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The Power of Presence with Dr. Nancy Gordon

Episode 112

Dr. Nancy Gordon is a Chairperson and Associate Professor of the Graduate Department of Counseling, Leadership and Expressive Arts at Salve Regina University in Newport, Rhode Island where she has a full-time teaching load. Dr. Gordon is also a Program Director for the Holistic Graduate Programs with oversight of several cross-disciplinary programs including an innovative MA and Holistic Leadership. Her most recent published work is entitled Women and Leadership: An Integrative Focus on Equality. Dr. Gordon received her Doctor of Education from Harvard University. In this episode, Dr. Gordon discusses the main purpose that weaves it’s way into all of her work, what it means to be human, the importance of integrating humanity into our work, her simple and effective tip to help you be present in the moment, why people of influence need to focus on making sure those around them are fully present, the power of utilizing storytelling to help those around you focus, why trust is crucial when it comes to collaboration, the difference between management skills and leadership skills, the details of her upcoming leadership summit, and more!

Mentioned in this episode:

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Nancy Gordon Voice of Influence Podcast Andrea Joy Wenburg

Transcript

Hey, Hey!  It’s Andrea and welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast.  This is where we explore the intersection of human dynamics, communication, and service.  If you’re interested in growing your own voice of influence or the influence of those on your team, you can check us out at voiceofinfluence.net and just give us a shout out.  We’d love to talk.  

Today, I have with me Dr. Nancy Gordon.  Nancy is a Chairperson and Associate Professor of the Graduate Department of Counseling, Leadership and Expressive Arts at Salve Regina University in Newport, Rhode Island where she has a full time teaching load.  Dr. Gordon is a Program Director for the Holistic Graduate Programs with oversight of several cross-disciplinary programs including an innovative MA and Holistic Leadership.  Her most recent published work is entitled Women and Leadership: An Integrative Focus on Equality.  Dr. Gordon received her Doctor of Education from Harvard University.  

Andrea:  Dr. Gordon.  It is wonderful to have you here with me on the Voice of Influence podcast.  

Dr. Nancy Gordon:  Thank you.  I’m very happy to be here.  

Andrea:  So you have a lot of different things that you do.  So, I’m kind of curious, what do you consider out of all those different roles and your experience is there any kind of message or purpose that seems to be running throughout what you do and who you are?  

Dr. Nancy Gordon:  Yes.  I think my purpose has always been to help people find their own selves, their purpose, their voice, their mission, their ability to function effectively in whatever it is they’re interested in doing.  And in many ways, that’s been a lot of my life, my career, my interest in education and learning.  

Andrea:  Hmm.  And is there a reason for that, do you think?  I mean, is this a personal thing for you?  

Dr. Nancy Gordon:  I think it started out that way.  My background, I’ve always been interested in several things, in large system thinking.  I have a BA and MA in International Relations and then I end up in Rhode Island where that is not really a _____ for a career and began to work with all kinds of educational programs.  One specifically was with corrections and another was with urban adults wanting to come back to school and get degrees to further their own learning and education.   And I was always very interested in how education is a social change force, so that kind of guided me for many, many years.  And I went back to school to try to figure out how to use the ideas I had in education at a larger level and then found a voice in teaching.  As I came out of my doctoral program, I began to do the usual that some of us do go from one adjunct course to another.  But what I discovered is I really love teaching and I hadn’t known that.   So, in many ways I came accidentally to that part of what I’m doing now.  And then I came to Salve Regina University, which is a sister of Mercy University dedicated to justice and mercy.  And so I found a way to use that in the programs that I’m now running because they really are, in many ways, formative around those ideas and teaching people how to integrate the best of human, our humanity basically, into what they’re doing.  I don’t know if that…does that answer you?  

Andrea:  Yeah, I would love that.  

Dr. Nancy Gordon:  That was very long winded.  

Andrea:  No, no.  I love that.  So integrating our humanity into what we’re doing.  Tell me a little bit more about that.  

Dr. Nancy Gordon:  Yeah, what it means to be human.  Sometimes, I think we’ve lost that.  What does it mean to be human and how does that apply?  I am personally very interested in how things integrate and lineup.  You named my article about a focus on equality for women, I’m interested in how the body, mind and spirit are integrated into the work we do, which is why I found a perfect home itself at Salve Regina University because that’s pretty much the background foundation of all the programs we run here.  How to integrate body, mind, and spirit, what’s a holistic approach?  And holism has become sort of a jargonized term now.  And if you think about it as integrative, how do we integrate all aspects of our lives, our work, our families, our hobbies, our communities?  How does that all play a part in the way that we function in the world?  And how do we see that?  

Andrea:  Let’s go back first to…tell me this.  What does it mean to be human?  

Dr. Nancy Gordon:   Ah, that is the question, isn’t it?  

Andrea:  Hmm.  

Dr. Nancy Gordon:  I think it means, first of all, finding a way to be present in the world so that you’re not constantly reacting and judging what’s going on.  So, being human means to have compassion for folks that are different from ourselves, for folks that may not have had some of the same advantages or are more disadvantaged for being able to step back and live in a world of our own presence, our own voice influencing that more towards what could be improved.   What is important also I think from where I sit is that we are all human beings living on one planet, and I think we have forgotten that it doesn’t matter where we’re living, but that we are brothers and sisters in humanity.  And so that’s another thing that I’m very interested in helping all of us see.  

Andrea:  Yeah.  I think that idea of being present is, you know, in some ways it feels like, well, yeah, of course we need to be present, we’re present.  But being present in that moment and participating almost in that moment rather than being critical and looking at everything through analytical eyes is a really interesting distinction.  

Dr. Nancy Gordon:  It is.  

Andrea:  So tell me a little bit more about that.  

Dr. Nancy Gordon:  Well, presence, first of all, probably for any of us is “How am I here?”  “Where am I?”  “Am I in the place that I’m sitting in?”  “Am I focused in my own being, in my own body or am I here but I’m somewhere else?”  So presence is where a good question I would ask is where am I literally?  And I mean, literally.  I will sometimes start my classes by saying to my students, where are you?  And at first, everyone used to laugh at me and I’m saying to them, not how are you, but where are you?  What do you need to do to bring yourself into this moment in this room so that we can have a learning environment?   And since then, of course I asked the question whenever, whatever, I’m myself.  If I find myself off, I’ll just say, “Where am I?”  “What do I need to do?”  “Do I need to put my feet on the floor?”  “Do I need to walk around?”  “Do I need to take a breath?”  But the real question underneath it all is where am I?  It sounds so simple, doesn’t it?  

Andrea:  It does.  And yet I really understand because just a simple example when I was in college, I was a vocal major.  And so singing was just something that I did a lot.  And I would go in for my voice lesson and my teacher would ask me kind of, how are you doing?  And she would kind of ask those questions even though it’s not a where are you right now, it was getting to where are you, you know.  It was allowing me to kind of process a little bit how he was feeling so that I could come into the moment and actually sing.  

Dr. Nancy Gordon:  Exactly.  

Andrea:  And I think makes a lot of sense.  

Dr. Nancy Gordon:  So that’s part of it.  And now there’s a lot of research and work being done changing it from just presence to presencing.  Now think about that one because then it becomes an active process and an active practice.  And there are things you can do to really, and this is at a slightly higher level than just where are you, what are you doing in your own life, but as leaders, how are you guiding others to find their voice, find their heart, and find their spirit.   And then how do you find that as you’re working with other people, how do you line up a group so that the group can be fully present and working from all of that integrative place in their own being?  It’s really important as your teacher was showing you and your vocal.  You can’t sing if you’re not in your body.  And I can’t talk if I’m not in my body.  I can, but I can’t talk from the place that I want to work from.  

Andrea:  So why is it so important that leaders be able to help a group of people, be able to become more present?  I know that that’s not necessarily what everybody is thinking all the time.  You know, people don’t go into leadership thinking I need to help people be more present.  And yet I know that this is certainly important.  So tell us why.  Why should we even put effort towards that when we’re people who want to have influence?  

