Writing the Book on Building Strong Leaders featuring Alain Hunkins

Rob Kosberg:

Hey, welcome everybody. It’s Rob Kosberg, back with another episode of he Publish. Promote. Profit. podcast. I’m really excited to be with you today with a great guest, Alain Hunkins. He is a best-selling author. He is a leadership expert, sought-after speaker, consultant, trainer, and coach, over a 20-year career. He’s led over 2000 groups through multiple different countries. His clients include Walmart, Pfizer, Citigroup, General Electric, State Farm, IBM, and General Motors. The man is the expert on leadership. I’m excited to have him today with me to talk a little bit about his new book and also share maybe some leadership secrets, Cracking the Leadership Code and sharing how you can do that as well. So Alain, great to have you with me today, my friend. Thanks for being on the podcast.

Alain Hunkins:

Thank you for having me, Rob. I’m really excited for our conversation.

Rob Kosberg:

So, tell me, leadership hits every aspect of life. I’m married for over 30 years.

Alain Hunkins:

Congratulations.

Rob Kosberg:

I have three boys. I better be a decent leader, dad, hopefully mentor. Maybe they still listen to me. Tell me a little bit about how you started diving into leadership as this core expertise of yours. What intrigued you about it? What caused that initial surge, if you will?

Alain Hunkins:

First, I’ll say thank you for naming the fact that leadership is pervasive in every aspect of life. Some people think, “Well, I’m not a leader. I don’t have people reporting to me formally.” Scratch that. My definition of leadership is much broader than that. Basically any time any of us are trying to get anyone else or even just ourselves to get something done, that’s leadership. So the fact is if you use that definition, we are all leaders every day. The question is are we all effective leaders every day? That’s the real challenge.

How I got into this is probably pretty unique. I grew up in New York City, that’s not very unique. I was raised by a single mom and my grandmother, also not very unique. The more unique part about my upbringing is that both my mother and my grandmother are Holocaust survivors. My mother was born in 1935 in Belgium, which is why my name is Alain. I like to say it’s pretentious for Allen.

My mom was born in ’35, so if you know your World War II history, the Nazis invaded Belgium in ’42. My mom from the time she was seven until she was nearly 11 was actually separated from her mother and put into hiding through the Belgian Underground. Miraculously they both survived the war and were reunited. I share all that context because these were my primary parents who were very much shaped by an incredibly traumatic experience. So, the vibe in my house was, or I should say our little apartment in Flushing, Queens which is where it was, so different than it was over when I was at my friends’ houses or when I was with my dad on the weekend.

So, I think early on I was trying to figure out why are these things so different? I was always really interested in people. I’m also super attune to sensitivity and nuance, I was one of those sensitive kids. Then I studied psychology. What I’ve come to realize is, if we look at leadership, it is about influence of people, you’ve got to be interested in people. So I have just been fascinated.

Leadership is this wonderful umbrella under which there is high performance and there’s psychology and there’s neuroscience and there’s history. There are so many different pieces that go into it. So, that’s how I got interested in it. Then I started working with teams and groups because what I found, having done some of my own professional and personal development work, was the feeling of unleashing my own potential was better than, not that I’ve ever done crack cocaine, but if I did, this would be better. I was like, “Oh my gosh, this is great. This was amazing.” That sense of empowerment and that liberation and the freedom that it brought. That’s what I love to help others to do. I have a very clear personal mission which is around kindling the fire of brilliance in people so that we can create a more vibrant and alive world.

Rob Kosberg:

Wow, I love that. Thank you for sharing that. Thanks for sharing a little bit of your history. I’m from a Jewish background. My family was also from New York. The Jews kind of came through New York to immigrate. Fortunately, we escaped Russian persecution in the late 1800s, and I was also raised by my grandmother. I remember my grandmother and great grandmother, she still had a Russian accent, would talk a great deal. They were in many ways the leaders of our family which was very interesting at that time. I wonder, was it similar for you and did that play any kind of role in you being a man and saying, “I want to take on more leadership responsibility as maybe my dad should have.” Just wondering.

