In this episode Jared and Les Csorba discuss executive leadership and talent trends in the oil and gas industry, drawing on Les’s experience at Heidrick & Struggles. They examine current hiring challenges, shifts in executive management, and the skills leaders need to navigate ongoing industry change. The conversation also addresses the role of self-awareness in effective leadership and its impact on organizational performance. Together, they outline key considerations for developing and retaining strong leadership in a changing energy landscape.

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Welcome to Financial Planning for Oil and Gas Professionals, hosted by certified financial planners Justin Brownlee and Jared Machen of Brownlee Wealth Management, the only podcast dedicated to those of you in the oil and gas profession to help you optimize investments, lower future taxes, and grow your wealth.

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Management.Com welcome back to another episode of FPO&G Financial Planning for Oil and Gas Professionals.

This week on the podcast, I'm really excited to welcome Les Chorba from Heidrick and Struggles.

He's going to be visiting with us, really covering a wide range of topics.

We're going to talk about hiring trends in the oil and gas profession.

We're going to talk about kind of executive management track.

We're going to talk about his new book, Aware.

Les, we're really excited to have you on the show.

Thanks, Jared.

I'm looking forward to it.

Thanks for having me on.

Yeah.

So I figured I'd give our listeners a little bit of context.

Hopefully some of them have heard of you, but you're a partner at Hydrocon Struggles, so it's an executive search firm in Houston.

And just based geographically on where you are, my guess is there's a large percentage of your demand or your placements being related to the energy sector.

And interestingly, before your work there, you worked as a special assistant to George H.W.

helping with presidential personnel and identifying leaders for top government roles.

I'm curious for you.

I'd love for you to share more about the work you do today and then kind of how you came to realize this was the work you wanted to do, because I don't feel like many people grow up wanting to be an executive headhunter.

But based on my learning, it feels like you really like your work.

How do you come to find this and realize it was what you wanted to do?

Well, when I was in Washington, in the White House working for For President Bush 41, I was in the personnel world, the process of recruiting and persuading leaders in the private sector to serve in government, in public service.

And I had four years of that.

I was very young, but I just loved it.

I just fascinated with people making the sacrifices to serve their country and just the process of vetting candidates and understanding the impact of leadership, that got me excited about leadership as a whole.

So it's been about 34, 35 years.

Wow.

Awesome.

That seems like a very high stakes way to kind of get introduced into it.

Seem really, really important placements.

Yeah, I mean, obviously these are high profile roles in government.

I focused on sort of the national security portfolio, ambassadorships, senior level executives at the Pentagon, the State Department.

And so, yeah, there is a national security dimension.

There's a lot of vetting, obviously, background checks and just the seriousness of that job and the responsibility just got me excited about leadership in general.

Yeah.

So it's interesting because human capital is a fascinating equation because the analogy of the right, you can have the right people in the wrong seats.

Right.

It's just so tough to really actually get that equation right.

Or it can be the right person at the wrong time.

It's just really getting a team that's optimally kind of working in a flow state.

Just seems like there's so many different dimensions you have to consider.

Yeah, I mean, I've always argued and I have a lot of friends who are in the management consulting business or with technology companies or bankers, and I often tease them that, you know, capital is important, technology is important, strategy is important, but if you don't have the right leaders, you're just not going to be successful.

It's leaders that really shape the destinies of companies.

You know, it's.

It's leaders that drive performance.

I've always believed, you know, I'm biased, of course, that we're in the most exciting business you could possibly imagine.

Right.

Because, you know, there's an incredible purpose and meaning in the work that we do.

Our tagline at Heidrick is, you know, we change the world one leadership team at a time.

And that may sound a little bit ambitious or over the top, but if you think about it, it's really true.

There's an exponential effect to impact.

Right.

Like you.

You can only have so many leaders that you're coaching or placing or actively working with.

But assuming those placements are good, there's kind of a exponential multiplier because that, you know, that moves down the chain of command.

So that's really, really awesome.

Yeah.

Oil and gas is funny.

Everybody thinks that's so niche.

But there's, as you know, there's so many different niches within that.

Right.

Some of our listeners might be middle managers at super majors, C suite at, you know, Mid Cap, EMP companies that most people have never heard of that are big businesses, oil field services, or you might even have privately held minerals and interests or, you know, oil and gas businesses.

