HOW TO DEVELOP LEADERS
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Tips on how to develop leaders with Peter Montoya
- As I help develop leaders my job is to help them become much more effective. And oftentimes I serve as a leader confidant.
- The feedback agreement is, you want to give feedback that is kind, honest and helpful.
- All leadership is leadership development, which means that my sole job is to be coaching, training, mentoring people in my organizations to be a leader themself, leaders of friends and family, and leaders in my organization.
- And leadership development starts before the interview, most likely in the employee manual.
- There is no avoiding all political decisions. There is minimizing political decisions.
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HOW TO DEVELOP LEADERS
Most leadership authors portray leaders as being extroverts. And that is categorically wrong.
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Doug: Well, welcome back listeners to another episode of Real Marketing Real Fast. Today in the studio I’ve got joining me, Peter Montoya. Now, Peter is a very gifted speaker. He is a bestselling author. He’s a successful entrepreneur. And rarely do you find all three qualities like that in one person. Peter’s a thought leader, he’s a skilled orator and a leadership strategist with real-life experience driving his insights and ideas.
Doug: His business acumen, inspirational journey, and human behavior insight and decades of real-life experience have helped him become one of the most inspirational and sought after speakers, coaches, and leaders in development for creating high performing teams.
Doug: When he isn’t transforming organizations around the globe, Peter lives with his wife and his two teenagers in Orange County, California. He is the best selling author. His first book was called The Brand Called You, and his latest book is called Leadership Power. He is also just starting a podcast that should be out shortly.
Doug: So I’d like to welcome Peter Montoya to the Real Marketing Real Fast podcast today. Well, Hey Peter, super excited to have you on the Real Marketing Real Fast podcast today. So welcome to the show.
Peter: Thank you, Doug. I’m thrilled to be here.
Doug: Do you want to give our audience just a high-level overview of your kind of expertise and how you help your clients?
Peter: Sure. You bet. My previous career wasn’t that of personal branding. I wrote a book called The Brand Called You, and I spent the better part of 30 years working with independent financial advisors, helping them with their marketing and branding. So all that knowledge is still stored in my head. But as I’ve evolved, I really have become an expert in that of leadership in high-performance teams.
Peter: My job is to help leaders become much more effective. And oftentimes I serve as a leader confidant. Oftentimes what leaders need is someone to cry over the phone at nine o’clock at night when they’re faced with really big decisions. And then also helping people inside companies work better together and get more done. And that really comes to the process of empowerment.
Doug: Well, as I mentioned before we started recording, one of the things that really caught my eye when I was looking through your skillsets, and I would assume those are your kind of four power talks or presentations you get, was the feedback agreement. And as a creative agency, often we find it difficult working with clients because everybody’s got an opinion.
Doug: Can you walk us through a bit of the low hanging fruit, how you help your leaders to make sure that they’re getting appropriate feedback and dealing with that, and being able to use that to empower their people and to still be able to execute?
Peter: You bet. A quick story. I’m on my second marriage. I’ve been married to my wife Amy, been with my wife Amy now for nine years. And maybe about a year ago, she came to me and she asked me the most horrible question that any wife can ask of a husband.
Peter: She said, “Peter, I need you to do me a favor.” I said, “Of course wife, whatever you might need.” She said, “Peter, if I ever get too big, too heavy, I need you to tell me.”
Doug: That’s as bad as, does this dress look good on me?
Peter: Exactly. I said, “There is no way.” And she said, “Look, here’s what my body looks like when it’s too big when it’s too heavy. Here’s what I weigh. Here are my criteria.” And I said, “Baby, I’m not doing this. I don’t care what the criteria are. I’m not telling you this.”
Peter: She said, “Peter, you’ve absolutely got to tell me. I will never get mad at you, but you absolutely got to do it.” I said, “Okay wife, I’ll tell you. It’s now.” By her criteria, she had gotten a little too heavy. And we both know that human beings are self-delusional creatures. We have ways of kind of masking ourselves to how we appear, or how we interact with other people.