Alain Hunkins:

Oh, great question. Yeah. Traditionally if you look at, again, cultural and Jewish families, it’s very common to have the matriarch be the head of the household. In our family, my dad and my mom, they split up when I was one. I think part of my own journey has been to try to figure out how I can be that father that I didn’t have. I was mentoring a group of young men, and they asked, “What’s your biggest success?” It has nothing to do with work. It has to do with the fact that I’ve got a 17-year-old son and a 14-year-old daughter and I have a great wife and a great family. By far, that is my greatest success. I feel like I’ve shown up in a way for them that I didn’t experience first-hand.

Rob Kosberg:

Yeah. Oh I love that. Thank you for saying that. I don’t remember if I mentioned on the podcast or we were talking before, I’ve been married 30 years, I have three boys and I didn’t see a lot of that myself growing up and it caused me, I think internally maybe, not to seek personal leadership, though obviously I must have taken that on somewhere down the road, but kind of spiritual meaning in my life and to build a better foundation. I love my dad and we’re very close and they split up when I was six months old. So very, very similar. Here we are getting into the psychology of both our lives. I did not anticipate that by the way. I didn’t think we were going there. It’s really interesting to think about how your upbringing sometimes, a rebellion against it, can actually cause really good things to happen in your life.

Alain Hunkins:

Yeah. You touched on such an important thing there Rob, which is, and I talk about this when I work with leaders too is we behave because of our beliefs and we have our beliefs because of the stories that we tell and part of the stories that we tell come from the experiences that we have. For example, your parents split up at six months, mine at one year. We each had a story and maybe that story was true, partially true somewhere, but those beliefs create this mindset of what the world is supposed to be like and we can choose to follow along with that story, or like you said, we can choose to rebel against it and I think one of the journeys of maturity and self-discovery is really stopping and taking stock of your own stories. Because if you don’t understand your story and start leading your story, your story is going to lead you.

Rob Kosberg:

Right, right. So how do you do that? I’m even wondering, in Cracking the Leadership Code, do you address these things? Because this is really deep stuff here.

Alain Hunkins:

The book has four sections and the subtitle of the book, Cracking the Leadership Code, is Three Secrets to Building Strong Leaders. So, those three secrets are parts two, three, and four which are connection, communication, and collaboration. Part one is all around the context. It’s about the mindset of what it means to be an effective leader. So, we go very much into the psychology of why most people are bad leaders. I’ll just put it out there and don’t take my word for it. I did a lot of research. There are 30 pages of footnotes. Only about 23% of people think their leaders lead well. So, you’re looking at 77% of us that are kind of stinky. Again, I don’t think 77% are waking up every day thinking, “Today I’m going to be mediocre. I’m going to do a crappy job.” No. They actually mean to do well. But the problem is, it’s really hard to be effective at something that you’ve never seen role modeled well.

Most of the leaders that we had before us came from this mindset, psyche, and story. They believed, “I’m the leader, I’m in charge. I tell you what to do and your job is to basically shut up and do it.” We call it the old school leadership or command and control and that worked to a point when people were all on the assembly line doing the same repetitive thing eight hours a day, like Lucille Ball with the cookies. You remember that episode, whatever that is.

Rob Kosberg:

Laverne and Shirley.

Alain Hunkins:

Exactly, pick your metaphor. That worked to a point because people weren’t being asked to think a whole lot, necessarily. Now that’s not the world we live in. We live in what is known as the knowledge worker age. So, we need people to be creative problem solvers. People need to be engaged and thinking about what they’re doing. We go deep into this whole set that I call the facilitative mindset. Because a challenge for many of us, and everyone can recognize this, when I say people nod their heads. Most people who wind up in leadership roles got there because they were really high performers. They’re like, “Hey, Rob, you’re a good salesperson. Let’s make you the manager of the sales team.”

It’s a totally different skill set. So, there’s a big gap of being a high performer and facilitating the high performance of others. You don’t close that gap by just being a higher performer. You need a different skill set and a different mindset. So what leaders need to realize is I’m no longer the person in charge, I’m the person who has to facilitate getting the most out of those around me. We go into this pretty deep in the book.

Rob Kosberg:

Love it. You brought up something that I’ve often thought. I want to try to figure out a way to communicate best my question, you said that 77% of people don’t wake up every day thinking, “Well I’m going to be a crappy leader, a mediocre leader,” and that is certainly true. I’ve often thought that and even looked at that in my own personal life. I don’t want to be offensive, but I think a lot of people look at developing leadership skills as boring or they don’t think of themselves as a leader. So, how do you get somebody, the 77%, to the point where they begin taking the steps of self-awareness? When do they realize they need to do better for their sake, as well as for their wife, kids, and obviously corporate partners? What are your thoughts on that?

