TRP 206: How Pursuing Profits Hurts Your Leadership and Influence with Michael Goss

[00:00:01] You're listening to the Rainmaking Podcast, hosted by high-stakes headhunter, author and professional speaker, Scott Love. You're listening to the Rainmaking Podcast, and my name is Scott Love. Thank you for joining me on the show. A lot of my interviews sometimes are just conversations between two people exploring

[00:00:33] ideas and coming up with action steps that can help our listeners reach their goals of client development. That's how I would describe my interview with Michael Goss. Michael is an accomplished business executive who mentors and coaches those in business to

[00:00:49] help them discover their passion, determine their purpose, and tap into their inner power. Michael firmly believes that it's possible to achieve success in business without compromising on family health or personal fulfillment. Michael and I talk about how pursuing profits can hurt your leadership and your influence.

[00:01:09] Here are some substantive ideas that I think you're going to get from my conversation with Michael today. Make sure that you go to the show notes and check out his information on the web and connect with him personally.

[00:01:21] As always, this show is sponsored by Leopard Solutions, Legal Intelligence Suite of Products, FirmScape, and Leopard BI. Push ahead of the pack with the power of Leopard. And now here's my conversation with Michael. Thanks for listening. Hey, this is Scott Love with the Rainmaking Podcast.

[00:01:39] Our special guest today is Michael Goss, and our topic is how pursuing profits hurts your leadership and influence. Michael, thanks for joining me on the show today. It's great to be here, Scott. Yeah, this is great.

[00:01:51] So the topic, how pursuing profits hurts your leadership and influence, and the people listening to the show are responsible for profits. And they're pursuing them every day. So tell me about this paradox. How exactly does that hurt our leadership and influence?

[00:02:07] It's interesting because being a longtime business person, this was an epiphany that I had a few years into what I was doing. Because what profits ultimately represent is the result that we would like. And there's nothing wrong with profit.

[00:02:21] In fact, profit without it, we don't have a business. So we have to have profit as a part of our business. But it never needs to be at the focus. It's the byproduct of doing the right thing, of providing the service.

[00:02:34] And most importantly, what we're all looking for, I believe in business, is influence. And influence, a simple definition that I like to use it as it's the ability to move someone, the ability to have someone come along with me.

[00:02:48] And so when we think about leadership, I know you're a Navy man, so you understand leadership very, very well in order to have someone willingly follow you. See, you were when you were in the military, you didn't have a choice. You followed because you had to.

[00:03:02] And in business, we talk about positional leadership. I listen because it's my boss or I'm the boss, so everybody has to listen to me. Well, that only gets us so far. In the real world, when we're recruiting people from other places, we're dealing with

[00:03:16] clients, we're dealing with potential clients. Maybe we're in a courtroom and we're needing to convince a jury about something. Now we're not talking about the ability to force someone to do something just because I'm in a position to hurt them if they don't. Yeah.

[00:03:30] I'm in a position to affect their future. Now they have to willingly give up themselves. They have to give up their most prized possession, which is their heart. Yeah. Think about this.

[00:03:40] The creator of the universe had the ability, if he wanted to, to force us to do whatever he wanted us to do, but he chose not to. He gave us for you will. Right.

[00:03:50] And if he can't force us or chooses not to force us to do something, then no one else can either. So let me ask you this and I think everything you said is very insightful and it is deep and I really like that.

[00:04:02] Do you think most people in business get to the point where they have that aha moment where it's not about always be closing, but about doing the right thing, about serving people? What do you think about that?

[00:04:13] I think for most of us it's a paradigm shift that we have to have and I'm not going to suggest that everyone ever comes to that because I've worked with enough people over the years to say sometimes it's hard to, it's more

[00:04:24] difficult to teach some older dogs new tricks. Right. And this will feel like a new trick because it kind of goes contrary to the dog eat dog. I got to beat everyone else to get to the top. It's two ways of doing business.

[00:04:38] There's the competitive side of life or competitive playing which most of us grew up in where in order for me to get ahead, I've got to beat you or I've got to beat someone else. It's about what's the old saying when you're closing?

[00:04:50] The first person to speak loses. Right. That's a competitive environment. It's really not about that my way of looking at it. If I'm making an offer to someone but it's not a good deal for them, if they buy my offer, I have it won.

[00:05:03] I've actually lost in the process because they're not going to get the outcome that they were hoping for and their experience with me is going to ultimately be a negative. Which means I didn't win. I didn't gain influence in that environment just because I got the sale.