Peter: And we kind of had a good laugh over that. And we realized both of us had feedback for our spouse that we’re both holding off from giving each other. And we said this is ridiculous. We both know each other, love each other more than any other human beings on the planet, so why are we not sharing feedback with each other that could actually help us grow?
Peter: So that’s how we kind of came up with this informal feedback agreement that I later took into companies. And the feedback agreement is, you more or less want to give feedback that is kind, honest and helpful.
Doug: There you go.
Peter: First of all, feedback is always given for the benefit of the recipient. The recipient gets to choose when feedback is given. So it’s not like you can just say … My wife was one time in the middle of parenting one of our children, I thought she was being too aggressive. That was not the time to give her that feedback.
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Most leadership authors portray leaders as being extroverts. And that is categorically wrong.
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Doug: We’ve got three kids. We’re into the grandkids now. And, yeah, my son doesn’t want to get feedback from me parenting while he’s in the middle of giving one of his kids a timeout.
Peter: Exactly. So, later on, I said, “Hey, do you mind if I give you some feedback?” She said, “Here’s when I want you to do it.” Usually, it’s almost always when we’re laying in bed snuggling at night is when she likes to receive feedback. And then I was able to give her the feedback.
Peter: The person receiving feedback gets to choose the time. Almost always it’s confidential. And almost always is done in private. You don’t want to be doing that out in public where everyone else can see it, because it’s really hard for people to receive.
Peter: And when you give the feedback, the whole idea is it’s kind, number one. You’re not doing it to hurt somebody else. You’re doing it to help them. So you use soft language.
Peter: It’s honest, which means you’re not practicing ruthless honesty by being brutal with your language, but you’re being rigorous and you’re sharing all the details that need to be shared.
Peter: And you’re being helpful. And helpful means you be specific. When you were with your kids, here’s what I heard, here’s how I experienced it. And you try to be as specific as possible. That’s how you give good feedback.
Doug: How do you get to that place? If you’re a leader in the organization and you’ve got a team, you’ve got staff, you’ve got consultants and suppliers. How do you get to that point where you can have that conversation?
Peter: A couple of different ways to implement it. How I’ve done it in my company is we’ve built it both … What I really believe, that all leadership develops … First of all, leadership has fundamentally changed. 40 years ago leadership was about commanding control. I’m the leader of the organization. I do all the thinking. I tell people to do, people do what I order them to do. That was the old model of leadership.
Doug: Oh, has that changed?
Peter: A bit. Today, in my view, all leadership is leadership development, which means that my sole job is to be coaching, training, mentoring people in my organizations to be a leader themself, leaders of friends and family, and leaders in my organization.
Peter: It’s all about leadership development. And very little is about strategy and vision, which is what most leadership books are about. About how to be a strategist and vision. That’s actually a minority of it now. Now, it’s about collaboration, getting ideas from the bottom, how do you push decisions closer down to the people who are actually implementing them?
Peter: All leadership is about leadership development. And leadership development starts before the interview, most likely in the employee manual. So in our employee manual, we have several of our values that are actually put into it. And the feedback agreement is built into our employee manual.
Peter: It’s built into the interview process, so when we’re interviewing people, we ask them how they feel about feedback. When was the last time they gave feedback? How did they respond to it? And sharing that we are a feedback organization, and you’re going to be getting feedback almost daily on a regular basis. Does that offend you? So that’s built into the interview.
Peter: And then we make sure that managers are giving feedback to all their employees the first week. Doug, did you ever play a sport where you had a coach who was ruthless about giving you feedback?
Doug: Yep.
Peter: Which was it, hockey, football?
Doug: No, I wrestled.
Peter: Wrestle, right. On day number one you probably walked in there and after about five minutes that coach was giving you some very vociferous feedback, maybe even yelling at you. And you got used to that culture very, very quickly. So if you go into a work environment and you don’t get feedback for two weeks, it comes out of the left field. It’s got to happen right away when you go to work.
Peter: And feedback doesn’t necessarily mean constructive, it just means feedback. “Hey, what you did over there was really good.” You can start conditioning them to it for that environment. So feedback happens even before the first interview.
