Positivity and Purpose From MIT to the Boardroom

Jon Clifton:
[0:08] Today, I'm with Carlyle's Chief Transformation Officer, a 30-year vet from Booz Allen and one of the former chairs of the Performing Arts Center, and what I believe is the greatest consultant of all time.

Reggie, it's great to have you here today.

Reggie Van Lee:
[0:25] Thank you. It's very kind of you.

Jon Clifton:
[0:26] What was your first reaction when you discovered your top five CliftonStrengths?

Reggie Van Lee:
[0:31] It's one of those obvious things that weren't obvious until you looked at them on paper. You know, it's almost like in writing my memoirs, like these things about me that have always been a part of me. But I didn't take the time to think about them in that sort of way. So it was refreshing. It was reinforcing and confirming. And just I kind of rediscovered myself through CliftonStrengths.

Jon Clifton:
[0:54] Reggie, now of your top five strengths, which one would you say it is that helped you be successful throughout your career?

Reggie Van Lee:
[1:01] I think the first one, Positivity. What I learned is, well, there's an old adage that it takes fewer muscles to smile than to frown. But I learned that people want to be engaged in a positive way. And even the most difficult clients are human beings at the end of the day, and don't really want to be angry, don't really want to be mean or difficult, want to be engaged. And when you are positive with them, it's infectious, it's contagious. And they find their way from their position to something that's more positive themselves. And then you can work together.

Jon Clifton:
[1:30] Now, again, you mentioned how much you identify with Positivity. If someone just completed CliftonStrengths and they found that they also have Positivity in their top five, what advice would you have for them?

Reggie Van Lee:
[1:42] Recognize that not everybody is going to be positive initially. Recognize that you have to get through sometimes these shields and these veils to get to their positivity. But the intellectually curious person in me wants to do that. And every time I've done it and done it successfully, like the client that hated me and ended up being still friends, you see the benefit of it. So don't be deterred by the first reaction that people will have to your Positivity. Keep pushing it, because at the end of the day, it prevails.

Jon Clifton:
[2:11] Can you talk more about how people brought out your strengths at a young age? A guy from Texas that ended up going to MIT. Who was the individual that really helped bring out your strengths, and how did they do it?

Reggie Van Lee:
[2:23] My parents. I mean, it sounds sort of trite, but my parents were amazing people. I loved the story of the way that I went to MIT was, well, first, I worshipped my parents, and anything they said, I felt I should do. So early on, my mother, when I said I wanted to be an artist at the age of 4, she said, well, artists starve. You need to have some money, so you should be an architect. So at the age of 5, I decided I was going to be an architect. And when I got to the eighth grade, my mother said, well, you know, architects are good, but engineering is a thing now, so you should be an architectural engineer. So I said, OK, I'll be an architectural engineer. I was watching Star Trek one night, and I just love Star Trek. I'm a real Trekkie, and I thought Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock were gods. And so this guy comes on the USS Enterprise who went to MIT. They made this big deal about MIT, bowing and scraping to this guy from MIT. And I'm thinking, who is this guy that my deities, my heroes are bowing to? So I said to my mother, what is MIT? And she says, I don't know, but we'll figure it out. Now, this is before internet. You couldn't Google it or anything like that. And two days later, she came back and said, it's the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston. It's an engineering school. And I said, well, I think I want to go to MIT. And she said, you're going to MIT. That's what I had. I didn't have this, oh, watch television. Oh, you don't know what that is. Oh, you know, I had these parents are really engaged in if this is what you want to do, we're going to do what we can to help you do that.

And then the last part of the story is when the MIT recruiter came to Houston, they didn't come to my high school, and they came to another high school. My mother discovered they were there, and my mother and father and I walked into that school. When all the other people who went to school there were there with the recruiter, my mother walked up to the recruiter and said, I want you to meet my son. He wants to go to MIT. That's the sort of encouragement that I had always. And in my charity work and my not-for-profit work, I'm trying to provide an opportunity to others, kids and adults, that they don't have that I had. I mean, I grew up in a house with two parents, very positive people, emphasis on education, made sure my sisters and I all went to the colleges we wanted to go to, didn't have to take out student loans. I don't know what they did but they found the money to get us through school. And so this notion of who really helped me most really first and foremost are my parents. And then I've had a number of mentors and advocates since that time as well.

Jon Clifton:
[4:45] You know one of the great elements of people with Positivity is that they have a great deal of resilience. And you had a time when you were exploring this idea about going to MIT and there was actually somebody, a leader in your life, who said, that's probably not the right option for you. Yet you still found a way to make it happen. Can you talk a little bit more about that story and how you overcame that moment?

