Dusty Holcomb | Connecting the Dots: How to Effectively Lead Yourself and Others

Elise Holtzman: Hi, everyone. It's Elise Holtzman here, a former practicing lawyer and the host of The Lawyer's Edge Podcast. Welcome back for another episode. Great leaders aren't born. They're built through intention, challenge, and practice. In this episode, we are going to explore how to unlock your full potential, as well as the potential of the people you work with.

My guest today will share a practical framework for leadership that drives engagement, fosters accountability, and helps leaders navigate even the toughest challenges with clarity and authenticity. Today's episode is brought to you by the Ignite Women’s Business Development Accelerator, a nine-month business development program created by women lawyers for women lawyers.

Ignite is a carefully designed business development program containing content, coaching, and a community of like-minded women who are committed to becoming rainmakers and supporting the retention and advancement of other women in the profession. To learn more about Ignite, visit thelawyersedge.com/ignite.

I am delighted to welcome today’s guest, Dusty Holcomb, the founder and CEO of The Arcqus Group, an executive coaching and leadership consulting firm that helps leaders clarify their mission, overcome challenges, and lead with authenticity. Through CEO mentoring, executive coaching, strategy planning, and team building, Dusty empowers clients, including many, many legal clients, to reach their highest potential with a principles-centered approach to leadership.

He holds an MBA from Auburn University and completed the Advanced Management Program at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. Dusty sits on multiple private and nonprofit boards and is a longtime member of the National Association of Corporate Directors, the Private Directors Association, and YPO. Dusty is passionate about leadership, lifelong learning, and making a positive impact. He's an avid sportsman and a five-time Ironman finisher. I'm exhausted just thinking about that. He lives with his family in the Charlotte, North Carolina area. Dusty, welcome to The Lawyer's Edge.

Dusty Holcomb: Thank you so much. It's a delight to be here. You know, I'm tired thinking about it too. So it really is more than anything else, a marker of just not that smart.

Elise Holtzman: Yeah, I mean, I was going to say, listen, I can't run from my house to the house across the street. So anybody that can do something like that certainly shows a lot of tenacity, and I'm in awe. I'm going to ask you a little bit about that later. But in the meantime, I just want to start off with something I noticed because as a coach myself, we—you and I—know that asking our clients powerful questions enables them to look internally, look inside, and see what they have to offer, see how they can achieve their goals and help other people achieve theirs.

So one of the things I learned about you is that you coach leaders to ask five powerful questions that unlock discretionary effort. First of all, what do you mean by discretionary effort?

Dusty Holcomb: You know, I like to think about the job that people do. So discretionary effort is the work that people do that isn't required. There's this basic minimum expectation that you get when you have somebody come in to do the job. But how do you get more than that? In fact, how do you have them want to do more, to bring their best and full self to work? Not to say, “I clock in at 8:30 and I go home at 5:30 and I'm just going to hit the bare minimum for the day,” but to absolutely crush it.

So when I think about discretionary effort, when I challenge leaders to think about discretionary effort, it's how do we get full commitment from the person because they want to be there? They're committed to being there and they're delivering because they believe in being there. That’s where you get instead of the minimum, the maximum output, and you get relational connection between their work and the mission that you're trying to achieve.

Elise Holtzman: I love that idea because isn't that what everybody wants to have in the people around them? If you're showing up and you're giving your best and you really care about the organization and you care about your people, and you're surrounded by people or have even a couple of people on your team who are just phoning it in, for lack of a better term, that can be unbelievably frustrating.

I think it's very hard for people sometimes to figure out how to motivate those people. So, Dusty, what are those questions? Can you walk us through those and tell me a little bit about why those are so effective?

Dusty Holcomb: Sure. You hit a point there that I want to—even before I give you the questions—I want to share: people don't want to phone it in. I have a fundamental belief that people want to show up. They want to do good work. They show up and believe everybody's excited about a job when they first get the job. Then something happens along the way in how they're led. They'll either continue to be excited or they'll phone it in.