I'd love for you to kind of.

I know I'm sure your work is very energy heavy.

I'd love for you to talk kind of about the sector in general.

Right.

Because I think there's some leadership principles that kind of broadly apply, whatever, some sector, but there's also some, some nuance as it relates to, hey, energy specific.

My first kind of question for you is, is energy a net exporter or importer of human capital?

It seems like, are more people leaving the sector or joining it or.

It's always sort of ebbed and flow over the years, over the decades based on the cycles in the industry.

If you're in the upstream part of the industry, you've gotta be built for the boom times and then also the down cycles.

And so consequently, as we've had some of these down cycles, we've had a lot of leaders leave the industry and pursue careers in technology or in consulting or financial services.

When we've had boom times, we've had a lot of interest in the industry as well.

I would say overall there's been a decline in technical talent in the industry, geologists, engineers, et cetera.

And so there's been a bit of a gap in terms of the leaders in the industry.

I would argue, Jared, that this is actually quite an exciting time.

If you're young or mid management and you're in the energy industry and you're trying to figure out do I stay, do I get in the industry?

I can't think of a more exciting time.

I mean, we're in this massive infrastructure super cycle where it's all about energy.

We just need more energy to drive obviously the AI race and to alleviate global energy poverty, which is an issue that most people still don't talk about and address.

So I think if you're young and you, you want to be part of something that is growing and having real impact on people's lives.

The energy business is, is as exciting as it's ever been.

I think there's a big, big opportunity.

I'm curious, you know, as you think about filling that gap, do you think we have to raise energy leaders up or maybe poach them from other industries or kind of, or is it a combination?

One of the things that's interesting about energy is like, as I think about somebody going from energy to marketing, the technical expertise of the subject matter of What I'm doing, leadership is leadership.

But trying to figure out what leadership looks like maybe in a less scientific discipline like marketing might be very different than it is for energy.

Right.

When you're working with geologists and having to understand rig count, it feels like there's probably a steep learning curve for maybe somebody outside the industry.

I'm curious where you think that gap gets filled.

Yeah, it's been harder frankly to recruit other skill sets from other industries into the energy industry just because as you pointed out, there's a technical aspect of it that is really unique.

I mean, you can, and we have been successful in on occasion bringing in manufacturing executives, those that come from a large sort of industrial background that use energy.

So there are some adjacencies, but by and large it's a tougher industry to recruit to from other sectors like financial services or tech or consumer products.

The industry is just so highly technical and so unique.

Maybe there's parts of the industry, maybe like the power sector, the utilities, where you could broaden it out a little bit more.

But in terms of upstream and midstream, it's a little bit more challenging to think of recruiting leaders from other industries to join the energy industry.

It's likely a multi pronged approach.

Right.

It's not too dissimilar from how I think about energy in general.

Right.

Is nuclear the future?

Are hydrocarbons the future?

Is AI?

You know, the answer is yes.

Right.

It's going to be some mix of everything.

I don't think there's a singular thing that hey, this is going to solve kind of the talent shortage in energy.

The other thing I would just add the folks that have come into the industry or maybe who have been reticent to come in the industry is there may have been a stigma associated with the industry because of this notion or stereotype that the industry is dirty or that it's not sustainable or it's not part of the plan to transition to, to other forms of energy.

And I find that just to be very shallow because as we all know and as physics show, we need more energy.

The so called energy transition shouldn't be called the energy transition.

It should be more about energy addition.

And frankly, the energy transition, the way I think about it, and way I think a lot of analysts think about it, it's really more energy across the board with, with less emissions equals what I think is the energy transition versus moving from one system, large energy system to another system that that's just not the reality.

Yeah, absolutely.

I'd love to Kind of talk.

And it's funny, you know, so you kind of called this.

And as we're having this conversation, 26, I think that's rung true.

And the interesting thing is the economic environment.

We could talk more about the commodity super cycle, but the economic environment in terms just of a price perspective.

Prices were actually more compelling then than maybe they are today.

The talent shortage has gotten worse or any signs of improvement or maybe just a steady state of what you were writing about?

Yeah, I think it's gotten a little better.

