Sales leadership is a critical factor in the success – or failure – of any sales organization. If a leader wants to secure desirable outcomes for their team, they must learn how to lead from the inside out. In this episode, Mark Cox sits down with a global co-leader, Kevin Cashman of Korn Ferry. He explains how leadership must embrace authenticity, courage, critical thinking, and inclusivity in order to become truly effective and impactful. Kevin also emphasizes the importance of a leader’s self-awareness, deep emotional intelligence, and the duty to be always ready to take care of their team.
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Kevin Cashman: Embracing Leadership From The Inside Out
We got a great show for you because that was Kevin Cashman. Kevin's the author of a fantastic book called Leadership from the Inside Out: Becoming a Leader for Life. That's the book we talk about here. Kevin's written five other books, including The Pause Principle: Step Back to Lead Forward and Awakening the Leader Within. Kevin is a bestselling author. He is a global thought leader and CEO coach.
He pioneered the grow the whole person to grow the whole leader approach to transformative leadership. He was the Founder of LeaderSource Ltd. and the Chief Executive Institute. In 2006, LeaderSource was acquired by Korn Ferry, where Kevin is now the Global Co-leader of CEO and Enterprise Leaders Development. He ends up running 130 offices globally.
In the book we discussed in this episode, Leadership From The Inside Out, we talk about these eight pathways to achieving that leadership from the inside out. Also, their forms of mastery we've got to get to, whether it's Personal mastery, Story mastery, or Purpose mastery with a great quote from Mark Twain. “The two most important days of your life are the day you're born and the day you find out why. That’s Purpose mastery.
We get into Interpersonal mastery, Change mastery, Resilience mastery, Being mastery, and Coaching mastery. We talk about this leadership journey from serving the I as a direct contributor to serving the we, where you're leading the team, and how important it is to have a balance of both. Kevin has amazing experience and a shocking track record.
When his firm was acquired by Korn Ferry, there were about 900 million in search and 10 million in consulting and now, there are a billion in both. It's been an amazing growth journey at Korn Ferry. I love Kevin's approach to purpose and meaning in developing the person. He's also got some great stories about coaching NHL players, NFL players, and some of the top-performance athletes in the world. I enjoyed my conversation with Kevin Cashman. I'm sure you will too. If you enjoy this episode, please like and subscribe to the show because that helps us to get other great guests like Kevin. Here's Kevin Cashman.
Kevin, thank you so much for joining the show. It's so great to meet you.
It’s my pleasure to be here. Thanks for the invitation and thanks for letting me add to your well and wellness of selling.
What a great way of putting it. Kevin, I was extremely excited and slightly embarrassed to run the show because as a matter of course, we'll do the reading on some of the great guests that we have and I chose to do a deep dive on a book that is amazing to me. I hadn't read it before. Your book, Leadership From The Inside Out: Becoming a Leader for Life is one of those very unique books and for the folks reading, this is in the third edition.
It’s the third edition. It’s probably twenty printings.
For those who aren't experts in publishing like me, when you do research into this, you'll never get a second edition unless it's a runaway bestseller but to have a third edition is shocking.
It's shocking to do it too because you get these markers of what you've learned in between the editions and it's quite shocking in a very positive way. The third edition is 70% different than the first edition. The principles held up but the research, the stories, the emphasis, and the writing got much better. All sorts of things changed. It's not a superficial thing.
I had heard some of my other research, Kevin, that in between the second edition and the third edition, you changed 40% of it. It’s a massive amount of change.
I don't know how all of that math works, but sometimes somehow it did change that much in each edition.
Looking Back
I'm reading the third edition and so fundamental in terms of this connection between leadership and personal growth. As you aptly point out, these are themes we've seen quite a bit between your first edition and now, that length of period of time other people have published great works referencing this connection. Before we do a deep dive and jump in, Kevin, you've got a very interesting background. Having been an entrepreneur and then having your business LeadSource Ltd acquired by Korn Ferry in 2006, tell us a little bit about that professional journey that you've been on.