What we're really talking about is an antidote to the “phone it in” mentality for those who are value-aligned. You have to be value-aligned at the end of the day. That's the first thing. But the five questions are really simple. What I've found in years and years of leading organizations and years of coaching leaders to lead their organizations more effectively—simplification is a superpower. The ability to distill to the essence of what matters is an absolute superpower. That’s really how these five questions came to be.

Question number one, and everyone in an organization, whether they are the CEO or the person who is in janitorial services, it does not matter, everybody needs to be able to ask and then answer these five questions. So as a leader, we have to be able to do it for ourselves first.

Question number one: Why are we here? What's our purpose beyond making money? That's a really important distinction, especially when you're in a world like the typical legal profession, where it's billable hours and all these things. But what is it that we believe in? Why are we here? What's our purpose beyond making money?

I'll run through all the questions, and then we can dig deeper on any of them if you like. Question number two: Where are we going? This is our vision. This is the ability to articulate clearly and cleanly that we as leaders have an idea of what we're shooting for. Because when people are in an organization that doesn't have that clear, articulated vision that they can attach their work to, then they're going to be much more likely to phone it in because they don't know why their work matters.

Question number three: How are we going to get there? What's the plan? Do we have a plan? Is there a plan? That's really important. But again, people want to connect the dots and be able to assign meaning to their work.

Question number four is exactly that: Where do I fit in? Where does my work contribute to the plan, to the vision, and to the purpose of the organization?

Question number five, and it often gets challenged through a financial lens—and I don't mean it this way at all—but it’s: What’s in it for me? That can be opportunity, promotion, contribution. It could simply be, "When I go home at the end of the day, I have made a difference in the life of another person. That’s what’s in it for me. I get to go home and be satisfied."

The reason these questions are so important for a leader to be able to ask of their organization and to have their organization answer is because when you do this and do this well, you empower the person who's the closest to the problem, the closest to the customer, the closest to the challenge to make better decisions. When they can understand the answers to these questions, you don't have to be in the room to make sure that they're answered accurately. The people doing the work answer those questions. That’s what unlocks discretionary effort because they actually believe in the work they're doing.

Elise Holtzman: What I find remarkable about these questions is that they are so simple and yet so powerful. We know that many people, especially busy people, don't often take the time to ask themselves some of these basic questions. So they're running around with their hair on fire trying to get things done. But as you point out, they're not necessarily aligned with whatever the mission is supposed to be.

They don't necessarily know why they're doing it. They don't necessarily know why they're the right person to do it or how they can make the contribution. It is hard to get lawyers to slow down and to be willing to take some non-billable time to answer these questions. Not because they're not good people or they don't care—it’s because they're so programmed and so driven by the billable hour and under so much pressure, understandably so in some ways and not so understandable in other ways, from their firms and their leaders to get the hours billed.

So sometimes it’s the simplest stuff that gets us to make the pivots and changes we need to make in order to be most effective and be happiest.

Dusty Holcomb: Well, it is true. There is this dichotomy there. We have to hit the billable hours. We have to do the work. But we also have to sharpen the saw. We have to make sure we're doing the right work and the right efficiency. The pain point that we often hear and see is frustration from leaders going, “Why aren't we achieving the results that I know we should? Why aren't we bringing this to life?”

The question I always ask is, does everyone understand why we're here, where we're going, how we're going to get there, and how they fit in? The answer is often no, because the leader doesn't know it yet for themselves. They haven't invested that time for themselves to be able to answer it and articulate it. You can't expect anyone else to be able to answer them if you can't answer them for yourself.

While it does take time, I like to think about it like this: if we decide in advance what's most important, we give ourselves the opportunity to make better decisions when the world is crazy and we're running around like our hair is on fire. When we decide in advance what's important, we can make better decisions in the moment. From a weight perspective or from a sports analogy perspective, we take the weight off of our heels and we shift to the balls of our feet. We get to be future-forward. We get to be thinking and leaning into the action as opposed to being on our heels, reacting, and always taking a shot from out of left field.

No, no, no. We get to decide in advance and execute against that plan. Then we unlock the effort. We let the people make the better decisions because they understand why it matters.

