Growing through personal disruption (with Whitney Johnson)

Can we approach self-growth like business growth? 

Can we ‘climb our mountains’ and achieve growth through personal disruption – in the same way that disruptive innovation transforms industries? 

And can we grow so much that we become the ‘keystone species’ for those we manage, feeding their own growth and development?  

JP's latest #PositiveLeadership guest, best-selling author, leading business thinker and former Wall Street analyst @Whitney Johnson, certainly believes so.  

Listen to the full episode to learn all about her seven-step method for achieving this high-growth.  

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Transcript

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JEAN-PHILIPPE JP COURTOIS: Humans are hardwired for growth. Even after achieving success, there's always so much more to learn. Having a growth mindset is key to being a positive leader. It’s something I share with my guest today. He has a belief that growth is actually our default setting. That people don't always know how to grow. So what guides you forward once you have achieve your goals? 

VO: Jean-Philippe JP Courtois is Microsoft Executive Vice President and president and the founder of Live for Good. In the Positive Leadership podcast, he talks to some of the sharpest minds in business and beyond about their approach to leadership. 

JEAN-PHILIPPE JP COURTOIS: Whitney Johnson is a best-selling author of Smart Growth: How to Grow Your People to Grow Your Company. In it, she provides something that's just incredibly useful: a map to grow. 

WHITNEY JOHNSON: So you've got this S-curve of learning and you can visualize it as a mountain. And so when you think about this, you can say, well, where am I on the mountain? Am I at the launch point, am I at the sweet spot, am I in mastery? And you can apply it to a new role, a new project, to your career. 

JEAN-PHILIPPE JP COURTOIS: And the idea came to her back in 2002 when she was working in Wall Street as an equity analyst. American Idol was the most popular show on TV at the time. And during a training session one day, she caught herself spending a lot of time thinking about her colleagues in a very particular way. 

WHITNEY JOHNSON: If you were a contestant on American Idol, what would you be? Would you be a comeback kid? Would you be the diva? What's your brand? Are you a conductor? 

JEAN-PHILIPPE JP COURTOIS: So what we didn't realize was that the tools she was using as part of her job to understand how to manage a stock portfolio could be used to help her understand people and their potential for growth. The key was the S-curve. 

WHITNEY JOHNSON: So the S-curve is something that was popularized by Everett Rogers back in the sixties. It's been around for decades. And he used it to figure out how groups change over time. Initially, this is quick background. Corn, a new type of hybrid corn, was being introduced in Iowa back in the thirties and forties and it had a 20% higher yield. It was drought resistant, it was easier to harvest, and yet people weren't adopting it. It took three years, excuse me, five years for the first 10%. And then over the next three years, it went from 10% to 40%. And so he found that ideas are adopted in the shape of an S. 

JEAN-PHILIPPE JP COURTOIS: Yes. 

WHITNEY JOHNSON: And at our disruptive innovation fund that I co-founded with Clayton Christensen and his son, Matt Christensen, we were using the ask curve to help us figure out how quickly an innovation would be adopted. Well you can now start to see there's a pattern here. I said, “Hmm, I think we can use this S-curve to help us understand not how groups change, but how individuals change. That whenever we start something new, we're on a new S-curve.” 

JEAN-PHILIPPE JP COURTOIS: Yes. 

WHITNEY JOHNSON: And there are three major parts to it. There's the launch point. There's a sweet spot and there's mastery. So you start a new job for example, you're at the launch point of the curve and you're going to be awkward and gangly and uncomfortable. And it's not that growth isn't happening, it's just not yet apparent. And so it feels… 

JEAN-PHILIPPE JP COURTOIS: Uncomfortable, right?

WHITNEY JOHNSON: Uncomfortable. It feels slow. And then you put in the effort and you reach this tipping point, you move into that steep, sleek back of that curve where things are hard but not too hard. They're easy, but they're not yet too easy. You feel tremendously exhilarated. This is the sweet spot where all your neurons are firing. 

JEAN-PHILIPPE JP COURTOIS: You're starting to get some success, right? 