I'm glad you find it interesting. I don't know if I can call it interesting, but it's surely been a fulfilling journey, I have to say. I think if there's anything I've done well, and it's not easy to say that as your first speaking, but with humility, I think if I've done anything well. I've organized my life around purpose and what is important. To me, elevating the growth of people, I call it growing beyond. It means we all can grow beyond wherever we are right now. That's what learning is all about. I bet it's about what selling well is all about too. I've been true to that journey. I've been very fortunate to organize my business around the purpose of helping people grow beyond.
It started off early. I got a Psychology degree because I was interested in human development. I was going to go for a PhD in Psychology, but then started using psychology to coach professional athletes, NHL players, National Football League players, and Olympic athletes. I was helping them do a counterintuitive thing and that is relax before they compete and stay as relaxed as they possibly could at their peak effort. It's counterintuitive, but it translated well. Do you remember the Purple People leaders?
Yes.
Way, way back, they were in the Super Bowl and these four massive guys sitting with them in a conference room and teaching them how to meditate, relax, and all of that. I wish I had a video of it because it's this little consultant and these gigantic guys but it really helped. That was my entree into applying psychology and mindsets to performance.
From there, I started helping executives. Part of my psychology background was in career and vocational psychology. It was natural for me then to start coaching executives in transition. Also, not just get another job, but what would be most fulfilling and purposeful was the real hidden opportunity for them. It wasn't about getting a job. It was about being fulfilled in that job in their life.
We did that. We built that up. We transitioned that company because I finally learned from a CEO, he was the Godfather’s Pizza CEO. After we helped him transition, he said, “Do you know what business you're in?” I said, “Yeah. I know what business I'm in.” He said, “I don't think you do.” You're in the business helping leaders develop and not just transition. This has been the best development experience of my life. The light bulbs went on and we started taking the methodologies we had learned, transitioning around purpose, leadership, teamwork, culture, and so on.
They then started applying it explicitly to developing senior people. We also developed these institutes called the Enterprise Leader Institute, and the Executive to Leader Institute. Long story short or maybe long story shorter is we grew that and went from local to national and international. It became too much for us to manage multiple locations. We then started looking for a partner and eventually, after almost two years, Korn Ferry convinced us to join them when they were $10 million in consulting and they're about 900 million in search. The end of the story from a sales standpoint. Now, search and consulting is a billion. It's been quite a ride.
Now, Kevin, correct me if I'm wrong. You're the Global Co-leader of the CEO and Enterprise Leader Development group within Korn Ferry. You're working with up to 130 different offices globally.
Yeah. That's right. Korn Ferry decided to be all things talent. Instead of being the largest executive search firm in the world, which they still are, they decided to be the largest talent management firm in the world. Also, not only acquire people, but how do you develop them, compensate them, and structure organizations and strategies. That long title means that our group develops CEOs and CEO successors. We develop enterprise leadership. It's a very different kind of leadership at the very top of the house and cascades down into the organization.
Korn Ferry acquired Miller Heiman so Miller Heiman, still to this day, their core fundamental methodology originally created around '88, '91, or around there that is still one of the most foundational sales methodologies for a complex sale now. Also, about 60% of most sales books refer back to that core methodology of multiple people influencing the sale, personal win, professional win, red flags, strengths, and weaknesses. It’s fantastic stuff. Alice Heiman is a frequent guest on this show, by the way.
That's fantastic. I assume there is a connection, but I did not know that. It also is interesting that Korn Ferry does nineteen evaluations of firms for every firm they acquire. The due diligence is high. In our track record, we've had 24 or 25 acquisitions over the last few years. Korn Ferry's ability not to just pick the premier thought leader, process leader, and program leader, but the right people too. It's been quite amazing what's been done.
It's also been such an amazing and interesting journey for you. I do want to double-click a little bit on this purpose-driven. You talked about this being one of these fundamental principles for you and your entire life. You've been very purpose-driven. I love the quote from Mark Twain that the two most important days of your life are the day when you're born and the day you find out why. That's in the early going of the book, if my memory serves but I stole that quote. I'm going to use that quote quite frequently. I love that quote.
We're commonly accused of saying that sales leadership is the X factor of professional sales now in our view, Kevin. It’s an interesting statistic for our industry. There's $70 billion spent annually on training professional salespeople. In the US, it's about $5,000 per person. On average, a company spends 20% more training salespeople than any other business function. The amount of money spent training sales leaders is so small that they don't chart it. It's a very interesting dynamic because sales leaders are quite comfortable sending their team out or having people like us come in to train the team because they'll say, “The team needs training.”