Elise Holtzman: One of the things that you and I both know from working with leaders in law firms and in other parts of the legal profession is that many leaders have too many competing priorities. Especially in law firms, they’re practice group leaders or they’re simply running cases or transactions or they’re on the executive committee. And they’re also supposed to be practicing law. And they’re supposed to be taking care of their clients. And many of them are still expected to be rainmakers.

So I noticed that you talk about friction slowing things down when leaders have too many competing priorities. How do you help leaders, especially those in law firms who are wearing so many hats, identify—and get comfortable with, too—which initiatives to drop, which ones to deprioritize, or to delegate to somebody else? Because I think that's very, very hard. I know that's very, very hard for some leaders, especially in the legal profession.

Dusty Holcomb: Yeah, it's hard for leaders in any profession, but especially in the legal profession, where there are so many contingent demands on your time. The first question I always like to ask someone, when I'm working with leaders in law firms, especially, is: what is the work that only you can do? What is it that, if it isn't done by you, it can't be done?

They’ll say, “Well, I have to bill these hours.” Okay. Are you the only attorney in the firm who can do this work? Yes. Okay. Is that a gap? Is that a risk? Does that mean that you now have created a pinch point for growth because you're the only one that can do this work? Are you scaling? You start to dig deeper and uncover excuses because oftentimes what happens is people gravitate to retaining things they're comfortable with as opposed to offloading and delegating.

They do it because they don't have a good delegation system. They don't have a good way of trusting other people to deliver it to their level of expertise. They don't want to spend the time teaching, training, and coaching, etc. But the first filter is: what is the work that only you can do?

It’s so funny. There’s a wonderful book, 10x Is Easier Than 2x. He talks a lot about Dan Sullivan and Dr. Ben Hardy. If leaders especially were able to spend 80% of their time doing the things that create 80% of the value, they would be automatically four times more valuable than the typical leader, the typical entrepreneur, or the typical law practice leader who is spending 20% of their time doing the things that create 80% of the value.

So that lens of “what is the work that only you can do that creates the most value for the firm?”—do that first. You have to be comfortable saying, “I need to offload this work. I need to recognize that maybe I just suck at delegation. I need to get comfortable figuring out how to set clear expectations, how to establish a system of measure, how to coach and train a person to do this work, and then create a culture of accountability.” But you've got to identify those things first. Because if you don't, you're always going to be reacting. You're always going to be the bottleneck—the pinch point for growth—because you're trying to do too much.

Elise Holtzman: I have a similar conversation with many of my clients. To your point, it's very hard to let go of the things that have made you so successful thus far and try to pivot to something else. It's a lot easier to hold on to those things. It's understandable. I always say it's understandable, but it's not desirable, right? Because you're moving from one role to another.

You're not just the individual contributor anymore who is grinding out really good legal work and talking to the client when it comes to all of these detailed matters. You are now in a position of marshalling people and resources to get that stuff done. That's where I think a lot of lawyers struggle. So I talk the same as you about what's the highest and best use of your time.

I think that lawyers are fairly good at identifying that. But I think, as you said, the execution then becomes difficult because they are afraid to let go because they've been so successful thus far doing, doing, doing all of it themselves.

Dusty Holcomb: Yeah, I think you're right. I think that they've been successful for a reason. They're exceptionally good at these things. One thing, because of this time crunch or time constraint in needing to deliver billable hours, there has not, in my experience, typically been a lot of leadership development or self-leadership initiatives that allow a person to build the necessary skills.

Leadership is learned. You learn these things. You have to study these things. You have to grow and take your lumps along the way. But because you've been in a production manufacturing environment—if we distill what law is, the practice of law to its root element—it's a manufacturing environment process. We've got inventory, we have to sell it, and we have to get it through and produce as efficiently as possible. Every hour we're not doing that is not creating manufacturing throughput.

So I think people need to give themselves a little bit of grace and say, “Okay, I haven't been trained to do this. That's okay. But I need to learn new skills. How do I learn these skills, and how do I then divest work that is done better by someone else to do the things that only I can do?” What that does is it eliminates friction, and it eliminates waste because context shifting is hard.