Dr. Nancy Gordon:  Well, first of all, the work now is starting to come together around this.  There’s a lot of work about how do you working more from your authentic self.  You begin to hear that or working from the inside out, leading from the inside out, finding your own purpose, your own values, your own core, your own place.  And so it’s starting to come together that this is critically important to how to thrive whether you’re in a group, you’re in a large system, you’re in a community, you’re in a church, or you’re in an agency, you have to start from the place of presence in order to be able to function effectively, to live more fully.   Now, I mean that’s a really simplistic term to say it and if you’re working with a corporation, you might say it helps the bottom line.  If you’re working with a not-for-profit, you might say, this is really a way to show your core values.  Do you see what I mean?  But really, it’s how do you have an effective meeting?  How do you get out of the police where we’re always judging each other or we’re doing 5 million things instead of just being there in that moment doing the thing that we need to do to effectively contribute to whatever the product or the service or our own wellbeing in any endeavor that we’re involved in.  

Andrea:  So let’s take it to a meeting.  Let’s take that as an example.  

Dr. Nancy Gordon:  Sure.  

Andrea:  People are walking into the meeting and there is an agenda.  Somebody is leading the meeting, what’s going on in the individuals that are coming in the door and how can they move from being distracted and out in, you know, trying to get their to-do-lists done in their own head rather than, you know, sort of being in the moment.  How does a leader guide the group in that situation?  

Dr. Nancy Gordon:  Well, first of all, if the group is used to the leader doing that, say for my department, we always start with a moment of say silence or centering because we all know that’s what we’re modeling for our programs and our classes.  However, I go to other meetings and we immediately start right in.  And so if I’m starting something where I’m the leader in a new place, I’ll ask permission.  I’ll say, “Would it be OK with us if we start with just a quick moment of focusing?”, I never say meditation or grounding or you know, you all are way out of your coming in with all your to do list.  I’ll just say, “Can we just stop for a moment and come together so that we are able to function together in concert.”  So that’s one way to do it.  

Andrea:  I really like that idea of saying, “Can we stop for a moment of focusing?”  I think that that is a really good tip.  

Dr. Nancy Gordon:  Yeah.  And also to ask permission because some folk, I mean I think that’s really important.  Sometimes, some of my students, for instance, will learn a new technique or a new concept.  And they’ll go home and they’ll say to whoever or wherever they’re working, “Oh, I see what you’re doing whatever it is, you know, your odd alignment, you’re jumping the ladder of influence.”  And I’m saying to them, “Don’t do that.”  You’re learning some new things that you need to incorporate into your own being before you can cow call out somebody else because they’re not doing it.  So, that’s would be the same thing for a leader in a group.  You know, rather than calling out, you might say, “I really like to try something new to get us more effective in and probably out of here quicker.”  

Andrea:  Uh-hmm, exactly.  To most people they would be thrilled to hear that.  

Dr. Nancy Gordon:  Yeah.  I think you know, let’s try away of being able to focus quickly and also another thing is just doing it in a couple of minutes.  You know, don’t take people who aren’t used to this through 20 minutes of something.  You know, give five minutes of, put your feet on the floor.  I’ll walk around and you know, if that isn’t going to work in a group then find something that does.  You know, it could be have a little snack before we start walk around.   I have a tendency in my groups, I make people walk around, stand up, but they’re used, you know, that’s what they’re used to me.  If they’re not used to me, I’m very cautious.  

Andrea:  Have you ever used storytelling to help them focus?  

Dr. Nancy Gordon:  Yes, I’m starting it, yes.  And I’ve been part of what we did over the last couple of years was to begin to take some of our courses and integrate in our community.  And we brought somebody in who would guide us to begin with a storytelling.  I have just instituted that into one of my classes.  Each of my students is going to have to do a circle story starting October 22nd and I have never done this before, but I’m giving them some guidelines about.  I want you to just tell a story.  The only hard and fast rules, it has to be five minutes and then they can write it.  They can talk it.  They can do whatever they want in that five minutes, but then they have to write a summary of it that they handmade.  So I’m really curious to see how this is going to work.  

Andrea:  That’s my primary way of getting a group to focus is start out with a story.  

Dr. Nancy Gordon:  Well how do you do that?  

Andrea:  I usually just start in.  I don’t tell them I’m going to tell them a story, I just sort of start telling the story.  

Dr. Nancy Gordon:  I love this.  

Andrea:  And I take them into the moment.  I learned really how to do that when I wrote my book and it’s a memoir and I didn’t really know how to do that before that.  But to really bring people into the moment, setting the scene, that sort of thing, making sure that there’s something, a reason to listen to the story, you know, that there’s something at stake and then either closing the loop right away or at least giving some enough of a conclusion that it will lead into the topic at hand.   And then coming back at the end to make sure to close it up completely with that last little, and so therefore, you know, you go and do the thing, you know, whatever the thing is.  And I feel like it has been super impactful and effective.  

Dr. Nancy Gordon:  Well, I love this.  We’re going to do a leadership summit here in April and that’s why I’m testing this now.  I’m beginning to think that’s the way to start the start the summit.  

Andrea:  Yeah, yeah.  Oh, that’s exciting.  

Dr. Nancy Gordon:   I haven’t got it all in my head yet, but this is the beginning of thinking about it.  Because stories, the way you’re describing them, “I’m closing the loop.”  They can be personal.  They can work with the group.  The group can have a story or the system can have a story or a person can have a story.  I love the way that you’re describing it.  

Andrea:  I find that it really helps when it’s a light story where there’s something deeper underneath always.  

Dr. Nancy Gordon:  Always.  

Andrea:   Yeah.  Yeah.  So it’s not a hard, hard thing to tell.  It’s not a hard thing to listen to, but there’s something really deep underneath of it.  Yeah.  

Dr. Nancy Gordon:  Like a parable.  

Andrea:  Yeah.  Right, exactly a parable, which Jesus used quite well and it’s something that we have gotten poor at doing.  We’ve want to just tell people what to do instead of sharing a story that could illustrate it.  It’s very interesting.  

Dr. Nancy Gordon:  So what has been some of the results for you?  

Andrea:  Well, I guess mostly people being able to pay attention and people feeling like I feel like I see people actually present in the moment and that sort of thing.  So let’s go back to you.  Let’s go back to you.  I’m sorry, I didn’t want to hijack the conversation, but I thought that’s such a good idea of bringing people into that focusing moment and I hadn’t made that connection myself before that that’s exactly what was going on.  

Dr. Nancy Gordon:  Right.  I just need to say I don’t feel hijacked at all.  

Andrea:  OK.  

Dr. Nancy Gordon:  I thought that was a great intervention.  

Andrea:  OK that’s fun.  I think you and I could talk a long time, Nancy.  

Dr. Nancy Gordon:  It’s beginning to feel that way.  

Andrea:  But I’m actually really curious more about this idea of collaboration and working within a system.  These are other things that you really talk a lot about.  And so what do you see as being some of the most foundational elements of a team that can really work together in collaboration well?  

Dr. Nancy Gordon:  Trust is huge.  How does that happen?  A team needs to be able to communicate.  And I mean literally, the root word of communicate is commune.  So, a team that is used to working together may need a little bit of tipping into another direction if the communication is off.  Collaboration means first, also being able to say, “I’m great at this.  You are great at that, can we share whatever we need to do because none of us is by ourselves can handle the whole thing.”  I’m sure you’ve heard the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, but that’s literal.  I mean that is a literal equation that works for collaboration.  Everybody can contribute and everybody has a gift.   So if you really want collaboration, we need to learn how to honor each other’s gifts and be able to say, “You’re great at this, can you handle that?”  And that’s of course if everybody’s willing and also that there isn’t always one leader.  There may be somebody that’s in the ability of seeing the whole, but can also let the parts work on their own ways.  Does that make sense?  

