About this talk
In this talk, the speaker delves into the complexities of leadership and burnout. He argues that burnout stems from the stress of striving for success and the responsibility that accompanies leadership roles. By reflecting on personal experiences and historical examples, he illustrates the fine line between ambition and egocentrism, emphasizing that true leadership is about uplifting others rather than simply acquiring followers. The speaker critiques the myth that anyone can be a leader, asserting instead that effective leaders are developed through responsibility and collaboration. He encourages fostering an environment where leaders nurture other leaders, and shares lessons learned from past mistakes in delegation and teamwork. Ultimately, he highlights the importance of making informed decisions and understanding the inherent sacrifices of leadership.
Full transcript
[music] Hello everyone. And I'm very pleased to be here with you. And because I can't cheat on myself, it turned out that I decided to change the opening part to what we're going to talk about now. I don't have a presentation. I won't cheat on myself on this either. I don't really like having presentations to be able to communicate with the audience, although it might be a
little more difficult here, but Netko made a very strong impression on me and deserves a lot of applause, Netko, quite seriously for what he said. for this very reason, I decided to change a part of the opening words that I wanted to say, perhaps, and they are related to the part that he touched on about burnout. And burnout is actually a really big stress. Personally, I think
there will be a mini conflict here. I don't believe in Burnout. However, burnout is about getting things done, it actually causes a lot of stress, and that's where this burnout comes from. But there are often 22-23 year old people who do a big project and say they screwed up, when in fact they shouldn't have. But stress is the key thing that causes burnout. And it is also
related to leadership, actually. And burnout is the price we pay for wanting to go in some direction. And very often, leadership comes at a price, and this is actually the dark side of leadership, is the price we pay for wanting to be on top. It would be interesting to know why someone would want to be a leader. have always asked myself this question first. Why have I
always wanted to be a leader? For a very long time, I couldn't answer this question, except for my own personal ambition to achieve something, to prove something, to show that I can do more than everyone else, which leads me to think. Another part that Nedko said is self-eating in relation to your own growth based on what you want to achieve. And now a very interesting thing. It's
a myth that anyone can be a leader, but it's also a myth that anyone can actually be a leader. There is no reason why people can't be leaders. The question is what we do to become leaders and how we achieve that part with ourselves. I repeat, it is a myth that people are born leaders, and people are made leaders. There is no single leader in the interest
of truth. Even so, if you go back in time, I really like reading history. And here too, lately I've been paying a lot of attention to part of the construction of the Roman troops. The Roman troops were divided into many parts. There are people who have ruled 10 people, 20 people, 50 people, 100 people up to 1000 people, large legions and so on. And it turns out
that every single person has been put in the position of leading someone based on personal qualities. And these personal qualities were, uh, because they were very good at what they did initially, but they were actually put in the position to become leaders. Okay. That is, if you pay attention now to many COs who occupy certain positions, startups that suddenly become very big. There are great, great examples
in Bulgaria, there are great examples in the West. Standing in this position, very often you don't yet have the necessary skills to develop this part. And actually, this is where the interesting part comes in, the critical part. What skills do I need to be a leader and what does being a leader actually mean? And what does it mean to be a manager and this huge difference between
management and leadership? And it also turned out that I actually do this research quite often. Oh, personally, I'm very interested in this topic: what actually builds leaders. And if someone can answer for themselves like that in fact, leaders take responsibility and if you want to be in any position, whatever it is, it has to come with the responsibility for that position. First, everyone wants to be a
leader, obviously, but no one knows the price they have to pay. And the real price is responsibility. Leaders very often, or a large portion of people who are in such a leadership position, try to use a lot of clichés with followers. How many followers must there be for leaders to be followed by large groups of people? Political parties are such an example , right? Usually we follow