When you go from, “Hey, I'm working on this client over here and I just booked three hours on this issue. Now I’ve got to go do a leadership team meeting. Now I’ve got to come back and do that,” context shifting creates friction, and it creates waste. So how do I do these things that only I can do, and time block it out so I make sure that they get done?

Elise Holtzman: We've been talking a lot about how lawyer leaders can become more intentional about what they're doing so they really can step into that leadership role. Let's talk a little bit about leading other people. Once you've made up your mind that, yes, this is a role that I'm inhabiting, I am going to be clear about what my highest and best use is, how I can deliver value to the clients and the firm by really embracing this role and maybe getting rid of some of the things that I really don't need to be the one doing—what are some of the things that you think lawyer leaders need to focus on as they step with confidence and intentionality into that role?

Dusty Holcomb: I think the first thing is understanding what leadership is. First principle—leadership is influence. Nothing more, nothing less. That's John Maxwell. Leadership is influence. So the first thing you have to recognize is that everything we do is leadership. Every example, how we show up, what we do, how we talk, how we sound, how we act, how we react—it's all leadership.

We're all setting an example of what others will emulate because they will. And they follow bad examples just the same way they follow good examples. The second thing is, in order to effectively lead others, we must be able to lead ourselves first. We must be able to set and hold ourselves to a higher standard of growth, development, learning, practicing, time discipline—whatever it is.

As we step into this role of leadership, we have to recognize it's not about us. It is not about us. We aren't in a leadership role to have our ego stroked or to get the better parking spot or whatever that is. Those may be perks and those may be benefits, but that's not why you do it. If you want to be in leadership and you want to be effective and you want to have influence, it has to be about those you lead.

So the self-indicting question is, “How am I working on myself so that I can create more impact for someone else?” That's an honor-seeking or an honesty-provoking question that I ask the leaders to say, “Hey, are you doing this for you or are you doing this for them?” Because if you're doing it for you, you're in management. If you're doing it for them, you're in leadership. It's a really important distinction.

Elise Holtzman: I like that distinction. There's a lot of conversation about the difference between leadership and management, and I haven't heard that one before. So that's a good one. One of the things you talk about is that many people in leadership are reactive rather than being intentional. What are some of the practices or routines that you have seen that can help leaders move from reaction to intention?

Dusty Holcomb: Yeah, that I would say is the most common challenge that we as leaders, myself included, live in in this world. The world happens, and the world happens fast, and we can't plan for everything. I think it was Patton or maybe MacArthur who said, “Everybody's got a plan until you make first contact with the enemy.” We always have a plan, but when we react, we are delegating to a situation the power and the control. But when we're intentional and we plan, we are ceding to ourselves the opportunity to have control, to have influence over what's going on.

So from a discipline and practices [standpoint], I would say that the number one practice—and I recommend this to every leader I work with, and I’ve done this myself for years, and every leadership guru I’ve studied does the same thing—is a weekly review and plan. It is the single best and most important hour of time that leaders can spend, where they sit down and do an after-action review with themselves for the past week. What went well? What didn’t? What were my wins? What were my losses? What did I learn? What am I going to do differently?

Now, what’s coming up in this next week? What’s important? What must I get done? Those intentional practices to lead yourself, to establish these markers of importance, allow you to be up on the balls of your feet because life’s going to happen. Change is going to happen. The client’s going to call, and it’s going to screw your entire day and calendar. All these things are going to happen, but you give yourself the opportunity to live in a place of influence over the design of the week, the design of the time. That allows you to not be under the control or at the mercy of Mr. Murphy, as we say in different areas.

So I think that would be the number one practice. A daily review is incredibly important. I always recommend to leaders that we do a daily review. I like to tell folks, “Hey, on a quarterly basis, you need to be getting off-site somewhere for a day or two, planning your quarter, reflecting, doing the work.” It’s very intentional time blocking and setting aside time, which is funny because it’s that intentionality to do this time that allows you to lead with more intention. It allows you to decide in advance what’s important.

