There are so many different models of leadership and there are so many different solutions out in the market. Martin Lanik, CEO of Pinsight and the author of the business bestseller, The Leader Habit, says what makes their process different is the realization that traditional classroom-based leadership development just doesn’t work. They focus on 5-minute daily leadership exercises that build positive habits. They work with organizations to help them hire better leaders, and then to promote better leaders to identify the right high-potentials that they should invest in and to develop them to prepare them for executive positions. Martin shares some effective leadership behaviors you can practice to the point that they are your second nature.
We are in Downtown Denver with Martin Lanik. He’s the CEO of Pinsight and the author of the business bestseller, The Leader Habit. I had the good fortune of getting a copy before it was released and finished reading it. Martin, thank you so much for taking time to be on the podcast.
I’m happy to be here. Thank you, Bob.
Martin, if you would tell us a little bit about your business and who you serve.
I run a software company called Pinsight and we focus on leadership development and leadership assessment. We work with organizations to help them hire better leaders and then to promote better leaders to identify the right high potentials that they should invest in and to develop them and prepare them for executive positions and work with those high potential as we are developing them.
I’m paramilitary so the leadership model was pretty understood and taught and so on. What took you down the path of working on leadership and developing solutions and applications to help?
I have a background in Industrial Organizational Psychology. I have a PhD from Fort Collins from Colorado State University. I started very early on in my career focusing on leadership and leadership assessment and then development. Then I worked as a consultant out of Pittsburgh and London working with global organizations, helping them with their leadership strategy. When the recession hit, I identified an opportunity. I thought, “There’s an opportunity here in the market where you can take all the really good parts of general leadership programs and then streamline them so they become much more cost-effective and scalable globally. That’s how I founded Pinsight.
Let’s make leadership as natural as brushing your teeth.
I think about the folks that are listening and they’re going, “There’s a number of leadership programs with one description or another.” It’s really module-based inside the book where you could go through and try to do some work with big topics and work your way through, what led you basically to the thought process to start chunking it for lack of a better term?
You are absolutely correct. There are so many different models of leadership and there are so many different solutions out in the market. What makes our process different is the realization that your traditional classroom-based leadership development just doesn’t work. This was actually why I decided to write the book. Several years ago, I came across an article in the Journal of Consulting Psychology that shows