Back when I wrote that piece, we had a flourishing of new energy businesses related to renewables and new energy.

So there was a question about where the talent's going to come from to fill a lot of the seats in those companies.

And at the same time you had a lot of leaders in the upstream and the midstream business that were retiring.

And so there was a gap within the traditional oil and gas sector.

I would say that since then, companies have been very creative in thinking about how to recruit, promote and develop leaders to fill those gaps.

I would still say that there is a bit of a shortage in terms of up and coming talent.

And so companies are working really, really hard to develop and coach sort of next generation leadership in the industry.

It's still a real challenge.

Now, having said that, there has been consolidation, as you know, on the upstream side and to a certain extent midstream in services.

So there are some really compelling candidates and leaders who are free agents kind of looking for that next opportunity.

So it's a little bit of a mixed bag, I would say.

And you talk about this in the paper, which I think is really interesting.

We'll be sure to link to it in the show notes.

It's kind of two distinct problems, right?

Legacy, what I would call legacy oil and gas has a baby boomer retiring problem and then renewables are growing exponentially faster and that, you know, as those come online, there's just not a lot of existing renewables infrastructure talent to kind of solve that.

Would you say that, you know, are those kind of still the two distinct problems?

And I mean, I guess it's kind of the same net problem, which is we don't have enough people joining the industry.

But the reason why, you know, I would say the alternatives is alternatives.

Renewable is more of a, you know, there's tons of demand, just not A lot of capacity.

And then oil, traditional oil and gas is more of a leak of existing talent without people to backfill.

Yeah, I think that's true.

I mean, there's probably a little bit today less of a talent gap on the new energy side just because the dollars, billions and frankly trillions of dollars flowed into new energies.

And that has kind of pulled back a little bit just because of the realities of the physics.

And the demand for baseload energy is huge around the world, particularly if you think about data centers and the requirement for gas fired power, lng, obviously.

And so I don't think there's as much of a push on the new energy side.

I think those companies are really trying to figure out how to operate in a leaner way and more profitable.

I just think that certain segments of the energy value chain, particularly on the power side, the infrastructure side, to a certain extent, you could say sort of upstream as well, is where I think there's a need for new talent.

And developing talent obviously within those organizations is critical.

Yeah, absolutely.

And I think that's a good segue into kind of the next thing I want to talk about, which is talent development.

Right.

You serve in a bunch of different capacities.

You think of, you know, kind of board management, you help place executives.

But also I know you coach some people, so I'd love for you to kind of talk about executive career development.

And one of the things like I think about when I think of that, it's really weird in business because, you know, the skill set that gets you promoted is often the one you have to abandon or maybe just add to.

It's just a very different skill set.

Right.

Like an example of geologists, hey, I'm a great geologist and then I get promoted to a manager of geologists, which actually creates a very fundamentally different day.

And there may not be the translation that I thought there was because it's just a different set of skills, frankly.

So, you know, you kind of alluded to this earlier thinking about, hey, I need to develop talent.

How do you think about, you know, in your work as a coach, how do people transition kind of from the task executor to direction setter, people manager.

And kind of interestingly, you know, I wonder if that's maybe a little harder, different or unique in different ways for people that with a profession that is a lot of times engineering skewing hard science.

I think if technical leaders really want to move into managerial roles or leadership roles, they've got to start with sort of a foundational basis that you know, they need to heighten their awareness, which is the subject of the book and an important principle, because I believe that self awareness is the greatest tool a leader has for transformation and growth.

And as I've found over, you know, 30 plus years in this business, the best of the best leaders that I've encountered, and I think the research shows this as well, the best leaders do not view themselves as the completed, finished product.

So they're always working on something to get to that next level of impact.

I think if you start with that mindset and you're a sponge and you're curious and you want to learn and you want to grow, you're going to grow and transform much more quickly than if you kind of set in your ways and you have a particular point of view of how you should manage and lead people.

So the premise is really starting from this idea that I want to heighten my awareness and surround myself with people who can tell me the truth about both my strengths and my capabilities, but also my flaws, my gaps, and have those kind of honest conversations and relationships that allow you to show up as the best version of yourself.

Yeah, I love that.

Yeah.

Awareness is really, really what you're saying.

I think that's so important.