WHITNEY JOHNSON: Absolutely. So this is the place where growth is fast and it feels fast. And then the third part of the curve is mastery. And mastery is this place where you figured it out. But because you're no longer learning you can get bored. 

JEAN-PHILIPPE JP COURTOIS: Can get too comfortable. 

WHITNEY JOHNSON: That's right. Exactly. Uncomfortable, comfortable, and growth now slows. And so you've got this slow at the launch point, fast in the sweet spot, slow in mastery. So slow, fast, slow is how you grow. And so what it does is it gives you a map of the emotional arc of growth, and you can apply it to a new role, a new project, to your career. And so I was so excited because understanding what growth looks like increases our capacity to grow. 

JEAN-PHILIPPE JP COURTOIS: So can you expand a little bit more on that, because that is much richer, I know, than just the three steps of the curve. 

WHITNEY JOHNSON: Yeah. So there's another framework. This is the framework of personal disruption. And many of us are familiar with this idea of disruptive innovation. It's a silly little thing that takes over the world like David to Goliath. The big difference with personal disruption is that you're David and you’re Goliath because you are disrupting you. 

JEAN-PHILIPPE JP COURTOIS: Yes. 

WHITNEY JOHNSON: So personal disruption. Now, if you're thinking about this curve, this mountain, you need to get up that mountain. You need tools in your backpack. This framework of personal disruption, these are the tools that you can put in your backpack that allow you to move along that mountain. And there are seven growth accelerants that I can talk through very quickly at a very high level if you want me to. 

JEAN-PHILIPPE JP COURTOIS: I’d love to, and I will also tell our listeners that you've done a wonderful job of splitting them out one by one on LinkedIn, on the LinkedIn course, which I took as well. 

WHITNEY JOHNSON: It’s a company that you know very well, is it not? 

JEAN-PHILIPPE JP COURTOIS: I think I know well, our LinkedIn friends, and I think they've done a pretty nice job capturing some of those great insights. So why don't you go through those seven stages/steps? 

WHITNEY JOHNSON: So you're thinking about this mountain and oftentimes we think about disruption as I'm changing my job. I want you to think about these right now, these tools in your backpack as micro disruptions, these stepping back from who you are right now to slingshot into who you can be to move up that curve. So tool number one, taking the right risks. It's a willingness to play where you have not played before. The theory of disruption says that when you do that, your odds of success are six times higher. So you’re taking on market risk, you're not taking on competitive risk. You're taking on market risk. We think about it in terms of products. I want you to think about it in terms of you as a person. And one phrase that I think encapsulates this is that amateurs compete and professionals create. So as you think about your career, as you think about moving up a curve, how can you take on market risk? How can you play where no one else is playing so that you increase your odds of success? So that's number one. Take the right risk. Number two, and this goes to positive leadership and positive psychology is play to your distinctive strengths. 

JEAN-PHILIPPE JP COURTOIS: Absolutely. 

WHITNEY JOHNSON: Play to your strengths. What do you do well? What makes you feel strong? Because when you feel strong, you're willing to play where you haven't played. And so there's a flywheel effect of playing to your strengths and taking the right risks. 

JEAN-PHILIPPE JP COURTOIS: And your confidence grows as well. 

WHITNEY JOHNSON: It grows as well. Yeah. Number three, embrace your constraints. So we think, faulty assumption we think if only I had more time, more money, more resources…

JEAN-PHILIPPE JP COURTOIS: To do this and that… 

WHITNEY JOHNSON: Then I would be successful. And yet we know it's the law of physics that without… you need constraints, you need something to bump up against. And so as you're moving up that curve, you want to ask yourself, whatever I don't have enough of, whether it's time or money or buy-in from my boss, buy-in from my stakeholders, how do I turn that constraint into a tool of creation? Because that's what it is. The constraint is a tool of creation. 