Doug: Where do you start when you come into a company? You come into a company, a company’s existing, they’ve got staff, they’ve got a certain culture that’s going. They may still be running the company from the top down, I’m the boss, I make all the decisions, I do all the vision, the creation. Where’s your starting point?
Peter: Yeah. It’s almost like, if ever a psychologist wants to change the behavior of a child, they start by coaching the parent. All of my work starts with coaching the leaders first and getting buy-in to the feedback agreement.
Peter: We have a couple of different versions of the feedback agreement. And one’s an enterprise version where basically any employee can give feedback to any other employee, independent of title and status. And that’s the one I recommend. I want feedback in my organization from everybody at my team, no matter who they are. And that’s really, really unusual. And you have to create an incredibly safe environment for your lowest ranking employee to give your most senior employees honest feedback because they’re afraid you might fire them. And you’ve got to create a culture where they know that’s not true. That’s one type of feedback agreement.
Peter: Another one is peer-to-peer. Anybody in the organization can find someone else who in the organization who’s lateral with them and tell them, “Hey listen, I want you to be my truth-teller. Tell me the truth when I’m messing up or I can do something better, I want you to tell me.”
Peter: And the other one is the manager to employee, which is kind of one-directional, which is the managers give feedback to employees. Which they should be doing anyway, but we’ve become a kind of siloed in away from giving feedback in organizations.
Peter: My hope is that business leaders choose the enterprise level of feedback agreement, and do it completely throughout the organization. Build it into the employee manual, build it in the interviews, and start taking it culture-wide.
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Most leadership authors portray leaders as being extroverts. And that is categorically wrong.
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Doug: Yeah. In the space that I work in, there’s definitely silos because we’ve got usually the three big ones, or the four big ones are you got the CEO, we’ve got the finance department, which we need to get a budget approved from. And then I work in the sales and marketing department. And sales and marketing throw rocks at each other all the time. So the feedback isn’t generally kind. It’s like, “Hey, your leads suck.” And then marketing goes, “Hey, you guys can’t close sales.” Is the general conversation. That doesn’t fit into your criteria of a kind, honest and helpful.
Peter: No. So people definitely need some training on that one.
Peter: I’m going to take a quick aside here. The other master value that I put into my organization, and we also provide to companies, is that of the meritocracy. Let’s just say for argument’s sake, there are two ways to make decisions. One way is a meritocracy when either the best idea and/or the best person advances, which is what you want to do as a business. You want to make sure the best ideas actually win and actually get implemented by the organization.
Peter: The other way is political. That’s a very simple, simplistic view. Political decisions are where some faction of people make a decision based on optics, or what’s best for them, or their own advancement. And it isn’t necessarily the best for the organization. There is no avoiding all political decisions. There is minimizing political decisions.
Peter: And so a good organization also has got to commit to being a meritocracy where the best ideas win and/or the best people advanced independently of age, creed, whatever other things that it might be. You don’t look at that, it’s just the best person to get the job done advances in an organization. And as soon as you make that solely as your ideal, make a commitment to it, it makes the feedback agreement easier to implement.
Doug: Looking at that as kind of a bar to achieve, who makes the decision the best idea, best advance?
Peter: Correct. Oh, who makes the decision? Well, obviously it’s the company leadership who should be making that decision and putting it into place. Otherwise, you can look at individual teams could be making the decision. But it’s always best when everyone in the organization is playing by the same rules.
Doug: How much do you think has changed in the world now with the number of remote workers? I see now we’ve got companies in America that have huge outsourcing offices all over the world, in Europe and Asia. Do you think it’s affected this leadership style?
Peter: Yeah. And that’s such an interesting question, especially considering the dynamics that are happening right now with the Coronavirus. The land beneath our feet is shifting as we speak right now with that.
Peter: I have a couple of different views on teleworking, outside and independent of what’s happening in the Coronavirus. People are more productive, by and large, in their home environments. And also, they’re less collaborative and less creative outside of the office. That’s pretty clear on what the research says there.