They're far less comfortable putting up their hand and saying, “I need help.” As a result of which, whether you're a Chief Revenue Officer or a VP of Sales, the average tenure for that title right now is shockingly short. It’s almost under two years, if you believe recent Gardner research and some of it is McKinsey research as well.
CEOs are as low as 4 to 5 years now.
Pathways To Mastering Leadership
It's a very challenging environment. Let's get into the book a little bit where we talk about the pathways to mastering leadership. I have so many questions. What's changed over the three editions was at the core we talk or you write about these eight pathways to mastering leadership, Personal, Story mastery, Purpose mastery, Interpersonal, Change mastery, Resilience mastery, Being mastery, and then Coaching mastery. Do you mind if we unpack a couple of these, Kevin? Tell us how you came up with this framework.
That would be great. If I could back up and piggyback on your introduction, then we'll go to the eight mastery because you provoke something. Sometimes we say leadership changes everything. Now, it might be it changes everything for better or worse but it changes everything. If great leadership changes everything, great sales leadership changes leadership. It does because what happens if any leader is not influential enough, serving enough, or understanding needs enough? You could make a case, which I'm sure you wouldn't mind, that sales leadership changes everything if you think of it in the broadest sense.
Great leadership changes everything, and great sales leadership changes leadership itself.
I completely agree and we see it in practice. As you, with your experience, and one of the things you write about one of the many benefits of joining Korn Ferry was your reach. The 100,000 executives that you're working with annually or monthly that you end up touching. You have a research based on seven million executives. There are assessments done to a shocking scale that validate the research.
At a much smaller level, Kevin, we're working with these mid-size companies when we either bring in, help them find the right sales leader, and properly onboard that sales leader, we can see the change in a year. It's absolutely amazing. We've seen the other examples as well where something is running smoothly. There's a change made and the amount of time for a negative impact to take place is so crazy quick. It's shockingly quick.
Sometimes keeping the wind in the sails, if you've got a leader who believes in the potential of the team and they believe their job is to uncover that potential, all these great things happen. You coached hockey players, the Wayne Gretzky effect, where the best salesperson who comes in becomes a leader, but their joy isn't developing people. Their joy is doing deals. They see everybody else as a tool to help them hit a bigger number. It’s a completely different environment.
This is where sales leadership and enterprise leadership come together because typically, we're developed as an executive leader, sales executive leaders, or any other kind of leader. We come up through a silo and we get reinforced for producing results.
We get in the bad habit of, “I produce results,” and we are a bit of an afterthought. It's the same thing in enterprise leadership. We come up with a function. We get skilled at running up and down stairs vertical and we develop a certain fitness, musculature, or aerobic capacity for a certain sport. Suddenly, whether it's the marketplace or our own awareness, some mentor, or advisor says, “Wait. That sport, you still need to do once in a while, but now you're in a lateral sport.”
Now, you have to go across. You have to think across, collaborate across, innovate across, share resources across, coach across, and help your colleagues across. That juncture of the I to the we is the most difficult juncture in development for executive to enterprise leaders and I bet for sales leaders too serving the I or serving the bigger we.
Without going to other folk’s research, there are volumes of research on this. I'll share my own experience of making that transition. Back in 2000, I was that person who'd been a successful salesperson and was promoted to leader. Within a 90-day period of time, not only was everybody who reported to me was reporting to me miserable, but I was miserable.
It felt like the worst job of my life because it was still about me, the I, and now, I was frustrated because I was responsible for the performance of five other people. Also, for the life of me back then, I couldn't understand why they couldn't do everything exactly the same way I did it. It didn't make any sense to me.
Then you'd have to do it for them.
I was happy to tell them exactly what to do and I was so surprised when they didn't want to hear it. Kevin, it's so funny with large org companies. Even though I was terrible at the role and I was thinking of leaving, I ended up getting promoted again. What I got promoted to was a different division, a different side of the business, leading a different group of people in a business I knew nothing about.
When every interaction with someone, they'd come in and say, “Here's what's going on. What should I do?” My knee jerk was, “I have no idea. What do you think you should do?” Suddenly, they started to enjoy the process and I started to enjoy the process. They were getting elevated and I realized that is the true joy. It's one of the main reasons we run our training company. We love seeing people develop.