[00:05:16] And so the ultimate goal here is that we're not focusing on profits and it's not to say profits are not important. It's critical to the success of our organization and to us personally. So profit is definitely the result that we're looking for but what's the

[00:05:29] method of how do we get there? And we get there by focusing on the cause of the profit, not the result of the profit. So I don't see my prospect as a marker or as a sale or as a dollar sign or anything like that.

[00:05:42] I see that as a human that I'm here to help get to what it is that they want. So I make what I do about their needs and their desires. Now, sometimes they don't understand what that is.

[00:05:54] Okay. Most people have a difficult time answering the question, what do you want? So my job is sometimes to help them get to that. And so I help them clear it away. And if what they want is what I'm delivering, then my job is to help

[00:06:06] them see that. And I do that by building influence in the relationship. And it doesn't take a long time. The old way we talked about it, we call it rapport building. And we always thought rapport building was this little something you do.

[00:06:18] Like a couple of jokes, you get them laughing and then we start pitching. I like to golf, we like to go on that. Right, I get that. It's deeper, it's much deeper than that because the whole purpose

[00:06:27] of connection and building rapport, it doesn't have to be about today. So you're doing this podcast. This podcast is not about a today thing for you. This is about building relationships with a large group of people over time.

[00:06:41] When they hear you speak, they're listening going, I agree with that. I'm going to take connection on that. Whether they ever directly connect to you or not doesn't mean you have an added value. In your profit that you're going to get in your business is not connected

[00:06:55] directly to just the people you personally do business with, but all the ways in which you are adding value into this world. It's building your influence. It's building your voice. And the more authentic we become as leaders where we're actually pursuing

[00:07:09] our own purpose and that's the key to this. When we're pursuing our purpose and if our purpose is really truly serving others and not just serving myself, that's when we can really start to achieve greatness.

[00:07:20] In whatever course of business that we're in, this is not about any specific business. This is about in every business because at the end of the day, our business is always about people. I don't care what we sell. I don't care what our service is.

[00:07:32] The end of the day it's about people. And so the key to this is we're all in the people business and people want to be led, but they get led willingly through the influence that we build in that relationship.

[00:07:43] Yeah, this is interesting because I think I learned this when I was a young naval officer and I knew that I've got my authority. I could tell my sailors to do something and they'll do it and they'll do a minimum if it's almost like there is a scale.

[00:07:57] And in my own mind, I called it a response scale on one to ten. How much enthusiasm and commitment are they going to have? And if I have the authority, I tell them to do it because I'm the boss of them.

[00:08:08] They'll give it maybe a one or a two. That's right. But if you earn their trust and they know that you're not going to do anything unless it serves, of course, the mission accomplishment but it helps them.

[00:08:20] And they see it and even feelings, talking about sailors with feelings. We're never gonna talk about that but I could see it that they trust you. And then if they trust you, you have built something within you which you can take with drawl.

[00:08:35] I can push them a little bit harder because I built that trust and that influence. And so in today's professional world, B2B sales, you've been a sea level executive. You've probably sold services. You've dealt with subordinate employees.

[00:08:49] For the person that's listening right now, let's just say there's someone listening, a young man or young woman probably in their late 20s. And they're just starting to kind of figure things out or at least maybe I never figured it out.

[00:09:01] But maybe they're kind of figuring it out and they realize, oh, it's not about me. It's about building that influence. How would you speak to that person in terms of how they can go about building this influence?

[00:09:12] What should they be mindful of as they make kind of that transition into the thoughts that you're talking about, Michael? Well, I may have very little moral authority because in my 20s and 27, I wasn't as exact as I was president of the company.

[00:09:25] I was able to tell people what to do. And so I had to learn this lesson over time because of what you said. I was able to see that people would do what I was asking them to do because they needed to.

[00:09:36] But when I got outside of my organization, outside of my business unit that had to do that and dealt with people that didn't have to do that, that's where I saw, I could say the right words, but it didn't get the necessarily the right result.

[00:09:50] So for young people, one of the things are younger people as you know, younger professionals that are just coming in and starting to understand what do I need to do? Number one, we always make it about the other person.

[00:10:01] Remember in the report building, it was just a French word, a French word that means gaining agreement. At the end of this, that's what we're looking to do is gaining agreement. And it's an emotional, it's a hard thing. It's not a head thing.

[00:10:14] So it's not always about just the words that we say are those words that I'm saying congruent with the actions that I'm delivering. Remember the old saying, I can't hear what you're saying because I see what you're doing. Your actions speak much, much louder.

[00:10:29] Remember communication, words and verbals only about 7% of it. The rest of it is everything else which includes our actions, the intent with which the what we're communicating without speaking a word. It's radiating from us at all times and we can't turn that off.