JEAN-PHILIPPE JP COURTOIS: Yes. It's a wonderful one, just sorry to interrupt you, because it reminds me as well of some great exchange I had in a podcast with social entrepreneurs. I'm a big practitioner of social entrepreneurship as well, in my home country’s foundation. And so clearly what they do, what they create, actually, is frugal innovation because they start with very little, very little, not just in their financial means in terms of capacity and everything. And yet they are going after a huge social cause and issues. So please keep going,. but I love that because… 

WHITNEY JOHNSON: It’s exciting, isn't it? 

JEAN-PHILIPPE JP COURTOIS: It's super exciting because you can see the passionate people, the way they're going to fulfill not just their dreams, but the ability to change the world as they actually use those constraints as an opportunity to actually achieve a lot more compared to sometimes very large companies that have a lot of money. And where people still whine about, “Oh, we could have more and could do more.” Wow, actually, constraints help a lot. 

WHITNEY JOHNSON: That's right. So number four, this has shifted over time. It's examine expectations. What are your expectations as you're moving along the curve? If you find yourself saying things should be different, you know you're in trouble. 

JEAN-PHILIPPE JP COURTOIS: Yes. 

WHITNEY JOHNSON: Because what you're doing is you are competing with what is rather than creating with what is. And that will stop you every single day of the week from making progress because it makes you a victim. So you want to look at what are your expectations and manage those expectations. And we can talk more about that if you want. But just at a high level…

JEAN-PHILIPPE JP COURTOIS: You got me to think of another fantastic session with a good friend of mine. His name is Mo Gawdat who was someone who worked at Microsoft actually. He was in one of my teams, then he left for Google and then he wrote this book I would say, of course, at a tragic moment in his life when he lost his son and something we shared together a few years back. And he wrote this book, which is Solve for Happiness, where he's talking about the way we need to manage our own expectations. And the way you can do that so that you can create opportunity for the happiness in your life. So that for me resonates tremendously because I think that’s such a critical factor in our lives, not just professional, personal life. In a way, represent the world as we wish as the world we’re going to create ourselves. And what we leave open to us to make it happen.

WHITNEY JOHNSON: Oh, that's beautiful. 

JEAN-PHILIPPE JP COURTOIS: Yeah. 

WHITNEY JOHNSON: Okay. So that was number four. Let's talk about number five. So number five is step back to grow or step back to slingshot forward. And two things on that. So when you think about disruption, so what's happening with disruption? If you've got a Y axis of success and an X axis of time, when you disrupt yourself, what you're doing is you're saying, okay, I'm at a 12 on the Y axis and it's over one, up one. And I'm going to go down to a ten because I believe that over time it will be over one, up three or over one up five when it comes to my overall sense of well-being. And so oftentimes when people leave a job and you say, why did you leave that job? You're making so much money. And it's so… like when I left Wall Street, it's usually because a functional job is being done, but the emotional job isn't… 

JEAN-PHILIPPE JP COURTOIS: Is not there anymore. Yeah.

WHITNEY JOHNSON: So you step back because you believe over time the ROI will be higher. So that's the mechanics of what disruption is. Now I want to add one other thing, because you're talking to a lot of technologists. There's a wonderful quote here from Tiffany Schlein. She wrote a book called 24/6. And right now, especially as we're coming out of the pandemic, people are not doing a very good job, at least as we're seeing in our research of resting and recharging. And so she makes this bold statement, which is what if we thought of rest as technology? Because what is the promise of technology? You've just said, tell me what the mission statement of Microsoft is. Say it just out loud. 

JEAN-PHILIPPE JP COURTOIS: Yeah. Empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. 

WHITNEY JOHNSON: Okay. 

JEAN-PHILIPPE JP COURTOIS: Yes. 

WHITNEY JOHNSON: And the promise of technology is to achieve more. And we know from the research that when we rest, we become more productive. So you step back to slingshot forward. 

JEAN-PHILIPPE JP COURTOIS: You're preaching someone very convinced because for the last 12 months of my life, I've been actually improving a lot better my sleep, which I mistreated for like decades in my professional life. And it gave me so much energy, not just in the morning when I wake up, actually all along the day and the quality of the engagement I have with everyone is so different. 