them very much like that without at first glance selflessly. We just listen to what they tell us and we follow them with rallies because someone said something. In fact, creating many followers makes for a very weak leader. And that's a very interesting thing. A leader should make leaders, not followers, because being a follower means acting blindly and blindly following what you are told. If you want to
be true leaders, you have to create leaders. You need to create opinion leaders. You need to build a team that is much better, and surround yourself with people who are much better than you. Without fear, without fear that they might have a better idea, without fear of asking for their position, without fear of asking for their opinion on a certain topic. Years ago, one of my coaches
told me the following thing. If you're trying to be the smartest person, right, in the room, you're in the wrong room and secondly, it puts you in a very, very weak position. I used to have a very sick ambition, a really sick, sick ambition to prove that I was better than everyone else. And a while ago, many years ago, my mother gave me a book to read,
and it was more like the beginning, an excerpt before I got the whole book, and it was by Dale Carnegie. I guess you've all heard of How to Win Friends and Influence People. And actually, this book was the first book that opened my eyes to how to create an organization, or rather a team, that doesn't follow you, your sick ambition to be a perfectionist, because in the
previous topic, Netko mentioned perfectionism. It's very consuming, it 's a very key thing if perfectionism is based on how I can become the best and nothing else interests me. Leadership really means, I repeat, creating people who are better than you. Pass on the skills and knowledge you acquire to other people. Create a team that constantly challenges you. Many, many years ago, I didn't have much going on
in the team. Oh, and actually, that was causing me a lot of trouble. There was a point when I went to my boss maybe 14-15 years ago and told him I achieved this, this, this and this and this and this. Oh, and I was expecting to be promoted because he called me and said, "Peter, I want you to come to London, we need to meet." I want
to invite you to dinner and I was imagining some great things, right? Your boss calls you and says, "Come to London and we'll go to a really nice restaurant." And he really had reserved some very expensive restaurant. Oh, we're going, and I was imagining myself being promoted, right, and I'm very happy about this whole situation. And he told me, "I'm not going to give you a promotion."
And for me, it was very shocking how he made me go from Sofia to fly to London urgently. He went to an extremely expensive restaurant and suddenly said to me, "Well, Peter, I'm not giving you a raise." It took me about five minutes to figure out what was going on, and I said, "Okay, what's the reason for listening to this thing ?" He told me, "There are
several reasons. First, until you learn to delegate like people, it won't work. Second, and then he taught me one or maybe one theory that remained very practical, and better today than perfect tomorrow in relation to perfectionism. He had given me a task that was to his presentation on the board, because he was part of the board and he had asked me to do some things to help
him with his presentation to the board. I took it, I started doing these things, but I put them off for a week. I want them to be perfect, because they tell me about the board, right, it 's very important. After a week, I go to a meeting with the board and I do, do, do, do, do some things and in the end I give them to him
and it turns out that he didn't use any of these things at all. And he said to me: "You can't expect me to give you a task and you don't call me once and ask if you're moving. "And maybe you can't imagine that what you did is perfect because you're working on it alone. And he said to me: "How many people from the team did you include
in this report that you had to do?" I told him not a single one, again out of sick ambition, that I had to show else. I deserve to be promoted, I deserve everything best and how can I not include the people around me. That ate at my head. I took it quite personally and told him okay, but obviously I need to change some things. And then he
gave me another book. And which later became very famous over the years. Extreme Owner, I guess you've heard of it. And he said to me: "You have to read that book ." And actually, while reading this book, I realized what extreme responsibility means. It really means your responsibility to make some decisions based on information that you have to collect from the people around you. But this information
has to be very balanced. This information has to be correct and if you don't involve the team, you won't be able to find this information. Since then, I decided that I would never go to a single client meeting again, because before that I very often went to client meetings alone. And again, in order to be able to show how I strongly understand the things they are talking