Andrea:  Oh yeah.  And I wonder too, do you think that people kind of need permission to be themselves in those situations?  

Dr. Nancy Gordon:  They not only need permission, sometimes they need to learn how to do it.  And in conversations, especially hard ones have to be facilitated usually, but conversations in groups where we just need to get things done, some folks can’t stand the process around the communication.  Others love the process but want to get right into the structure of something.  So, I think for collaborating in a group, you have to have it all.  You have to have a way to open and close the loop, as you said.  You also have to have an agenda.  You also have to have probably goals if that’s needed or tasks or whatever the purpose is.   And I think that’s underneath the whole thing as well as you have to know the purpose of a group. Otherwise, have you noticed things just they’ll flounder, you know?  But if you know your purpose then you have sort of a landmark or a map or a way to stay on purpose even if things go differently from the way we think they’re going to go.  My own idea for planning is to have like three separate arm strategies and then an optimum and then OK.  Maybe none of those are going to work but at least I’ve thought about them.  

Andrea:  Yeah.  

Dr. Nancy Gordon:  And then I don’t walk in with that.  I’ll throw that away.  But I’ve thought that there’s always a way that whatever I’m thinking about can somehow be integrated, but maybe not necessarily the way I’m thinking it ought to be.  So, yeah, I suppose the collaboration is a lot if I’m really truly living that the sum is greater than the sum of its parts, then I also have to live with the fact of letting go and controlling some of it.  That has been a hard lesson.  

Andrea:  Yeah.  Being kind of open to offering your ideas without demanding that they’d be the way that it goes.  

Dr. Nancy Gordon:  Exactly.  That’s kind of interesting to have to learn to do that.  A professor in a classroom, my classrooms, I have to do it all the time.  And my students laugh with me now because I’ll recalibrate standing right in front of them.  “OK, this is going to have to change right now.”  But I’m not afraid of that anymore.  You know, I’m into it long enough to know they’re appreciating me doing that.  

Andrea:  You used to be afraid of it?  

Dr. Nancy Gordon:  I didn’t know how to do it, you know, I mean I’m trained highly left-brained.  I’m trained in traditional ways of, well, research for one thing, but also for the way you consult, say, in systems.  And I’m standing in the classroom and I was trained, you’d never tell anything about yourself and that’s sort of got to be thrown away in a program like I run.  And then I don’t lecture, so what’s going to emerge in the classroom is something we’ll have to work with.  I don’t know that I was afraid.  I just didn’t connect up that it was a skill that I could do it.  That it was OK.  

Andrea:  And is that something that you teach people to do?  

Dr. Nancy Gordon:  I do.  

Andrea:  Yeah.  

Dr. Nancy Gordon:  I absolutely do.  

Andrea:  And what sort of process do they have to go through internally to kind of get to the point where they can do that?  

Dr. Nancy Gordon:  Well, it depends on the level of the class and whether they’re in my program or, you know, in my leadership classes I have a lot of sometimes across different disciplines.  They’re not as used to me as my own students.  So, I have to _____ really carefully, like in my first class, I’ll ask permission to do focusing.  Now, they expect it in my own classes there, especially those that have had me more than once.  They’re ready for this.  They’re ready to be a part of the process.  So, they’re learning that they can be a part of the process.   In some of the classes, I’m teaching leadership skills because leadership skills have to be…they can be learned and that’s the message underneath our whole program. And that they’re different from management skills.  We have great MBA programs, but that’s not what I’m doing.  

Andrea:  So, what is the difference between management and leadership?  

Dr. Nancy Gordon:  It’s really appropriate.  They’re totally different, disciplines really.  Leadership is teaching a set of skills of how to see systems, how to lead, how to lead change, and notice that it’s lead.  Management is a control function and really the important one, but it’s still a control function.  And a lot of times what we’re finding is people who are really great managers who are all thrown into leadership positions and then it’s a “Duh, what do I do now?”  Because the skills for management and control are not necessarily the skills for leading, especially leading people or systems.   So, they’re just totally different skills.  I’m teaching interpersonal communication skills.  I’m teaching some cross-cultural awareness skills, a way of seeing holistically.  Can you hear the language?  If I were teaching in an MBA program, I’d be teaching some finance and management and control.  I would be teaching planning and I teach planning as well, but it’s a different way of thinking about planning.  For me, the planning is at the vision level.  For management and control, it’s at the implementation level, and they’re really both important.  

Andrea:  Absolutely.  

Dr. Nancy Gordon:  It’s just that I’m not doing that.  

Andrea:  They’re just different.  

Dr. Nancy Gordon:  Yeah, they’re totally different and there’s been a lot of, I think, confusion, especially in the beginning of, leadership, now is a great jargon word.  Everybody is into leadership but what does that mean?  Do you see what I’m saying?  

Andrea:  Oh yeah.  

Dr. Nancy Gordon:  “Oh, I lead all the time.”  “Well, OK, you know, that’s great.”  But that is also not the way we’re teaching it.  We’re teaching people to be effective leaders, to be effective in their bodies, to be effective _____ projecting to really look at their biases and the way that they communicate _____ other people who are equally skilled, be able to also function at the same level.  Does that make sense?  

Andrea:  Yes.  So, Nancy, I know that you said that you have this leadership summit that’s coming up.  When is that?  Is that something that you want to tell the audience about?  

Dr. Nancy Gordon:  Yes, it’s coming up April 17th, 18th and 19th.  We’re calling it Salve’s Leadership Community Summit.  It’s an emerging summit, but we’re in the process now of…we want to get folks together that really want to actually start learning about storytelling, about planning, design learning about the ability to create dialogues around topics that are of interest.  And we’ll create some topics that we think of our interests.  We’re thinking probably inclusion is going to be one of them.  Also what it means to lead now, what it means to lead going forward into the future globally.  

Andrea:  Hmm.  That’s huge.  

Dr. Nancy Gordon:  And our program is a program that works from the individual all the way through thinking global issues.  So, I think what we’re going to try to do is use that as our ability to help people work through a lot.  But mostly, I think underneath it all, it’s get together and have people learn to have good conversations across sectors.  I think that’s my main vision.  That’s as far as we’ve gotten.  

Andrea:  That’s so important.  Well, it sounds wonderful.  If people are interested in attending that, how do they find it?  

Dr. Nancy Gordon:  Well, we’re going to have a domain up very soon, but for the moment they can contact me at nancy.gordon@salve.edu.  So that’s one way.  They can contact our grad studies program.  Kristen’s number, I think you have it.  

Andrea:  We’ll make sure to put that in the show notes so that people can find it easily.  

Dr. Nancy Gordon:  We’ll have a domain up for the summit very soon.  

Andrea:  Then it might be up by the time the podcast episode comes up.  

Dr. Nancy Gordon:  When is it coming up?  

Andrea:  I’m not sure yet, but we’ll talk about it later.  

Dr. Nancy Gordon:  Oh OK.  

Andrea:  So no problem.  So yeah, we’ll have information about how to find this summit and if you’re interested in attending, if you want to look, check it out.  We’ll have the information on that on our website in the show notes so that you can easily find it.  But Nancy, one more question for you today.  Again, I feel like we could talk for hours and hours and hours.  

Dr. Nancy Gordon:  I agree.  

Andrea:   But what would be one final sort of tip that you would leave with the audience for somebody who really wants to have a voice of influence.  

Dr. Nancy Gordon:  Be yourself.  And that might mean find out who you are.  If you know who you are, trust it, use it, and be proud of it.  

Andrea:  Beautiful.  Beautiful.  Love it.  Thank you so much for being a voice of influence for our listeners today.  

Dr. Nancy Gordon:  Thank you so much for having me.

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How to Unite Your Team With An Anthem

Episode 102

It should be a goal of every corporate leader to get their employees to buy into the company’s mission and brand. Yet, the further you get down the line, the more difficult it becomes to do that. You end up with people who don’t feel like they have a purpose within the organization and then they’re there just for the paycheck.