[00:10:45] And so being authentic, meaning we're being true to ourselves and our purpose is the only way that we're ever going to increase the influence that we want. And so if we're looking for promotion, if we're looking to close sales, the first thing

[00:10:58] we have to do is get the sale or the result out of our mind because we're not responsible for the result. Yeah, yeah. Keep in mind, if we're doing a sales presentation, I don't have any way to force that person to say yes. That's totally within their control.

[00:11:13] So one of the first least lessons of leadership and business and life is get out of the business and worry about stuff you have no control over. You control you. You control what you do. You control how you interact. You control the attitude with which you show up.

[00:11:29] You control everything else. Go into any of those situations, not worried about what's in it for me. Well, I'm here to serve this other person. This whole, because I keep that in the forefront of my thinking, then whether or not I get

[00:11:44] the sale is irrelevant because I don't control that outcome. What I do control is did I walk into that and walk out of that with my integrity intact, with my humanity intact? Did I attempt to take advantage of and manipulate and attempt to talk somebody into something

[00:12:00] that they really didn't need? Those are things that I know whether they know it or not. If I believe that I'm doing things that are going against my belief system, ultimately that's the thing that's going to wreck everything you're ever going to want in your life.

[00:12:16] Success is always about being authentic. It isn't about closing every sale because if you'll do this and as we begin to do this more and more, what we're going to see is this builds momentum.

[00:12:25] This starts to build a place because now I believe in myself because I walk into that place and I don't care what they think. I don't care what they do. Their reaction or their response to my presentation is not a reflection on me. It's a reflection on them.

[00:12:41] And so that's why I need to walk into their confidence in who I am and that confidence begats confidence and that starts to allow me to speak with more clarity. I start to be able to deal in a very different way and I start to be able

[00:12:54] to have what we like to call requisite variety. Tell me about this. What does that mean? Requisite variety. You'll love this. I think you'll love this because it actually comes out of the law of cybernetics. And cybernetics is just something that's about control.

[00:13:06] For instance, thermostat is a cybernetic mechanism, not applied to cybernetics mechanism. Well, requisite variety is that any mechanism within a system with the most flexibility has the most power and control. Well, in any sales presentation, in any gaining agreement situation,

[00:13:23] the presenter, the one that's looking to receive from this has to be the most flexible. We have to be willing to respond and react based on what our prospect or what our customer is asking for. And read between the lines somewhere. Pay attention to what signals they're giving.

[00:13:39] Don't be worried so much about what you're going to say. Be way more focused on them. What's their reaction when I bring up this topic? How do they respond? What is their body language? What are their eyes telling me? Start to be more in tune with your prospect.

[00:13:53] And then once I get in tune and they feel that. But Stephen Covey says like the deepest need the human soul is for understanding. Exactly. Once we understand their position and they believe it, they can feel that understanding. They can feel this. You can't fake it.

[00:14:08] We can't just put on a show and it worked. It has to be genuine. And once they do, now they relax, they let down their substances and now they're open to receive. You know, Michael, some of the things you've shared, it's like, oh, that's why that works.

[00:14:22] I'm thinking of experiences I've had within my own practice. I recruit partners for big law firms. And these are people that are guarded. They're trained to be untrusting and they hate change. But sometimes the discomfort of staying in their own firm is pretty high.

[00:14:36] And that, that idea of moving to another firm actually looks appealing. And so I've learned how to get them to tell me what motivates them. What are their intrinsic motivations? What are there's, is their career vision? What are their goals?

[00:14:49] And what are the things that bother them about their current situation? And it's almost like there's this moment. I can predict three, two, one, here it is. Let me tell you what's really going on. And it's almost like there's a ritual and a dance each time.

[00:15:03] And it's predictable and it's not contrived. And it's not inauthentic. It's not duplicitous or anything genuine where tell me about this. And if I know sometimes when a partner tells me what he or she is going through and they kind of elaborate and they go into details,

[00:15:19] I'll always tell them, Joe, I want you to know I heard everything that you told me. And it's kind of like passing a checkpoint. We can now proceed to the next step. And if we were to take those conversations, and

[00:15:32] actually you've given me some good ideas here by the way, about there's this checkpoint in each conversation. Now we can proceed to the next deep meaningful conversation. Tell me about your career vision. They would never tell strangers that.

[00:15:44] And what's interesting a lot of times when I'm calling these people, that's the very first time we've ever had a conversation. We go through a sequence of these steps in a compressed period of time where we get to that point.

[00:15:55] So all the things that you're saying, I think this is definitely applicable to anybody that sells professional services to a sophisticated audience. And I think it starts out with what you said, asking them questions, getting to know them, listening to them. Let me ask you this.

