152: The Flipside of Leadership – Intelligent Disobedience with Ira Chaleff [rebroadcast ep15]

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Ep152 flipside of leadership intelligent disobedience Ira Chaleff TalentGrow Show with Halelly Azulay rerun ep15

While we take a vacation, we’re rebroadcasting a few of our favorite episodes from the archives of the earlier years of the show. This one was originally broadcast as episode 15. Enjoy!

While we take a vacation, we're rebroadcasting a few of our favorite episodes from the archives of the earlier years of the show. This one was originally broadcast as episode 15. Enjoy! All of us are both leaders and followers.

All of us are both leaders and followers. While we often focus on how to lead, author, speaker, workshop presenter and innovative thinker Ira Chaleff has focused his career on the beneficial use of power between those who are leading and those who are following in any given situation. On this episode of the TalentGrow Show, Ira and I chatted about ways in which we can all become more courageous followers and why there are times when we should all choose the path of intelligent disobedience. Taken from the lexicon of guide dog training, Ira introduces the term Intelligent Disobedience to fit our model of leadership and followership in organizations, societies, and families. Based on his latest book of the same name, Ira talks about when we should feel the responsibility – even the obligation – to speak up and push back to those in power, because it is the right thing to do and it helps our leaders avoid big, possibly hurtful, mistakes. And we discuss the important ways in which, as leaders, we can create the kinds of cultures that supports courageous followership. This episode will expand your view of leadership, courage, and living in a principled way and leave you deeply inspired.

About Ira Chaleff

Ira Chaleff is an author, speaker, workshop presenter and innovative thinker on the beneficial use of power between those who are leading and those who are following in any given situation. He is the author of The Courageous Follower: Standing Up To and For Our Leaders, coeditor of The Art of Followership: How Great Followers Make Great Leaders and Organizations, and his latest book, Intelligent Disobedience: Doing Right When What You’re Told To Do Is Wrong. Ira is the founder of the International Leadership Association’s Followership Learning Community and a member of the ILA board of directors. He is also the founder and president of Executive Coaching & Consulting Associates, which provides coaching, consulting, and facilitation to companies, associations, and agencies throughout the Washington, DC area. He is chairman emeritus of the nonpartisan Congressional Management Foundation and has provided facilitation to nearly one hundred congressional offices to improve their service to constituents. He is adjunct faculty at Georgetown University, where Courageous Followership is part of the core curriculum in its professional management training for staff. Ira holds a degree in Applied Behavioral Science and is a Board Certified Coach from the Center for Credentialing and Education. He lives in the beautiful Blue Ridge Mountains outside of Washington, DC. Bears frequently disobey the no trespassing signs on the road and help keep his connection strong with the wonders of nature.

What you’ll learn:

  • Why teaching the flipside of leadership is just as important as teaching leadership

  • How successful leaders require effective followers to actually succeed

  • What is meant by the term Intelligent Disobedience, where it came from, and how we should think of it in organizational, societal, and familial contexts

  • What event in Ira's background catalyzed his interest in what he calls courageous followership

  • What do the Nuremberg Trials and the Milgram Experiments have in common?

  • What keeps CEOs up at night

  • The downside of power and authority and why it's a possibly dangerous situation to avoid

  • When should you disobey authority figures?

  • How we should train our youth to intelligently disobey

  • What's the right balance between complying with authority and not causing harm

  • What can we learn from surgeons and nurses that can apply in our corporate environment to help ensure we make good decisions?

  • and more!

Resources

TRANSCRIPT

Halelly: Hey there, TalentGrowers, a quick note from Halelly Azulay here, your leadership development strategist at TalentGrow, and the TalentGrow Show is taking a short break for vacation in August. And we will be back in September with brand new content for you. But we are rebroadcasting some of our favorite earlier episodes that, perhaps you didn’t listen to yet, or perhaps you want to re-listen to now that it’s been a while. I chose some of my faves for you, and every week you’re still going to have content shared with you via these reruns, so I hope you enjoy them, and see you soon!

Announcer: Welcome to the TalentGrow Show, where you can get actionable results-oriented insight and advice on how to take your leadership, communication and people skills to the next level and become the kind of leader people want to follow. And now, your host and leadership development strategist, Halelly Azulay.