Reggie Van Lee:
[5:07] And it was amazing. When I tell this story, it's just really saddening and people sort of get sort of annoyed by it. But when I was applying to college, I applied to all the Ivy schools, MIT, Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Stanford, all those schools. And I was blessed enough to get into all the schools. And word was going around the school that, you know, Reginald had gotten to these schools and gotten scholarships to these schools, et cetera. So my senior counselor, the college counselor, called me out of class to come to her office, I assumed, to congratulate me on getting into all these schools. She proceeded to tell me, you may be important for this little school here in Houston, but I'd hate for you to go to Boston and embarrass yourself and waste your parents' money. Why don't you stay here and go to somewhere you can be more competitive, a local school, right? And because I was polite and knew how to treat adults, I thanked her. But from that very moment I said, I'm not listening to her. I have all these other people around me, my parents, my friends, kids in the school saying, oh my God you're going to MIT. This is fantastic right?

And what I found is that there will always be haters in the world. You can't avoid them. They're there. I use the haters to my advantage. So when I graduated from MIT four years later, she was still in my high school. I went back to the high school with my diploma, showed her the diploma, and she was apologizing for not being more encouraging. I said, no, you have no idea how much you encouraged me because when I didn't want to stay up late and burn the midnight oil, I could hear your voice in my head, and that inspired me to keep going. So what I do is I use the haters to inspire me. What haters don't want me to do, I must do. And sometimes that's more motivation than me wanting to do it. I want to do it because you said I couldn't do it.

Jon Clifton:
[6:41] Now, a lot of times great leaders have had to overcome big obstacles throughout their life. Is there an obstacle in your life that you had to overcome where you were able to use one of your strengths to overcome it?

Reggie Van Lee:
[6:53] There have probably been a couple of them. A couple of times at Booz Allen with a difficult client situation. A couple of times in my life with an investment that I made in a business or organization. And each time, as I found myself sort of being subsumed in the self-pity and the unhappiness, I said no I've got to pull myself out of this. And very few of those are fatal situations. And I remind myself that unless you're dead, you still have an opportunity. And as you go through a number of these failures and you survive them, the next time you meet another failure you said OK I've gotten through the others I can probably get through this one as well. So I put those things in context. I'm always putting life in context.

Jon Clifton:
[7:36] Now, you have Woo as number five. How does your Woo manifest itself in your leadership?

Reggie Van Lee:
[7:42] One, I feed off of people and conversations and emotion and that sort of thing. I really like that, especially if I feel like I can be helpful in the situation. So I need people around me. I'm not a loner. I'm accused oftentimes of being invited to dinner and then arriving with 12 people and creating a circus around it. But I just like people. I really do like people, like all sorts of people. Even those people that are the most difficult ones, I seem to find a way to attach myself to them and them to me. So people that others don't like the most seem to like me the most. I think that's just the Woo.

Jon Clifton:
[8:16] Do you ever have a moment in your life where you felt like there was somebody that was virtually impossible for you to win over? And if so, what was that interaction?

Reggie Van Lee:
[8:27] Probably one of my clients. I had a client once that really had a problem with me coming in as a young person trying to tell him about his business over the many years and the experience he had and who did I think I was and blah, blah, blah. So much so that I had an interaction with him, left his office in Boston, went back to my office in New York. By the time I arrived there the next day, the senior partner called me into his office, said the client had called and wanted to remove me from the engagement because I didn't know what I was talking about. The senior partner proceeded to grill me for about 30 minutes, came to the conclusion I did know what I was talking about, told me I have good news and bad news. The good news is you know what you're talking about, the bad news I'm sending you back to that client. And what I did in being forced in getting through and working through the situation with the client, I discovered his issue was he was from Boston. He did not go to MIT. He did not go to Harvard Business School. He wished he could have. He didn't understand how I could do that and he couldn't. And as we got through that, we became friends, actually. So I won him over, and he's actually a good guy. He just was acting out of his insecurities, and we had to get to that point.

Jon Clifton:
[9:33] A lot of times, people with Woo have huge networks. They have a list of friends that extends beyond the average network of most individuals. How big would you say your network of friends is?