As you mentioned, there's so much research on this. One piece of research from Zenger and Folkman in the book The Extraordinary Leader is they took a look at people who were mainly about getting results. A little more the I to impact kind of leader. They were known for getting results. Another group was known for teaming and people skills. Those two groups produced about equivalent outcomes but there was a third group that got results and connected with people. They were 67% more. It’s a huge amount more effective. That's the principle. It's not I or we. It's I and we to produce more impact.
Connecting With People And Authentic Leadership
Tell us a little more about connecting with people. What do we mean by that?
It basically gets into emotional intelligence. It’s Goldman's work, Yale's work, CCLS’s work, and Korn Ferry's work too. Normally, we think about connection I think a little superficially. We have a little chat and we use a little humor, which believe it or not, I love, even though a CEO told me, “You say you love humor, but you're not very funny.” Sometimes we think of it in terms of that kind of banter. It's important that it is a connection but there are two things that are coming together.
Deep self-awareness, authenticity, and understanding of what I have and what I don't have. Also, being real about that and being real and revealing about it because that builds a lot of trust. Not trying to always look better than we are. Be who we are, be honest about what we have, what we know, and what we don't know. That builds a tremendous amount of trust in us.
That's part of the equation is deep personal authenticity and awareness that builds trust. The other thing is deep awareness of others and deep care of others. Wanting to know what your needs are, and what your goals are, and not doing it as a consultative selling technique which by the way is great by doing consultative selling with a heart and with care that wants to help. When all of that is happening at the same time for both people, it's electric. Time stops and we have a great conversation and we want to work together. That's the magic. It's a magic born out of authenticity, curiosity, and real care.
It makes so much sense and everybody reading this will have examples in their career where they knew they were reporting to or working with a boss like that. They felt it. That boss didn't have to be warm and coddling all the time. They might give significant challenges or hold you accountable with love or even a coach. You talked about athletics at the beginning. I had many coaches like that but if you believe their intent was making you better, it changes everything.
Now, sometimes you have to discover their intent later, and sometimes that's too late but underneath that intent, the thing that works is presence. We know when somebody's there for us and with us. That's the foundation. You can't fake it. You are either really present or not and people have a radar for it. I'm doing all these old sports stories.
You cannot fake it all the time. You are either present or not. People have a radar for authenticity.
We love sports on this show.
Maybe I'm overdoing it.
No. We love it.
There's a Vince Lombardi story that came to me firsthand and I had the good fortune early in my career. I had this athletic connection and so on. I had two CEOs who were on Vince Lombardi's World Champion first Super Bowl and second Super Bowl. They were both players. Now, this was 25 years after their Super Bowl. It's not that long ago, but it's still quite a ways. I get this laboratory where I'm meeting with each of them and I can't tell the other one that I'm working with this other one.
They say, “I talked to such and such,” “Okay, fine.” They divulge it. I had this laboratory of these two independent situations. What am I interested in asking them as a punchline? What was it like with Lombardi? What impacted you?” I knew it had an impact, but I couldn't say it in the beginning. I had to build trust and then I was going to ask them and get the real deep answer.
What was interesting is they both used the same word, which was shocking to describe Lombardi. We all know Lombardi is the tough, win-at-all-costs kind of person. They both said the same word. They both said, “I've never been so loved by anybody in my career. Maybe my family, I've been loved as much or more, but in my career, I've never been loved by a human being like Lombardi.”
Here was his hidden success formula. They knew he was in it with them and for them no matter what. He earned the right to push them to no end because they knew he loved them. That's real leadership and I’m inspired thinking about it right now. It's so foundational but he didn't have to do a lot of speeches and sales talks. No. He would have them over to his house and cook dinner. He'd love them like a family so they'd do anything for him.
Love is such a strong and powerful world. You use the same example in the book with Shaq and his college coach Dale.
He's an amazing mentor of generations of talent.
I was a hockey player and was a goalie. When I was playing prep school hockey, which was okay. For Canada, there are much higher levels but it was pretty good. Our coach had been a former professional goalie and I knew that he cared. He could be direct. There were some tough things but he was a great guy and I knew he cared. Even for a young person, 17, 18, I knew his intent was to make me better and help me get through certain plateaus or ceilings of complexity for what we're doing. You're right. You do anything for them.