In this episode, I explain how you can help your employees feel like they have a purpose and a voice within your organization by creating and utilizing a team anthem specifically for your customer service team. I also explain what a team anthem is, the three reasons we utilize team anthems with our clients, how to create your team anthem, and more!

Mentioned in this episode:

Play here (the red triangle below), on iTunes, Stitcher or TuneIn Radio (Amazon Alexa) or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Voice of Influence Andrea Joy Wenburg

Transcript

Hey, hey!  It’s Andrea and welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast.  One of the things that we often talk to people about is brand awareness and the opportunity that people on, sometimes, the frontlines or throughout the company have to be able to truly represent and embody their brand.

That is something that leaders usually want.  They want everybody in the company to be on board and buy into the mission, the vision, and the values of the company.  And yet, it’s very easy, the further you get down the line in terms of seniority to end up with people who feel less than excited about the brand, less than committed to the company and the company’s success where it might just feel like a job.  It just feels like a job to them that they want to maintain to get paycheck, which is a legitimate reason to have a job.

But there’s something significantly missing when there are people in your company who work at your job just to have a job, something significantly missing for them and for you.

One of the most important things for us to remember when you are a leader is that the people around you want to know that they have a purpose.  They want to know that their voice matters.  If their voice doesn’t matter within the company or with your customers then it’s just a job.  However, if they find purpose and meaning and believe that their voice really does matter then they’re going to have a different level of investment into the success of the mission and vision and values of the company.

One of the things that we do is work with individuals on their own voice of influence, so helping people to really believe that their voice does matter to find their authentic voice so that they can make a difference.  So that their advice can be _____, so that their expertise can be accepted and utilized, and so that their leadership can be followed.

When people are searching for their voice of influence, one of the tools that we utilize is the Fascinate Assessment in order to be able to help people kind of understand how the world sees them, how they are perceived by others.  It is a fairly simple assessment, which is what I love about it because I love the really in depth stuff but at scale.  In depth is very difficult to apply and utilize fully.

The Fascinate Assessment has just enough meat on the bones that it can really make a significant impact.  But it’s also simple enough that people can take it real quick and then have some results right away and come up with what they call a personal brand anthem, something that would help them to remember what their purpose is.  And so this is an assessment that we use and I love the terminology, the anthem.

So, we have applied this idea of having an anthem to the importance of having one as a team.  A personal anthem would be based on your personal purpose.  The things that you’re particularly good at or what you bring to the table that is significant and that others need to know about how other people really see you when you’re at your best, but what about the team as a whole?

A lot of times companies have, you know, values and mission statements and things are super important to the DNA of the company and you want to maintain that throughout every bit of the company.  But what about teams?  You know, sometimes a team needs to have their own sense of identity.  Why does our team in particular matter?

And it’s interesting, but customer service can tend to feel like it sort of everybody wants to be important.  Everybody wants the customer experience to be good, but at the same time it has historically been sort of these are the people that are taking care of the hard stuff and they’re dealing with the hard conversations.  They’re just cleaning up the messes and that sort of thing.

The problem with that is that if you are hiring people to participate in customer service and you want them to do a good job, then you’re trying to hire people that care.  You’re trying to hire people that would be good with people and that sort of thing.  Those are all very important things.

But if they don’t have a personal connection to the purpose, to the vision, to the mission of the company, if they don’t see how they fit in as a team, as a customer service team that matters to the bottom line, that matters to the leadership of the company, if they don’t feel like they really matter, then whether they mean to or not, whether you mean to or not, they’re going to end up feeling as though they don’t really matter.

I’ve spoken with a number of managers or customer service teams or call centers who feel as though the bigger company and the leadership of the company doesn’t respect the fact that their frontline customer service people need to understand what’s going on in the company.

So when there is a strategic initiative that starts or when marketing is going to take a turn or a new product is going to come into play, many times the customer service team is the last one to know about these changes, which is unfortunate because they’re often the one place that customers actually have contact with the company itself.

One of the very first or most important voices of your company is your customer service team.  And if they don’t sense that from you, if they’re not getting that sense or they’re not truly connected to the bigger purpose, mission, vision of the company then it becomes more difficult for them to really truly embody it and represent your company well.

So, today we’re going to talk a little bit about creating a team anthem for your customer service team.  Why we do this?  Why is this a piece of what we help companies to do and how can you do it for yourself?  So we’re going to start here with an anthem.

So an anthem, let’s think about this in terms of a national anthem.  So the United States National Anthem, the Star-Spangled Banner is played on a regular basis at ball games and sporting events and political gatherings and all kinds of places that is played on a regular basis.  Why is that and what is it about an anthem that is so important?

Well, we got three things here.  So first of all, an anthem is really, really important for providing perspective.  When an anthem is played before a competition, there is a sense of we are all together under this anthem, under this one nation and we are a part of this bigger story.

There is perspective to be gained when we take a step back and say, “Wait a second, this is what we’re all about.  This is where we came from.  This is where we’re headed, this is what we stand for,” that sort of thing.  So, having perspective and understanding that in the moment of the fight, in the moment of that point of a competition where things get really intense prior to that you’ve said that moment is important.  But overall we’re on the same team.  And when we can say that, then those little moments though they might be intense and people might fight really hard to come out the winner.  That’s great.

But bringing that sense of perspective allows people to remember that they’re really a part of something bigger than themselves.  And this is not just about me and winning this competition, but who we are as a people and where we come from is really important.  And that we don’t have to compete on that in particular.  The anthem reminds athletes who and what they’re actually representing.  This is about something bigger than ourselves.

So, when we offer people an anthem, when they have an anthem to rally around, then that helps them to gain a perspective about what we’re all about, where we come from and the fact that this is about a bigger story, this is about more than me, “I am not the only piece of this puzzle that matters, but I am a piece of the puzzle that does matter.”

And that brings us to point number two.  A good anthem calls out our identity.  Who do we say that we are as a people, as a company, as a nation, who do we say that we are?  In the United States National Anthem, the Star-Spangled Banner, at the very end you hear a very clear “This is who we are.  We are the land of the free, so we are free and we are a home of the brave.”

So, this is where you can really find a place when you are brave.  You are brave and you are free and that piece of identity at the end of the national anthem, every time it is sung, every time a whole huge crowd or every time that we hear “The land of the free and the home of the brave” and that is belted out at the end and we all rally around that sound, those words.  It’s an amazing opportunity for people to f to be reminded of their identity and who we are.  This is important.  I am important.  I can be brave and I am free.

Then finally number three an anthem provides, I don’t know if you’d call it motivation or really a sense of purpose.  So perspective and identity and purpose, they all sort of come together.  They come together to help people to feel like they know, “OK this is what we’re all about.  This is where we come from, this is what we’re all about and this is what I’m here to provide.  This is how I show up.  I show up as brave, I show up as free, I show up with respect that sort of thing.

So when a company adapts this idea of having an anthem, a good anthem is going to provide those three things; it’s perspective, a sense of identity, and a very clear purpose.  This is where we come from.  This is who we say we are and this is what we say we’re all about an anthem, for even a team like a customer service team is going to bring all those three things to bear.  It is going to make sure that those three things are hit on so that the team can rally around this anthem and have that sense of identity and perspective and purpose.

But what happens when there’s an anthem and there is a sense of discrepancy between what the anthem says and what people are seeing in their company or in their country.  When they see an anthem, when they’re hearing an anthem and they hear these words like respectful invitation or, you know, freedom and bravery and these values or these words that really call out something really beautiful and important and purposeful.  And then they look at the company or they look at the country and they say, “But that’s not what I’m seeing here.  I’m seeing a discrepancy between who we say that we are and what we’re actually doing.”

You’ve probably been quite aware of some of the controversial ways that the anthem in particular of the United States National Anthem has been used to discuss this and bring up conversation about the discrepancy that athletes are seeing between the anthem itself and what they’re seeing in the way that it plays out for equality.  And the way that some of these people have chosen to address this or to bring this discrepancy to light is to kneel during the anthem instead of stand, which is an interesting way to do it.