Halelly: Hey there, welcome back to the TalentGrow Show. This is Halelly Azulay, your leadership development strategist with another episode. This one is just so fascinating. I’m telling you, it just blew my mind the first time when I listened to the interview as I was conducting it, and it blew my mind again just now when I prepared to record this customized intro. I think that you’re going to really enjoy listening to Ira Chaleff talk about the idea that everyone is a leader but also every one of us is a follower. And both as leader and follower, we have the responsibility to be courageous followers, and sometimes we have the responsibility to disobey. What he calls intelligent disobedience. And so we talk about what exactly that is, what are some of the downfalls of leadership and followership? What keeps CEOs up at night? The possibly dangerous situations that can occur as a result of power and authority, and how we as employees, as leaders and as members of society, as parents, as children, as members of families can begin to make a difference by thinking about this, by asking more questions, and by taking up the courage to sometimes intelligently disobey. I hope that you enjoy this episode as much as I did, and I really would love to hear your insights and input in the comments after you listen.

Welcome back to the TalentGrow Show. I’m Halelly Azulay, your leadership development strategist and my guest today is Ira Chaleff. He is an author, a speaker, workshop presenter and an innovative thinker who studies the beneficial use of power between those who are leading and those who are following. He has a really unique perspective about leadership, I think, and I’m really looking forward to having him share his knowledge with you. I met Ira a few years back, actually, because in the D.C. area we seem to hang out in very similar networks and knew a lot of people in common, and I’ve seen Ira speak. He also spoke at one of the programs that I guided for the OD network chapter in the D.C. area, and so that I know that he is a very smart and thoughtful man, and I really, really am glad that he agreed to be on the podcast. Ira, welcome.

Ira: Thanks so much Halelly. It’s good to be back in touch with you.

Halelly: Fantastic. So Ira, one question that I ask every person that I interview is for you to give us a little bit of a snapshot of the journeys that you’ve taken over your career, but in a very short description, which of course is always a challenge for someone with an illustrious career like yours. Because everybody has such a different path and I find it really fascinating to see where you’ve been and how you got to where you are today. Would you do that for us?

Ira: My journey began at a very young age. You know, you introduced me as being very thoughtful about the subject of using power beneficially. Well, I grew up in a multigenerational household where my maternal grandmother lost her entire family in the Holocaust. And at a very early age, this was imprinted on me that a terrible crime had been committed. And as I grew older, the question emerged, “Well, why did people follow such a murderous, destructive leader?” And this really became the organizing thread for a lot of my inquiry in life, and a lot of my efforts to make a difference. So, it took different forms. In the 60s I was involved in the Civil Rights movement, how did you create better justice in a society where the laws and the culture were not fully just? In the 70s it went more into the human potential movement and found there some great ways of expanding awareness, but also could see how power could be distorted and abused in those circles.

In the 80s I came to Washington, D.C. I was always fascinated with political power. I found the niche in Washington in which I was able to work with Congressional offices on both sides of the aisle and got to see how staff in their 20s and 30s worked with the member who was often in his or her 40s, 50s or 60s – how did they build relationships in which they could have influence? How did they do this well? When they failed, what went wrong? And that became one of the laboratories for my work. I then expanded that out to an executive coaching practice in the D.C. area, so of course that largely focused on mid-level and senior federal agency managers and executives, but also in the private sector. I was fortunate to really be able to spend a few years looking into many industries, and seeing how business worked, how different cultures worked. And that led me to write – 20 years ago – the book The Courageous Follower: Standing up to and for our Leaders. That created tension. And then this year of the extension of that work is my new book, Intelligent Disobedience: Doing Right When What You’re Told You’re Doing is Wrong.

Halelly: What an amazing journey. I mean, really, you’ve been in a lot of different contexts, and I love to hear in how you describe it, the thread of that interest in protecting people from the wrong use of power, I guess, or abuse of power. So thank you for the work that you do, and how fascinating. I do work with leaders and certainly I also help people a lot of times figure out how to become more powerful when they don’t actually have authority power. And so I’m certainly very interested in this concept of both being powerful or being a leader and I believe that everybody is a leader, even when they don’t have an official role or sort of an ordained authority power. And I noticed that through that work, you were focused kind of like the flipside of leadership. And the idea that in order for there to be successful leadership, there needs to be successful followership. And I love the concept of courageous followership, which I think you probably if not invented then at least you are, in my mind, the lead person speaking about it and writing about it. So, now that you are thinking about more deeply about this idea of followership, your newest book, Intelligent Disobedience, actually instead of teaches people how to become good followers, it says to them sometimes you don’t follow, right? Because if there is some kind of guidance you’re getting from leadership that you believe is wrong – I love how you describe intelligence. In your book you say, “Intelligent disobedience is about finding the healthy balance for living in a system with rules and authority while maintaining your own responsibility for the actions we take.” So, I want to hear a little more from you about the background for this concept and how you promote it and definitely a little bit about the comparison between this situation and what you described in the Holocaust and how you referred to the Milgram Experiments in Yale in the 1960s, where – listeners may have heard about these, they’re quite famous – where people were told to give electric shocks to these innocent subjects, and they could tell that the subjects were wailing and crying and in pain, and because the experiment, power of authority, told them they had to keep doing it, two-thirds of the people kept doing it. So is that what got you to focus on this idea of intelligent disobedience, or are there a couple of other examples?