Elise Holtzman: You mentioned the sorts of things that come up on an everyday basis that can push you off track and get you into reaction mode rather than intention mode. What are some of the most common things that you see coming up for people? What are some of the leadership pain points that you see?

Dusty Holcomb: One of the leadership pain points I see that happens—I was actually at a client a few weeks ago, and we were preparing for their quarterly meeting, and they walked in and said, “Well, our top attorney in this business segment just resigned.” Oh. Now we’ve got to go deal with all this. At first, they were trying to soldier on and be in the meeting. I finally said, “Guys, we just need to stop this and take 30 minutes and deal with this issue,” as opposed to being fully distracted for the entire day. That’s what we did.

But it’s that unexpected thing that happens—whether it’s a client meeting, somebody resigning, some issue that comes up. Those are the ones that come out of left field, and they happen all the time. You can’t really prepare for those, but you can be prepared to focus on those when they matter. You have to be able to say, “Okay, this is now a class-one priority. Everything else gets put to the side. We’re going to go deal with this right now in the moment.”

So those happen. I think the other thing that happens is a result of a lack of intentionality. What I mean by that is most people don’t control their calendar. Most people do not have their calendar blocked so that certain work—the most important work—is done when they do their best work. When that happens—in fact, I was just working with the CEO of a very large health organization a couple of weeks ago—his challenge was, “Hey, I am going from 7:30 in the morning until 7:30 at night. I’m really worried because I’m not able to keep and honor the commitments I’m making during meetings.”

I said, “Well, why is that happening?” He said, “Well, I just don’t have any white space during the day because my calendar gets taken over by meeting requests and all these things that are going on.” I said, “So who’s the CEO?” He goes, “Well, I am.” “So why don’t you control your calendar? You don’t have to say yes to every request. You don’t have to say yes to every opportunity.”

He sat there and looked at me for a second and went, “I don’t know.” Because what you’re doing is you’re putting yourself on your heels, and you’re putting yourself in a position to fail the people you want to lead because you don’t have time to follow up. You don’t have time to do the things you committed to—or worse, you’re burning yourself out going until 10:30 or 11 o’clock every night.

So control of your calendar—control of the time when you do your best work—is one of the most common ways that people can begin to retain a little bit of control and get out of that reactive state.

Elise Holtzman: I think most people feel like they don’t have that control and that they can’t exercise that control. It’s like, “Well, Dusty, you don’t understand. The client needs me, or the partner called me, or somebody’s having a problem and they need me to respond right away.” What do you say to people when you hear that sort of thing?

Dusty Holcomb: Do they react or do they think? Is your answer an automatic yes or an automatic no? I mean, it’s okay to say no. It’s also okay if you need to think about it—you can say not yet. But what I always advise people is if they’ve done a good weekly process, they have a good daily priority, and they get that call—the partner calls, “Hey, can you be in my office in 30 minutes?”—you need to pause and go, “I’m going to wait a second. Let me get back to you. I need to move some things around,” or whatever it is that you need to do.

In fact, my default state when I have somebody email me or ask for something is, “Let me take a look at it, and I’ll get back to you.” I’m committing to following up. I’m committing to something I can do. I’m not committing to the thing that they’re asking for without having taken the time to consider where it fits within my priorities, where it fits within their priorities, or the organization’s.

I think we all know those people who are energy vampires, and they’ll call and just suck the ever-loving life out of the room and out of you. Thank God for caller ID—we can screen them out now. But when we have that energy vampire, that time vampire who’s calling us and demanding time from us, we’re not victims. We have the right to choose. We have the power to choose. We have to exercise that.

Simply installing a circuit breaker that says, “Let me review this and get back to you,” allows you to be in control of the response you’re going to make—not be subject to an emotional reaction in the moment.

Elise Holtzman: I think this applies to younger lawyers as well, or younger people who may not see themselves as in leadership roles and may not feel that they have control over their time. When the partner says, "Jump," I have to say, “How high?”

The way I put it is, to your point, if somebody asks you for a particular time—if the partner says, “Hey, can you meet me at 10 o’clock this morning?”—I think you can say, “I have something on my calendar at 10 o’clock. Does it have to be 10, or would 11 work for you?” If they say, “No, no, it’s really got to be 10 o’clock,” all right, give me a few minutes. I’m going to move something around, and I’ll make it happen.