There are lots of different perspectives on this and having had grandparents or relatives that have served in the military almost giving their lives or giving their lives for the country, I can understand the depth of intense feelings that people have around this issue.  And yet I think it’s important that we always look at, especially for if you’re going to have a voice of influence, you going to be able to take perspective.  You got to be able to look at the way that other people are seeing the world as well.

So, why would somebody kneel during the national anthem?  Is it possible that they actually do respect the national anthem and they respect the many ways that people have contributed or sacrificed for the freedoms in the country so much that they see that there’s a need to do it even better.  They see discrepancies between that freedom that we proclaim in the national anthem that people have fought for and what they’re actually seeing in real life.  And this is a way that they are choosing to bring this to light.

So the point for a company is that there are going to be times that even if you do create an anthem or if you have a set of values that you say, you know, on a big scale mission, vision, values for the company.  And those get down to the people who are on those front lines that you get down to the customer service folks and they look around and they say, “Yeah, but I’m not seeing that here and I’m not seeing that here.”

How would you like them to handle the discrepancies that they see?  Do they have an opportunity to share their voice, to help make the communication or the anthem that of the company actually get everybody aligned underneath of it so that it’s not saying something that’s not true about your company because if values aren’t aspirational, I don’t know what they are.

Obviously, they’re not going to be perfect in a sense an anthem should be calling out what’s already present, the strengths that are already there in your company or in your customer service team or in you as an individual.  But if people are seeing discrepancies, they should see discrepancies.  What should they do with those discrepancies?  What do you want them to do about it?  Do they have the opportunity to really voice their concerns and make a difference?  Does their voice matter?

So, as you’re thinking about an anthem and giving people an anthem, it’s not something that you actually create for other people.  Instead, it works so much better if a team gets together to create their own anthem because then they do have a voice.  When you do have that company mission, vision, values and then try to get it to filter out through the whole company; different sites, different divisions, different teams, it’s good to have all that but it’s even better when a team can come underneath of that and in alignment with what you’ve already created be able to get even more specific about who they are as a team and who they are as an individual.

When they do that, you’re going to find that the people, the individuals have a clear sense of what they bring to the table, their own sense of perspective, identity and purpose and that they see how that connects with their teams sense of perspective, identity and purpose and then they see how their team fits into the strategic mission, vision, and values of the company then things feel more aligned.

People don’t see as many discrepancies or when they do, they have a better sense of what to do with those discrepancies when they come up.  So as for the technical pieces of an anthem besides this general sense of perspective, identity and purpose, how do you do that?  What process can you go through to take your people through this opportunity to find an anthem for your team?

There are different ways that you can do this.  There are different people that have different systems that give you one word or give you a set of values or give you whatever.  There are lots of different ways that you could do this.  And the basic concept is that you want them to be very, very clear on the perspective, identity and purpose.

The way that we do it with companies when we do a voice of influence program for like a customer service team or a sales team is we go in and we identify the strengths of the team itself.  People take the fascinate assessment and we give people the opportunity to create their own anthem and then from there, their own anthem in the Fascinate Assessment is like an adjective and a noun.  It’s what you do best and how you do it.

So for example, empowering expression is one of the pieces of my personal anthem.  So when I walk into a room, I’m thinking to myself, “This is what I bring to the table.   I bring empowering expression.  This is the perspective that I have. This is where I come from.  I know in my own mind and heart just the background of why that’s important to me and what I’ve done to be able to get to the point where I can actually help people with that.  I know that’s my identity.  This is who I am, this is what I provide.  But it’s also my purpose.”

I can help people by helping them be able to express themselves.  And when I have that as my main mission, when that becomes the goal then most other things tend to fall into place because I’m very, very focused on what I can bring to the table.  I’m very, very focused on my anthem.

When it comes to with voice of influence, and our anthem is Voice of Influence, what we have chosen to do is to take that same model, the adjective and the noun and create four or five different adjectives, noun phrases that would describe different pieces of who we say that we are and what we’re all about.  And by doing that then we use a one sentence to describe that to make it very clear and then we use a question to ask, “Are we really doing that?  How does this actually play out? Is this a thing that we can actually do?  Are we doing it well?”

And so that is the basic format of the team anthem that we help teams create.  You can do that on your own or if you need help with that, we could certainly help.  But that is so important for people to be able to come together to create this together.  And once you have an anthem, you can utilize the anthem to create a system of checks and balances to create a system of accountability if you’d like to incorporate it into your personal reviews, personal reviews for the person.

If culture and tribe and getting everybody together to be aligned with that mission, vision, and values of your company is important to you then spending time on an anthem, spending time on giving people a voice, helping people to find their own voice and to be able to connect it to the voice of your company is so worth it.  Because in the end you’re going to get more buy-in and you’re going to get more engagement.

When people really feel like they understand the perspective of what this company is about, where they came from, what your company says that they are, who they are and who they are as a team within the company and then their purpose.  When they know that your purpose and their purpose are connected, they’re going to be motivated to be able to do more and really truly embody the brand of your company.

If you’d like any more information about creating an anthem, you can find more information on our show notes at voiceofinfluence.net/99 and folks that means that next time it will be Episode 100 for the Voice of Influence podcast and we are celebrating here on our team.  We’re very excited about Episode 100.  So in that episode, I’m going to be back again to share with you what we have distilled over the past two years, two plus years of interviews and working with clients, working with individuals on their voice of influence.  What are the six main elements of a Voice of Influence?  Why are they so important?

Clarity around these things changes the game.  When you are wanting to a difference, you need to know the six elements for yourself and for helping your team know these six elements for themselves.  If you’re looking for emerging leaders to come up and come up the ranks in your company, this episode is for you.  You’re going to want to hear it.  We’re excited to share it with you next time and until then, until Episode 100.  Go and find an anthem for your team and go make your voice matter more.

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Four Imperatives for Successful Managers with Ron Carucci

Episode 101

Ron Carucci is a co-founder and managing partner at Navalent where he works with CEO’s and executives who are pursuing transformational change for their organizations, leaders, and industries. Ron has a thirty-year track record helping some of the world’s most influential executives tackle challenges of strategy, organization, and leadership. He has been featured in many business publications including The Harvard Business Review and Forbes.

In this episode, Ron shares what first got him interested in topics like influence and leadership, the shocking statistic of how many people aiming for leadership positions fail within the first 18 months, the four traits his study revealed that all people who succeeded in becoming influential leaders in their organizations had in common, what his research showed about the connection between honesty and being an influential leader, how his company helps organizations diagnose and correct the issues within them, and more!

Mentioned in this episode:

Play here (the red triangle below), on iTunes, Stitcher or TuneIn Radio (Amazon Alexa) or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Transcript

Hey, hey! It’s Andrea. Welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast. Today, I have with me Ron Carucci who is co-founder and managing partner at Navalent, working with CEOs and executives pursuing transformational change for their organizations, leaders, and industries. He has a 30-year track record helping some of the world’s most influential executives tackle challenges of strategy, organization and leadership all over the world. He’s been featured in many business publications, including the Harvard Business Review and Forbes.

Andrea: Ron, welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast!

Ron Carucci: Hey, Andrea, good to meet you. Thanks for having me.

Andrea: All right. So your body of work is just a great fit for our audience, so we have a lot that we could talk about. It will be fun to see where this conversation goes today. To begin with, what kind of got you interested in the areas of influence and power and honesty and leadership in general?

Ron Carucci: Well, it certainly wasn’t looking around and seeing how well those things are going in the other parts of the world. I think we’re all discouraged when we look around and see the degree to which influence and power are being used in ways that caused far more harm than good. But it was personal.

Probably about maybe just under a decade ago, we were working with a client in one of our sort of very beefy, transformational products. As is always the case, a young leader distinguished himself in that project. When it was over and people were ready to be reassigned to bigger jobs and newer roles in the new organization design we had finished, he was given a chance to take on a much bigger opportunity. Of course, nobody was surprised and everybody assumed he would thrive.

