David Lapin: The Power of Self-Awareness and Values-Driven Leadership

Episode Transcript

Julianna

Hello and welcome to the daring to succeed podcast. I’m your host Julianna Yau Yorgan. And today I’m joined by David Lapin, a global thought leader on leadership, culture and business transformation and the author of lead by Greatness.

Raised in apartheid era South Africa, he helped draft one of the world’s first formal corporate ethic codes as found founder of Lapin International, David advises executives worldwide on aligning strategy with character and culture with purpose. Welcome to the podcast, David.

David
Thank you very much.

Julianna
Yeah.
I’m so excited to have you here. I’ve listened to some of your other podcast episodes and and I’m sure there’s so much you can bring to our audience. I wanted to start a little bit about the concept of bringing your soul into the boardroom.

David
I must say, even before we go there, I think the the, the title, the name of your podcast is amazing. That that idea of daring to succeed people think that succeed is just a success is just a matter of effort and talent and skills. And all of that which it is.
And I guess some luck as well, but but one of the biggest inhibitors to success and and you’ve said experienced that many times which is why you’ve given it this name is people don’t have the courage to succeed it and it it’s so sad in a way like it’s it’s there for you. It’s just there just go for it.
And what is it? I’ve often asked myself, what is it that, that, that holds people back? And I think part of it is that that’s to succeed. You need your whole self. Yes, you can succeed in a very narrow area without bringing your whole self into it, but just as.
If you’re going to be an amazing concert pianist or tennis player or basketball player or professor, business person is no different, and and and a leader in any form is no different. You’re not going to do that if you’re.
Only bringing a piece of yourself to it if you’re not bringing everything that you are, and I think that courage to succeed is the courage to bring everything that we are as individuals into our activities, not just into the boardroom but.
But into the room. Whatever room it is, if there’s one other person in that room or there 150 people, or 1000 people in that room, it doesn’t matter. We sometimes resist bringing our full selves into that room. And I think part of the reason for that is fear of rejection and fear of ridicule.
What do people think of me? If they really know who I am with all my vulnerabilities or backgrounds and we try and curate this kind of image that we think people want to have of us, and we present ourselves as that image rather as who we are.
And who we are is is deep, but who we are obviously is our personality and our character and our background and and also all all manner of things. But who we are is also what I call our our soul and by soul. I simply mean that part of us which nobody can see.
So so that includes character and personality includes all those things because those things are rooted in a very deep part of us and and and whether one is a person of some form of faith and and has a belief in, in, in a spiritual element, in the human being.
Or not. I think everybody acknowledges there is a mysterious deep inner part of us that can’t be seen, can’t be analyzed, can’t be understood, and it is responsible for so much of who we are. That’s what I call the soul.
And we can get to know our soul to to some degree. And one of the ways is to know and understand the values that drive our decisions, not just the values that we believe in. Good and bad things. Everybody kind of believes in all sorts of good things. They’re not many people who believe that honesty is bad and fairness.
Is a terrible thing and people shouldn’t have integrity with. Nobody’s like that. Even the dishonest people in the world are not like that. So we all have good values in the sense of things we believe in. But when we talk or when I talk about values, I’m really talking about valued drivers. I call them value drivers, the values.
That have driven our decisions and choices, even when those choices have been uncomfortable and they haven’t been expedient when they haven’t been in our in our immediate short term interests, we’ve made decisions in our lives, all of us, and that aren’t the obvious decisions.
And usually when that happens, it’s because there’s something deep inside us that just doesn’t feel comfortable with the alternative. And that’s really what what I mean by bringing our soul into the boardroom and into business. Know your value drivers.
Know what those values are that drive. You know how they work with and against one another because values can conflict with one another. They’re not. They don’t always work in harmony. Understand how that works. Get get into that in a in a deep way and and map that out so you know who you are at the deepest.
Level you know what your identity is as a human being and bring that identity into everything that you do so that people feel your authenticity. They know who you are and they can connect to you.