WHITNEY JOHNSON: So six is to give failure its due. And this is one where this idea of that failure is actually a constraint and therefore a tool of creation. Where we get hung up on failure is that we make it a referendum on us. And so this has been something that I've really been thinking about and working through over the past couple of years. I'm an oldest child. I'm a recovering perfectionist. But if we're really going to iterate quickly and have a growth mindset and move through that curve, iterating means that we have to look at failure as a tool of creation. And if you can't do that yet, hey, everybody who's listening, time to do some inner work. It’s absolutely a priority. All right, number seven is to be driven by discovery. And so this is the notion that when you are playing where no one else is playing, so this goes back to the first accelerant, you, by definition, are discovery driven. What's exciting about this is that when you look at the research for products, 70% of all successful new businesses end up with a different strategy than the one they started with. 

JEAN-PHILIPPE JP COURTOIS: Absolutely. 

WHITNEY JOHNSON: And the same is true with our lives. So that's number seven. So those are the seven, the take the right risks, play to your distinctive strengths, embrace your constraints, examine your expectations, step back to grow, give failure its due or leverage failure. And at the top of the curve, the bottom of the curve and everywhere in between, be driven by discovery. Those are the tools that you want to put in your backpack, those micro disruptions that allow you to move along the curve. 

JEAN-PHILIPPE JP COURTOIS: Wonderful. I love it. And please to our listeners again, check it out on LinkedIn, because I think you've done a wonderful job being extremely precise on the way you equip all of us with our backpacks to go up in the mountains. So as you get started and you kept growing, you said I think that you need to understand your superpower and the ecosystem to flourish. Those are the words I picked up. So can you help us understand, how do you identify your superpowers and where can we find the ecosystem to flourish? What does it mean?

WHITNEY JOHNSON: Two questions that I think are really useful in this regard are to ask yourself what exasperates you. So... said that the frustration of genius is believing that if it's easy for you, it's easy for everybody else. And so when you find yourself saying, oh, everybody knows how to do that, or, this is just common sense. 

JEAN-PHILIPPE JP COURTOIS: Yes. 

WHITNEY JOHNSON: Those are signals of your superpowers. Now it means you still need to figure out a way to be patient with people, but it's giving you information about what actually… no,  everybody isn't good at that. So that's one clue that you have. Another one is to really focus on what compliments do you receive? And you probably dismiss them really quickly. But what are those compliments? Because when I give you a compliment, I am holding up a mirror to you and I'm saying this is what you do well. Now, what I find fascinating about strengths is that we think that we know what they are, but we're actually blind to them in the same way that we're often blind to our weaknesses. And the reason is, is that they're so reflexive. They're so much a part of who we are. 

JEAN-PHILIPPE JP COURTOIS: Yeah. 

WHITNEY JOHNSON: We literally cannot see them. And even if we can see them because they're so easy for us, we don't value them. Why are you asking me to do that? If you valued me, you'd give me something really hard to do. So that's the strengths. Now, let me tell you a story that will then illustrate the question about the ecosystem that you asked. So National Football League here in the United States, about ten years ago, a woman by the name of Michelle McKenna became their new chief information officer. And at the time that she joined, she looked at all of her talent and she said, “I've got some really great people. They're not all slotted to their strengths.” And one person in particular, his name was John Cave. He was the VP of technology. He was really great at building things, but did not have time to build things because he was doing things like payroll systems and things that people need to do. So she goes to him and says, “John, I want to reduce your scope of responsibility because I want you to start building things.” And you would think he'd say, great. He didn't, because she was reducing the scope of his responsibilities. And he thought, “Oh, she doesn't value me.” She said, “No, you could advance the game of football through technology. Trust me, you're going to be a great innovator.” And he has been. And more to the point, when the virtual draft came around two years ago, remember that thing called the pandemic, and they had to do the draft in six weeks and figure out what they were going to do? Because he had been training and developing that muscle of advancing the game of football…

JEAN-PHILIPPE JP COURTOIS: The organization was ready. 