So let's say you are a leader and you're kind of self aware, or you're a middle manager and you want to rise into the aspirational ranks.

There's kind of this weird tension, right, of like, hey, I have an interest and aptitude in developing and leading people, but I also don't want to become fixated on control.

And like, what really kind of illuminated this point for me is in your book, you talk about Rex Tillerson, right?

His hesitation to become the CEO because he didn't want to be in charge.

How do you kind of coach people that, hey, I want the executive track, but if I come on too strong or maybe presume or become overly domineering or about control, that might be off putting.

So, you know, how do you kind of throw your hat in the ring in a respectful way that demonstrates, hey, I'm a team player, I'm collaborative, and this isn't about control for me.

Any thoughts or ideas there?

Yeah, it's such a really interesting question because I'm sure many professionals and leaders in your audience kind of wonder this, you know, face that dilemma all the time.

And I think the story you're referring to is Darren woods, who actually had gotten a call or gotten a visit from Rex Tillerson, who was then chairman and CEO and Basically said that the board, you know, wanted you, Darren, to step into the CEO role.

And he.

He pretty much.

He kind of hesitated and said, you know, I really don't need the top job.

And Rex said, that's exactly why you're the perfect man for the job.

And I think the lesson there is, if you look at Darren's history and his experiences, in every job that he held, he did it to the best of his ability and focused exclusively on executing, you know, the task at hand.

And he let things just kind of happen.

Right.

So.

And then he kept getting promoted and bigger jobs and bigger responsibilities, and he had a.

Had a focus, a laser focus on executing extraordinary, extraordinarily well and not being so aspirational and ambitious that it.

It got him distracted.

And, and I find actually a lot of the CEOs in the energy industry that I focus on in the book are what I would call sort of accidental CEOs.

They didn't necessarily aspire for the top job, but they just focused on doing the task at hand and doing it with a certain humility so they could continue to grow.

And.

And everything generally works out in the end.

Yeah, like, to use your word, awareness just in this present moment.

Right.

Get like a presence of, hey, what is the task at hand?

How do I do it with excellence and trust.

That if I do that, that compounds and gets me where I need to go.

Yeah.

I just find that those that are overly ambitious and focused on sort of selling and positioning themselves tend to.

I'm not saying that they don't get the top job or they aren't promoted, but over time it doesn't work well for them.

That's just my experience.

Yeah, I love that.

Any.

Any other ideas in terms of, like, traits or disciplines or maybe.

Maybe they should look at sectors.

So like you mentioned this, the bifurcation of different parts of the industry or maybe have more of headwinds or tailwinds.

If I'm a young, kind of upwardly mobile person that's really hungry and ambitious on top of awareness, which I think is principal, this will solve everything.

Are there any other disciplines or strategies or ideas in terms of things that might have an outsized impact on their career trajectory?

I think curiosity is huge.

I think developing an intellectual curiosity and a hunger for information, what's going on in the world and not just having a sort of myopic view of their business or their industry and bringing that perspective to the table tends to accrue to the benefit of a leader more quickly than those that say are just focused on kind of their silo or their business.

So I would say curiosity, really having a view of the macro environment, really understanding business, some of the geopolitical things that are going on, developing that skill set, because that then leads to things like a strategic acumen.

It leads to things like foresight, of course, agility, which is so important now with the world changing almost, you know, every week there's something going on.

So, so I do, I do think curiosity is huge.

Getting beyond kind of just the little, you know, business that you're involved in or function that you're involved in and bringing that perspective to the table will get the attention of those that, you know, that you're serving and working with.

Yeah, I mean, it's not too dissimilar from our business.

Right.

I tell people when we hire them, hey, you have to like puzzles.

Right.

The regulatory environment is changing, the rule, you know, how effect executives are being compensated is changing.

Investment environment is changing.

So it's.

The board is not static by any set of the imagination.

But if you like puzzles, it's a fun, constantly evolving thing.

Yeah.

And not being hesitant to share your point of view, I feel like there's a lot of hesitancy because there's just a lot of people pleasing and people want to be validated and they want to be liked in the workplace.

And so they're reticent to share their point of view about, you know, a particular energy trend or economic trend or whatever.