Julianna
Yeah, that that’s such a powerful statement. And there’s so much to unpack. But I I wanted to maybe touch on the values piece a little bit because we see a lot of that in, in companies, you’ll go to the company website and they have this 20 point list of their their corporate values.
Which I personally wouldn’t really call values in the sense of like a soul’s value. How do you see values in terms of a person and and how that shows up?
When we bring our whole self into the boardroom or or just to work in general.

David
So I I like to look at values as that which gavins what we don’t do. Not not that which Gavins what we do. There are all sorts of reasons why we do certain things and I guess there are lots of reasons why we don’t but when.
We just decide this. This is a line I won’t cross. This is something I won’t do. This is something I won’t participate in. This is something I won’t support. Not necessarily because it’s bad business. Just because it’s not me and not even because it’s necessarily wrong in the global sense of the world. That in a in a universal.
And sometimes there are those things too, where you just believe this is just wrong, that nobody should be doing this, but sometimes it’s just. I’m not making a judgement about what other people should do. I can’t do this because if I do this, I’ve lost my soul and and one of the the the big things is.
Being able to conduct oneself in the business world, which is so external, it’s so out there, particularly in the United States. It it’s so external to be able to do that without losing one’s inner being without compromising it, and also without losing its evolution. We spent a lot of time.
Developing our exterior skills, but we don’t spend enough time developing our interior place of being and so we become this bigger and bigger shell of a person. The structure of a being with nothing inside and and you’ve seen it and I’ve seen it and one sees it all over the world I’m not seeing.
Out the United States. But the United States is particularly susceptible to it because of the emphasis on on the external. You know, Julianna, when I came to the United States in the late 1990s, I was told that it took me more than 10 years before I believed it.
I was told it doesn’t matter what you sell as long as it’s well packaged. If you’ve got something good in the package, that’s a bonus, but don’t try and sell them out. How good it is if it isn’t well packaged, don’t try and sell it and spend your time and money on the packaging, not what’s inside it.
And I remember saying to the person who told that to me, and I heard it from many people, if that were true, I’m I’m leaving. I’m not staying in this place. But I did stay in the place for a long time and and and enjoy it and and and had a wonderful time in the States and still do but. But there is that element of it being very out there you’re expected to.
Self promote you’re expected to package. You’re expected to market to be selling, selling, selling and there’s nothing wrong with selling and marketing, but when it’s at the expense of what’s inside, when there’s no correlation between the brand and the soul of the business. When a company like Enron had some of the most beautiful.
Values on its on its in its brochures. I don’t remember if there were websites in those days, but it had these beautiful values and and it is no more because it collapsed on ethical styles on doing exactly the things it says it doesn’t stand for.
And many businesses are like that. Once a client of of ours, a very large bank, removed honesty from its value system after a lot of pushback from us and a lot of conversation, they finally decided to take the word honesty out of their value system. And you know what the response was from the.
Employees of the bank, 10s and of thousands of them. The response was that’s the first honest thing our bank has ever done. You know, when you talk about this discrepancy between what is going on inside and what’s on the outside that you drivers have to be the things that you discover. They’re not things you choose. You don’t take them off a list.
So when we do values with people and we’ve developed this most magnificent AI tool now, we used to only be able to do it in coaching. We still do it with coaching, but we’ve taught AI the results of 30 years of coaching and it does quite a good job and the tool doesn’t start with you know, here are 50 values. Choose the ones that are most important to you.
Which is how a lot of people do value. It really pulls it out from your life story. What tell. Tell me about your life. Tell me about the choices you’ve made. Tell me about the hardships you’ve encountered and how you’ve handled them. And from the way you’ve lived your life.
And the the tool helps you identify what your values are and and how you construct them and relate and create what we call your leadership fingerprint the the fingerprint, the essence, the identity of how you make decisions and lead people.
Yeah.

Julianna
Yeah, that that’s such a compelling process because obviously a lot of us have come across these activities of years, 50 values pick the ones that sound most like you and and they always they do feel really empty and and even thinking about what you mentioned with.
That company, removing honesty from its values when I talk to a lot of my coaching clients, it seems like that values disconnect between what the company promises, what they actually do and what’s important to the individual.
When there is that huge disconnect, that’s where.
It’s almost like your soul is bleeding because those three aren’t in alignment.