WHITNEY JOHNSON: He was ready. They could do it. And when she said, “Could we do this?” He said, “Yeah, Michelle, we can do it.” 

JEAN-PHILIPPE JP COURTOIS: Yeah. 

WHITNEY JOHNSON: So. What happened here? He had a strength. He didn't value it. It was reflexive. So this goes to the ecosystem question. What do you do? So we're going up the mountain, you got the tools on your backpack. Now we're talking about the weather patterns. 

JEAN-PHILIPPE JP COURTOIS: Yes. 

WHITNEY JOHNSON: You as a manager are creating the weather patterns. What did she do? She said you have this strength. I see it. I value it. 

JEAN-PHILIPPE JP COURTOIS: Yeah. 

WHITNEY JOHNSON: I'm going to put you in a situation that feels uncomfortable. You need to trust me. And so she created an environment where he could do his best work and made sure he knew that it was valuable. So that's the ecosystem. You as a manager create that ecosystem. And I think it's so important because as we're thinking about our growth and development, we think, is there an ecosystem around me? Are people helping me grow? Who's my keystone species? The person without whom I couldn't survive. And for me, it's my manager. But we forget that as a manager you are the keystone species to your people. You're the sunlight, you're the food, you're all of that. And so that's how you create that ecosystem. But Michelle McKenna, I think, is a great example of identifying the strength and then giving him that opportunity to develop that strength, even though initially he wasn't quite so sure that she was giving him that gift.

JEAN-PHILIPPE JP COURTOIS: One of the key ideas in your book, Smart Growth, is that you need to grow yourself before you can grow others. So how important is it to do things in that order or sequentially? You and then others?

WHITNEY JOHNSON: Do you have a table I can pound? 

JEAN-PHILIPPE JP COURTOIS: Yeah.

WHITNEY JOHNSON: It’s very important. Okay. Let me tell you, there was a study that was recently put out by Egon Zehnder. And they surveyed a thousand CEOs. And the CEOs, they asked them, do you strongly agree that to transform the organization, you need to transform yourself? And 80% strongly agreed, 100% agreed. But here's the gob smacker. Two years ago, that number was only 26%. 

JEAN-PHILIPPE JP COURTOIS: Really? 

WHITNEY JOHNSON: That number has tripled. 

JEAN-PHILIPPE JP COURTOIS: Has tripled? 

WHITNEY JOHNSON: It has tripled. So, now, I think that data point is so powerful is this idea of if you want to grow your organization, if you want to grow your people, it starts with you. It’s the only thing you have control over. Oftentimes the growth that you want to see and other people, I talked about this idea of a keystone species a minute ago. There's something that you're doing that's inhibiting the growth of the people around you. 

JEAN-PHILIPPE JP COURTOIS: Oh yes. 

WHITNEY JOHNSON: And so if you're willing to change, not only are you modeling it, not only is there moral authority, but your change more than likely is going to make it possible so that the people can do the growing that they want and need to do as well. 

JEAN-PHILIPPE JP COURTOIS: Yes. This is so well said Whitney. But let's shift gears and talk about disrupting an entire organization. A lot of people, some small team, some very large teams. You know, in the business world, we tend to use a lot of the word... and I’m guilty of that as well.... Transformation, transformation, we transform all the time. A few years back as starting myself transforming the Microsoft salesforce, almost eight, nine years ago, the very beginning. It was starting that coaching of my leaders and salespeople across the world. I use the book, which I loved a lot. This is a book that is called Switch by Chip and Dan Health. I don’t if you read this book. It's a very interesting book. 

In his book, the authors use the powerful metaphor of the elephant and the rider. So think about the elephant as the emotional side of our brain and the rider as its rational side. And changes often fail because the rider simply cannot keep the elephant on the road long enough to reach the destination. And if you want to change things, you've got actually to appeal to both the rider and to the elephant, both of them. And the former provides the planning and direction, and the latter provides the energy to get going or maybe to climb the mountain. Who knows? And so Whitney, the basic three-part framework of the book to change behavior is the following: You need to start directing the rider by providing crystal clear direction. Then you need to motivate the elephants, meaning engaging people on their emotions. And finally, you got to shape the path by tweaking the environment to remove friction and building some lasting habits. 