Peter: And then the other major problem when people are spending large amounts of their time at home and not with other people, is we are also not meeting our social needs. Human beings need between three to four hours a day of good social contact.
Peter: Good social contact rarely happens over the phone, however it can. This is when you’re really connected with somebody and you’re empathetic, so it’s kind of a subjective measure, a little bit spongy. And you can get it through conference calls, but not usually. If you’re in problem-solving mode, that’s not what you need.
Peter: You need three to four hours of good social connectivity. And when you don’t get that, what happens is your anxiety goes up, your self-confidence and self-esteem goes down. Your propensity to be authentic, which is unique onto yourself, starts to drop away, and you start adopting behavior styles to fit in.
Peter: This has longterm implications, not only on the individual but also on the organization. So I’m really trying to thread the needle on that one between having people work from home, which is more cost-effective and more productive, with maintaining collaboration, culture, creativity, and also developing leaders, which requires face to face contact.
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HOW TO DEVELOP LEADERS
Most leadership authors portray leaders as being extroverts. And that is categorically wrong.
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Doug: Well, I’ve got remote workers, and we’re dealing with different cultures and different beliefs. And it’s just a whole different dynamic because people that work inside North America have a general business sense, and people who are in India or the Philippines or different countries, whole different culture. To come back to your feedback loop, giving them feedback, at least from my experience, you have to take a different approach because there is a different culture and you have to understand and respect that or it’s not going to go well.
Peter: It is so amazing. One of my favorite quotes is the last thing to discover the water is fish. A fish is always in the water. They don’t know it, they can’t see it because that’s what they are in. And the same thing is true about our culture. As Americans, we’re so fast-talking, straight-talking and blunt. And much around the world, they don’t understand that. Much around the world, they are incredibly deferential to their leaders, which means whatever the leader says goes. And here in the United States, it is much more of a conversation, and where we have to honor the thoughts, moods, wishes of our workers in order to really empower them. So you’re right, it’s different depending on where you’re talking around the world.
Doug: Looking kind of at a global view, and how the world is changing, business is changing, the change of attitude with the millennials coming in. What are you most excited about, and where do you see this unraveling? For your business, where do you think the big opportunity is?
Peter: That’s a great question. My perspectives on marketing have radically changed, and I’m really understanding the power of social media and Google search specifically. 20 years ago, when I was in personal branding, what you did, you worked as an artist.
Peter: More or less, you looked at the marketplace, you had this kind of intuitive sense of what they might want, you went back to your workshop or your artistry shop, your salon, and you crafted this brand based on what you thought the marketplace might want. You’d take the brand out there to the marketplace, and you’d wait three to six months to see how the marketplace reacted. And then you would go back and kind of craft and sculpt your artistry a little bit more.
Peter: And today, it’s much more driven by data, which means we’re constantly looking at what the marketplace is actually searching for on a day by day, hour by hour basis. And then try to build our messaging and our brand to be what people are looking for. And that has been a seismic shift that’s happened for me over the last 20 years as a marketer.
Doug: Well, and now you bring in AI that’s been rolling out. And now they’re creating advertising in images based on AI in people’s realtime conversations online. So it starts to take some of that creative thing, where you and I would sit in a board room and craft a brand, now it puts it in the hands of a computer. It’s like you said, it’s getting realtime feedback from the marketplace, and it’s doing that without necessarily a human input.
Peter: Yeah. So the big question for us as marketers is how do we move faster? How do we shift faster? I mean, I’ve been an entrepreneur now for the better part of 30 years, and I was always pivoting, constantly adjusting my business to the winds of the marketplace. But that might happen once a month or once every three months. And now it’s happening even faster than that. So how do we psychologically adjust to making pivots even on a day, week, monthly basis?
Doug: Well, and with the companies that you’ve worked with, especially in the financial space, where do you think the low hanging fruit is for most of these guys? And I’m not asking you to name names, but I’m thinking that when you go into a company, there are probably two or three big “ahas” that right away you walk in and you just know. When I go into a company, I look at what they’re doing marketing-wise, I can normally see really quickly what the potential issues are to resolve. So what are the issues that you normally discover as you go in and have your first meeting with these guys?