The thing that got sparked, I'm thinking, “You're not wide enough to be a goalie.” You must have been fast.
I'm also not that tall. I'm only six feet tall. In this day’s game, it's much different. You block the net but in my day, you had to give a little piece of net to somebody and then take it away.
These principles we were talking about hold up. When you get down to it, whether it's athletics, business, or selling, it's how we employ who we are, how we know who we are, and how we employ who we are to make a difference. The venue doesn't matter but becoming a leader for life is what's important. Getting the next million-dollar sale is important. Going home and influencing our family. Selling is not popular at home but influencing towards something that's important is universally applicable.
When you talk about authenticity, we’ve got a couple of things with some of the teams we work with. Not always leaders, but certainly with younger generations as they're coming up, we are encouraging them to be their real selves, but they're not comfortable. Part of it is we all have those things. Somebody thinks a young person's a little bit in debt or they went out and partied a little bit too much two weekends ago and they feel bad. They feel like they have to keep those things in some ways hidden away. They're not comfortable understanding that we all have that stuff.
Understanding Authenticity
With the younger folks, we just try and be yourself. Nobody wants a marketing automaton in sales. With more of the leaders that we manage, we talk about authenticity but let's talk about this. Also, you bring this up a little bit in the book. Most leaders either think they're being authentic or they don't think there's an issue with authenticity because whatever state they're in is what they're showing. If somebody out there is reading this Kevin, can we unpack that a little bit and say, “What do we mean by authenticity and how do you assess whether you are authentic in front of your team?”
Let's just get the assessment part out of the way because there's a very valid and valuable way to do it. In companies that use 360 methodology where the person ranks themselves with different behaviors and characteristics, and then other people above, across, and below get to do a similar ranking. If those tools are valid and the interpretation is good. We get to reconcile with how we see ourselves versus how others see us.
Now, the interpretation of this is science, but it's real art too because sometimes we see things in ourselves, that others don't see, and then our developmental challenge reveals more. People can experience who we are or at other times people see things in us that need to be developed that we don't see and then can we be open to that and learn and grow and so on.
It's a great process. It needs great coaching and interpretation to know what to do because sometimes we get feedback from others and we go, “That's what we should do.” Maybe you should do it, but maybe you should do it differently based on who you are, your life story, and so on. It's this reconciliation of individuality and social constructs and we're somewhere in between in terms of our authenticity.
Authenticity is important throughout all of business. Our products are services that authentically create value. If they're not, you are in the wrong company and they're in the wrong business. Those are tough decisions and that's not a reactive decision. That's an important thing. We could go on and on. What is an authentic product or service? It's probably a product or service that has a real purpose that's enhancing the lives of the people it touches. It’s probably more authentic when it does that.
If it destroys more value than it creates, what certain products do, you have to challenge yourself to be there. However, the key thing with authenticity is not, “Kill me. This is who I am.” You live with it. It's like, “I love my dog, but I probably wouldn't take it to a board meeting at Johnson & Johnson. It might be authentic for me, but it doesn't create value for others. Authenticity ultimately has to reconcile with what's real and important for me. What creates value for the audience that I'm serving? Also, finding that sweet spot is where our authenticity will create value in who we're serving.
Again, the reconciliation of the I and the we. If authenticity is all in the I, then it's, “Kill me. I'm this. You have to accept that and the heck with you.” No, it's both, and. Authentic in the I, connected in the we creating value. That's what real authenticity is and this is not leadership in a hierarchy. This is leadership in the hierarchy and in life. We define it as the authentic influence that creates enduring value. That gives you a sense of authenticity across the I, the we, and the enterprise.
I’m creating value, which leads a little bit to the way you dedicated the book to those value-creating leaders with the courage to commit to authentic personal transformation and the passion to serve the world on purpose.
That sounds good. I hadn't heard of that in a long time.
It does. I thought so too. That's why I pulled it out.
That's exactly the point. Whoever wrote that, good on them.
I'm talking to the guy who wrote that. That's why I'm so excited. You wrote that.
Those are great principles.