Alain Hunkins:

Great question. To distill that down, let me ask the question, how do you coach someone who’s not coachable?

Rob Kosberg:

Or someone who doesn’t even know.

Alain Hunkins:

They don’t even know what they don’t know. It’s such a great question, Rob. I think it starts with helping. People only start to change when they have an awareness that there’s a benefit to changing or the cost of not changing is so great that they know they have to change. So, for example, if you go to your doctor and they say, “Rob, you’ve got six months to live unless you make these lifestyle changes,” my hope is that’s your wake-up call. Like, “Whoa, I need to stop doing this and start doing whatever those things might be.”

So, the fact is people are creatures of habit and we coast along at these things and once you get into these leadership roles where you feel, “I’ve arrived,” we tend to coast. So, what I would suggest is you, as a leader, and if you want to facilitate this awareness in other people, you need to point out what it is costing you to stay the same. If it’s okay, like if you’re okay with everything, if your life is perfect exactly the way it is, fine. But it’s the willingness to ask, “Hey, what do you really want?” Because I think a lot of people start to rationalize, “Well, the job kind of sucks but I have a mortgage to pay,” or “I got promoted and it could be worse, I got health insurance.”

So, we have a lot of people that end up living these lives of quiet desperation because they’ve stopped asking the harder questions of who they are and what they really want to do. am Look, our culture gives us infinite different ways to numb out, whether it’s through activity, social media, drugs, alcohol, or food, you name it, there are ways that you can go from one, kind of a mediocre place and go home and numb out in front of the TV and your dreams just kind of get put on hold and then they get dusty, really dusty.

Part of it is, look if people are listening to this podcast already have taken the time to say, “I want to do something differently.” Even if it’s just listening to a podcast to be inspired. I would say find those people and those resources that inspire you to want to take a step forward. Let’s face it, the challenge with growth is to grow and change, you have to step out of your comfort zone. You don’t learn in the comfort zone. I like to say that leaders get really comfortable with getting uncomfortable. It’s not fun, but the more you do it, the less panicky it makes you.

Rob Kosberg:

That’s good, that’s really good. So a great place to start is just asking yourself am I really happy with where my life is at, and that could be in any area. It could be in the area of a relationship, it could be the area of your finances, it could be your work or where you live or anything and obviously if there’s something that you feel like is missing, then that internal desire that you’ve now uncovered will spur you to taking the next step of growing in your leadership in that area, whatever area that is.

Alain Hunkins:

Totally. If I can just add one thing to that. When you’re doing that reflection of am I happy here, I invite every single person listening, do that work without getting the blaring of the mass culture media. Because let’s face it, advertising and social media for that matter is all designed to make you feel that you’re missing something. I don’t have the newest car, I don’t have the newest trophy wife, you name it. It’s so easy to feel less than versus what’s really important to you. If that’s important to you, go for it. There are so many other voices out here telling me that I need to do this.

I don’t know about you, Rob, but I’m active on LinkedIn and that’s the only social media platform I’m on. Sometimes I’ll find myself mindlessly scrolling through and I’ll catch myself going, “Wow, I feel a lot worse about myself than I did 10 minutes ago.” Because you can’t but help but comparing yourself. One of my mentors always says comparison is the thief of joy. I just wanted to throw that caveat out. Watch where you do that work and protect your dreams because other people will come along and squash them.

Rob Kosberg:

Yeah, I love that, I don’t love it, but I get it. Very, very good. Anybody, we started really in the beginning of the podcast, anybody at whatever point they are in their life has to assume some kind of leadership role, at the very least over themselves. But I doubt that you wrote the book thinking that the book is for everybody and has principles for everybody. Who in particular is your ideal client? Who are you putting the book in the hands of and saying, “Okay, before we take the next step with your corporate culture, I want you to read at least chapters four, five, and six?” Who do you think of when you hand that out or how you use it personally?

Alain Hunkins:

I mean yes, it’s applicable to everyone, but the target market is aspiring leaders in really small to large organizations. It’s basically for people who recognize that there’s this gap between where they are and where they want to be as far as leading themselves and leading other people.