I think having that curiosity and then the courage and the willingness to share your point of view, you know, it's going to accrue to your benefit.

Intellectual diversity really matters.

Intellectual diversity that's not shared and hashed out is no net benefit to the organization.

Absolutely.

You know, we're financial planners, so I'd love to kind of ask you some financial planning adjacent questions.

It's interesting because, you know, one of the things we've seen is a macro trend.

If you think about somebody retiring from ExxonMobil 30 years ago, the percentage of their balance sheet that was a pension and kind of a 401k was disproportional percentage of their retirement.

Now we see people retiring and it's restricted stock, non qualified deferred compensation.

So the landscape of how people are getting paid, especially as the economic environment changes, tax legislation changes, compensation rules change.

It's kind of this moving puzzle.

And those two different people might have the same net worth, but from a planning perspective, drastically different strategies, order of operations, how we, how we tackle and build a Financial plan for that person.

I'm curious for you.

As you see, you know, kind of the landscape of executive management changing, how's the compensation changing?

Are there any macro trends that you're seeing and what are the best firms doing to kind of attract and retain talent?

The long term equity component of compensation in the industry is much more focused on the value that you're creating.

So instead of just simply stock options, which is, you know, fluctuates based on the price of a stock or share price, it's more equity that's based in performance of the company, related to peers and other metrics that the company sets up.

So I would say there's been a shift to performance based equity and that's almost across the board.

And I would also say, you know, as it applies to the boardroom, for example, instead of having cash as predominant form of compensation, it's more stock because the best directors and the best leaders of companies have an ownership mindset.

And so you have to have enough skin in the game to be credible and to be motivated by the right behaviors to drive, you know, shareholder values.

So that's the other trend as well.

I think it's disingenuous to say act like an owner but get none of the economic benefits of ownership.

Yeah, definitely a shift towards an ownership mentality tied to equity compensation.

I'm curious from your perspective.

You know, hey, that's, that's how firms are kind of.

And companies are managing their talent.

In terms of talent, there's this kind of, you know, how are they optimizing their lifetime earnings and career satisfaction?

Right.

Like, you know, there's some people that kind of are on this out of the camp, hey, I want to go one employer for life.

And some people are, hey, best way to get comp raises change every two years.

Any idea of, you know, kind of like.

Or just general thoughts about how people think about how talent kind of manages their development and whether to stay or to go and kind of balance that.

Trade off of as a recruiter, you know, who reads, you know, hundreds of resumes, thousands of resumes, you know, I don't know how many I've seen.

I think I estimated in the book that I've set in over 10,000 interviews, I think the most compelling candidates for me, and there always are exceptions, Jared, are those that have had a steady career, not maybe not with one company, but maybe two if there's six or seven or eight changes.

Now, they may be explainable because of a deal or a transaction or whatever, but if they're viewed as sort of a job hopper and a bit of a mercenary, kind of out for themselves and just looking for the next sort of higher payout.

That sort of tells me a little bit about potentially about their character and their self interest.

Again, I don't want to be overly general in that regard because there are exceptions.

There are some incredible leaders that have moved around six, seven times.

But I think by and large the ones that have had steady performance have shown great loyalty and have hung in there.

And maybe it's not just two companies today.

It's kind of hard, you know, because there's been so much change in transactions and consolidation in the industry.

It may be three or four, you know, chunks, if you will, as opposed to, you know, being with one company your entire career.

So I do look for that steadiness, that impact, the value they created as opposed to somebody who, you know, every 18 months is looking, looking for the next deal.

It's a balancing act, definitely.

But I think, yeah, demonstrating competence and getting promotions and building relational equity, that that compounds and, and it's.

And it stands out to you.

Yeah, no question.

So one of the things that's really interesting about our job and that we found with clients is it's like no one's really.

Retirement's really fascinating because if you look in history, it's a fairly new idea.

And I would argue that nobody's really good at full stop retirement going from a really demanding, intellectually stimulating job to just nothing.

And so it's a tough transition.

And you know, we kind of help clients kind of work through that.

And a lot of people, I'm curious for you is with your work, with people in this, like anything you've observed is people you've coached who've retired well or kind of navigated hey, the, the accumulation, the high earning years, but also kind of translating that into a purposeful retirement that may or may not involve some degree of work.