Embracing Courage
One of the ones we haven't talked about, we've talked about purpose. We've talked about this being authentic. We'll talk a little more about transformation but let's speak to courage because that's a constant theme throughout the book. How do we define it and is this a muscle that we can develop?
We could take 60 minutes on this question. We just finished a three-year research study on enterprise leadership to not only figure out in this day's world what are their capabilities, which were not that shocking, but what are their capabilities. What are underneath their capabilities? What are underneath the clusters of competencies and skills? The five mindsets became clear. These mindsets are deeper than the behaviors or capabilities.
Two of these mindsets we've already touched on. It’s purpose and courage. We can talk about the other three too because they're all equally important and have a certain dynamic between them. For instance, when you have purpose and courage, these two are mindsets that if they dance together are more powerful. For instance, if you have high courage and low purpose, you can do a lot of damage in the world. We've seen that.
If you have courage but low purpose, you can do a lot of damage in the world.
The history of leadership has a hell of a lot of damage and diminishing life in it when you look at the whole history. There's a lot of courage and not a lot of service and purpose. That's a literally lethal combination. Now, on the other hand, if you have a purpose without courage, important things don't happen. It's a nice aspiration, but nothing moves.
This dance between the mindset of purpose, meaning how can I bring myself, and my organization to others in a way that touches and changes their life? It’s because purpose is not purposeful as you know. It's not real until it touches the lives of others. That's the measure of purpose. Are we impacting lives or not? You've got a mindset around service and impacting people's lives. Also, an openness to it. Not a closeness.
We can talk about what that means in psychological terms if you want but then the second thing is courage. Courage is this openness to go for something new, different, or challenging, feel, fear, and still go for it because it's important. Hopefully, it's important to others more or courage can go wrong. If courage takes on things that are important and even scary, we go for it.
Courage is the openness to go for something new, different, or challenging. It is about going for something despite feeling fear.
This is where purpose helps courage. We go for it because it's important to us and to all of us. Those two are particularly powerful. I think if you only had two mindsets that you worked on, those would be the two. We studied, as you have said, it used to be seven million, then now it's 28 million data sets of assessment. I heard it's going up to 50. It's going to hit 100 before too long.
AI helps with all this, right?
Yeah. It's growing exponentially. The people we get to assess and help but we studied courage across five industries. Our hypothesis was, “Is it going to be important in all of them? Is it going to be important in none of them? Are there certain industries where it's more important?” What was shocking to us was that courage was the only mindset or capability because it happens to be both that showed up in all five industries. Of about 80 to 100 possibilities, it was the only one that showed up in all industries. It's foundational to leadership and to selling too.
We will talk about that openness, Kevin, but what are the other three mindsets?
Integrative Thinking And Inclusion
The other three mindsets after purpose and courage are integrative thinking. This is not just seeing the dots, but synthesizing the dots into new realities. I am constantly trying to find the new dot that will change everything again. That's this unending synthesis of thinking that's endlessly curious to find the new synthesis. It's a lot more than strategy. You better have it if you're going to do strategy, but you better have it if you're going to innovate too. It's a key thing.
Another one is inclusion. This is important for diversity, equity, and inclusion. DEI, it's important to it. It's a mindset that supports that openness to difference but we're looking at inclusion on more of a fundamental level. The connecting, the including, the ideas, and different perspectives of different people. This one feeds integrative thinking. These two are different, but they dance well together. I can see your light bulbs already going on. I don't have to describe that more. The last one, which could be seen to be the basis of the other four two pairs that are dancing together but a common denominator underneath all of them is the mindset of self-awareness and awareness of others which is emotional intelligence that we talked about because without that, nothing else works.
I love the idea of these mindsets dancing together. That's an interesting thing for all of us to think about in the importance of them. There are many interesting things to think about here. Just a reminder to everybody, we're talking about Leadership from the Inside Out: Becoming a Leader for Life. This is one of six books by Kevin, many of which have become bestsellers or identified as top sales.
Two have but it sounds better how you said it.
Leadership from the Inside Out: Becoming a Leader for Life
The Awakening the Leader Within is one of the other top-selling. Also, The Pause Principle: Step Back to Lead Forward was recognized as one of the business books of the year.
That's the other bestseller and it gets into the counterintuitive idea that sometimes to accelerate, we have to step back in order to go forward more powerfully.