David
Yeah, that’s a great metaphor, since I sort of that the soul haemorrhaging and that’s exactly what you’re what you’re talking about. And it’s not companies only isn’t, you know, you’ve seen it with with people too. I think that’s often when should when children lose respect for their parents, it’s very often if not always, because they detect that the values they were brought up.
With are not the values by which the parents are living, and that just feels inauthentic. And it, and it always does. So it’s important when we, when we do values with people, whether with the AI tool or in personal coaching, you only come out with four or five. It’s not a whole lot.
Only four or five, sometimes even less, maybe six or seven, and some people. But it’s those value drivers that are absolutely core to who you are and that if you compromise them, you are actually compromising your song.

Julianna
And how does that translate more concretely into business decisions and business performance and things like that?

David
So my work started the very first thing that I did was a research project in in the 1980s in South Africa with a very large mining organization. One of the biggest in the world. Looking at how values ethics and culture affect performance.
And what would happen if we could improve the values and the and the culture of an organization? What would its effect on performance being in that time? That was a quite a radical thing because business at that time was just about making money and profits and people didn’t really understand the correlation between culture and values of the one.
One handed and output and performance on the other hand. So we did a lot of research and then started implementing initiatives and programs in businesses and measuring the results. And the results are stunning. Now, that doesn’t mean that they’re not some businesses that don’t do that kind of work and do well.
Sometimes you’ve just got the kind of product and the kind of price and you’re just competitive and you do well no matter what and and sometimes people do well, even if they’re not honest. The Mafia probably does quite well, so it’s not. It’s not that you need values to do well. I would never argue that. I would just say, however, well you’re doing. You could do a whole lot better.
If you’ve got the the alignment to culture and values and it and the the values piece doesn’t help that much in the external focus of the business it does. Sometimes the famous story is Johnson and Johnson when they pull Thailand off Tylenol off the shelves because it.
Contradicted their core value of of promoting life and health, so it does sometimes affect the way you go to market and and the way you design your product. I think there was a lot of that in the way Steve Jobs build Apple, but what it really does is the values is the way you conduct.
Internal matters. The way you lead A-Team the way you manage performance, the way you deal with with gaps in, in conduct and and behaviour in an organization. The way you build the culture in the organization, that’s where the real value of values is from in a business perspective.

Julianna
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense and I’m, I’m sure a lot of our listeners would agree just based on their experiences with leadership right now.
And maybe stepping aside for a moment in terms of a more practical viewpoint for some of our listeners, I know a lot of them are struggling right now because there is that huge misalignment.
Umm, how would you suggest that they kind of think about how to look at umm.
To look at their leadership right now and determine what is it that, what is that disconnect? Where is that disconnect point and what can they do for themselves in, in terms of refinding or realigning their values with their leadership team?

David
So after I think that the the first point would definitely be the the the need to be able to establish what their own values are, the need to be able to map their values, understand their values as individuals.
Because once personal values can’t be too out of alignment with with ones business values, so really to understand what my values are, what my core values are, what really drives me, what I’m not willing to compromise and and to have that key, and then to actually.
It goes through one’s day and and one’s week and just say what have I done that doesn’t feel aligned and what was driving me and was I conscious and and what we tried to to to do in in our coaching. Sure you do something similar is teach people to notice in the moment I’m about to do something.
Something I’m feeling triggered. I’m about to act in the defensive way. I’m about to do something I might regret later on when we regret what we’ve done, it’s usually because we were out of alignment with our values. When we act in accordance with our values, we we’re usually.
We don’t regret it. Doesn’t mean it always turns out well. I might act in accordance with my values and have to lose my job because of that and have months and months of hardship. It doesn’t always turn out well, but I don’t regret it. I feel proud of myself and my family. Feels proud of me, so that sense of is, am I about to do something that I might regret?
Is an indication that maybe there’s not alignment here and I should check my values.

Julianna
Yeah, that’s such a great point because we we do hear a lot of stories about people who have, say, blown up their entire lives because of their values and not look back, even though, you know, maybe they have lost their jobs or their business falls apart because of it. But they can at least sleep at night knowing that.

David
Right.

Julianna
They’ve done the right thing, at least the right thing for themselves.

David
Right, right. Correct.