Rob Kosberg:

Yeah, love it. Good. I’m not trying to disqualify anybody that wants to grow in their leadership. After all, we’ve just spent 20 minutes or telling people they need this. I still think they do, but I also know that as an author I think you had somebody in mind from a business perspective that you wanted, that you saw and maybe have examples in the book that those people can very easily slide their feet in those shoes if you will. Tell me, maybe just to shift gears a little, the book obviously it’s done very, very well. Over 100 five star reviews, congratulations on that.

It’s barely been out a year at this point, which is terrific, so obviously people are loving it and getting a lot from it. To get 100 reviews means you’ve got tens of thousands probably that have bought it and read it. When it comes to, not the people that you wrote it for, yourself, how has the book helped you? In what ways has the book helped you to grow your authority in this leadership space and attract new clients? We like to say at Best Seller Publishing make an impact and an income. Any stories? In what areas would you say it’s been helpful?

Alain Hunkins:

Oh, it’s been tremendous. My background, before the book was published, I was working in the leadership development space for over 20 years and I started that journey as basically a full-time employee for an external training company, so I was delivering their content to their clients and I got lots of experience. In fact, that’s the experience in which I grew up in around this work corporately, which was great. However, when you do that, you’re seen through a lens which is your XYZ’s company employee and it’s their content. I knew that I had other stuff I wanted to say, so the book platform offers me is suddenly is Cracking the Leadership Code by Alain Hunkins. Therefore, it builds this credibility.

Then for me, by the way, it was really important to get a major publisher that added credibility. So Wiley, one of the biggest publishers in the world, published it. I also got some great endorsements from people like Marshall Goldsmith, Jim Kouzes, Dan Pink, Barry Posner, top people in the field who only would endorse it if they read it and believed in it. I’m super proud of the book. It took years of writing and rewriting and editing. I had literally 12 of my friends all read nearly the final version and I spent probably another month and a half editing all their stuff nearly full-time. That’s the level of quality that I wanted to put out there, because once the book is out there, it’s out there. So what the book provided for me was this platform to be seen as a thought leader in the leadership space in a way that without the book I didn’t have.

Now when I approached this whole strategy, you talked about profit as well, I never expected to make money from the books. I’m not looking to use the book to provide revenue for me. If that happens, I get royalty checks from Wiley, and it’s a bonus. But what I really see is it’s a conversation starter. It starts this dialog where I’m now influencing people to start thinking of me in this way. “Wow, how could he help our people beyond just reading the book?” Whether that’s through speaking, whether that’s through training, consulting or coaching, which I do all of those things. The book has been this door opener and suddenly people know who I am and they want to know more about me. So part of my journey, and just to kind of back up for a second, you said the book’s been out just over a year, it was actually published on March 24, 2020, the week after the entire world shut down.

What timing, which was not part of my master plan, let me tell you that. So, what I had to do was figure out what I can do in the midst of this. Because I had this whole vision of speaking on a book tour. I thought I’d be speaking in front of organizations and associations whereby I could multiply. You go to an organization or actually an association where you have 100 people from 100 different companies. Suddenly you start exponentially grow. That world disappeared and that stuff’s done. So, I was like, “What can I do?” I thought, “Well, I can get on a lot of podcasts.” So, I pivoted a lot around my strategy. So, in just over a year I’ve appeared on over 120 podcasts.

People are like, “Wow.” My mother is like, “Wow, all these people invited you to be on their podcast, like at the beginning?” No. I was me reaching out. It’s all the work and just like you said, also, same thing with the 100 or so Amazon reviews. Many of those people are people who I asked to write a review. I knew they had read the book, but I asked. People don’t just do this stuff on their own. I have a mentor who really gave me some good counsel because I don’t know, some of you listening right now might be of this camp. I was a good student as a kid, I wanted to please my parents, good student. And in school, good work speaks for itself. If you get good grades an you’re a great student and you get rewarded and you get recognized, you get put in honors classes, etc.

Once you get out of school, the world doesn’t work that way and good work does not speak for itself. So, my mentor said to me, “Alain, if good work spoke for itself, the field of marketing would not exist. So, you need to learn how to toot your own horn without blowing it.” That’s a fine balance, but I think most of us when we’re starting out, we tend to be very tentative about what you’re doing and how you’re reaching out. Because people want to celebrate with your success. So yeah, long story short, it’s been quite a journey of getting this out there in the world.

