The New Portrait Of Leadership: Scott Blanchard On Which Legacy Ideas About Leadership Need To Be Discarded, And Which New Approaches To Leadership Should Be Embraced

An Interview with Karen Mangia

One behavior I mentioned earlier is having your peoples’ back. Research points to the importance of trusting people — and building trust with them is critically important. The deepest trust is earned over time, but you first need to extend trust and let people know from the beginning that you have their back and you mean them no harm. So that’s a big one.

We are living in the Renaissance of Work. Just like great artists know that an empty canvas can become anything, great leaders know that an entire organization — and the people inside it — can become anything, too. Master Artists and Mastering the Art of Leadership draw from the same source: creation. In this series, we’ll meet masters who are creating the future of work and painting a portrait of lasting leadership. As part of this series, we had the pleasure of interviewing Scott Blanchard.

Scott Blanchard, CEO and co-owner of Blanchard®, has been with the company more than 30 years. He has held a number of senior positions in management, product development, sales, and delivery. Scott is driven by a background in research and hands-on experience working with organizations around the world, proving his principle that the success or failure of any business depends squarely on the quality of its leaders. Every employee and customer experience — whether good or bad — is determined by the leader. With this in mind, Scott is dedicated to helping managers and leaders find the best way to avoid the pain, fear, frustration, and political mayhem that occur in the absence of good leadership.

As a true visionary and early adopter of emerging technologies, Scott co-founded one of the first coaching companies — today’s Blanchard Coaching Services (BCS) — in 1999. Later, with the goal of democratizing corporate coaching, he co-created the first coaching management system to enhance the delivery of coaching at scale. To date, BCS has provided the highest caliber of coaching to hundreds of companies and more than 10,000 clients worldwide.

Scott is co-author of Leverage Your Best, Ditch the Rest and Leading at a Higher Level as well as Blanchard’s Coaching Essentials® and Blanchard Management Essentials™ training programs. He holds a bachelor’s degree in hotel administration and hospitality from Cornell University and a master’s degree in organizational development from American University.

Thank you for joining us. Our readers would enjoy discovering something interesting about you. We all get by with a little help from our friends. Who is the leader that has influenced you the most, and how?

Bob Small, who passed away in 2014, had a huge influence on me early in my career. He was the CEO and president of Fairmont Hotels. Before Fairmont, he served as executive vice president for Walt Disney World Resort Division. As a 40-year veteran of the hospitality industry, he taught me the importance of vision and service. He served as a role model, exemplifying what leading others toward a compelling vision — and achieving that vision — looked like.

Another important leader in my life has been Garry Ridge, who was CEO and president of WD-40 Company for over 25 years. I first met Garry when he was a board member of our company. Knowing him as a friend and watching him lead at WD-40, I learned the importance of strategy and of building a strong, engaged, and accountable structure so that everyone is looking, leaning, and incentivized to help the company succeed.

Sometimes our biggest mistakes lead to our biggest discoveries. What’s the biggest mistake you’ve made as a leader, and what did you discover as a result?

My biggest mistakes as a leader have always centered around the same two issues. The first one will probably be on my tombstone — words to the effect of “He was often too early.” From a strategic standpoint, most of my errors or decisions have centered around being ready for something too early. I’ve had a pattern of doing that — but it hasn’t been all bad. For example, the tendency for me to be ahead of the pack enabled us as a company to be equipped for the craziness that happened during Covid. We were prepared and ready for the transformation from in-person training to a virtual learning world because we had been preparing for it for decades.

The other mistake I tend to make is when I delegate tasks to people without checking on their needs for direction and support. My wife, Madeleine, will tell you I am a master at providing people with the direction and support they need — exactly two weeks after they needed it. I’ve often failed to provide people with enough direction, clarity, and support, especially at the beginning of a task. I’ve had to learn to circle back, slow down, and become a lot clearer on the front end than I otherwise would be.