But not to roll over and play dead right away and assume that every request is equal to every other request, even if it’s coming from someone who’s senior to you. So I love your idea of having to control your own calendar. It reminds me of the old story about putting the oxygen mask from the plane on yourself before you put it on other people.

I know that that’s one of those trite expressions that people use over and over again, but I think it’s worth remembering that you cannot be effective in your role if you are just saying yes to absolutely everything and overloading yourself.

Dusty Holcomb: I couldn’t agree with you more. While it may be an overused example, I can’t think of a better one to demonstrate how important it is that we retain control, or at least retain influence on our time. We can’t control everything—we’re never going to be able to—but we can have influence on it.

Elise Holtzman: You say, Dusty, that great leaders repeat themselves so much that they echo. What does that mean to you, and why does that matter?

Dusty Holcomb: Yeah. One of the things that I’ve learned over the years—and a mentor actually shared that with me maybe 15 or 20 years ago—because I was griping, because, “Why do I have to keep saying the same darn thing?” He said, “Well, because you understand it, and they don’t understand it yet. Because in your head, it makes sense. In their head, they haven’t connected all the dots.”

It was one of those moments where the scales fell off, and I could see. I actually understood that we have to say it and be tired of saying it, because when we get tired of it, it’s only starting to sink in. That can be vision. It can be strategy. It can be reinforcement, because in some cases, people have a “this too shall pass” mindset about things.

So we say, “Hey guys, these are the three most important things. We’re going to repeat it. We’re going to repeat it. We’re going to repeat it.” I once had the privilege of visiting Chick-fil-A down in Atlanta, spending a couple of days with them. Dan Cathy was telling a story about how they launched the My Pleasure initiative, how Truett Cathy deployed that into the restaurants. They were having their annual owner-operators meeting.

Truett Cathy got up on stage and told the whole story about going to The Ritz-Carlton and that they were not going to just say, "You're welcome" when someone said, "Thank you." They were going to say, "My pleasure." He gave the whole reason why and everything. Well, they not only shared that, but they also started measuring it. That was when they launched it.

Year one, they came back, and it was like 65% alignment with doing that. Year two, they came back, and they did it, it was like 80%. It took three years until they got over 95% compliance or made that part of the culture of Chick-fil-A. Now I laugh anytime I talk to somebody out, and I say, “Thank you,” and they say, “My pleasure.” I go, “Did you use to work at Chick-fil-A?”

You have to repeat it because it takes time. When we’re changing and influencing the behavior of others, they need to understand. If we just say it once, we might as well have not said it at all. We’re going to get the 1% of people who believe and adopt it very, very quickly.

A few years ago, Harvard Business Review did a study where they showed that 95% of the people in an organization don’t understand the strategy of the organization. Said differently, the way I like to think about things is only 5% of the people actually understood the strategy of the organization and were actively doing work to achieve it. That means 95% of the organization is not even trying to help because they don’t understand it. It’s not that they don’t want to. They’re not being subversive. We just haven’t repeated it enough until we hear it back.

That’s the important part. When you can ensure that the vision, the strategy, the plan—whatever it is—is being talked about the way you would talk about it when you’re not in the room, you know that people believe in it and they’re executing it.

Elise Holtzman: A couple of examples came up for me while you were talking. One is that many years ago, I was asked by a chief marketing officer of a law firm to come in and talk to them about how they could get more of their lawyers working on client attraction and business development. The managing partner said something along the lines of, “We don’t need training. We brought somebody in to do a couple of hours of training eight years ago.”

So what I kept saying was, nobody’s heard this for eight years. They hadn’t been talking about it. They hadn’t been discussing it. They just wanted people who showed up and understood that, as lawyers, they should be trying to develop business. That was a particularly egregious example.

But the other one that comes up for me is research that was done by human resources folks and SHRM and those kinds of organizations that when you speak to a group and you tell them something—for example, in a seminar—even assuming you are the world’s best seminar leader, something like 95% of the people forget 96% of what you taught them within a couple of days. They can’t just hear it once.