Reggie Van Lee:
[9:45] Well, I send 3,000 Christmas cards every year, so that gives you a sense. I used to sign them all, now I don't quite sign them all. And that's just a subset of the total people. There are probably 10,000 people in my contact list because I never leave anybody. I'd say my relationships may change, but they never end. So I stay connected to people as best I can. But my annual Christmas card, which is special for people because they're Cartier cards and people keep them. And I have to make sure I don't recycle the same ones too much. But I keep in touch with people. And if I see something like today, this morning, I saw something in the news about someone and I sent a note to the person saying, bravo for you. I mean, it took two seconds of my life. But keeping that connection is really important.

Jon Clifton:
[10:28] But according to research, the average human being can really only keep a network of about 150 people but you've done it with 3,000. How?

Reggie Van Lee:
[10:37] Because I invest in time with people. But people think it's being selfless of me but it's actually selfish. I need that. I feed off of those interactions with people. This is how I learn. This is how our pursuit goes in life. This is how I enjoy life because it's about those experiences with people more than anything else. So for me I have to do more than 150 because that's what I need to feed me.

Jon Clifton:
[10:59] You've had an insane amount of courage throughout your entire life. Of your top five strengths, which strength is it where you really get a lot of your courage?

Reggie Van Lee:
[11:09] Probably Woo. Probably Woo. I really love interacting with people. And sometimes people aren't interested in interacting with you. It's obvious by the body language, and because I am so drawn to that problem-solving it and trying to figure out how can I make that connection to the person, it gets me beyond some of the sort of issues that allows me to be successful in a way I never would have suspected.

Jon Clifton:
[11:34] And would you say the same is true about your confidence?

Reggie Van Lee:
[11:37] I think so. I think so. I think it's the Woo again. And I've learned that at the end of the day, we're all human beings. And all humans want to be treated a certain way and want to feel listened to, want to feel engaged in some sort of way. And so being an active listener, and I'm listening because I'm trying to figure out what's going on and how am I going to win this person over. And people receive that in a big way when they know you're listening to them.

Jon Clifton:
[12:02] When we did a massive study on the needs of followers, we found that hope was one of the single biggest needs of followers. What strengths do you use in order to create hope in times when they feel like there is no hope in front of groups?

Reggie Van Lee:
[12:19] Well, probably the Woo. I mean, just for people to feel as though they're being listened to, for people to feel as though what they're saying is important, that someone's taking the time. And I get this all the time. Just the other day someone called me and said, you know, you're so senior and you're so important and all this sort of stuff. And for you to take this time to talk to me, even if it's 15 minutes, means so much to me and encourages me that I am worth time being spent on. And I was like, wow. So people have this sense of worthlessness or mediocrity or they're not important. And when you give them that attention in that way, in a genuine way, it makes a big difference.

Jon Clifton:
[13:01] Now, you also mentioned, with respect to competence, burning the midnight oil. Of course, Achiever is one of your top five strengths. And Achievers are those individuals who regularly burn the midnight oil. Can you talk more about how that strength manifests itself with you?

Reggie Van Lee:
[13:17] There's so much to know in the world, right? And nobody knows everything, and the world changes and things change and situations are different in different environments. The exact same problem in one organization can manifest itself very differently in another. So if you don't take the time to really understand what's going on there and if you don't use the sciences around you and the history that's been happening around you and the facts that you can bring to the table and those insights, then you miss on the opportunity to really understand what the issues are and get involved in that sort of way. So I really love those knotty problems. I really love untangling things. I won the Houston Science Fair on two different years, first as an eighth grader and then as a, first as a seventh grader and then as a ninth grader. And in both cases, they were, one was the Rubik's Cube. I figured out mathematically how to solve the Rubik's Cube. And the other was another math sort of thing.

Jon Clifton:
[14:12] And how old were you at that time?

Reggie Van Lee:
[14:14] Well, in seventh grade, I was 13. And in ninth grade, I was, I guess, 15.

Jon Clifton:
[14:19] OK, and when you say that you mathematically solved that and you said it was your Achiever that drove that, talk more about that.

Reggie Van Lee:
[14:25] Well, I mean, the fact that I'm not going to let this problem be unsolved and many people said, this is a waste of time. How are you going to do this? It doesn't make sense. And even how do you communicate this solution to someone? And this is before we had supercomputers or anything. A lot of this was done completely by hand with maybe a calculator or something. And so that's the Achiever in me, to push hard to solve those problems in that way. Problems that no one else could solve before. And that's important. I don't want to re-solve a problem that's been solved. I want to go down a new path and find a new way, not to just do it harder than someone else, but to do it better and different than someone else.