How has your definition of leadership changed or evolved over time? What does it mean to be a leader now?

At the senior and the CEO level, I’ve gained a lot more clarity about the importance of understanding my personal leadership style and the way it impacts how I communicate the vision, values, and strategies we are working on and how I reinforce those messages. The significance of that has become more heightened for me.

One thing I’ve learned recently that I wouldn’t have known ten years ago is that one of the biggest jobs a leader can do is take responsibility for the environmental factors that influence people to feel safe, valued, and useful. It’s recognizing that when people feel physically and emotionally safe, when they feel valued as human beings and believe what they do matters in the big picture, they will give us their best.

I believe a big part of being a leader is realizing the environment you intentionally create around people — the environment you allow to exist — has a tremendous impact on their success. Leaders are environmentalists to a certain degree. The environment we create in our companies is our responsibility.

Success is often as much about what we stop as what we start. What is one legacy leadership behavior you stopped because you discovered it was no longer valuable or relevant?

I think it’s important to address legacy dynamics in your culture that aren’t serving you anymore. Allowing outdated behaviors or processes to continue can erode people’s trust in your leadership. In my case, running a 45-year-old business, we’ve had to address legacy issues from the past that wouldn’t happen today. It’s about communicating to people that the past is important, but we’re not going to allow some things to carry over. It can be tricky because, as a leader, you have to be willing to deal with people’s disappointment around something ending or being taken away. Ultimately, you need to be able to look at yourself in the mirror and know you’ve behaved with integrity for the benefit of your present and future employees as well as your customers.

What is one lasting leadership behavior you started or are cultivating because you believe it is valuable or relevant?

Forthrightness is one of the most valuable principles I established when I took the role as president and then CEO of our company.

Being forthright includes telling people what you have decided, what you are committing to, and what you’re contemplating — even if you don’t know exactly what’s going to happen. It’s telling people what you’re thinking and also telling the truth around things you don’t have a stance on yet or don’t know. One benefit? It’s much easier to remember the truth than try to remember what kind of twist you may have put on something.

What advice would you offer to other leaders who are stuck in past playbooks and patterns and may be having a hard time letting go of what made them successful in the past?

If we have a health issue with our heart, and we see a cardiologist, we expect the cardiologist to utilize the latest techniques and approaches given the current research happening in the field. We should expect the same from our leaders.

Leadership strategies and behaviors need to keep up with the latest findings in human behavior. I learned a lot of things about leadership in the eighties that are still true today. But there were other things being taught in the eighties around leadership that turned out to be false — things that don’t work now.

For example, there was a belief that it was good to put on a little pressure and exact a little bit of fear from people. It was thought that if a leader put people on edge, they would pay more attention. That was just wrong. We know now that adding fear and uncertainty creates a brain condition where people get nervous, focus on protecting themselves, and actually perform worse than we would have otherwise expected. In today’s world, leaders need to let people know we have their back if we want them to perform at their best.

Leaders who are stuck in the past are making a fatal mistake that is as significant as going to a cardiologist who has not evolved in their approach for the last 15 years.

Many of our readers can relate to the challenge of leading people for the first time. What advice would you offer to new and emerging leaders?

I would first direct my advice to organizations that are promoting people into new positions of leadership. Take care in how you prepare these people for leadership. If they’re not prepared and don’t get a good foundation before they begin stepping into a leadership role, it will not go well. Research shows people in a new leadership role underperform 60 percent of the time in the first two years — so train, prepare, and support people as they transition into those roles.

For people stepping into leadership for the first time, take it seriously. It is a completely new professional capability. It’s a role that, if you do it well, will last a lifetime. When you are responsible for the support and success of other people, it requires a completely different set of behaviors. It’s a different mindset. It’s a different skill set.

You should not enter a leadership position frivolously or without a lot of deep thought and preparation. If you’re not ready for your life to be completely turned upside down, don’t go into leadership. Think about it carefully.

Based on your experience or research, what are the top five traits effective leaders exemplify now? Please share a story or an example for each.