If anybody who’s listening is a parent, you also know that when you’re trying to teach your children certain values and certain ways of behaving and how to go out into the world and how to treat people and what your family values are, you can’t just say it once when they’re five years old or once when they’re 10 years old and expect them to execute on it.

Dusty Holcomb: No, I think that’s the perfect metaphor, right? How many times do you have to teach your kids to say please and thank you? You just say it, and it’s just routine until it becomes their routine. Then you’re like, "All right, this really, really worked."

I’ve heard a similar statistic. In fact, I use this when I prepare for keynote presentations or when I’m working with leadership teams in workshops. I say, “Look, the research shows that two hours after our presentation today, you will have the ability to retain 50% of the content. By this time tomorrow, you will have retained 25% of the content. A week from now, you’ll have only retained 10%. My job is to articulate the 10%. I’m just going to hammer on the 10% that is most important because if you forget all the other stuff, you’re going to forget it anyway.”

So as a speaker, as a leader, we have to articulate and really think about what is the 10% that I want to land. In fact, earlier today, before our recording, I was working with a CEO, and I was asking him that. He’s preparing for his annual vision and strategy meeting. I said, “What is the 10%? What is the one thing that you want everyone in this room walking out of the room with that when asked, they’ll remember a week from now? Oh, by the way, you’re not going to have to just say it once. You’re going to have to reiterate this time and time again.”

In my last role as a CEO—actually, my last two roles—people knew that when I did town hall meetings or when I had a skip-level meeting, I was always going to talk about three things. I was going to talk about our purpose as an organization. I was going to talk about our plan and what we were doing. I was going to talk about how we were turning that purpose and that plan into passion for them—how they were connecting the dots to what they were doing.

I was always going to be talking about those three things: where are we going, how are we going to get there, and how do we connect it for you.

Elise Holtzman: Great example of using the echo—repeating yourself over and over. You mentioned a couple of times connecting dots, and I saw—I was stalking you online as I do for many of my guests to learn as much as I can—and I know that you’ve been called a “dot connector.” So what does that mean for you in terms of leadership?

Dusty Holcomb: Well, I think that a dot connector in terms of leadership is maybe one of the ultimate responsibilities that we have. What I mean by that is we have to, as leaders, be able to collect information and cast a vision. We have to have this codified idea of where we’re going, and we have to be able to connect people to that vision. Otherwise, they’re going to go off in their own directions.

I think of a rowing skiff as a good example of this. We have to get everybody rowing on time, in power, and in cadence. Otherwise, we’re not going to go in a straight line. We’re going to be going off in multiple different directions. But it’s being able to articulate and connect their work to the passion or the purpose of the organization.

Let me give you an example. In a prior role, I was the president of an automotive group, and we were meeting with our accounting team, our finance team. We always talked about why we were here. It was really easy for the frontline folks in automotive repair for us to say, “Hey, we don’t fix cars. What we do is we make sure that people know that their car will be safe when they need it to be when they’re out on the road.”

So I want to talk to a technician, and I can say, “Hey, you’re not fixing brakes. What you’re doing is making sure the car stops when somebody pulls out in front of that mom with kids in the back,” and they get it. That’s really natural and native. But there was an accounting person in, I believe, our accounts payable group who said, “Look, I get it for the technicians. They actually do the work. How does my work have anything to do with protecting people in the car?”

I said, “That’s a wonderful question. I’m so glad you asked. What do you do?” She said, “Accounts payable.” I said, “So you make sure that our bills get paid on time?” She goes, “Yes.” I said, “So what you’re really doing is you’re making sure that the person in the shop, the manager in the store, isn’t distracted because his vendor got cut off or because he has to go chase down a bill or follow up on all these things that prevent him from ensuring that we’re doing the best quality work in the field at the point of repair for the car.”

She goes, “I never thought about it that way.” I said, “That’s what you do. You enable the person closest to the customer to focus on the customer. When you do your job well, we get to do our jobs better for the customer who’s paying us the money. So don’t ever dilute the importance of what you do.”