Ira: Well, first of all, tying it back to the Holocaust, after the Holocaust, there were the famous Nuremberg Trials of the primary war criminals, but also the lesser war criminals. The accountants, the physicians, the guards, etc., and a clear principle was established that one could not excuse one’s behavior by saying, “I was simply following orders.” If you have any opportunity at all to not follow the order, you are accountable for what the choice you make is. So, that’s primary here. Now, you also talk about that we are all leaders, or all can be leaders, which is true. And, the balance to that is we are all also at times followers. And that’s true all the way up and down the organizational chart. The CEO still has to follow the guidance from the board. And the Secretary of Defense needs to be a leader but if he’s not a follower of the President, the Commander in Chief, we have a constitutional crisis. So following occurs at every level. There is a school of thought that one of the ways we learn to be leaders is to develop as courageous followers. Leadership requires courage. And to the degree we can display that courage, when we are in the follower role, that prepares us for courage in the leader role.

Now, I didn’t actually come to this line of thought through the Milgram Experiments directly, though I’ve been fascinated with them for years and I’ll say more about that in a moment. But I was teaching a class on leader/follower dynamics, and talking about authority and how most of the time, it makes sense to follow authority, but sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes it’s actually dangerous. And a woman in the class raised her hand and said, “I have an example under the table.” Well, that got my interest – what do you mean under the table? Really, she had a dog under the table, and she explained that she was training this dog to be a guide dog to support a blind person. And the first year and a half of the dog’s life would be spent with her, learning to be socialized, to be able to sit under the table for an hour and a half, and also to learn all the commands it would need to know. And she said, “But then, it needs to go to a higher level trainer to teach it intelligent disobedience,” and I’d never heard the term. I said, “What is that?” Well, it’s a term in guide dog training where the dog must know that if it gets a command, for example crossing the street when a quiet, hybrid car is coming around the corner, it must know to disobey. It must be able to resist obeying, even if the command is repeated. And if the situation calls for it, it must help the human find a safer way to get to the goal. And I just loved that metaphor and in the new book, I use it as a way of thinking about how do we find that right balance between supporting the rules of the game and complying with authority and not obeying when doing so would be the wrong thing, would cause harm.

Halelly: What an amazing story. And such … I agree, it’s such an interesting metaphor. I actually had no idea that that’s how guide dogs are trained, but it makes so much sense. So wow, that’s really tough. We’re putting tons of trust back into every individual follower’s – what’s the word I’m looking for – every individual follower’s judgment, which is good, right? Most humans have good judgment and are smart enough to know what’s right from wrong.

Ira: We have to do that, Halelly. For example, I have CEOs that tell me what keeps them up at night is that their people won’t be candid with them, and won’t tell them if they’re about to make a serious mistake, because you have so much power, positional power, when you get to the high levels of an organization. And people’s behavior tends to change around you. And there’s sort of cultural programming on how am I supposed to behave and the space of authority gets in the way of candid, professional communication. And that is a dangerous situation. And good objectivists know that and they try their best to break down those walls between the different levels of the hierarchy or the different class structure that may exist in some organizations and cultures.

Halelly: So do you think, how did we get there? What do you think is at the root of people being so afraid to resist wrong guidance or wrong commands from leadership? Is it because they’re punished for it usually?

