Thirty Minute Mentors Podcast Transcript: UScellular CEO Laurent Therivel

I recently interviewed Laurent Therivel on my podcast, Thirty Minute Mentors. Here is a transcript of our interview:

Adam: Our guest today is the leader of one of America's largest wireless communications companies. Laurent Therivel is the CEO of U.S. Cellular, where he leads a business that serves more than 5 million customers and generates more than $4 billion annually. LT, thank you for joining us.

Laurent: Adam, thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.

Adam: Pleasures mine. You grew up in Texas, where you are a boy scout. And you did your undergrad at Texas A&M before joining the Marines and then getting an MBA. Can you take listeners back to your early days? What were the key experiences and lessons that shaped your worldview and shaped the trajectory of your success?

Laurent: So I think it's important you mentioned where I grew up. You didn't mention I had mom and dad who stayed together. I kind of grew up in college, upper-middle-class America, a lot of success. I think it can be attributed to good luck. I'm sure we'll get into later in the interview, some specific things that maybe I did along the way or experiences that I had along the way. But I think the importance of what can't be discounted, my parents were immigrants. My mother was born in Germany, my father born in Italy, they moved here to have us. And so, we were sort of the American dream. And they kind of instilled that in us. And I will say one of the key lessons that I learned, and I learned this particularly from my mother, was put yourself out there. Don't hesitate to take a risk. And I think about the risk that my parents took coming to us. My mother took an interesting risk. You mentioned being in the boy scouts. My mother was the real driving force behind that. And she's actually continued to be very, very active in the boy scouts. And she recently was awarded the Silver Buffalo, which is the highest award you could possibly receive in the boy scouts. And the reason I bring it up is because she was getting involved in the boy scouts as a woman in the early 80s. And that was relatively unheard of. And so, I got to see my mom take these risks and to put herself out there for me. I was involved in student government in high school. I was not a cool kid. I asked seven girls to prom, they all said no. And so that gives you kind of a sense of my level of coolness. But I still tried out for student government and got elected because they had a funny speech. And that concept of not being afraid to put yourself out there and not being afraid to take risks. And having this mindset of what's the worst that could happen? I think it has helped drive a lot of the risks that I've been able to take. And a lot of the success that I've been able to drive has just been being willing to give it a try.

Adam: There are so many great lessons there. Asking seven girls out to prom, putting yourself out there, having the willingness to get up in front of an audience at a young age, give a speech, tell jokes, you don't know that the audience is going to laugh. And they did. They found it funny. You had better success making your audience laugh than you had in your audience of girls being willing to go out with you. But nonetheless, being willing to put yourself out there is a lesson that's applicable in just about every vertical. And another thing that you brought up, which I think is really interesting, is the topic of luck. A few years ago, I was actually moderating a panel and the specific topic was, how important is luck to executives and entrepreneurs? And to what extent do you make your own luck? To what extent is it a matter of capitalizing on the luck that you receive? And I want to know if you could share with listeners, what your views are on that topic? What are your thoughts? What advice would you share?