In about nine months into that assignment, he called me. When I saw him in my caller ID I distinctly remember thinking, “Oh, he’s calling to check in and say hi, give me a great progress update and all the great things they’ve accomplished since we finished.” But he was calling to tell me he’d been fired and that he was looking for help networking another opportunity.

I was shocked. I just couldn’t imagine how could that possibly have happened. He was on top of every nine-box, eight-box, six-box high potential career property list.

A couple of hours later, the CEO, who had been our client, called also to tell me they had to let him go and he was a little bit perturbed and more than subtly _____ that similar responsibility for his failure was mine for not having better prepared him which, of course, to anybody in this field it’s devastating to hear that somebody is laying the failure of a great, otherwise promising, leader at your feet.

Andrea: Oh yeah.

Ron Carucci: So I said, “Can we come in? Can I come sniff around? I mean, I just want to, on my own dime here, understand how could we all have so badly misjudged his opportunity and talent and potential and find out what could have gone wrong here,” because I was just baffled.

So we went in and that short investigation is what led us to our 10-year longitudinal study with more than 2,700 leaders. And, Andrea, only to discover that he was just one more statistic that we’ve known for decades, that more than half of people in his position, leading from the middle of an organization trying to enter the top, more than half of them, maybe 50 to 60 percent of them, fail in their first 18 months.

And I thought, “How is this acceptable? How is this appropriately okay that we just continue to take otherwise very promising people and send them off a cliff?” So I was like, “We’re going to turn over every single rock we can find to uncover every landmine being put in these people’s way and expose them to find out how do we prevent this carnage.”

Of course, all the recruiters love it because it’s an annuity for them, but we just felt like we can do better. The great part of the research was that we thought, “Well, okay. So if 50 to 60 percent of them are failing, what are the other 40 to 50 percent of them doing that are sticking the landing, that are arriving at higher altitudes and thriving in these more complex, more ambiguous purchase? How are they doing it?”

We were able to, in fact, extrapolate very consistent patterns in that population of people that set them apart and allowed them to be influential and successful for more difficult places.

Andrea: Well, that’s so exciting. What kinds of things did you find that helped them to be more influential and successful?

Ron Carucci: There were four. The interesting thing about these patterns, my research team got a little bit frustrated because I made them do 99 different regression analyses to keep looking at the data because they kept coming back, no matter how we cut the data up and sorted it, these four patterns, in some form or other, were the top of the list. And if any of them were not included, it put the leaders in the failure group.

What that meant was you had to be good at all of them or you were in the failure group. And I didn’t want to have to write that. I wanted to be able to say, “Three or four will be fine and you can learn the fourth,” but that’s not how…

So I tell people think of this as one thing with four parts.

Andrea: There you go.

Ron Carucci: Not four things because, while they can be somewhat isolated to develop them, the reality was that all of them are what’s required to succeed.

The first one was context. These were the leaders that could come in and read the tea leaves around them. They were curious. They asked hard questions. They wondered about the environment around them and they recognized that, for them to be influential, they had to adapt as much to their environment as they had to impose change on it. Too many leaders come into situations to be influential looking to impose an answer that they already had.

It’s interesting, Andrea, we do this to leaders on their way in. During the selection process, we say things to people like, “Hey, look at these great brands you’ve built. That’s what we need.” Or, “Oh, my gosh, you’ve had such success leading sales forces. That’s exactly what we’re looking for here.”

And in those statements, we’re setting those people up to fail because what we’re telling them is, “You have a recipe. You have a formula. And we’d like you to repeat that formula when you come here.” What they think is that they just have to go reach back to past success and slap it on formulaically to the environment they’re on without even adapting it or thinking about the context.

So this mythical mandate creates this contextual blindness in people, and it happens every day. We all see it. Of course the harder they slap, the more receptive _____ becomes and the people begin to back away. We’ve all seen the movie when somebody comes in and of course we all hear the famous last words, “Oh, they weren’t a good fit.”

Andrea: Right. It seems like there is an expectation of new leaders to be solid and not movable. But what you’re saying is that they should be moveable. They should be adaptable. There should be some adaptability in what they do.

Ron Carucci: Not ‘should be’, Andrea. There has to be.

Andrea: Yes.

Ron Carucci: How could you… there’s no one-size-fits-all. No matter how good you’ve been in your past, no matter how much talent you have, there’s no way that anything you can do is Plug and Play. So you have to walk into the environment assuming that you don’t have to go native. You don’t have to completely go native into the landscape and be like everybody else, because then your ability to create change is a little off.

But you have to adapt enough to build credibility with people, that they know you didn’t come to fix them or change them, that you came and that you’re willing to have them fingerprint you as much as you’re willing to fingerprint them.

Andrea: Absolutely. I love that so much. I really, really do. I love that.

Ron Carucci: The second one was breadth. Breadth, these are the people that they grew up in finance, they grew up in marketing, they grew up in some discipline, but they no longer have the luxury of seeing the world through that lens.

So, if you came up through finance, you can’t see the world economically. If you came up through marketing, you can see the world through consumers and customer analytics.

Breadth means you understand that the best parts of an organization happen at the seams. And that organizations naturally fragment, so you have silos, you have cliques, you have groups, you have regions, you have affinity to localization. And your job is now to stitch those seams. Your job is now to build bridges. Your job is now to create connection among people and to create traffic patterns that bring people together to create more cohesion in your organization, not intensify fragmentation.

These are the leaders that could build bridges. These are the leaders that could cross borders in organizations, that could bring people together, that were willing to see that if they were in sales, they knew they drove marketing crazy and wanted to find out why. They knew that if they were in supply chain, they drove R&D crazy and they wanted to find out why. They didn’t just intensify the rivalries. They actually built bridges and created community across unlikely boundaries because they understood that that’s where real value gets created.

The third was decision-making choice. So, the most influential people are not afraid of hard choices. Too many people get into influential positions where they want to please everybody. They say ‘yes’ too often. They make promises they can’t keep. And they dilute the focus of the organization because they commit to way too many things and, in so doing, they institutionalize mediocrity, because everybody is trying to do everything and then, therefore, nothing well.

So these people could say no. They knew that that influence and leadership mean disappointing people at a rate they can absorb. That it’s okay to say ‘no’ for the greater good. And that the greatest gift you can give those you’re trying to influence is focus and a narrowed set of priorities.

And the last one, not surprisingly, was connection, was the relationship they have with people. What was interesting about this group, from an influence point of view, is that they didn’t prioritize their stakeholders, bosses, peers, or direct reports according to what they needed or what they could get from them. They prioritized their relationships according to what they could most contribute. They focused more on the people whose agendas they could drive, on whose development they could advance, on whose success they could contribute to more so than the people they needed to contribute to theirs.

You’ve seen them. We’ve all seen them in organizations. These are the people everybody wants to be around, the bosses everybody wants to work for, they’re the ones who are just nice, good-hearted people. They’re smart. You know that if you’re in their presence you’re going to feel good, you’re going to learn, you’re going to be committed, you’re going to feel safe to be yourself. And they’re the ones that are the most influential.

So context, breadth, choice, connection. Four not easy things but the key thing is, to your listeners, Andrea, is the time to start learning these is yesterday. If you wait until your first significantly influential role to start learning them, that’s probably not going to go too well.

But you can start learning these right at college. You can find seams and boundaries to cross. You can be contextually curious. You can start figuring out what is your decision-making apparatus and how do you prioritize and how do you narrow and say no and find the courage to make hard choices. And you can start finding ways to help other people be successful. So the sooner you start putting those muscles, the more likely it is you will be influential.

Andrea: That’s so good. These are great. OK, you also have done research recently on honesty. How does that connect with this? Why did you make that choice to study honesty?

Ron Carucci: After our 10-year study, the database grew. So at 15 years, we now have 3300 interviews in the database. In those first four patterns we isolated, we were looking for what shapes individual behavior. But I wanted to know what it was that could create systemic performance position.