Peter: In the financial services business, which is a little bit different from other businesses out there, a lot of them were really hanging their hat. I worked a lot with financial advisors. And what financial advisors wanted to do is they wanted to project trustworthiness and credibility, so a lot of them would create corporate brands. So they may have been a one-man office, or a two-man office or one financial advisor, an assistant of some sort, and they would try to create these big company names as a way of projecting size and credibility. And it never ever worked.
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Most leadership authors portray leaders as being extroverts. And that is categorically wrong.
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Peter: What’s really interesting is by and large when we look at the most credible names in financial services, they’re almost always personal names. The luxury space is dominated. When you are looking at high-quality luxury brands, it is dominated by personal brands, which means the company names are based on people’s last names, or first and last names, like Charles Schwab, or Merrill Lynch are two last names. It is dominated by that space.
Peter: And financial advisors who are in the business of personal relationships, when their personality is everything, it’s always moving them away from the corporate brand and toward a personal brand. That’s because that’s who the relationship was with, was with that financial advisor.
Peter: Now, that lesson is not true for all financial services companies, but it’s true for most individual financial advisors. The book was called The Brand Called You. That was for a reason. It was because the relationship was between the advisor and the client.
Doug: Yeah, I’ve seen that as well, where you look up the address, and the address, as you said, is a small office. But the idea is if you can create a big image so you can look like … I’m looking at your website, Fidelity, which is a company I’ve worked with and rented their data before. You want to look like that. But really you’re not. I mean, you’re one person with an assistant. And that doesn’t hold true today because, as you said, social media, the internet, do a quick Google search, they can take a look at your office from wherever you are in the world with the street view and quickly size up the company.
Peter: Right. The only way to demonstrate quality is to have quality. So that means if you want to demonstrate that you are a sufficient company that has quality, you have to have quality stuff. You got to have a quality office space, you got to have a quality reception, you have to have quality branding materials and business cards and websites. You have to have things that are well thought out. You got to demonstrate quality if you want people to think that you’re credible.
Doug: Yeah. I mean, looking at your website, I didn’t know you had a branding background. That explains why your website looks really good.
Peter: Thank you.
Doug: You’ve done a great job. It’s easy to navigate. It just screams high-level professionals. So yeah, it was really well done. So outside the financial services, who are most of the types of clients that you work with? Is there an industry that you specialize in?
Peter: No. I’ve been fortunate enough to be able to speak with lots of different people from engineering, a lot of professional services, biotech, technology. All of those I’ve had a great hand in. I even had a chance to work with Disney for a while here too.
Doug: That’s really cool. Is there a win that you can share with us? Name the client, not name the client, of somebody that you came in, and after they invested some time with you at senior management level, you managed to have a significant impact on their company?
Peter: I did. So the two things that were really kind of the one-two punch. Number one was the feedback agreement. And that is revolutionary for organizations. And the reason being, in my opinion, is that feedback is the oxygen of growth. So as an individual, we’ve always got to be growing, and feedback is probably one of the best ways to do that, on top of either coaching or self-reflection. But feedback, they can hire expensive coaches like me to give them feedback, but all they have to do is really empower their peers and employees to give them feedback and they can save themselves $500 an hour in hiring me to give them feedback.
Doug: I’m sure you’ve got a framework. I mean, it’s easy to say: Hey, give me feedback.” But without a framework, and spending some time setting up a system for feedback, it’s likely it’s not going to end well.
Peter: Very true.
Doug: If I went to our team, or a client I’m working with, and said, “Hey, give me feedback.” I’d get 50 emails of how I should change a few words in the ad, and it’s the wrong color, and they don’t like the picture, which isn’t going to be helpful to me at all.