Jon Clifton:
[15:03] Now, a lot of time Achievers pride themselves on just how much they work. How much do you work in any given week, and what does that look like?

Reggie Van Lee:
[15:12] I think I've learned how to be more efficient in my work, but I also could argue that I'm almost always working. I'm always thinking about things, and I'm pretty good at structuring a problem in my mind, going to sleep, and waking up with the answer. So in my sleep I think I'm even problem-solving. It's amazing. I wake up in my teens and say, I got an email at 4 in the morning. I wake up at 4 in the morning and the answer's in my head. I'll write it down, send them email, and then go back to sleep. So I'm a little bizarre like that.

Jon Clifton:
[15:40] Have you ever been accused of being a workaholic?

Reggie Van Lee:
[15:42] Oh yeah, but then people would say if you do work hard, you play hard too. So it's pretty obvious that I have a good time as well. Work hard, play hard, people can accept, but only work hard. And I don't require others to work as hard. Sometimes I will write an email and not send it because I don't want them to see me up at 5 and 4 in the morning, so they won't feel as though they have to do that as well. But I do get a number of people that feel as though they have to step up to my standard. And my standard isn't time, my standard is quality. We had an old saying in Booz Allen, we don't pay you on level of effort, we pay you on results. So if you work really hard and work really long and don't deliver results, and if you can get done in five minutes and it's good, good for you.

Jon Clifton:
[16:26] Activator is, of course, the one theme we haven't talked about yet. Activators often encourage others to act. How have you used that throughout your consulting career?

Reggie Van Lee:
[16:37] Well, once again, selflessly. The only way you scale is if you teach others to do things and they do it as well. You can't do everything yourself. And I don't find that interesting. I like to move on to another problem anyway. So the notion of getting people engaged, helping them understand how they can solve the problem, training them, doing an intellectual transfer from you to them, giving them the opportunity to blossom and spread. This mentoring thing for me is so important, and I've been blessed enough to be old enough now to see people who I mentored 20, 30 years ago that are doing amazing things. I just did a book signing for a friend of mine in D.C. last week who worked for me in Booz Allen directly out of Harvard College, then went on, after she worked with me for two years, back to Harvard Business School, went to investment banking, became a vice chairman at a big investment bank. Amazing career. And she credits her success to some extent from my having worked with her. And so just the feeling you get from that to know that you did something that went way beyond you and scaled in a way that you wouldn't have thought is really important to me.

Jon Clifton:
[17:40] People with Activator are very quick to give advice, but you have the right kind of patience and thoughtfulness to know exactly when the right time is to give that kind of advice. How do you do that?

Reggie Van Lee:
[17:53] Well, some of it is that the advice has to be the right advice. And you may explain a situation to me, and I may have seen that three other times with a different person. So with you, it manifests itself somewhat different. So I need to understand a little bit more, do a little bit more thinking, test some things, because in my intellectual curiosity, I don't want to run to an answer. I want to make sure I got the core problem, not the symptom of the problem. And that's when it's important that the Activators take the time to think through what the real answer is. The other thing is, it's important that people hear you. It's not sufficient that you speak. People have to hear you. And so sometimes the timing has to be right. The intonation has to be right. The approach to it, that you get to it, has to be right. And it's funny because the advice I give people on when you say yes to things or when you make a statement or offer a point of view is, did you understand the implications of the question? Did you understand the impact that could have on the other person? And you have to think through those before you are so quick to speak.

Jon Clifton:
[18:51] So your Achiever is inspired to solve the world's hardest problems. In your more than three decades of consulting, what's the hardest problem that you ever worked on, and how did you use your strengths to overcome it?

Reggie Van Lee:
[19:04] Oh my God, the hardest problem I ever worked on probably was not in a business context. It probably was one of my not-for-profit sort of things. We did some work with Bill Clinton up in Harlem when he had moved there after he was president, and it was called the Harlem Small Business Initiative. And it was trying to bring competitiveness to businesses, small businesses in Harlem that were about to be made obsolete by downtown businesses moving into Harlem and taking over franchises, etc. And so you have the problem of the economic problem, you have the cultural problem of people in small businesses that didn't have the sort of business acumen that you know a Booz Allen consultant had, you had the politics of the local political people there, you had the homeowners. It was all sorts of issues going on at one time. So it was a multivariate problem that had to be solved. Some of the stuff were hard, quantitative things. Some were very soft, qualitative things. And so I think I called upon all of my strengths in various ways. Input, Woo, Achiever, Positivity at different points in the solution to the problem. And what we created was an ability for those small businesses to survive. And many would tell you now they're there now some 30 years later because of that work and that it's expanded beyond Harlem into other urban areas as well. So that was a hard problem with an amazing feeling of success once we got through it.