We didn’t go looking for… we decided, since we’re using some pretty sophisticated Artificial Intelligence, we’ve got IBM Watson in there, which is an amazing technology, we thought, “Let’s let it tell us.” It reads the data, Andrea, we’re talking creepy-well, like it’s creepy what this stuff can read. So we thought, “Well, let’s see what it will tell us about the system of organization.”

It turns out it came back and it was able to predict four – there may have been more but we cut it off at four – conditions in which people will lie, but they line up very closely with the pattern. This was not intentional. This was just serendipity. But they line up with those four patterns of influence.

The first one was strategic clarity. So if your organization lacks that, meaning you have a mission, vision, and value, you have identity statements that don’t match your behavior in the eyes of your customers or your employees, or if I go around the organization and I say, “Hey, what’s your strategy,” and I get 20 different answers, or people’s own sense of purpose is not locatable in your purpose, so there’s a disconnect there, if that strategic clarity is missing, you are three times more likely to have people lie or withhold the truth.

The second one was accountability systems. The way contribution is measured, not compensated but measured, is seen as unfair. In other words, people think that there’s a bias. They think they’re not really truly being heard or seen. They don’t think they’re getting fair feedback. If your accountability systems are seen as unfair, you are four times more likely to have people lie and withhold the truth.

The third was governance. If your decision-making processes of the way resources are allocated is not transparent, it’s opaque, it seems capricious. In other words, there’s no form for the truth to be told and it has to go underground. You are three-and-a-half times more likely to have people lie or withhold the truth.

And lastly, if you have unresolved conflict, if you have cross-border rivalry, if you have conflicts at the seams between departments that remain unresolved, in other words, if you fragmented the truth and now we have dueling truths, you’re six times more likely to have people lie or withhold the truth.

Andrea: Wow!

Ron Carucci: And it’s cumulative, so for the cash, the cruise and the car, if you have all four of those conditions, congratulations, you’re 16 times more likely to find yourself on the headline of a newspaper and a story you’d never wanted to be in. So I was sort of sitting around playing with these content and I put them side by side and I realized, oh, my gosh, if you’re a contextual leader, you could bring strategic clarity. If you have breadth, you can bridge the seams. If you’re a good choice maker, if you can narrow priorities, you can contribute to great governance. And if you build great connections, you can hold people accountable in an honest way.

So the four influence patterns can have a direct implication on creating a more honest organization, not just a more influential one.

Andrea: That’s just incredibly powerful. So how do companies utilize or how can they utilize this research that you’ve done in these connections and these insights that you have you’ve made?

Ron Carucci: Well, the first thing is to be honest.

Andrea: Right.

Ron Carucci: Everybody wants… 5,000 people did not wake up at Wells Fargo one morning and say, “Hey, here’s an idea.” You know, 90 R&D engineers didn’t get up one morning in Germany and say, “I know how to beat out that electric car market. Let’s sell more diesel cars.” These are things that happen over time, right? The fungus in that ethical Petri dish grew over time.

So be honest that the origins of these problems are much, much sooner than you think they are. By the time you were starting to hear noise or symptoms are starting to appear or scandals are emerging, you are years past the origins of those stories.

So diagnose. What do we say about cancer? Early prevention, early cure, right? Get your annual MRI done. Have your organization looked at not just for ethical things but just for its wholeness. We’re not just talking about integrity as a matter of truth telling, but integrity as a matter of consistency, congruence. You are being who you say you are. You are deciding on things according to a strategy you commit to. You are teaching leaders to con to talk about contributions in a fair way.

This is all organizational health issues that will… if you’re wondering why half of your employee population is disengaged or your employee engagement scores are what they are, or you’re having talent defections by your most talented people, this is not random. It’s not because it’s a good employer marker, right? People really do quit bosses, not companies.

So, for goodness sake, don’t ignore the signs that there are some even minor cracks in the foundation of your organization. Go dig deep. Get an MRI to understand where might we be at risk, where might we be susceptible to problems down the road that we might not want to be part of, and do and address it head on.

Andrea: Now, with this one, with this being honest part, this is kind of hard because prevention is much more difficult or it’s much more difficult to convince people to actually do. What kind of organizations tend to actually be honest in the first place? Which ones are choosing to not ignore the signs and things like that?

Ron Carucci: I’m studying one company right now in Phoenix, Arizona. They’re called Nextiva and I’m studying them. I just wrote a piece in Forbes about them and I think I’m going to study them for a book I’m writing on this. The hard answer is the ones that build them from the ground up that way, right?

Now, I don’t want to have to say that either. It’s like saying you have to be good at all four of these things. I don’t want to have to say, “Well, if you’re now 40 years old, you’re too far gone.” I do think if a leadership is committed to wanting a healthy, whole, vibrant organization, you can. And, you know, people can come back from Stage VI cancer, right? You just have to go and do the work. You have to care enough to want to go there.

If your complacency, if your success, if your financial success is tied too much to the status quo, if you’re too fearful of making change or too fearful of looking in a mirror of what it might tell you, it’s like the person who doesn’t go to the dentist. It’s like, “Well, I don’t want to go now.” So suddenly it’s eight years later and their teeth are falling out. Denial is a very powerful force.

I think the organizations that are, it’s hard to say it, Andrea, but the ones who are in pain, the ones who skin their knees, who get some early warning signs that things aren’t going well. Pain is a marvelous source of commitment. As the old adage goes, the sight of the gallows focuses the mind. But it would sure be great not to have to wait until you’re in pain before going. You get an annual physical for a reason.

So, I don’t know why leaders wouldn’t want to be honest in the employee engagement survey. Would you not want to have some ongoing set of metrics that tell you is my organization and those leading it healthy, and doing it in a way that is consistent with who we say we are?

The thing I always tell my leaders is, “Would you tell your mother? If the next morning, would you make a decision that you would be proud to tell your mom and that you wouldn’t mind having it on the cover of the New York Times?” If you can tell me ‘yes’ to both those things, you’re good. But if you would not be proud to tell your mom or you would not want it on the cover of the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times, there’s a reason that you should have paused.

Andrea: Yes, absolutely. That’s really interesting. And definitely with the pain, it’s the same way with individual people. People don’t want to change until they are kind of shaken. It takes a lot for people to change individually too.

Ron Carucci: And most of us are all _____ until our doctors say, “two of the four are occluded,” we don’t think about our cardiac health. I was walking around with a really strong pain in my calf all fall long and I was afraid it was a blood clot because I had blood clot pain in… DVTs, deep vein thrombosis in my family. I went and had an ultrasound on Christmas Eve. I was so panicked. It wasn’t that at all. That’s OK. It’s muscle strain. So I continued to play tennis. I continued to play. I wrapped it. I didn’t really ice it much, but I kept it wrapped.

Until one day on a tennis court, early January, big popping noise, and I’m down on the ground writhing in pain because I slipped muscle. Why? Because I thought, “Oh, it’ll be fine.” I checked and it wasn’t a blood clot. Well, when the lady came back into the ER and said, “Not a blood clot,” and handed me a whole bunch of information on muscle strains, what caused me to not go, “Oh, I guess this really is a problem.” I decided it wasn’t the problem I was most fearful of, so it wasn’t a problem.

Andrea: Right. Yes. It’s not the one that we’re looking for.

Ron Carucci: Right. And then I paid a price for this. Then I was off the tennis court for two-and-half months, where it could have been probably three weeks had I just taken care of the problem when I really first dealt with that, which was like October.

So you’re right, as human beings we’re comfort-seeking, stability-seeking machines. We want stability. We are homeostatic-seeking machines. And we all say we’re all for change but what I really am is all for you changing, especially if you change so I don’t have to.

Andrea: Totally. OK, so be honest. That’s the first one. What’s the second one?