Peter: So the feedback we’re talking about here specifically is really around us. So leadership is a very highly personal endeavor. It isn’t like where you’re swinging a hammer on a construction site or ringing up people in a retail store. It is personal about how you showed up. Hey, when you said this, this is how you came across. Hey, your energy in the room was kind of angry and intimidating and diminutive, and I felt threatened, or whatever it might be. You might be thinking, well, I was just trying to be direct. I didn’t know I came across that way. But people are very, very in sense of that.
Peter: So the feedback we’re really talking about here is personal feedback, which we as leaders desperately need to evolve and grow so we’re much more effective.
Doug: For our listeners that are listening and go, “Hey, that sounds great, but …” How do you take that and implement that? You’re working in an organization, you’re at a C level, your CEO is doing what your CEO does, and you think, “Hey, he needs some feedback.” How do you take that first step to have that conversation and begin that conversation?
Peter: Much to my surprise, CEOs absolutely love the feedback agreement and really do want it. Most good CEOs realize that they need feedback in order to grow. The ones that I always worry about are the ones who like to chew somebody out, or kind of have this command and control kind of iron fist approach to leadership. Those are the ones I worry about. I’ve only come across one of those. I did not last long with him. He did not like my advice.
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HOW TO DEVELOP LEADERS
Most leadership authors portray leaders as being extroverts. And that is categorically wrong.
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Peter: But otherwise, other leaders I talked to are constantly into development and growth. They’re listening to podcasts, reading books, getting coaching. They really are already of that mindset. And the whole idea of unleashing the organization’s creative juices and feedback powers is really attracted to them.
Peter: So we start at the top, get leadership buy-in. We get it into the employee manuals. We come out and do training. More or less where a CEO introduces me and says, “We’re doing the feedback agreement, we’re implementing this.”
Peter: I train on the feedback agreement, both how to give it, kind, honest, helpful feedback. And then also more importantly, how to receive the feedback. We talk about that as well, where you’re kind of open-minded, you’re very, very humble. Humble means you’re able to look at yourself objectively, and you’re able to admit you’re wrong if you’ve made a mistake, and as well as you see it as a gift. You see feedback as a gift. And it’s kind of the mindset we give people.
Peter: And then we actually have them give feedback right there in the room with somebody else they work with, through an exercise of my experience of working with you is, and they give two or three minutes of feedback right there in the room. Then it’s required of them to give feedback to at least one person, every single business day for the next month.
Peter: It doesn’t have to be constructive, and that’s the word we use, constructive. Not critical, but they’ve got to give feedback where they say, “Hey, do you mind if I give you some feedback?” The quarantine themselves in an office somewhere, or on a private phone call, and then they give feedback. They’ve got to get themselves in the practice of it. And that’s kind of the quick start process we take with companies.
Doug: How do you find that the subordinates feel when the leader comes in and says this is what we’re going to do. I’m sure they’re kind of thinking, okay, that sounds good, but as you said, will I get fired? Will, I not get the next promotion if I give good, honest feedback, even if I give it to them kind?
Peter: Yeah. So the leaders have really got to demonstrate this. One of the things that I do very regularly is whenever I make a mistake in organizations, I tell people I made a mistake. I go ahead and I will have either conference calls and/or meetings, bring my mistake in full view, tell people what my thought process was, where I made a mistake and how I screwed up. And I use very forceful language like that. And I let people comment.
Peter: And whenever people give me feedback in those meetings, I never ever punish the feedback giver. Punishment means cross tones, bad looks, disagreement. I just go, great, thank you so much, I really appreciate that. And I just keep taking the feedback in a very open way. They’ve got to see it modeled for them what it looks like to take good feedback. And I have never, ever, ever gone back and punished somebody after the fact for giving me feedback that I didn’t want to hear.
Doug: Well, I mean, that’s great from your side as a leader and building your company that way. I think there are lots of lessons. Right away, as soon as you said that, I take responsibility and I bring my mistakes out front, my immediate thought went to politics, but we won’t have that conversation of, “Hey, if they just admitted they made a mistake, people would forgive you a lot easier than trying to deny it and hide.” But that’s a discussion for another day.