Kevin, first and foremost, thank you so much for joining us in this episode. I have one or two other quick questions because I have to be so cognizant of your time and you're so right, we could be on this topic for hours.
I'll come back if you want.
Currency And Leadership
We'd be delighted if you would come back. Please, and thank you. As we talk about these core concepts and principles, if I think of the last 10 or 15 years, I've seen a number of things over the last few years. These are things that haven't changed dramatically in 5, 10, 20 years. They haven't changed that much, the need for many of these things but when you created the second edition and third edition of the book, between the first and third, you changed 70% of the content. I know you added a different pathway, which was storytelling but has leadership really changed that much, or has most of the change in the book really come from more research, more facts, and more referenceable stories exemplifying these core concepts?
How I view it is there are two ends to thought leadership. One has to do with currency and relevance now. That's where research emerges and says, “We're seeing these correlations.” To me, that's one end of thought leadership that's always evolving towards the future but what's interesting to me is that the principles go back thousands of years in thought leadership, not 10, 20 years. What fascinates me is these enduring principles of life like trust, love, connection, and purpose. They are not new. They're part of the human experience. They go back literally a millennia.
What research does ultimately is to discover what's there. It’s physics and all of physics doesn't discover what's not there. It discovers what's there. It reveals. To me, that's where thought leadership gets interesting is it's current and it has endured through human existence. That's real thought leadership. It's both, and.
Closing Words
Kevin, first of all, thank you so much for joining us. What a pleasure meeting you and a real pleasure reading the book as preparation for now. A couple of the other books we're going to take a run at before you come back and join us next time. How do the folks reading this learn more outside of buying the book, which they're going to buy, Leadership from the Inside Out? How do they learn more about you and what you're doing with Korn Ferry?
There are two websites. One is to take a look at the Korn Ferry website and see all the capabilities that run across Korn Ferry. You've touched on Miller Heiman and executive development. There's a compensation group. It goes on and on. That's one thing that might interest people as a resource. There are a lot of articles and research. We view the website at Korn Ferry as a very giving kind of website. I have a website too that connects to Korn Ferry, but it's CashmanLeadership.com. You can go there and I'm highlighted. My articles, videos, thought leadership, and books are there but you can also connect to Korn Ferry and its capabilities as well. Those two websites would be, if you're interested, places to go.
Kevin, thank you again for joining us. Folks, thank you so much for joining the show. As always, we do this to try and improve the performance and professionalism of B2B sales and in doing so, improve the lives of professional salespeople. If you liked this episode, please share and like the show, if you enjoyed it. That matters to us.
If there's something we can do to make these even more valuable to you, please let us know. You can email me at MarkCox@InTheFunnel.com directly. That's my personal email. We love constructive criticism. The show is a result of you folks helping us try to make this better and better. Every note I get, I will respond to. That's me personally responding and thank you in advance for doing so. Thanks, everybody. We'll see you next time.
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About Kevin Cashman
Kevin Cashman is a best-selling author, global thought leader and CEO coaching expert, keynote speaker and pioneer of the ‘grow the whole person to grow the whole leader’ approach to CEO coaching and transformative enterprise leadership. He is the founder of LeaderSource Ltd, and the Chief Executive Institute®, recognized as one of the top three enterprise leadership development programs globally. In 2006, LeaderSource was acquired by Korn Ferry, where Kevin is now Global Co-Leader of CEO and Enterprise Leader Development across 130 offices internationally that touch the lives of 100,000+ leaders monthly.
Kevin has advised thousands of CEOs, senior executives and senior teams in more than 80 countries worldwide. He is an accomplished thought leader on topics of personal, team and organizational transformation. He has written six books including Awakening the Leader Within and Leadership from the Inside Out, named the #1 best-selling business book of 2000 by CEO-READ and now used at over 150 universities globally.
Kevin has written scores of articles on enterprise leadership and CEO coaching. He has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, Chief Executive, Human Resource Executive, Inc., Fast Company, Strategy & Leadership, Directors & Boards Magazine, and is a leadership columnist for Forbes.com and HuffPost/Thrive Global. For several years he has been named as one of the Top Global Thought Leaders by Leadership Excellence and one of the Top Global Executive Coaches by GlobalGurus.org.