Ira: Well, it’s a great question, and we really can take a little bit of a deep dive there. If you step back and think about society, society is very complex and we need to train our young to understanding the rules of the particular society in which they grow up in, and who they are expected to listen to, and to obey and how they’re expected to be, because it’s what level of differential-ness, etc. And in any culture, if the young don’t absorb this and learn it, they have a really hard time. They get kicked out of kindergarten, with all the consequences in our culture that that holds. So, we have a positive. So often as the case, we have a positive function at the root of this, at the root of obedience. Now, where does it go wrong? Well, it goes wrong in that these rules get so internalized that we forget that we’re even operating by them. And then we bring them into situations where we should not. They don’t apply. They’d be dangerous. So for example, hospital surgery rooms. It used to be that the surgeon was next to God and everybody else did what the surgeon said. Well, it was observed that there were far too many surgical errors. A wrong limb was being – in the worst case – cut off, or many other minor and avoidable problems. And deaths, you know, that could be avoided. So contemporary best practice in hospitals now is that before you start a surgery, every single person in that room, from the lowest person on up, has to verbally say they agree, that it’s okay to start the surgery. So you know, if a nurse says, “Well, do we have the right size knee replacement before we open the person up?” People check and go, “Oh my, we don’t.” And they just saved a problem in cost and potential infection, etc. Similarly the surgeon is not allowed under best practice to end the surgery until everyone gives their assent in that nurse said, “I counted 13 sponges in and we only took 12 out.” The surgeon cannot stop the surgery until he or she looks for that 13th sponge. So we’re getting better at this, but we need to get a lot better at this. We need to understand that because of the socialization, people need some extra – most of us. Some of us are naturally good at it. We all like to think we’re good at it, but the research you sighted on Milgram shows that any of us can fail this test on the right circumstances or the wrong circumstances – so we need to actually pay attention in our education system, in our professional development, in helping people understand that they actually have not just a right, but an obligation to speak up when they see something is wrong and not just obey because they happen to be in the subordinate position.

Halelly: And it’s so fascinating – what I’m hearing and I know that you care a lot about not just figuring out how to teach leaders that are already in leadership positions and politics or in industry, but to think about starting with kids, and really as children learn how to be members of society, the main teachers to them are their parents, and of course their educators. So, I definitely can see that you’re trying to make a difference by not only focusing on teaching good leadership and good followership when you’re adults, but starting early. And I would love for you to talk more about that, but I also, because so many of the listeners are kind of – although they’re parents and they can learn from you about ways to prevent this going forward – what can they do in their job where many of them are probably in the leadership sandwich as you described. If you are an authority leader, you’re also a follower, regardless. So if you’re kind of trying to be a good leader to the people who follow you, and a courageous follower to the people who lead you, what are some of the ways you can make an impact or start to peck at this problem and make a difference from where you are? I guess I asked you two questions.

Ira: That’s fine, and I’ll take them both up. I actually, when I started writing Intelligent Disobedience, I didn’t know I was going to take this deep dive into the education system and parenting, really. So, I decided though that I needed to treat my readers as whole people, not just as executives or worker bees or whatever. You know, most of them are also part of a family system or will be part of a family system, or certainly extended family system if not their own nuclear family. And this is really something that I think we need to develop holistically. So one of my goals for this book is that if people hear about it or pick it up because of their professional development that they also say, “Wow, but this also does apply in my personal life, particularly in the life of the young people that I’m involved with.” And I hope that parents and educators will have discussion groups, reading groups, and start tackling this topic of appropriate obedience and intelligent disobedience. Because it’s very important developmentally, particularly in a culture where we pride ourselves on being free and responsible citizens. We need to be able to know when not to obey.

So, with that in mind, your listeners are almost all engaged in economic activity. And most of us don’t have vast amounts of wealth that we can fall back on if we suddenly lose our jobs. So there is a fear factor that can get in the way of our natural desire to be candid and professional. We really need to step back and assess that. To some degree, this goes to brain wiring. When something triggers fear, we now know that the primitive limbic system tends to flood us and we can go into the fight, flight, freeze symptom. And that is something we need to be aware of and learn how to manage and overcome. Because most of the time, we are not going to die if we take a principled stance. And in fact, sometimes that’s the stance that will help our career. If we actually do help someone in the formal leader role understand the risks they were missing in the order that they gave, and we help save them and the organization from the serious misstep, our social capital and value as a part of this organization goes up! So there’s not just a downside risk to taking a courageous and principled stand. But because of that inherent quality that leadership needs those characteristics, there’s an upside potential as well. We don’t take these stances as manipulatively to advance our career, but I think it’s important to understand when we think it might hurt our career that that ain’t necessarily so.