Julianna
And because we have a little bit more time, I wanted to switch a little bit and and talk a little bit about something I’ve heard you discuss with others as well, which is the concept of living a life of challenge and resistance rather than one of comfort. Can you talk to us a little bit about that?

David
Should you, and of course, we all like to be comfortable and and comfort is a is a default position, but it’s it’s something we we naturally tend towards. But it’s a little bit like I once said to my trainer in the in the gym, how about I pay you for the rest time in between the exercises, the more risk you give me, the more I pay you.
And I deduct for all the time you make me work and that’s that’s how absurd looking for comfort is in life. Life is a gym. We’re here to exercise ourselves. We’re here to build ourselves, to make ourselves strong in all sorts of different areas of our beings and our personalities and characters.
And seeking comfort other than to recover, one needs comfort to rest. One needs comfort to recover. You need to sleep at night. You need a break. You need a vacation. You need a weekend. We need. We need comfort. But that’s not where the growth is. The growth is when it’s from resistance.
If there were no gravity, we could all lift 500 LB weights with ease. It’s it’s because we’re overcoming the pull of gravity that we build muscle and it’s the same with everything. When we’re overcoming and natural.
Urge to do something different and because of our values, we’re resisting that tendency to do something, whether it’s I want to lose my cool, lose my temp, and get mad at somebody or hurt somebody, or whether I want to just laze around and do nothing or whether I want to undermine another person.
To promote myself, any of these things are our natural default. We go there for whatever reason, but to be able to say no, I have values and this isn’t an alignment and this is something I’m going to regret and to be able to pause and resist.
And during the resistance, it’s not comfortable. It’s not that comfortable, you know, not not to have that delicious chocolate cake when you’re trying to lose weight. It’s not comfortable to say no to yourself, but it’s healthy. It’s not comfortable to say no to one’s child or or an employee.
Or to have a difficult conversation with ones partner. These things aren’t comfortable, but they grow us because we’re overcoming the discomfort, doing what’s right. And every time we do that, we become stronger. And the next time becomes a little easier.

Julianna
Yeah. And as you talk about that, I I can definitely maybe reconnect that to the the name of the podcast, daring to succeed because it often is the the most difficult things that people do that are celebrated and and remembered as.
Heroic stories and stories of note.
Maybe not so much recently, because we do see a lot of things that are being celebrated just for people showing up, which is a a point of contention for me, but certainly in in the bigger scheme of things, I think there’s a lot of.

David
Yes.

Julianna
Emphasis on.
Overcoming and doing those difficult things and and pushing past that natural resistance to get to a point of success, to get to a point where you’ve done a thing that you can be proud of.

David
Totally and thanks for looping back to that because that’s that’s the courage, isn’t it? The courage to overcome resistance.

Julianna
Yeah, absolutely. So as we start to wrap up, do you have any final thoughts for our listeners?

David
But just to encourage people to to treat life and leadership as a journey of discovery and exploration, we’re not going to get it right every time we’re going to make mistakes, we’re going to slip, we’re going to fall and we pick ourselves up and we and we learn from it and we move on. And then so we we become better and better and that in our business and our work.
If we treat our work, our professions, our business this way, then business becomes a place of enormous self development. There’s no better self development workshop than being in the marketplace, being in business and strangling with these and overcoming the challenges and.
Just becoming a better human being and in so in so doing a better leader and A and a Better Business person.

Julianna
Yeah, that’s so beautifully said. Thank you. Well, if our listeners are really loving what they’re hearing from you and want to get more or learn more about what Lapin does and the new AI tool that you have, but therefore value discovery, where can they find you? Where can they connect with you?

David
Sure, there are a few places. Firstly, the the book lead by greatness and is available on on Amazon, both in the in the hard copy and in in digital form. And we have our website with a lot of information and articles and pieces on it as well as tools. That’s lapin international.com.
And the digital tool to explore your values is available on labandinternational.com and then on LinkedIn. I’m the personally on LinkedIn, David lap. And you’re welcome to connect with me there and or to to write our company info at lab and international. And we also have a page on LinkedIn with a lot of information and lovely, lovely material, and that’s just lab in international at at LinkedIn.