So I've loved that metaphor. I've used it. I even offered to my team some small elephants and riders. And using it as we are implementing some pretty massive changes to talk about both elements of the people equation all the time, the rational, the achievements, the accountability is of course to business and applied, and guess yes, the emotion of the uncontrollable of all the changes. So what is your own perspective and what should be what would be your own coaching for many listeners who have to undertake a major transformation of their organization or reinvent the business, or can they can use, of course, the model you’ve been building, right? At the enterprise level. So not at a personal level, not a team and enterprise level. Who can help them create positive transformation? Because transformation can be positive, too. 

WHITNEY JOHNSON: Yes, it absolutely can. The fundamental unit of growth in any organization is the individual. So I'm going to put this at two different levels. We talked a minute ago about managing and examine your expectations. And if you think about moving along and S-curve, it's basically a dopamine management exercise. 

So we're going to start with individual and then we'll talk about the organization. So if you say to an individual, every single person on your team, we're about to do this really big thing. And I want you to understand that doing this really big thing, there are going to be so many days when you're going to feel really awkward and really uncomfortable because what's going on is your brain is running a predictive model and it's saying, I'm at the launch point, here's what I need to do to get into mastery. But at the launch point, it's running a lot of predictions, most of which are inaccurate. And so your dopamine drops. 

JEAN-PHILIPPE JP COURTOIS: Yes. 

WHITNEY JOHNSON: You also are trying to map this new territory and you feel like it's cognitively very taxing, so you’re exhausted. And your identity, who are you if you're not who you were? So that's the launch point. And so your dopamine is dropping and you've got to figure out ways to manage your dopamine at the launch point. And you do that by setting really small goals and also by knowing this is exactly how you're going to feel here. You're normalizing that experience. Like you were saying earlier you talk to your team, I'm doing these new things and you normalized it. Then you're going to say, eventually we're going to get into the sweet spot. And what's going to happen here is we're going to have lots of emotional upside surprises because that dopamine, now we're getting this delight. And so it's wiring our brain, it's telling us this is what's working and this is going to feel so good to us. And then we're going to finish the project. And we will have figured it out. It will be done. We will no longer be getting very much dopamine. We'll get bored. And so we need to do another transformation.

JEAN-PHILIPPE JP COURTOIS: When we get to the mastery. 

WHITNEY JOHNSON: That's right. So here's what I want you to know as we go through this process. You as an individual, this is what you were going to experiment. 

JEAN-PHILIPPE JP COURTOIS: Yes. 

WHITNEY JOHNSON: Then what you can do for the overall organization is you can say this project has a launch point. This project has a sweet spot. This project has a mastery. But I want you to understand, it's going to feel like it's taking so long to get started, it’s super messy, but the emotional journey that you are going to have and we are going to have, this is what's happening. And going back to the metaphor of the elephant and the rider, the elephant is going to say to you, stop, stop, stop, stop, don't do this. What are you doing to me? And I'm telling you use your rational brain, use this S-curve. It's a simple visual that is going to allow you to say to the elephant, it's okay. 

You're going to be okay. We're going to make it up the mountain. 

JEAN-PHILIPPE JP COURTOIS: I love it. I think you also said something very important, Whitney, which I can relate to. In those early moments, again, the launching pad, as you go and make the change smaller, which I believe a lot about. Make small chunks of change one at a time. As you do that, you also, I think, need to take the time to celebrate, and to celebrate those early wins and even small success, early signals of something that is promising that we want to see on the mountain with everyone. Actually in the book, they talk about riling the herd of all the elephants. I had the time to think about that. Large elephant herd in terms of a larger organization of the people getting there. So I think you said actually in one of your interviews and books, we don't just celebrate the win. We celebrate to win. 