Halelly: Really good point. So, it’s kind of like, I keep reflecting back to my childhood and to my kids. I think that in my family there’s a really strong value for being an independent thinker, and that influenced a lot of the decisions that I’ve made, or that I’ve felt free to make, to think for myself and to resist doing things that I didn’t agree with, even though I was told to do them. And I’m sure that it has led me down this path of entrepreneurship, because many of my earlier experiences within corporate America, I felt like I saw things that were unethical or just totally inappropriate, and I tried to speak up to the best that I could, but at some point I needed to make a decision about whether do I just put my head down and keep following what I know is wrong? Because they won’t change it or I wasn’t successful in influencing the powers that be. Or do I need to go somewhere else so that I am not forced to do what I really believe is wrong? And I made several of those decisions. And I notice in my children, I believe that they’ve been raised by two very independent thinking parents, and that kind of comes back to haunt us sometimes when they’re not little soldiers at school and they use whatever limited reasoning and background that they have to sometimes question authority. It’s right back, it comes back and it’s tough. Because I really want to raise them with that value, but it makes everything a little more difficult. I appreciate that you have just described that upside. Everybody is so afraid and I think that many people are risk obverse, so a lot of their decisions are made out of fear instead of out of courage. As a leader, how do you make sure that you’re leading courageous followers? What can you do as a leader in an organization to help nip this problem in the bud?

Ira: Well, it’s a very important question. All managers and people in formal leadership roles like to think that they create an environment in which people will be candid with them and will push back with creative ideas, etc. Unfortunately, for two reasons, that isn’t always true. One is as we discussed, each of us come with our own family of origin and early childhood upbringing and different cultures that we come from – ethnic cultures with different rules and values and behavior. Gender issues as well, you know, that enter in here. And so even though we, as the manager, might think we’re creating a very safe environment, it doesn’t necessarily translate that way to the people we’re working with. So we have to work harder than we think we might in order to genuinely get people to feel we really mean it, we really want them to speak up and we’ll value that.

The second piece is that unfortunately, we all have blind spots. And we don’t, we’re not always aware of the kind of micro messages that we send out that discourage candid feedback and input. So, in the Courageous Follower, over successive editions – it’s not on its third edition – I’ve added a chapter on the courage to listen to followers. So it really walks leaders through a lot of the hidden pitfalls and ways that they can proactively create the culture that will genuinely support that kind of candor. It’s not easy. As we know, trust can be easily lost, to inadvertent missteps. So this requires some thought, some reading, some practice, some coaching, even, in order to do it well.

Halelly: Can you share maybe one or two of those?

Ira: Sure. So here’s a classic one. A wonderful CEO of a very vibrant company came back from a three-day retreat with her six top senior executives, and there was a meeting with her, about 50 or 60 midlevel managers, and before we started the meeting, she said, “Do you mind if I have a few minutes, just brief the management team on what transpired in our three-day retreat?” And I said, “Of course not.” So she went and she started to sell the ideas that they had come up with and how they were going to change this and that and the other thing, and the product line and the target customer base and … after about 10 or 12 minutes of this passionate selling of her ideas, she asked, “Does anybody have any problem with that?” Well, you see she created this environment, unintentionally, where you would be such a damp mop on her enthusiasm that nobody would speak up. It took me two hours, with very carefully designed group processes, to undo that. Now, imagine the difference if she had instead come in and said, “You know, we had this wonderful retreat. Here were the four key ideas that emerged from this that we’re giving serious consideration to. Before we do that, we really need your input to see are we missing anything? Do we have blind spots? Are there ramifications in the system that we haven’t thought about?” And just listen to the difference there, how people would be willing to put in their candid viewpoints, and then the CEO and her senior team can make really good decisions.

Halelly: Great. Thank you for sharing that. I think that really helps clarify what you mean and I hope that people go and read your books, because I do know that they are full of very actionable ideas. It’s not just theory. And one of the things that I’m going to ask you is, as I always ask my guests, is to have one specific actionable tip that people can take away. But before we get to that, I do want to ask you what is new for you? What’s exciting and on the horizon? You’ve written this book. I know that you’ve been actively speaking about it, doing interviews and sharing the content and the book with people. What’s next?

Ira: Well, it’s funny, Halelly. It’s interesting, how many people say, “Well, what’s the next book you’re going to write?” Or some version of that. And I have to explain, I don’t write books in order to write books. I have found myself a steward of certain ideas in the world. And my role and my passion is to be a good steward, a good kind of relayer of those ideas so that in current way of thinking, the mean that the idea represents takes root in the cultural soil and can survive, beyond my being there to talk about it. I’ve been very, very blessed on the subject of followership and courageous followership that has happened to a very significant degree, and I now see my role for the next frankly five to 10 years of championing this idea of intelligent disobedience, which almost nobody has heard of. And as soon as they get the metaphor of the guide dog, they get it. And now they’re really interested and so my work, certainly for the next two to three years at least, is going to be finding creative ways to get these concepts, these skills, these tools into the culture so that they take on their own life and then I can pass the baton onto whomever is coming next as I’ve been able to do with a great deal of satisfaction on the subject of followership.