Laurent: Yeah, I think that there's certainly an element of being prepared to capitalize when opportunity presents itself. And to me, that has to do with preparation. And it's not just preparation in terms of skills. It's also preparation mentally, right? So being prepared to say yes when opportunity arises, when luck comes your way. Can you be in a position to take advantage of it? Have you done the legwork? Have you done the legwork professionally? Have you done the legwork personally? I'll give you an example. It's been later in my career but one of the pieces positions that I had the opportunity to do when I was at 18. It was a regional manager position. And it was a highly sought after position where you got to run a market. And this is a position that lots of people want. My boss came to me and said, “We have a regional manager position for you. Do you want it?”. And I said, “Well, can you tell me where it is?”. And he said, “No, it could be anywhere in the United States. If you want this job, take it”. And I said, “Yeah, I'll take it”. And the reason I was able to do that, the reason I was able to capitalize on that opportunity, is I had a discussion with my wife, literally a year ago about this role, and about the possibility that we might be asked to move as a family. And were we okay with that? And at the time, our kids were young enough, we were in a position that we could do that. But we could take that risk. And so to me, that's an example of being prepared when luck comes your way or when opportunity comes your way. But there's a flip side to that, which is the example I used of being born to parents that stayed together. White parents, upper middle class income, I don't want to say I was born on third and thought I was a triple, but I think it's important to understand the level of walk. Sometimes it simply comes in the country that you've been born in by the parents you've been born to. And it's important not to discount that. When you think about the opportunities that are presented to other people, this concept of how you make your own luck, that sounds great. And to me, it's a way of patting yourself on the back when you've been able to take advantage of an opportunity. And so there's a balance here. You have to be ready to take advantage. But I think you also have to be appreciative of the circumstances that are presented to you. And in my case, I was very lucky to have parents that I did the family upbringing that I did. And I don't take that for granted.

Adam: And they'll see, I think, what you're sharing really ties into a couple of key principles that are essential to leadership, self-awareness, humility. To that end, what do you believe are the key characteristics of a great leader? And what can anyone listening to this conversation do to become a better leader?

Laurent: There are a few non-negotiables that you need to have as a leader. I think integrity is one of them. And I think there's a base level of integrity that we think about now shalt not lie, cheat or steal. But I also think there's a next level of integrity. And let's take a why, for example, are you willing to speak truth to power? Are you willing to stand up for your team? To me, those are elements of integrity that need to be there, regardless of circumstance. After you have that base level, I actually think that great leaders modify themselves, modify their approach and modify their style based on their team circumstances. And so, if I think back to my experience, at one point, I was leading strategy for AT&T. And my team was very cerebral, really smart people, highly educational, pedigreed. You're talking to MBAs from top schools, former investment bankers, former strategy consultants. The way that I lead and inspire and motivate that team is completely different from the way that I would lead and motivate a team of my frontline sellers in the stores, or call center employees. And it's not because anyone is more or less sophisticated. It's simply that different things resonate with different people. I think if you come into a situation and you say, well, I'm a leader, and here is my style. That feels fairly egotistical. You need to be adjusting your style and modifying your approach based on who you're talking to. Another example is situational context. From my perspective, it's the leader's job to manage a situation. And what I mean by that is in a situation of high stress, maybe we're not hitting our sales numbers, or maybe the financials don't look good. In my case, my marketing team and my finance team, they don't need me coming into the room and banging on the table and saying, dang it, guys, what are we going to do to improve these numbers? It's terrible. The quarter looks terrible. It's a disaster. In this case, it's a stressful situation. They don't need a leader adding more stress in times of turmoil. My perspective as a leader needs to provide calls, they need to be the calm in the storm. The flip side of that is when things are going well when the numbers are clicking on all cylinders, people are feeling good. That's the moment to instill urgency because you can avoid people getting complacent and more people sitting back-patting themselves on the back. And so to me, a great leader adjusts their style based on the team that they're leading and the situational context in which they're operating. And I've tried to do that throughout my career. 

Adam: So important. The importance of flexibility, the importance of reading the room, the importance of not walking into a specific situation with your mind already made up, but understanding that you need to be adaptable. You need to be willing to do what's required in that particular moment.

Laurent: That's right. And it comes back to this theme of humility, and servant leadership. Because if your approach as a leader is what does my team need from me today? Sometimes they need a kick in the pants, right? Sometimes they need a rallying speech. Sometimes they just need some column and to say, hey, look, we're gonna get through this, this is a problem, and we can solve it together. And you're adjusting based on the needs of your team, not vice versa.

Adam: You made reference to your time at AT&T. You spent more than a decade there before becoming the CEO of U.S. Cellular. You've been promoted five different times, ultimately becoming the CEO of AT&T Mexico. What were the keys to rising within your career? And what can anyone listening do to rise within their career?