WHITNEY JOHNSON: That's right. So BJ Fogg, the social scientist at Stanford, talked about how emotions create habits. And so if you're thinking again about wanting to move up your S-curve at the launch point, we talked about dopamine is dropping a lot. But there are two things you can do. Number one, you can set small, ridiculously small goals in the words of James Clear. So, for example, I'm not going to run 30 minutes today, I'm going to put on my tennis shoes every day for a week. Guess what? Dopamine. Yay. And I started. 

JEAN-PHILIPPE JP COURTOIS: Yes. 

WHITNEY JOHNSON: And so you celebrate that you started. Then when you get into the sweet spot, you celebrate I'm doing it. And what you want to do there is you want to focus your brain on everything that's going right because our brain has this filter, and the more we focus on what's going right, the more we get of what's going right. So you celebrate that. And then in mastery you want to celebrate, yes, you need to keep climbing, yes, you've got that growth mindset. But you want to honor the fact that you reached the top of the mountain. You did it. And when you anchor it, then it becomes a part of who you are. So you're celebrating because you started. You're celebrating because you're doing it. You celebrate it because you finished it. And when you're celebrating that dopamine, that delight, it becomes who you are. And so you're able to move through that growth cycle more quickly. 

JEAN-PHILIPPE JP COURTOIS: Super clear, Whitney. Thanks so much because I believe so much, again, those early moments of success and the way you nurture them actually to keep going. I know you've been learning a lot and you’ve be inspired so much by Clayton Christensen, Whitney, you mentioned him already. I had the opportunity to attend one of these talks many years back at Microsoft where he was reflecting on his own life strategy, commenting actually his great book: How will you measure your life? I'd like to share with you, I know you know it well, but for our listeners, actually wonderful paragraphs that says it all. When I have my interview with God, all conversation will focus on the individuals whose self-esteem I was able to strengthen, whose face I was able to reinforce. There was discomfort I was able to assuage, a doer of good, regardless of what assignment I had. These are the metrics that matter in measuring my life. 

WHITNEY JOHNSON: Makes me cry. 

JEAN-PHILIPPE JP COURTOIS: Yeah, it's an incredible quote. It's an incredible quote. I mean, so powerful when all of us have to reflect in our lives, at different stages of our life. So let me ask you the question, Whitney, as we get to a close unfortunately, how do you measure your life? 

WHITNEY JOHNSON: Yeah, so I think there are definitely some similarities is that I asked myself, am I good with God? Absolutely. It’s the first question I ask. And then I think about what my purpose is. And I really want for every single person, and now I'm still emotional, every person that I interact with that they have a greater sense of who they are and of their possibility and who they can be. And when I feel that I am doing that, whether it's someone I barely have met or people that I work with and especially with my family, and that is where it is the hardest. Then I will feel that I have succeeded in my life. 

JEAN-PHILIPPE JP COURTOIS: Well, we cannot think about a better closing Whitney. And really reflecting what you just said, and certainly myself believe we don't invest necessarily in the most personal things with our family, but whether we invest in our jobs sometimes, we realize that while we got to get the balance right. Because family day-to-day investment don't pay off in the short term, but they do in the long range. Those moments of love with family, friends or people who matter the most in our lives that makes such a huge difference. Thank you so much. From the bottom of my heart, Whitney, for this great moment we share together. 

WHITNEY JOHNSON: Thank you for having me. 

JEAN-PHILIPPE JP COURTOIS: After 38 years of Microsoft, I've got so much respect for leaders who use the opportunity of being in a management position to grow. Not only the best version of themselves, which is important, but to help others to flourish so they can be confident to achieve much more. The fact is, people want to do meaningful work. We all want to grow. And the S-curve of learning is a way to help people just to do that. It is simple, it is visual, and because of that, it is incredibly useful. By using this model to have that very simple conversation about what growth looks like, you can help people grow. And that's a pretty amazing thing to do. 

NARRATOR: To hear more inspiring conversations with innovative global leaders. Subscribe now wherever you get your podcasts, to the Positive Leadership Podcast with Jean-Philippe Courtois. 

JEAN-PHILIPPE JP COURTOIS: Goodbye.