It became one of those seminal moments for her. Every time I’d walk past her, she’d go, “I’m helping fix cars today.” She got it. So that’s what I mean by connecting dots—being able to take the work and describe meaning and connect it to what really matters.

Elise Holtzman: Dusty, maybe you can help somebody who’s listening connect the dots—someone who says, “This podcast episode is about leadership, and I’m a fairly junior lawyer, so I’m not a leader.” Can you speak about that a little bit? How does our conversation relate to someone who doesn’t necessarily view him or herself as a leader just yet?

Dusty Holcomb: There’s leadership of others and there’s leadership of self. You may not have a leadership by title of others where you are charged and responsible and accountable for the performance of others, but you are charged and responsible and accountable for the performance of yourself. So the principles apply. In fact, I would strongly argue that in order to lead and influence others, you have to lead yourself first. Principle number one.

So how does this apply for that young junior person? What are the standards they're setting for themselves? How are they growing? How are they setting an expectation and a commitment to grow and learn and be better for themselves so that they can create more influence? Are they setting an example? Leadership is an example. Are they doing the work well? Are they following up? All these little things—that is influence.

So it's not about the title. It's about the opportunity to lean in and go, “Here's where I am. Here's my vision of the future. What do I need to do to close the gap? What commitments am I willing to make? What's my plan to go do it?” Then holding themselves accountable. That'd be the first thing.

Second thing I would say is, if you have an aspiration to be in a leadership role in the future, become a student. Harry S. Truman once said, "Not all readers are leaders, but all leaders are readers." So you have to really dig deep and you have to understand, “Hey, I've got something to learn here.” Go find a mentor, go be a shadow, go study someone, and go, “What is it that makes them successful in influencing the behavior of others?”

It has nothing to do with title. It has nothing to do with role. It has everything to do with how you show up and lead yourself and set an example that makes it a de facto thing that you will get an opportunity to lead others because you can do it well for yourself.

Elise Holtzman: Yeah, I love that. I think that's so important for people to understand. Leadership is not just a role that somebody suddenly says, “Oh, we'd like you to be the leader of this group,” or “We'd like you to be the leader of this initiative.”

First of all, they're probably not going to ask you if they don't see any leadership qualities in you, but it's a mindset shift. It's a way of thinking about growth in yourself so that at some point you can help marshal those people and other resources to get the job of the organization done.

Dusty, as we wrap up our time here together today, there's a question that I ask all of my guests at the end of the show. There's a phenomenon called the curse of knowledge, where experts sometimes forget that what is so obvious and natural to them is not at all obvious to others. When it comes to leading yourself and others, what's a principle or piece of advice that may seem obvious to you but is important for people to hear?

Dusty Holcomb: I love this question. This is such a rich question. The curse of knowledge is you have information and you take it for granted. So what's obvious for me that I think I would leave for others is you must always be seeking to learn. You don't have all the answers.

So as I think about this, how do you simplify what you do and always be learning more? “What's the most important thing I can learn? How can I be better? What is it?” I used to say I want to read a book a week, and I did for a long, long time. Now I want to read a book that matters, and it may take a month. It may take six weeks, but I want to learn and I want to activate on it.

So having all this information is wonderful, but there's always more to be learned. There's always more to understand. How do you simplify and learn the things that matter next for you? Such a rich question. I'm going to really chew on this one all weekend long because when you have all these answers, you sometimes want to just prescribe them and forget that you simply need to keep learning.

Elise Holtzman: I love it. I feel the same way. So this has been such an interesting conversation for me. I'm grateful to have had you on the show today, so thank you so much for being here, Dusty.

Dusty Holcomb: Elise, thank you so much. I could talk about this stuff for hours, and I know that you could as well.

Elise Holtzman: Me too. I keep looking at the clock, not because I'm dying for the conversation to end, but because I'd love it to continue. I know we have to end our time together, so I know you and I will continue the conversation.

I also want to thank our listeners for tuning in today. If you've enjoyed today's show, please subscribe, rate, and review us at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. In the meantime, be bold, take action, and make things happen. We'll see you next time.