[00:16:12] And by the way, thank you so much for everything you've done so far. This is really helpful. I think our listeners are gonna get a lot out of this. Are there any pitfalls or danger areas that professionals should keep in mind

[00:16:24] as they learn about building their influence and wanting to kind of take these ideas and really push that out in their business, in their practice? Yeah, and you mentioned it just now in a sense that they start opening up. They start being more open and available.

[00:16:39] And by default so will I. I will wanna be that way too. And we gotta be really cautious in the area because we're dealing in a very sensitive place here where I may get a little loose-lipped and start talking

[00:16:52] about things that may be a little out of bounds. And it's because it gets comfortable. And so just because it's comfortable, let's remain disciplined to stay on point. And be cautious also with the information that they're going to deliver to you

[00:17:05] because that could show you fissures and things inside the organization. That may be revealing some classified information. You gotta be very cautious on how we use that information because once we start gaining influence, it's powerful. It's more powerful than money.

[00:17:20] The ability to move people way more powerful than money because with it, you can get all the money that you want if you have the ability to move people because that's where the money is. Right.

[00:17:29] And so be very, we have to become, and this is harder for younger people because we get so excited about it. We get so, I guess based on your saying, you can see it coming now that you can predict it and it becomes obvious because it is.

[00:17:42] We're all proud of the creatures. We gotta be very, use your power for good. Let me put it that way because once we start going down that other road and start using it to manipulate and to get what we want. Exactly.

[00:17:55] Oh my gosh, we have opened a Pandora's box and it's very difficult to get that put back together. And so that's the one danger. The biggest danger area I see is now that we have that we start to wield it once again, back for our own purposes. Yeah.

[00:18:10] Wow. This is really interesting. And we can go deep, we could spend a couple of days talking about these topics right here. Let me ask you this. If somebody's listening to this and they want to get started on really

[00:18:21] taking your ideas and if you could put them in let's say three action steps, what would be three action steps somebody could take to really take some of the ideas and start moving forward with those? Well, with everything, one of the most important things when we talk

[00:18:37] about how pursuing purpose is what this is all about. So one of the more difficult questions that I had to answer growing up was what is my purpose? Why not what I'm just doing here today, but why am I on this planet? What am I here to accomplish?

[00:18:51] Because going and talking to other people, if I don't understand what that is then I'm going to be glomming onto other people's purpose and what they are. So if I understand why I'm in this place and what am I doing in front of this person having this conversation?

[00:19:05] As long as I keep that in the forefront of my thinking I'm going to be helpful. So the first thing I would always suggest people do, ask yourself and answer the question, what is my purpose?

[00:19:14] And I would answer it on a generic level or a high level in life. What is my purpose of being on this planet? But also, when is my purpose of being in this firm? What is my purpose of being in this company?

[00:19:23] What is my purpose of being with these responsibilities? What am I here to accomplish? Well, let me focus on that first. OK, that's the number one thing. The second part of this equation is once I've established

[00:19:35] what my purpose is, now let me do a little bit of an inventory. Let's be looking around. What is it in my life that's not contributing to that purpose? What are the things that I'm doing right now that are taking me

[00:19:46] away from that purpose in a business environment? What is it in my job and in my current responsibilities that I'm doing that don't along with my purpose? Because every one of those things that's not along my purpose is diminishing my ability to influence another person. Exactly.

[00:20:00] Because I know I'm not living congruent. That means they can see it as well. They can feel that. And so let me let me ask you before we get to the third one. What are some examples that people might have come up with

[00:20:11] that you've coached about what is keeping them? What's taking them away from that purpose? What have you seen before? A lot of times what will happen is people that are having these softer skills, they're working on building influence, but they're in an organization that is hard, closures, charging.

[00:20:24] You know, and it's all about numbers. It's all about how many people did you close today? How much did you do? And it's all this force on result, result, result, result. Nothing on principle and nothing on whether or not the practices are

[00:20:37] because it doesn't matter what you do. Just get the result, get the result by look or by crook, so to speak. When people are in those kind of environments and that is not in alignment with who they are, then they're never going to succeed.

[00:20:49] Even if they're hitting their numbers, it's they're driving themselves into an early grave because everything they do every day goes against their belief system. And so that's just one example. There are others where we're in that place and we start making slight, I'm going to say compromise.

[00:21:04] They're not out now bad. They're just I'm starting to get in that gray area and I get further and further in the gray and that's saying, you know, I'm a little way over. I don't even know what the line is anymore because I've

[00:21:13] crossed that line right in my heart first. And that produces all kinds of stress, which creates all kinds of physical problems and drinking and all kinds of other things that come because I want to mask the pain of the fact that I'm not being true to myself.