Laurent: So I think the first key for my success at AT&T was I loved what we did. And connecting people, it's something that I have a passion for. And if you don't mind, I'll actually rewind that, too. When I was in the Marine Corps, because my love for connections and connecting people actually started there, I was a communications officer in the Marine Corps. And my first day in comms school dropped off in the middle of nowhere, one by one. They had us in the back of a giant truck, and they kind of dropped us off, two miles apart from each other in the middle of the woods. We had a school of wire, we had a handset, all the handset does is take your voice and turn it into magnetic signals. We had a battery, and you had a manual that was entitled The fundamentals of wave theory. And they said that there was a unit at Fort AP Hill, which is about 90-100 miles away, and they were monitoring a certain frequency. And if you could communicate with them, they would have an alphanumeric code that they'd give you. And hey, bring us that code and we give you food. So that was the deal, right? I had to figure out how to communicate more to eat. And what's the frequency? Well, it's a wavelength. And how do I create a wavelength power on one side of this on one side of this cable? The battery, string the battery up in the trees in the right direction. And I'm thinking I'm going to be hungry tonight. And I'll never forget, right? My first try is about how I made the connection. I'll never forget my alphanumeric code, roger for whiskey. And I was hooked. I just thought it was the absolute coolest thing that I could do. That I could communicate with somebody over hundreds of miles with just really basic equipment. And I just fell in love with it. And so this love for connecting people and his love for connectivity. That's what I did in the Marines. I ended up at a startup. And I think it really helped a ton because at a company as large as AT&T, you can sometimes lose sight of what you're doing every day. And why is it that you're doing what you do? And why do you put in the hours? And for me, it was always very grounding to have that fundamental approach of why does AT&T exist? Or why does U.S. Cellular exist? We exist to connect people and connecting people is important. And it feels good to do that, it feels meaningful, feels important. And so I think the first thing that really helped me was I had that grounding. I had that passion, it wasn't just a job. That was a calling. And that meant something. And it meant that when I talk to teams, when I talk to other people about what I did or why I did it, there was passion behind it, there was mission behind it. So that was step one, there's other ones but let me let me just pause for a second. I think that mission orientation, the passion of what we were doing, it's just so important.

Adam: It's critical. And something that I share with listeners, listeners of this podcast, have heard me say this, LT, you mentioned to me off the air that you've been listening to this podcast, maybe you've heard me say this in a couple of my episodes. Which is that when you're trying to figure out what you want to do in life when you're trying to figure out what you want to do in your career, you want to try to check three boxes. You want to find something that allows you to do something that you love, you want to find something that allows you to do something that you're great at, you want to find something that allows you to make a positive impact in the lives of others. And if you can check all three of those boxes, you know you’ve found it. It doesn't feel like work, you're going to be great at it. It's going to be something that you're going to thrive at. And what you described right there, whether it was your time in the Marines, whether it was your time at AT&T, whether it's your time now at U.S. Cellular, you're checking those three boxes. Your love for connectivity, the meaning behind this, the significance behind this, your passion for it. You understand at a deep, intrinsic fundamental level, why this matters, how the work that you're doing allows you to make a positive impact in the lives of others. And when you're able to do that, it doesn't feel like you're punching a clock. It doesn't feel like you're grinding hours. It feels like you're doing something. You're doing something that's at a completely different level.