Doug: What’s the bad advice that you hear in the leadership space? I mean, there’s a million people out there that talk about all sorts of stuff, whether it’s branding or leadership. What’s the really bad advice that you hear?
Peter: First of all, most leadership authors kind of portray leaders as being extroverts. These kinds of people who stand up on a podium and they’re giving these mass speeches, and they’re very jovial and social, and they kind of move people through this very extroverted way. And that is categorically wrong. It is just categorically wrong.
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Most leadership authors portray leaders as being extroverts. And that is categorically wrong.
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Peter: Leadership comes in all shapes and styles. Introverts are some of the most powerful leaders in the country. I think the best type of leadership is what we’ll call transformative leadership. And a transformative leader changes the fundamental understanding of what something is. That’s what a transformative leader is. They fundamentally change the understanding of what something is.
Peter: So our founding fathers here in the United States of America, up until 1776 the only type of government in the world, I think, at the time, if I remember correctly, were monarchies. Almost all the 100 and something countries were monarchies. Not a single democracy of the people. And our founding fathers, many of them who were introverts, many of them who were very thoughtful, excellent writers, incredible thinkers, maybe even some good or not oratory skills, decided to say, “We’re going to make a change with what people understand to be a country.” And they invented the first democracy back in 1776.
Peter: Now, that fundamental change not only caused a ripple effect, in now that we have a majority of the world’s countries are now a democracy. The United States of America is one of the most powerful countries in the world as a democracy. But it also unleashed the thinking and creativity of hundreds of millions of people in this country to go out and create something different. So, that’s what a transformative leader does.
Peter: One could argue that Stephen Hawking was a transformative leader. One could argue that Albert Einstein was a transformative leader. And these people were not necessarily the let’s go charge the hill, stand on top and make these big giant shows. They don’t necessarily always have great personality skills. They’re not always necessarily benevolent. Steve Jobs didn’t want to change the world, but he was very mercurial in how he wanted to do it, and not always a nice guy. He was charismatic to other people, but he could be incredibly harsh and brooding inside the company.
Peter: So this picture that all leaders are extroverts, and they all give rousing speeches, and they’re all great at strategy and vision, isn’t really true. I really sincerely believe that everyone is a leader, and everyone cultivates their own leadership style.
Doug: Well, it’s interesting because when you were talking about different styles, I was thinking of when I read Elon Musk’s book and thinking, as much as I admire his vision and the major changes he’s made to kind of put the US on the map big time with their own space program and stop outsourcing, I read how awful it would be to work for a guy like with his expectations of like, why aren’t you in the office 20 hours out of the 24 hours? So, maybe a great leader. I don’t know. It doesn’t sound like he’d be a fun guy to work for, but definitely someone who is … I don’t know. I call it transformational because he’s changed the thinking with our financial space. I mean, now we’re doing everything digitally and it’s really cool.
Peter: I would completely and totally agree with all of that assessment. He might be a little stronger on the command and control side of leadership. And you can do that when you are really, really brilliant. So when you’re Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates level brilliant, you can be a little more command and control, and do a little more thinking for your people. But when you’re like the rest of us mortals, you really got to empower good thinking from your base.
Doug: Looking at where things are going, where do you see yourself developing your businesses as the world changes? You’re obviously online, you’ve got a blog, you’re starting a podcast. So congratulations and welcome to the podcasting world.
Peter: Oh, I love podcasts.
Doug: You’ve written a couple of books. You’re a marketing guy, where do you think it’s going to go from here?
Peter: Where am I going to go? Or where do I think the-
Doug: Yeah. Where are you going to go from here? I mean, you’ve got all the traditional stuff, you’ve got the print, and now you’re moving digital to a podcast. You’re still going out and you’re speaking to audiences.
Peter: I think the next major wave is in live streaming, so that’s where I think I’ll be headed to very, very shortly here. So not only can people listen to the audio, or watch the video on YouTube later, but actually doing live streaming, that’s where I’m headed next, and where I think the marketplace next evolution will probably go.
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Most leadership authors portray leaders as being extroverts. And that is categorically wrong.