One behavior I mentioned earlier is having your peoples’ back. Research points to the importance of trusting people — and building trust with them is critically important. The deepest trust is earned over time, but you first need to extend trust and let people know from the beginning that you have their back and you mean them no harm. So that’s a big one.

The second trait is to not only share with people what you believe and where you’re headed, but actually talk about who you are. We call it sharing your “leadership point of view” — how you became who you are, your values, and the life experiences that shaped you. What do you believe as a leader? What’s your mindset and approach to leadership? What can people expect from you and hold you accountable to as a leader? What expectations do you have of people you’re going to be leading?

I believe the degree to which you can share yourself authentically and transparently is really important. Safety, value, and inclusion are built on it. Leaders need to take the first step in disclosing things about themselves they may not have shared before. Anything involving inclusion, trust, or mutual respect has to begin with the leader.

The third trait I want to reiterate is about truth telling. Tell the truth about what you know and what you don’t know. Also, surround yourself with people who will tell you the truth and who are smarter than you in their domain of expertise. Things move too quickly to have to work through all the dynamics if the emperor has no clothes.

The fourth trait is to take leadership seriously. The best coaches work very hard on the craft of coaching and have a strong point of view. The best doctors work very hard on the craft of being an expert in their area of specialty. The best salespeople take great pride in the way they approach and tackle sales as a profession. But many leaders don’t think of themselves in that way and don’t really invest as heavily as they should in their craft.

The fifth trait is to be a role model. Lead in a way that serves as an example, so that the people who work for you begin to see what it looks like to receive great leadership. They will be inspired and then become leaders. Look around you and create leadership in other people. As you move up in your career, consider how you are bringing others along with you.

American Basketball Coach John Wooden said, “Make each day your masterpiece.” How do you embody that quote? We welcome a story or example.

John Wooden was a great basketball coach, and like other great coaches he knew his role and purpose. They don’t take a shot. They don’t make a pass. Instead, they are in a position of helping others enable greatness.

Making each day your masterpiece begins with the expectation that you’re going to win. You have an expectation that you’re going to do as well as you can. You point to the big goal and focus every single day on every tiny little moment. And if it doesn’t work out, you do it again. You focus on the here, the now, the today.

My father, Ken Blanchard, wrote a book called Everyone’s a Coach with legendary Miami Dolphins football coach Don Shula. Shula told my dad he never wanted it said that he wasn’t paying attention as a coach. He never wanted to see something good happen without stopping and saying, “That’s what we’re talking about. That is exactly it.” And if something wasn’t right, he was never going to miss the opportunity to say, “Good effort, but not enough. Let’s do it again.”

Making each day your masterpiece is about focusing on the big picture — but it’s mostly about focusing on the here, the now, the today, moment by moment, practice by practice, minute by minute, segment by segment. What did you do today that helped advance the cause? And if you win the day and the practice and the week and the month, you’re going to win the season. Before you know it, you’re winning the championship.

I think it’s something we see in great leaders. They point to the future, but they help the company plan the day and win the day.

What is the legacy you aspire to leave as a leader?

I want people to know I had their back. Not only was I able to help people lead the company to a place we didn’t think we could get to, I also helped individuals achieve more than they thought they could. It’s not because of anything I did — it’s because of the safety and motivation and drive that comes from people believing their leader has their back, the company has their back, they’re here to pursue something worthwhile, and they’ve learned how to plan the day and win the day.

Thank you for giving us the opportunity to experience a leadership master at work. We wish you continued success and good health!

About The Interviewer: Karen Mangia is one of the most sought-after keynote speakers in the world, sharing her thought leadership with over 10,000 organizations during the course of her career. As Vice President of Customer and Market Insights at Salesforce, she helps individuals and organizations define, design and deliver the future. Discover her proven strategies to access your own success in her fourth book Success from Anywhere and by connecting with her on LinkedIn and Twitter.