Yeah, that's a really, actually an interesting question because the data shows I'm really interested in sort of the generations and I'm part of the baby boomer generation and our generation is actually retiring later.

There are more baby boomers still in the workforce than ever before.

And I think that has a lot to do with your point.

Not necessarily about, in some cases it may be a need to continue to work for financial reasons, but mostly it's because they want to continue to contribute and have meaning and purpose.

So I do see a trend towards sort of pushing off retirement.

And you know, when I work with, when I coach leaders and they're kind of at that inflection point.

You know, I never sort of use the word retirement in the sense that they're going to completely go from full time work to nothing.

Because a lot of leaders have so much value to add post working in a situation or in a job, whether that's advising a private equity fund or, or, or advising a small business owner or being on a board or serving in the industry in terms of an association or mentoring and coaching the next generation of leaders.

I like to advocate those kinds of transitions as opposed to just, you know, full on retirement.

And I am actually seeing a lot more interest in that.

I mean I, I can tell you how many people that I've visited with in the last roughly two, three years where they did retire, let's say at, you know, 63 or 65.

And now they're coming back and saying really, I want to, I want to get back in the game, I want to do something, I don't want to just play golf or I don't want to just travel.

You know, and so there is that hunger and desire to really have impact.

And, and, and they're not necessarily doing it because they need to continue to create wealth.

They're doing it because they want to have impact and have meaning and purpose.

It's really just deploying your human capital in seasonally appropriate ways where the economics make sense for you.

Right.

And that just like what a 50 year old needs, who's in their peak earning or peak spending years with kids in college and somebody who's, you know, accumulated a great nest egg, that, that changes over time.

So you talked about, you know, kind of some opportunities of private equity or you know, working with small businesses.

Are you finding the larger kind of publicly traded companies, you know, is this macro trend is kind of beginning to happen?

Are they more open to, hey, you can kind of stay on an advisory role or move within a business segment or maybe, you know, another competitor will poach you to kind of be a consultant.

Is there any, any appetite for that from, from bigger corporations?

Yeah, I mean, I just, I just see even in the, even in some of the large energy companies, sure there are some planned retirements, but I'm seeing a little more flexibility to retaining some of the veterans.

Maybe not in a full time capacity, but in an advisory capacity and perhaps in coaching and mentoring the next generation of leaders.

So I do see that flexibility, a little bit more flexibility in that regard.

And part of it may be that there just aren't as many leaders that are coming up.

And there's a gap still between the retiring generation, let's say, and the next generation coming up.

But even if they do leave the company, they're still incredible.

I mean, I think this AI revolution is going to create not just in more productivity, but with more productivity, lots of new businesses and industries and so many ways to serve and contribute.

And, and so that's kind of how I counsel a lot of leaders who are at that point in their lives.

Awesome.

Yeah, I think, but yeah, I agree with you.

I think the idea of it's not enough to say, oh, I can't wait to be done.

It's like, no, no, what are you going to do when you're done in this sense of the word?

And like, we'll see a lot of people who maybe haven't thought through that.

They're really excited for what they're leaving.

Excited, haven't, haven't even considered what they might actually fill that with.

Last thing I'd kind of love to talk about with you, your new book, Aware.

Right.

And I'm reading it, I'm loving it.

It's very timely.

We're an industry bot as a firm where we have six employees now.

Right.

And our jobs are slowly coming.

You know, as a small business, my work was essentially doing 100% of the time two years ago, and now it's managing with some doing and as time moves on, it's going to continually do that.

So, you know, self awareness I think is so important.

You gotta kind of internally understand how you're being, how you're showing up, what your motivations are, how your team's perceiving you, how the dynamics are.

I think self awareness is such an important idea and I've loved, you know, what I've read so far.

Still working through the book.

I'd love for you to kind of answer in your own words.

And you've, you've talked, you alluded to it a little bit earlier part of this conversation.

What, what is self awareness and what led you to determine that this was a book worth writing about?

Cause I'm sure you've seen tons of, there's tons of things you could probably write a book about having reviewed 10,000, having done 10,000 interviews, but this was.

You wrote a book about this.

I'd love for you to share that.

It's a culmination of 30 plus years in the industry and some observations around what I saw as a trend of lower self awareness and more blind spots.