about, somehow I should be the leading part, not the people with me. And this again ate at my head, because for example, no matter how good I may be at a huge part of the things I do, I can't know everything. And at one point I realized that I can't go to a client meeting, which I say, because here right now I see a very important colleague
of mine, actually Anton, who is standing here, who is one of the best architects, who I really hate to say this in the interest of truth, but he is one of the best architects a person can work with. And you could also ask him years ago how many times I have included him in some key meeting with a client. Zero. This cost me a few very key
deals, because for example the deals we work with are for many, many millions. We don't work, right, in our company, considering the size of the company, we don't work with deals that are 100,000 for example. We work deals that are a million, 10 million, 20, 50, 100 and so on. And that was one of the key things that I understood and that's part of the dark side
of leadership, the ego. Okay. The ego is something that needs to be broken very, very quickly. If you want to, you have the sick ambition to become a leader, they can be that ambition can be driven by ego initially. The truth is that leaders are egocentric. No, they are not. And this has been proven. There are a lot of studies done in Oxford, Cambridge and all those
very good universities. The truth is that people are egocentric. The truth is that if you are not led initially from your ego, you will not want to be in that position. And very often try to ask yourself why you want to be a leader. The initial answer that I gave myself was because I want to be on And what was wrong was the wrong answer that I
was rummaging through inside myself before I came to an answer about responsibility. But the truth is that here I open a parenthesis. Once I was given a massage, which was there with some stones, I do n't know what, blah blah blah, some very expensive massage, I don't know what. And I go to this and this massage studio, you name it. Very posh, very posh place. And I
don't like such places, but somehow they gave it to me. I decided to use it. I go and see a magazine, which inside was an advertising magazine for very expensive things, clothes, cars, I don't know what. And inside there was a very interesting article that was titled like this: "The top is the top, because it's only for one." And I said: "Wait until I read this ."
In this Post magazine there is an article that is very, very, very, no, in my opinion, it contradicted the entire magazine, but in fact it was written very interestingly that by climbing up you achieve a certain peak, but at that peak there can only be one person. It can't be two people. There can't be two There can't be, what do you say, two CEOs. There can't be
two IT directors. There can't be two managers of a certain department. And here comes the competition between people. And actually what do you as a leader do so that you don't crush everyone else so that you can climb up. And telling you all this, and I thought about and listening by the way, and that's why I'm referring back to Netko's previous lecture . I personally really liked
the sincerity with which he said a few things. And here comes the moment about And I played basketball as a teenager, semi-professionally. I had a few games in Turkey and there my sick self manifested itself again ambition, that I had to become the best possible. And I was really angry that I wasn't the captain of the team when we went to Turkey to play for the first
time and I wondered why. And then I started training really hard and it turned out that no matter how good I was, I somehow didn't unite the people around me. Even then. I said, I asked my coach then what I should do. He told me two things. I want you to improve your shooting from a distance, because you're short. I have the sick ambition, I'm short, I
have to prove that I can become a very good basketball player. First, you have to improve your shooting from a distance, to be able to pass, because this is a combination game, because I was very greedy for scoring points and in the interest of the game I became very good and so there were moments when you let me down, in general I scored almost constantly. But do
you really want to pass the ball to such a person who will never pass to you again ball a second time? After which year I stopped playing, and I started doing, right, what I love to do right now, which is leading teams. And I came across Kobe Bryant. I'm sure you all know him or at least people who are interested in sports. and I followed his development
and it turned out that he went through exactly the same problems. Sick ambition, sick ambition to be first and to be an obsessive ambition. And just before we started my lecture, I talked to Harry, because I told him that I watched a series called The Truth About Away Lakers. They are 10 episodes of one hour. A very recently made series that shows the progress of the LA
Lakers and even the inclusion of Kobe Bryant in the team. The obsession that he had led to the fact that at one point he wanted to be traded, because at one point the team didn't want to work with him again. And here again it comes to the moment for how you as a leader have to realize that if you don't include the other people around you, you