Jon Clifton:
[20:25] Now, when it comes to community, one of your four Cs, you not only know how to build community within your personal life, but you know how to build community in a professional life. There's even stories about one time at Booz when you had a fashion show, if I remember correctly. Can you talk more about the importance of building community at work, but also what strengths did you use in order to build those communities?

Reggie Van Lee:
[20:48] Well, in a business, if you want your business to scale and you want it to scale in the right sort of way, you can't be everywhere. You have to have agents out there that are thinking about the business the way you are, thinking the sort of cultural values and core values that you'd have, thinking the skills necessary to prosecute the business in the right sort of way. So the notion of building that community, you're building a bunch of little yous out there. And it sounds selfish, perhaps, but that's what you need to do. And so the fashion show thing is when I was running Booz Allen's New York office, it was at the time when the notion of casual Fridays, business casual Fridays, were new. And of course we said OK people can come casual on Friday, and people came in all sorts of inappropriate things. And so I was asked as the managing part of the office to come up with a dress code for the office.

So first I put a community together of representatives and different levels of the firm and different functions in the firm. And then I decided the best way to launch it was to do a fashion show. And everyone in the audience had a card that says yes or no and when they came out you could decide whether, yes, this is appropriate for casual Friday or not. And some people had beautiful clothes, but they were things you'd wear to a disco. It wasn't a thing you'd wear into an office, or you'd wear golfing or something. And then to make it interesting, I had two surprise models. I had Naomi Campbell to be one of ... she was a big model in that day, and another male model as well. So I mixed the fun in there but the lessons that people learned was OK, it's OK to figure out how to dress in the office. It's not them imposing upon us something mean and hateful. This is a fun thing as well as a good thing and the right thing. But I engaged the community both in creating the dress code, and then the way that I launched it wasn't just sending around a memo saying, this is how you must dress. I engage people.

Jon Clifton:
[22:34] Can you talk about now with the work that you're doing at Carlyle and the culture that you're trying to create, especially in this environment where people are working remotely, where they're working in a hybrid situation, what does that look like?

Reggie Van Lee:
[22:48] Well, once again, we discovered that first, our productivity has remained very high. And I think it's because we've made a real effort to determine when you can and should work remotely and when you can and how should you work in the office collaborative with others. And we took the time to figure out what are the teams that you collaborate with and are they going to be in the office the days you are? And we really tried to organize that sort of team approach and collaboration and innovation approach in the right sort of way. And people like it. People really enjoy the freedom of I don't have to be in the office five days a week. Everybody wants to be in the office. But nobody wants to be in the office five days a week with very few exceptions. And so they kind of got their cake and ate it too. The notion of flexibility, I can run and do this with my kids, or I can, you know, take a call from over to the side when I'm at my kids' baseball game because it's all virtual. And when I need to be in the office with others, with the people I need to work with, I can do that as well. So it's really been good for us. People have really enjoyed it.

Jon Clifton:
[23:44] When it comes to human-to-human interaction, there are two things societally that are pulling us apart from human-to-human interaction. One is technology and the other one is this idea of remote work. What should leaders do now in order to ensure that human-to-human interaction remains and is strengthened?

Reggie Van Lee:
[24:02] Well, on the second part of remote work, it is fine to work remotely when the work you're doing doesn't require interactions with people and no collaboration or no deep thinking and problem-solving. And so for me at our firm in particular, our rule is three days a week in the office working with others. But those three days have to be spent doing work that's collaboration work. If I'm sitting in my office and you're sitting in your office and we're on Zoom in two different offices, we may as well be at home or on the moon. But we need to find ways that we interact. And so those collaborative interaction, teaming exercises are what you need to do when you're in the office. And for those, what I found is if you have to have some efficiency around the time I'm collaborating with you, it's even better for me. So I can't waste a lot of time. I could sit in the office and waste a lot of time, or I could say, they're in the office these two days, we've got to get this stuff done. It's better problem-solving. It's faster problem-solving. And it's been net, net of benefit in my experience.

Jon Clifton:
[24:54] Reggie Van Lee, thank you for spending time with me on Leading with Strengths and also sharing your insights about how you've had such a successful career with your top five strengths. Thank you.

Reggie Van Lee:
[25:04] Thank you.

Transcript autogenerated using AI.