And I've always believed and sort of the evidence seems to back me up, based on my experience that the best of the best leaders have this unique combination of incredible self belief, intense self belief without the self absorption, you know, the confidence in themselves, but also the humility to continue to grow.

And that's a very difficult combination and skill set for a leader.

And I would argue that the way you pull that off is, is it hinges on high self awareness.

You've got to, you've got to have a high level of awareness of your, not only your flaws and blind spots and weaknesses, but your strengths, your capabilities.

She did a research study with Harvard which showed that 95% of Americans think they're self aware, but the data shows that only 10 to 15% truly are.

And I thought that was just.

That couldn't be true.

And so we did our own research at Heidrich and the number was about 13% of leaders are truly self aware.

So you got historic low levels of awareness.

And many people ask, well, why is that?

And the digital culture has really dulled our awareness.

More time online and less time we're offline from ourselves.

So I think those are the reasons why we have such low self awareness.

Why is it important?

It's important because all the data and the research shows that the most self aware leaders tend to be more productive, they tend to produce the most results, they tend to be more empathetic, they tend to have higher emotional intelligence and they tend to not engage in unethical behavior.

So that was really kind of the background and why I got excited about the topic and wrote the book.

I love it.

It's funny, that data is really astounding to me and it kind of reminds me of the data.

If you were to poll a group of a hundred people, how many of them think they're above average at a given thing?

More than half are going to say that's the case.

Right.

And you were talking about this on a podcast I was listening to of oh, that you know, somebody would say, hey, I love the book, Les.

I have just the person that it's perfect for, which is, you know, an admission of, hey, we might as a society, especially with some of the demographic trends, be systematically under aware as relative to what we need to be.

Yeah.

So there's the data and then there's sort of our everyday experience with friends.

And by the way, I fall into it all the time.

I mean I've got, I've got blind spots which I address in the book.

The major one is people pleasing, but also some others like not staying present, not being present enough.

I think I am, I think I am present with my team, but the reality is I'm not listening at the level that I should be listening.

So anyways, I just think being open to that and I often say that what you are aware of you can control and what you are unaware of controls you.

And so if you start with that idea that if I can just heighten my awareness, I mean, think about how much better I can show up and how we can all better show up.

And if we can take that 13% or 15% of self aware leaders and get that to 30 or 40 or 50%, think of how powerfully our teams and our organizations would show up and perform with that higher awareness.

It's a perfect book because the implications are huge.

And the potential audience and improvement with only 13% identifying as self aware or performing as self aware when they're objectively studied.

That's low.

Yeah.

Awesome.

Well, Les, I really appreciate your time.

Thank you for coming on.

We, we really just went 1.0 on all these.

I feel like I could have made each of these an individual episode.

But I appreciate you sharing your wisdom with our audience.

I'll be sure to link to some of the show notes, your website, you know, kind of some of the articles, the book.

Is there anything else you'd like to share with our audience or how can they find you if they want to learn more about what you're up to and how you work with energy professionals?

Yeah, well, I mean, first of all, thanks for having me on, but you know, a lot of people ask me, well, you know, I'm really interested in heightening my awareness.

What do I do?

How do I begin to take the steps to heighten my awareness?

And I do want to leave your audience with just a couple of things.

I mean, number one, make sure you surround yourself with contrarians and not sycophants.

People that you explicitly give permission to to share feedback.

You know, that is so important not just in our businesses or our financial organizations or in the oil and gas industry, but also in our families and our relationships.

And so that is a concrete step.

And I do have a self awareness scorecard.

It's on my website.

It's just an easy way to kind of get a sense of how aware you might be.

It's just 30 quick questions.

It's not empirical way to develop your score on awareness, but it does help.

It gives you a glimpse of maybe how you're showing up.

Awesome.

I'll definitely link to that scorecard and I'm glad I didn't know that before this call because I would have taken it, probably been underwhelmed with my score and felt obligated to share it.

So it works out good.

I'll definitely take it offline.

Great Jared.

So great to be here.

Thanks for being with you.

Love to hear from our listeners.

Thank you Les for your time.

And don't forget to subscribe like share ideas for Future episodes@podcastroundleywealthmanagement.com Thanks.

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