Laurent: You're absolutely right. And you get to do something that you're great at. And I think that's kind of a second component of what I think helped me to be successful at AT&T, was I tried fairly early on. And I encourage everyone that has worked with me in the past, certainly listeners to this podcast, as well as to try to define what you're great at and focus on. And in my case, at some point, I was able to take some of these personality tests and get the chance to kind of take a step back and think a little bit about what it is that you're good at. And what I tried to define is, is there something that I'm good at, that can translate through a bunch of different roles in the organization. And so it's not helpful to say, oh, well, I'm great at sales, or I'm great at accounting, or I'm great at managing supply chains. Instead think, okay, I'm great at working with people, or I'm great at motivating folks, or I'm very analytical, or I really like the details, and get into those. And so focus on defining your strengths in that way. In my case, I identified two. I said, okay, based on my experience, based on what I've done, based on what I've observed, and myself, based on what people tell me, I'm good at taking complex things and making them simple. And I'm good at motivating people towards a goal. And so what I tried to do is to find different opportunities within AT&T to do those and to focus on those strengths, while building a portfolio of experiences. That's pretty diverse. And so I joined the Strategy Group, and then went to a random market, like what I talked about. So that's operational leadership, I ran a small business team. So that was straight-up sales leadership. I was the CFO of AT&T business for a little while. And in each of those areas, what I tried to do is to say where can I have the opportunity to leverage those strengths to leverage those strengths of taking the complex and making it simple and motivated. And then also identifying my weakness and supplementing. And so in my case, for example, I'm not very good at negotiation. I acknowledge that I've noticed that about myself. I generally have the tendency to kind of want to be done with it. I want to kind of move on and get to that strategic goal. What I've learned over time is I need to surround myself with people that are willing to get into the details and are willing to slog it out. Really kind of create value, whether it's in a sales negotiation, whether it's in anything else in business. And so not being afraid to say this is maybe a weakness of mine. And rather than try to seek out opportunities that are going to expose that weakness, take opportunities that leverage my strengths that I feel good about, that I feel like I can step in and do a great job. But then acknowledge those weaknesses and celebrate people that fill in those gaps. Whether they're friends of mine, within your colleagues or people that work for me, try to celebrate those folks that step in and fill in those gaps. So I think that's the second piece to help me be successful at it.

Adam: I love it. It really all comes back to self-awareness. Understanding yourself, know thyself. I tell this to audiences all the time. I believe very strongly, most people in life are bad at most things. We're all good at a few things. And we all have one thing that makes us special that makes us unique, that makes us different. It's our superpower. And the more quickly you could figure out what it is about you that makes you special. The more successful you'll be in life, the more successful you'll be in business, the more successful you'll be as a leader and in your case, you figured it out relatively early on in your career. That you have this superpower around taking complex things and making them simple and marrying that with the secondary skill of being a well to motivate people. And that's allowed you to become such a successful leader, recognizing that I'm not good at everything. There are these things that I'm great at and the things that I'm not great at. I need to find people who can help me do those things well. And that's what leadership is really all about.

Laurent: Knowing thyself is so critical. It's one of the three big Maxim's of Delphi, right? And I actually use those three Maxim's as kind of a leadership philosophy. Knowing thyself is one. The second one, I actually find the most fascinating, and that is everything in moderation. But this Shirdi brings ruin, I find really interesting, because as the concept, of course, is that if you're just 100%, confident about something. Whether it's your decision-making or your capabilities, or the outcome of a problem, you don't leave enough space for the possibility that you might be wrong. And it's one of these Maxim's that I really like, because to me, it helps you tackle problems in a different way. And again, it kind of instills intellectual humility, to say, hey, look, if I'm 100% confident about this, I'm missing. And so I love know thyself. I love the other two as well.

 Adam: The best leaders are lifelong learners, the best leaders, have the humility, have the perspective, understand that no matter how successful I've been, no matter how much I've accomplished. I don't know what I don't know. And I want to continue to learn, I want to continue to grow. It's the people that think they know everything, to the people that are closed off, to learning closed off to expanding. Those are the ones that are struggling to take that next step or struggling to get to that next level.