[00:21:29] Right, right. Okay. And so what's what's number three? I mean, all these things are. So the number three, yeah, the third part is always the most difficult because talking about these are great. Scott, you know that thinking about it's even great.

[00:21:40] We were writing the list as good, but if we don't take an action, we don't start implementing and do the hard work in some cases, then you happen to be in the business of helping people find maybe another location where

[00:21:53] they can do the things that God put them on the planet to do where they can fulfill their purpose and do it in a way that honors their belief system the way God made them, the way they were put on this planet to perform.

[00:22:04] And in some cases, it may be getting out of that all together for me. Scott, you know what that meant? It meant walking away from a multimillion dollar CEO position with the worldwide company of which, oh, by the way, I own, but it was no longer it didn't.

[00:22:21] It really wasn't. It wasn't my thing. And I didn't realize that even though I'd been wildly successful in it until I got a little older in life and started to really ask these questions. And the hard part for me was walking away.

[00:22:32] And that's not easy to do because most of my life was tied up in that. Right. I mean, everything was in that. And I've had, I had done do all that, but it wasn't bad thing. It's the best thing I ever did.

[00:22:43] I have today in life that it is way better than it ever was before. But now it's because I'm living in the agreement with my purpose. What God put me on the list to do it every day. I get to do that. And it's all screen Michael.

[00:22:56] Well, I want to thank you for being here and sharing these insights that I think apply to pretty much everybody that's listening and tell us about your business, Michael. What are the things that you do that you have that you like our listeners know about?

[00:23:08] Well, one of the things that I realized is I was going through my process and I started when I was like it says very young and in my early 20s and the early 30s. And very quickly I got to a place where I just

[00:23:18] didn't have anybody I could talk to. I didn't have anybody that had been there done that that could help me navigate because I was in an area where none of my friends had anything like that. And I was there just was hard to find people that

[00:23:30] I could really lay back challenges to how was I how do I deal with these sorts of things? And one of the things that I wanted to be able to provide for other people that were in the same situation, I was people that are very successful.

[00:23:42] Got a good thing. They're not they're not going down the wrong road, so to speak. But there's something that seems new missing. There's a lack of fulfillment. I described it this way. It's as if you're 16 year old and you got a Ferrari

[00:23:54] for your car, but you were a little disappointed that it wasn't the right color. Yeah, most people would have traded their lives for my life. But it didn't matter. There was something missing and I needed help from someone to help navigate me.

[00:24:08] It's kind of like that person puts her armor and you go, Hey, have you thought about this? We talked about this. And so over the years I started developing coaching and I've been coaching my whole life. I just didn't know that's what God made me to do.

[00:24:19] And so I've been helping people and I don't work well with new beginners and people that are just starting out because I'm a little too harsh for them. I'm like, there's some things you got to do and you got to do them now.

[00:24:28] So I deal with people that are typically higher performers offer coaching, but I also do a high level of business consulting as well because what I have found is whether it's you into your business or it's business into you in both cases that flows together

[00:24:42] and they interconnect because the patterns that we create personally translate over into the business and the business translates back and forth. And so in order to fix one or the two, when I go in to talk to somebody about their

[00:24:53] business, it doesn't do much good if I don't deal with them. Yeah. And once I've dealt with them, now we got to go see what is it inside that business that we need to adjust and tweak. And I've had this the wonderful good fortune

[00:25:05] over the years to do a massive number of businesses in lots of different industries. And so business at the base is very similar. There's principles that drive all of that. Right. So one of the things I like to do, Scott, is

[00:25:16] I like to help people identify who they are, why they're here, what their purpose is, and then help them identify what they want. And then let's figure out how do we make that happen right here right now? So I do coaching and consulting as my primary

[00:25:30] primary, how I serve other people right now. That's great. Well, Michael, thank you for being here on the show. We're going to put your LinkedIn link, your site link. Also, I checked out your YouTube channel. You've got some great content there too.

[00:25:40] We're going to put that on the show notes as well. So everybody that's listening, go to the show notes where we hear the podcast and you'll be able to connect with Michael right away. Michael, thank you again for being here

[00:25:49] and I'd love to have you back on the show in the future. Thank you, Scott. I appreciate the time. Thank you for listening to the Rain Making Podcast. For more information about our recruiting services for international law firms, visit our website at attorneyssearchgroup.com

[00:26:09] to inquire about having Scott speak at your next convention, conference, sales meeting or executive retreat. Visit therainmakingpodcast.com.