thanks a lot for having me.
To our audience, thanks for tuning in. Thanks for your support. Until next time, keep elevating.
Important Links
- The Freak Factor
- The Four Factors of Effective Leadership
- Pink Goldfish
- Episode 70 – Past Episode
- The Element
- The Imperfectionist Podcast
- David Rendall
- Amplifi Test