won't be successful. And here comes the moment with motivation, because there are two types of motivation, intrinsic and extrinsic. Extrinsic motivation is usually related to the title. Title, cars, money, fame, how many followers I have on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook and there and whatever. Intrinsic motivation is rather motivated by rather comes from your ambition to create something for everyone else, not to be at the forefront. Yes. The
decisions as a leader are yours. And here comes the interesting moment. And based on motivation, is actually a very lonely job, because the responsibility is yours, the decisions are yours. You have a team, they give you the opportunity to collect a lot of information, to make information and decisions, but the decisions are only. In English there is such a nice expression. It doesn't sound very nice in
Bulgarian, but when the [ __ ] hit the fan, where does the escalation go? Have you noticed? The escalation goes up, right? No The escalation goes down, it goes up, because when the moment gets really tough, everyone pushes up. No matter what happens, everyone pushes up. At some point, no one wants to for the situation that's happening. And here comes the dark side. You, being in this
position, will incredibly make decisions that no one else wants to make. Laying off people, a difficult part of a leader's job is to lay off people when there's an unpleasant situation. A difficult part of a leader is not to lay off people, to find an option to save people, to transform the team, to transform the company, to transform the non-working parts of the company, so as to
keep Tough decisions can be any, of any nature, but always ask yourself the question what keeps you awake at night. And for me it's always been how we can be better, our teams can have more work, our people can be able to have better salaries, to be promoted, to have better development, to have better projects, to have better career. How do you achieve all this, though? And
that's why I'm going back to the You have to create the foundation yourself. You have to learn everything. If you 're a new leader in the company, let's say you've just been promoted or you've come from outside and been put in charge of a team, the dark side is to learn absolutely everything about the company and not make changes too Making changes too quickly often leads to
wrong decisions. There's a very interesting man named Bill George. And I had the honor of studying with him. He has a very interesting book called The True Nord. Oh, this book is a gem. It's very good. Oh, at our university, he taught us this book and he had done a whole uh because the program was leadership development. Anyway, the whole program at HBS was based on and
he also said something very interesting about a young leader who goes and takes over a company, being a very big CEO, he goes to a new company. Within six months he is failing the company, leading the company almost to bankruptcy, because he starts making a lot of changes, very very quickly, very ego driven, because he comes from a very big company with a lot of money, and
has achieved a lot of success and so on. And in fact, that's exactly what he writes in the book. Something that I didn't understand and didn't do correctly is that I didn't learn the foundations of the company. I didn't learn, I didn't understand who the informal leaders are. I didn't understand how the company works. I didn't understand how the teams work, I didn't understand how the processes
in the company work and decided to make changes. I made all the decisions myself. Okay. You can't make the decisions yourself. And that's exactly why, since I've been in some kind of position, I don't have an office. 90% of people in companies in Bulgaria, not in Bulgaria, the leaders, managers, whatever there are, have offices. I don't know why they have offices and what this office does. If
you're not where the team is, how will you understand what the team needs? In what way? Standing in this office and if your motivation is the corner office, the better car, the better fame, the title, you have taken the wrong path Standing in this office, you provoke people to knock on your door and maybe this strokes your ego to some extent that someone will knock on your
door, ask you a question: "Can I come in, can I ask you something and so on and so on." In some companies, I say again, not all companies are like that, but the truth is that a huge percentage of companies work exactly this way, especially if you get out of the bubble of the IT sector. In the IT sector, some companies don't work like that, but there
are companies that work like that, but like when you get out of this sector, because I have been to many other places, whether as a lecturer, whether to help some in the interest of I was in Montana, and there were such companies there, right, that are production of certain products, factories and so on. There the hierarchy is very sharp. Offices, 100,000 managers, each one has an office.