Rob Kosberg:

Love it. Well congratulations. Over 100 podcasts. I love what you shared as well. I think it’s super, super valuable. This is stuff that we teach and help our clients with. You need to ask people for reviews, your own mother will tell you that she’ll do a review for your book and then she won’t know how to log in to Amazon and get it done. Just because people have good intentions doesn’t mean that they’re actually going to do it. When you ask though, you raise the likelihood of that happening significantly.

Then of course you’re obviously not waiting for this book to accidentally find itself on the desk of one of your ideal clients or a corporation. You’re, I’m sure, sending it to them. You’re trying to appear on the podcast and the media that they’re listening to. Beautiful. Congratulations.

Alain Hunkins:

Yeah, and just on that note, you talked about that, for example, with reviews, one of my mantras around this when I’m asking for help is reduce the friction. How can I reduce the friction for other people? For example, if I’m asking people to write an Amazon review on my behalf, I actually send them a link to a hidden page on my website where it’s like here’s the prompt, here’s the link to Amazon, and here are some key word prompts that you can put together, and I have about 30 different words. It only has to be two to three sentences long. Oh, and by the way, it needs to be five star. Just in case. Just in case you were wondering. We don’t want a one star review on Amazon. Thank you very much.

Rob Kosberg:

Or a four star review.

Alain Hunkins:

Or a four for that matter because it brings the algorithm down. So, you realize, you want to lead the horse to water. The more that you can make things easy for the people around you and reduce their friction, the more likely they’re going to do it for you, which is why we all shop on Amazon, by the way. Because they’ve made it so gosh darn easy. Going on any other website and filling out the forms and putting in your credit card information, ugh. It’s too much work now because we’ve gotten so used to one click.

Rob Kosberg:

Totally. I love one click.

Alain Hunkins:

Yeah, of course you do. So does everyone.

Rob Kosberg:

So does my wife.

Alain Hunkins:

And Mr. Bezos is very happy that you do.

Rob Kosberg:

Sure is.

Alain Hunkins:

You’ve made him a very wealthy man.

Rob Kosberg:

No doubt, no doubt. Alain, thank you so much. You’ve exemplified leadership on this podcast, you’ve shared stuff from your heart, I really appreciate that, as well as some really good tactical things that I think people can do, whether it’s looking at their own maybe lack of desire around leadership and how to maybe start that truck moving, if you will, as well as some specific things for authors. Because our audience is mainly the author audience as well as those that are looking to potentially become authors, tell us, where can people find you? Where best to get more information about your book or offer you a review secret link? Anything you want to give we’ll keep it in the show notes as well.

Alain Hunkins:

Fantastic. Well the easiest place to go is the book website, which is www.crackingtheleadershipcode.com. It’s spelled just the way it sounds. That will take you right to the book page and there you can order the book, you can also actually download the first chapter of the book and give it a little test drive, a little preview. That is linked right to the alainhunkins.com website, so you can learn about all things Alain Hunkins, which is all around leadership, whether it’s speaking, coaching, training or consulting. One of the things for example that I’m doing now, I’m partnering with a technology company and we’re offering a 30-day online leadership challenge, which takes the principles from the book and has gamified them. It uses positive psychology and habit formation, and it is really about how to practice being a better leader on a daily basis as part of a global community. So, we’ve run numerous challenges like these. The last cohort we just finished had people from 18 different countries. So, all the information is on the website under the 30-day leadership challenge page.

Rob Kosberg:

Oh, love that. Congratulations. I love challenges. I’m running one right now, the five-day publish, promote, profit challenge. Thirty days, I’ll imagine you’ll run it maybe some other months and that kind of thing.

Alain Hunkins:

Yeah. We’ll be doing it throughout the year.

Rob Kosberg:

Highly recommend people take that challenge. You really make great strides in what you’re looking to change in a challenge. Good, good.

Well thank you, my friend. Thank you for being a part of the podcast today. Thank you for sharing. We’ll have all of that set up in the show notes and whatnot for people to go to your website, get your book, get your information. Thanks again.

Alain Hunkins:

Thank you, Rob. It’s been my pleasure.