Ervin (Earl) Cobb and Dr. Dave Cornelius

Dr. Dave: Okay, awesome. Let’s just get started. Hey, just welcome to the KnolShare with Dr. Dave podcast. I’m just really excited to have you on today. We’ve been having conversations back and forth via LinkedIn and through the Project Management Institute. I’m so excited to be able to talk to you about leadership. Do us a favor and just give us a one minute pitch about yourself so the audience can learn more about you. So whenever you’re ready, just jump on in and we’ll go from there.

Earl: Yep. Very good. Yeah. The one minute pitch that I have formulated and that I give now most of the time is that when they say, who is Earl Cobb? I say, well, Earl Cobb currently is a very satisfied retired technology executive, 34 years. Most of that was with Motorola and at various levels. I ran venture companies. I was the CEO of a startup back in the late 90s called MedContrax. And my last corporate task, before I retired, I ran all of the critical data centers for Wells Fargo Bank, right before the Wachovia merger.

After that merger, that’s when I got a chance to almost 10 years ago now to the corporate shield and just having a ball as a small business owner, entrepreneur, author, grandfather, loving husband, taking care of a wife who still is employed and traveling the world.

Dr. Dave: Hey, all good stuff?

Earl: He’s a blessed guy, put it that way. Yes.

Dr. Dave: Man, that is so good to hear that you’re a blessed guy. Today we’re going to talk about leaderless leaders. A very interesting way of talking about leaders in a different way. So for you, how would you define a leaderless leader in your words, your experience?

Earl: That’s a very interesting way to qualify leaders in terms of leaderless. What I’ve found, having studied and written about and talked about leadership specifically for the past 10 years, of course, 20 years before that actually having the responsibilities of an executive and leading large companies and initiatives. The idea of a leader, the way you would describe it within an organization is normally someone, supervisor, manager, team leader, VP executive, okay, who has a responsibility and finds out that a lot of other skills, a lot of other capabilities, but they run short on having the leadership skills and the leadership acumen that they need to do and be successful at the thing that they’re being asked to do right now. That’s how I would define a leaderless leader.

Dr. Dave: Earl, if you think about the traits or attributes that you would expect out of a leaderless leader, what are some of those traits that you would think of?

Earl: That’s interesting because when you think of leadership traits and for those who are somewhat of students of leadership, it’s normally classically defined in terms of traits and attributes and those types of things. But think about this, a trait, an attribute, whether it’s presence and vision, clarity, persistence they’re all nouns. From an experience standpoint, I mean when you actually are out there, when you’re actually faced with the need to elevate your level of leadership, you quickly find out that leadership is really a verb. Or this is how you describe an action.

Earl: And when you think of all the traits out there, you can Google and go through all the research, dozens of traits. And most of the traits that you think about fall into the category of that one challenge that a particular individual had at that time. Whether it’s bringing a company out of a bankruptcy or whether it’s turning arou...