people have such strange gaits at this moment. And then I asked these people: "Why?" They said to me: "But we don't understand what people need." And I said to him: "Okay, how many people are you a manager of ?" And he said to me: "About 30 people." Okay. And I say then out of these 30 people, how often do you talk to them, how often do you
hear these standing inside and think about how many of your managers or directors or whatever have their own office and how often do you go to them and how often does that give you the strength to actually go and ask something without the information you have collected, as Netko said, right, important information that you will collect. No, no, don't be that type of person. Don't go in
that direction, because it is very wrong. This thing that I at least managed to do from the very beginning for myself personally, never having an office, but aa but it cost me a lot. Aa the other thing that is really key is the price, which when I said about the price you pay, there was a moment when my sick wife almost broke my family. If you think
about it, if you follow, 99% of leaders in very high positions have some personal, very big problem, which is very often related to the family, they have divorces, aa they don't talk to their children and so on and so on. And is that the price you want to pay, going to a certain position? Is that the price you want to make aa just to take a certain
position? Where is the balance? I watched a very interesting aa show with a very great leader aa who was asked what the price of success is. this man is currently retired and he said, "Do you know what the biggest price of success is? That when I get home, I can see my children. Only now can I see my children and can I gather myself and talk to
my loved ones. And if I could turn back time, I wouldn't do it the same way. Yes, I would run my company, I would focus on the business, but I would not neglect the personal part, because by going to these high positions, the price you pay is the isolation that comes with it . First, with a large part of the people you work with, because at some
point, whether you want it or not, this isolation occurs because you have to make decisions, you have to take responsibility, you were in a certain position in your team. Imagine the following situation. You are part of a team and at this moment you are moving into a position where you have to lead the team. How long will the symbiosis that you have had with the team inside
of going to lunch together last? Will they include you in these conversations with the management? They won't include you. In our company, there were chats that were titled. And what was it like chatting without Peter, for example, right? From this guy. And the chat, in which Peter shouldn't appear, things like that, which is completely normal. It should have such chats. You can't be in these chats, right?
You have no business there anymore. So the moment you go to the other step, you'll exit those chats where everyone is. Or they, because they would be ashamed to kick you out of these chats, will, say, create new ones that can be called chat without peter or chat without netko and so on. This is the other price you will pay. as dark as the side of leadership
is, in my opinion it is one of the most meaningful jobs you can have, because you are the people who will create the conditions for others to grow, for others to become better than you. And I'll end with, because I still have very little time, I can continue speaking until tomorrow morning. And I'll stay here, so I can see each and every one of you. Anyone who
wants can talk, but I will tell you a very short story about a colleague of ours, who worked for us for more than 10 years, and no longer works for us. Ah, but we had the following situation with him. And I might be just two minutes overdue, sorry. Aa came to me one day, he said to me: "I want to have a meeting. I want to have
meetings with you." Okay. I enter the room. And he says to me, why wasn't I promoted? And it felt a little like deja vu to me, because I, as I told you earlier, had a similar conversation with my boss years ago and I said and asked him this exact question: "Why should I actually give you a promotion?" And he said to me, "Well, I 'm the best."
And I said, "Great, what if you're the best?" Well, I did this, this, and this. And I told him: "Okay, that's why I gave you the best bonus. In the interest of you, you get the biggest bonus in the whole company. Precisely because you're the best." And when you work, I don't expect that from all the people you lead teams, when someone works for you and you
hire them, don't expect mediocre work, right? You pay him a certain salary because he has to do a certain job very well. Okay. And I said to him, "You're connecting the dots really well ." And that's exactly why I was giving you this bonus. He yells, "Yeah, but you didn't promote me. I deserve a promotion." I told him: "Okay, think about why you want to be promoted.
And until you answer that question, it won't happen. And I have a rule that I follow to this day. I have never promoted people who don't know why they want this promotion and don't come to ask for it and don't understand why they want this promotion. I'm talking about senior positions, not mid-level positions, where promotions sometimes happen for different reasons. We're talking about senior positions, management positions.
And this guy didn't talk to me for six months, even though he's been working for us for 10 years, maybe even more. There was a period of six months that he didn't talk to me. Sradit enters the office, we walk past, because I'm standing where they are, as he said, where everyone else is. He doesn't talk to me. At one point he came to me and said:
"Now I understand. And I want to take responsibility for the position that I want to and then tell me what I need to do to get that position." I told him, "Okay, that's the right way to talk. You want the responsibility and I told him about the whole price he has to pay." If he said yes and I told him, if you still want to receive after
this conversation , to take that responsibility and do what you want to do, the path is ahead of you. Take and make sense of the work that you want to do as leaders. Thank you very much . M.