Halelly: I love it -- so visionary and transformational. So thank you for the work that you do. I certainly appreciate it very much. So let’s get to that tip – what do you think is something that people who are listening right now, knowing that they’re both leaders and followers and parents or children, teachers, educators, they’re somewhere in this mix. What is something they can do immediately – today, this week – that you think is going to begin transforming them or the people who follow them or the people who lead them more towards this vision you’ve created?

Ira: Well, I think that to span all of those groups and developmental stages, I would have to say paying more attention to the inner voice. People have different concepts of what that voice is, where does it come from, but that voice is somehow usually an expression of core human values. And sometimes core spiritual values. What is the right way to be in the world? What is the right way to both become who we are potentially capable of becoming, but also the groups and the society that we’re a part of – how do we best help others become who they can become in terms of the aspirational values that most of us hold? So, listening to that inner voice, giving it equal weight to the voice of authority, and understanding with humility, it doesn’t mean that we’re right. That our inner voice is right. It’s that our inner voice is important. And if we hear ourselves thinking that something needs to be expressed, that something is being said or done that’s not right, that someone is being mistreated, that we at least raise our voice and put that voice into the room. Being willing to hear and listen that others may have viewpoints that help raise us up and expand our view of what’s happening, and we can change our view. But not discounting our view, because of our age, our gender, our place in the hierarchy, honoring our contribution and potential contribution to whatever it is we’re engaged in.

Halelly: It’s so inspiring, and I am in awe of it and I hope that people do listen to you. Ira, how can people stay in touch and learn more about your work? I will include links in the show notes to your books and to your website and to your social media if you wish. What’s the best way for people to learn more and keep in touch?

Ira: Well, I encourage going to my new website, which is www.IntelligentDisobedience.net. The dot-net is important, or they can go to www.IraChaleff.com. They both feed into the same site. I’m putting up a number of interviews, videos, articles that I think can help people to further get in view with some of these ideas, play with them and see what will work for them. What I hope happens is that listeners take this conversation back into their own worlds. Perhaps they’re motivated to get ahold of the book, have discussion groups, and come back to me with what you’ve learned. Because this is a journey for all of us. My book does not begin to pretend to have the answers. It really is asking the important questions and giving some of the guidelines of what I’ve learned, and that we can build on collectively towards this journey of using power beneficially and not letting power be used destructively.

Halelly: Amen. I love that. Ira Chaleff, thank you so much for spending time on the TalentGrow Show and sharing with me and with my listeners some of your very inspirational work. I wish you lots of continued success, and everyone listening, I hope that you take that action that Ira suggested. Listen to your inner voice and go out and continue asking these questions and talking to others so that we can all become more courageous followers and intelligent disobeyers of the wrong kind of leadership and what a great world it will be. Thank you Ira.

Ira: Thank you.

Halelly: Well, I certainly was very inspired by that interview. I hope that you were too. I hope that you will take the action, all of the different suggestions that Ira Chaleff made throughout the interview and especially that last one. Listen to your inner voice. It may not be right, but it is definitely just not something to ignore. I hope that all of us make more courageous decisions as followers and as leaders, and as always, I would love to know what you thought, what you would like to hear more about, how I can make this podcast experience even more beneficial for you. If this is something that you enjoyed and you think that maybe other people you know would too, please share it. You can send it to them in an email, you can post it to Facebook, you can post it to linked in, you can post it on Pinterest, you can post it on Twitter – wherever it is that those people might be hanging out, you can just stick one of the links on that site and make a recommendation. And for random people to find it through discovery, that is something that becomes even more possible when you leave a rating and a review on iTunes. I created a little guide for how to do that. I have a link to that in the show notes, along with links for ways to get in touch with Ira, to his books, his website and everything else that we mentioned in the show. So I hope you’ll check it out. It’s a www.talentgrow.com/podcast/episode15. And as always, I appreciate you. I’m so glad that you’re here, and I hope that you make it a great day.

Announcer: Thanks for listening to the TalentGrow Show, where we help you develop your talent to become the kind of leader that people want to follow. For more information, visit TalentGrow.com.