Laurent: And I think acknowledging that, and acknowledging it early, is something that can be really helpful. And so I've thought about it. I get asked sometimes for folks earlier in their careers. I've talked to college students or folks who are trying to decide what to do with their first job. My pitch is, generally look if you know exactly what it is that you want to do, you are passionate about, and you're sure that fantastic, go do that. But acknowledge that making specific decisions like that closes other doors. So I'll rewind back to my point about when I decided that I just loved connectivity. And because of that I kind of love telecom. And that's what I wanted to do with my career. I was very cognizant that when I made that decision, I closed a whole bunch of doors, right? I closed the door to go be a doctor and I closed the door to be a lawyer. And there's a whole bunch of other doors that I closed. And I was comfortable with that. Early in your career, right, if you acknowledge the fact that maybe you don't know exactly what it is that you want to do, surety brings ruin, right? If you're not exactly sure what it is that you want to do, accept that, embrace it, and find those opportunities that create option value that open more doors than closes. And so if you think about it, if you're a college student, you think about your choice of major, you shouldn't do something you don't like. But there are certain majors that open a bunch of doors. It's an engineering major, finance major, economics major, mathematics major, these rigorous majors, they open doors. Think about your jobs after college. Why do so many people go into accounting or go into banking or go into consulting or go into some of these jobs? It's because they open doors. Now, again, you shouldn't do it if you don't like that. But creating optionality throughout your career, increasing your option value so that when you do make a decision to close some of those doors, you're doing so explicitly, you know exactly what you're deciding to do. I think it's really important. And it's not bad to not know exactly what it is you want to do. Heck, I I still don't know exactly what I want to do, because I've got a whole bunch more years to go, dude.

Adam: Such great advice. When I was in college, I was a sophomore at USC. We had a guest speaker, Stephen Sample, he was the president of the University at the time. He was a great leader and was instrumental in bringing USC to its current level of academic success. He gave a talk to one of my classes, and one of the things he said was that in your lifetime, you're going to have six to seven different careers, not jobs, but careers. And the 19-year-old Adam was sitting there thinking, what is this guy talking about? I know exactly what I'm gonna be doing in my career. I'm going to be running a major league baseball team. And I probably have six or seven different careers right now. So I think his perspective had a lot of wisdom to it.

Laurent: I agree. And I think if you look at what's happening here recently with COVID, and the COVID-driven reevaluation of work. And the reevaluation of where I do work and what work mattered to me and what is important? I would expect that number of careers that people are going through when he gave that speech. I'd probably add three or four on the back end. Because I think that, obviously, the last couple of years have been incredibly difficult. And taking over as CEO and middle of the pandemic was incredibly difficult, certainly not what I had envisioned. There's been so much pain and so many kinds of horrifying downsides to this. But there is an upside, which is that I think, so many people now are productively reevaluating. What is it that I want to do? And where do I want to do and how do I want to do it? And it's okay. It's maybe in the past that permission to take a step back and say, am I doing what I love? And am I doing what I'm great at? Many people didn't feel like they had that permission, and it does feel as if that's been unlocked. If it was seven careers, however many it was back then it's probably nine or 12, or 15. By the time we're all done here simply because of this, this positive reinvention.

Adam: You've enjoyed so much success over the course of your career. What do you consider the most significant failures, setbacks, and challenges you've had to navigate through the years that have allowed you to get to where you are right now? And what can anyone do to overcome the failures, setbacks and challenges that they face in their lives and in their careers?