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Doug: Yeah. There’s definitely a huge move there. I’ve seen it both on Facebook and LinkedIn, and people doing private live streams. I mean, we’re actually working on it with a client that’s doing a live stream for their business so they can show their investors what’s happening, so they can logon seven days a week, 24 hours a day and see what’s happening. So we’re definitely seeing a huge move to video. And we’re seeing great numbers in that coming in from the platforms. The platforms are just desperate for video. So from an advertising point of view, I’m not sure how closely you follow that these days, we’re getting rewarded for video, and getting punished for static ads.
Peter: Yep. That’s the direction we’re headed. And my guess is, and this is only a guess, that the coronavirus is probably going to accelerate that most likely here in the next coming six months to a year. So that’s probably just going to exasperate that trend.
Doug: Well, what a couple of guys that I talked to in my mastermind were talking about this week with the coronavirus, and they said, “What is the world going to look like after this?” How much of a change is this going to have across the entire world in the way that we do business in the future? Is it going to be the thing that moved e-commerce to the next level because people don’t want to go out and shop? And so we just kind of kicked around all this stuff. And obviously we don’t have the answers, but time will tell. But it’s going to be different.
Peter: I think so too. I think that it is going to kind of kickstart … People were teleworking a lot more, reducing business travel. I think big winners online are Amazon, all the food delivery services, and of course all of your teleworking type things, whether it be Zoom and/or there’s one called Teams on Microsoft. So all of those collaborative workings, I would imagine those would be the big winners that we’ll see after this.
Doug: Yeah, I mean we use Teams now for one client. I have Zoom calls every day. I try on my gym days, sometimes I don’t turn the video on because I’ve just come in from the gym and it’s not a pretty video view. Well, really cool. I just want to say I really appreciate your taking the time and sharing with us today.
Peter: Oh, it was so much fun, Doug. I love this conversation.
Doug: And I got a couple of questions for you. One is, who’s one guest that you think I absolutely have to have on my podcast?
Peter: Well, if you could get Sam Harris, that’d be the one guy who I would get. He’s one of my favorite podcasters, and he certainly is a thought leader.
Doug: And if you’re able to make an introduction, that’d be great. That always makes the conversation start easier.
Peter: I’d love to.
Doug: Where can people find you? I mean, I found you online because you’re a pretty easy guy to find. You’ve got a unique last name. There’s not five million Peter Montoya’s online. Where do you want people to track you down and take a look at what you’re doing and connect with you?
Peter: Yeah. The easiest place to find me is on the worldwide web at petermontoya.com. Petermontoya.com, just like it sounds. And then also, I have a good YouTube presence and am launching new videos weekly. So go to YouTube/Peter Montoya and you’ll find me there too.
Doug: And then when should people expect to be able to tune in and listen to your podcast?
Peter: May. We’ll be launching at least a podcast a week starting in May. And it’ll be the Peter Montoya Leadership Experience, which is also available through my website.
Doug: Really cool. Hey, thanks again, Peter. I really appreciate your taking the time with us today.
Peter: Doug, it was a thrill. Thanks for having me.
Doug: Yeah. Listeners, there you go, there’s another episode. Now, this was a little bit different approach. I just really love what Peter’s doing. I’m so excited about the feedback loop when I looked at all the things that he was doing and how that applies to my business, my clients. I hope you’ve taken some notes. And there are some takeaways for you for sure. We’ll make sure we transcribe the notes. We’ll have links to both of Peter’s books on the website. And then when he releases his podcast, I’m sure he’ll send us a note, and I’ll share that out with you as well. I just want to say thanks for tuning in, and we look forward to serving you in our next episode.
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Most leadership authors portray leaders as being extroverts. And that is categorically wrong.
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Get in touch with Peter:
- Web – Petermontoya.com
- Peter on LinkedIn
Find out more about Peter:
- Peter on YouTube
- Podcast – Peter Montoya
- Peter on Facebook
- Peter on Twitter
- Peter on Instagram
Links to other related podcasts and or blog posts:
LANDING CLIENTS VIA CARING AND SHARING
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