Laurent: Here, let me talk about two. So I mentioned earlier that I worked in a startup for a number of years. This was when I was in consulting. I've done consulting for a couple of years, the lifestyle was wearing on me. And so I wanted to do something that didn't require as much travel. So instead, I jumped into a startup that yeah, maybe I wasn't traveling, but I was in the office 90 or 100 hours a week. And so the lifestyle certainly didn't get better. But it was this interesting situation where I took over as CEO of a company and it was a bit of a mess. When I took over, there was a fair amount of what I don't hesitate to call nepotism. But there were friends of the CEO that were in high places. It was a b2b company, still quite small. We had five salespeople, three of whom sold nothing. Two of them were carrying the entire company, but the other three were friends of the CEO, and it was a bit of a mess. And I had a deal with that. I met with the chairman that I had a revenue target to get to. And I had to get us to cash flow positive. And when I did, I had a big bundle of shares that would be best and so I got there on day one. I kind of assessed the situation and said, wow, this is just, we don't have the right people. We don't have the right structure. We don't have the right goals. And so I blew it up two weeks later, blew the place up with brand new KPIs, a brand new workshop, brand new goals, fired the three salespeople that weren't producing, and promoted a couple people. And off we went, and we executed for two years. And we did it. We got to the revenue target, we got to cash flow positive. And chairman and the CEO called me in and they said congratulations, you did what you said you were going to do, now you're fired. And they fired me on the spot. And I was just, I was flabbergasted. I thought it was going to be Champaign County. And what I realized is that everybody hated me. I had not brought anyone along for the ride. It was me, me, me, right? It was my plan, my strategy, my goals, my approach. And I had spent zero time building consensus and getting by having people feel like it was our plan and our strategy and our mission. Adam, I was lucky enough to learn that when I was in my late 20s. I think so many people don't learn that until later. And they don't get the chance to recover. And in my case, I had the chance to recover. And so ever since then, I've really made it a point to ensure that people believe in what it is that we're doing. And they're not just doing it because I've told them to or because they have to do it as part of their job. You want people to feel as if a strategy or a goal or a tactic or an initiative or whatever it is that you're working on, it's theirs. It's not yours, it's theirs. And so that was a heck of a learning lesson that I had to learn very early on. And I was lucky enough to learn it when I had time.

Adam: LT, what can anyone listening to this conversation do to become more successful personally and professionally?

Laurent: The thing that I like about the question you just asked is you mentioned personal and professional. I imagine most of the people listening to this podcast, have a professional plan or at least some concept of a professional plan in the sense of, where do I want to get to in X number of years, what moves do I need to make in order to get there? And let's take those moves and turn them into tack exterminator rituals, that everything that you can go through every day that will help you achieve your professional goal. The biggest mistake I see people doing is not doing the same thing personally. Having that personal goal, and then having the conversations with the people that you love that are meaningful to you, your wife, your boyfriend, your girlfriend, your kids, your family, your friends. Making sure that your personal life is aligned with your professional life and your professional approach. I see a lot of people execute really well on their professional plan. And at some point, they pick their head up and they look back. And their husband or their wife is a stranger to them, their kids don't know them. And they have to play catch up. And a lot of times, it's too late. And so to me, the most positive thing that you can do is put the same level of rigor and the same level of discipline and the same level of communication and sharing and empathy into your personal plan as you do your professional plan and make sure the two are lined up. You do that you're generally going to be successful. You're gonna have bad days of work. If your personal life's in order, you come home and it's still gonna be a good day. You know what, sometimes you'll have a bad day at home. And it's okay because then you can go to work and things are okay at work. You'd have enough balance in your life. The mistake I see people make or at least the biggest opportunity, I think is to align those two but the same rigor personally as you do professionally. 

Adam: LT, thank you for all the great advice and thank you for being part of Thirty Minute Mentors.

Laurent: It's been a pleasure. Thank you for having me.

Adam Mendler is the CEO of The Veloz Group, where he co-founded and oversees ventures across a wide variety of industries. Adam is also the creator and host of the business and leadership podcast Thirty Minute Mentors, where he goes one on one with America's most successful people - Fortune 500 CEOs, founders of household name companies, Hall of Fame and Olympic gold medal winning athletes, political and military leaders - for intimate half-hour conversations each week. Adam has written extensively on leadership, management, entrepreneurship, marketing and sales, having authored over 70 articles published in major media outlets including Forbes, Inc. and HuffPost, and has conducted more than 500 one on one interviews with America’s top leaders through his collective media projects. A top leadership speaker, Adam draws upon his insights building and leading businesses and interviewing hundreds of America's top leaders as a top keynote speaker to businesses, universities and non-profit organizations.

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