Ron Carucci: So get data, do diagnosis that tells you where you’re vulnerable, where you susceptible, or where you have a disease growing and then act upon it. And don’t look for quick fixes. Don’t run everybody through an integrity workshop for half a day on a video. Don’t do a campaign. Don’t go put up posters that say, “Hey, if you see something, say something,” and think that the “nudges” are going to change behavior.

Don’t do team building. If you’ve got a lot of cross-border conflict, don’t bring everybody together to do trust falls.

The origins of these problems are systemic and you have to put in systemic solutions. If people in sales or marketing aren’t getting along, don’t just bring them together for a workshop on collaboration. Look at the incentives and what their metrics are. Look at governance to see where decision making is happening. Look at how the resources are allocated to see do they understand the value of your brand that both of them hold? Is sales being incented to sell things and make promises that marketing can’t keep? So, look at the systemic things that may be causing the conflict. It’s not just always interpersonal

Andrea: Totally.

Ron Carucci: The interpersonal things you’re seeing are probably more symptoms than they are roots.

Andrea: That’s great. So, either two then? Is that what you’re basically…

Ron Carucci: I think the last thing I would say is install a mechanism that continually gives you ongoing feedback. Just like a diabetic puts a meter in his or her arm to constantly be monitoring blood glucose, find ways that you have regular access to the health of your organization and the vibrancy you want it to have and be fine tuning all the time so you don’t get to the place where you would ditch.

Andrea: So how do you, how does your company actually help other companies to do this?

Ron Carucci: We have a really forensic way of doing a deep MRI. When we go in and we want to get a look under the hood, we do a very, very comprehensive diagnostic look. We extract data from people’s minds and hearts and the archives of your database, unlike what most people can’t do, and when we bring together an entire story that’s comprehensive.

And we put back in the room every single voice that you send onto the room. So we force leaders to listen to… by reading hundreds of pages of comments and data that we code in very sophisticated coding technology so you don’t know who said it but you know what was said.

So you hear everything we heard, you see everything we see, and then we make you spend time in a room for day or two. You have to make sense of that story. We’re not going to come and tell you as consultants, “Here’s the answer.” We’re going to say, “OK, here are the questions you obviously have been avoiding. Now, you as the leadership would have to look each other in the eye, look in the mirror at that hundred pages of story and we’re going to work until you have conclusions, until you have a plan you feel good about.

And at that point then I’ll tell you what I think. I’ll tell you my point of view as an outsider comparing you to the other hundreds of companies I’ve worked with. There might be a 15 percent gap that I may have to sharpen the contrast on but, for the most part, we’ll be aligned. The difference is you’re going to own it because it’s your story.

So the next chapter of that story is yours to write, not mine. So I think then we’ve got a very different psychological process that I’ve now forced you and your team to look at in the mirror, look at a story, say hard things to each other and now take ownership of a story in ways that you can circumvent.

And the minute that consultants come in with the answers, they went in and now it’s analyze and recommend, then I’m going to get up and 20 slides and tell you what you have to go do. There is zero emotional ownership for those answers in the room. I’ve now sidestepped the most important part of creating transformational change, which is embedding into your heart, mind, and soul the need to understand your role in how we got here and how we get to where we’re going to go.

Andrea: I think that’s brilliant. And it has to be very, very effective. Do you have a difficult time getting people… or I suppose if they want to work with you, that’s just the way it is, right?

Ron Carucci: Well, yeah. On occasion, we’ll get a leader who will say something like, “Oh, you don’t need to do any diagnostics. I can tell you what’s wrong.” To which we typically say, “Uh-huh. If you could have done that you wouldn’t have had to call.” So obviously we already know what you’re thinking the problem is as either, at best, partially right or completely wrong.

And I think if you have a severe pain in your chest and you walked into a cardiologist and you pointed to it saying, “There’s this really sharp pain right here.” And your cardiologist quickly said, “Oh, upper-left quadrant ventricle needs a stent.   Let’s go put one in.” Would you just walk into the OR with them and let them put you under and cut you open? Would you not want to say, “Uh, don’t you want to look first?”

Why, for goodness sake, would you do that with your organization if you wouldn’t do it with your own body? Why would you just go cutting up your organization? And we do it all the time, just we snip orchards and rearrange deckchairs. We slap on new processes. We overlaid new training and skills. And we just pile up, we pile on new governance with new task forces and new committees and whatever. It’s like bad wallpaper in a house. You walk into a house and there’s like nine layers of wallpaper smacked on top of each other, and they’re all peeling off and it won’t take another one.

Why would you do that to your organization if you wouldn’t do it to your body?

Andrea: I love that. That’s a great analogy. So, is there something that… just off the record here real quick, I have on here that it looks like you have something to offer people, your website and then transformation. Do you want to tell people about it?

Ron Carucci: Yeah. By all means, come stay in touch. We can be found at Navalent.com. We’ve got a free ebook called Leading Transformation. If you want to know more about our playbook and how we do this, come to navalent.com/transformation and download our free ebook on all the ways we think about change and transformational work.

We’ve got some phenomenal videos. We’ve got great whitepapers. We have a quarterly magazine called the Navalent Quarterly. You can subscribe for free. We’ve got lots of rich content. If all this is of interest to you, come hang out with us. You can all also find me on Twitter @RonCarucci and you can find me on LinkedIn as well, so love to keep chatting.

Andrea: Great! Thank you so much for being with us here today at the Voice of Influence. We’re really honored to have you and inspired. There’s so much here to dive into and for people to really chew on and think about and really act on. Thank you so much for sharing your voice of influence with our listeners,

Ron Carucci: Andrea, the pleasure was mine. Thanks so much for having me.

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Six Elements of a Voice of Influence®

Episode 100

We’re celebrating today because it’s episode 100 of the Voice of Influence® podcast! Our team is thrilled with where we’ve been and we’re excited for where we’re going with the show in the years to come!

In today’s show I share the ways the podcast has shifted and what has remained the same since the beginning. Then I discuss one of our biggest ah-ha’s from interviewing guests, the six elements of a Voice of Influence, so you can utilize the framework for yourself.

To get you started, here are a few examples of episodes where we address each of the six elements:

Your Purpose (or Passion)

Your Style

Your Message

Your Offering

Your Strategy

Your Community

Play here (the red triangle below), on iTunes, Stitcher or TuneIn Radio (Amazon Alexa) or wherever you listen to podcasts.


Transcript

Hey, hey!  It’s Andrea and you are listening to Episode 100 of the Voice of Influence podcast.

Your voice matters, but you can make it matter more through our in-depth conversations with leaders and experts.  You’ll learn what it takes to move your audience with your message at home, work, and in the world.  It’s compelling communication strategy brought to you by your host, Author, Speaker, and Strategist, Andrea Joy Wenburg.  Welcome to Voice of Influence!

Welcome, welcome!  I am so glad that you’re here with us today.  It’s a kind of a day of celebration.  We’ve made it to Episode 100, and it’s been just over two years and about two or three months since we started the Voice of Influence podcast and we’ve made it to Episode 100, so fun.  So, thank you so much for being here, for listening, and for engaging.  We appreciate it.  We value you and your voice, and we really believe that your voice matters.

Over the course of the last couple of years, we have shifted, tried to figure out what exactly we’re doing with the podcast.  I’m typically not somebody who makes up her mind and just goes for it and sticks with the same exact thing the whole entire time.  Rather, we really believe in making iterations as we go.

And so as we started the podcast, we were really focused on the personal brand and personal brand strategy, which is still really important to the work that we do with people and the people that we’re hoping will listen to the podcast.  So, we’re talking about people who are really wanting to understand who they are and how they portray themselves to the world, how you are able to provide a presence that it will leave an impact, and that has remained the same.

What has shifted over the course of the last couple of years, especially in the last year and a half or so is that we’ve also added in this idea of service and leading teams and having a bigger impact on business in general.  But, really, it all comes back down to who you are as a person, what you believe about your voice, what you have been called to do, or feel a sense of purpose to do, finding meaning in your life and going after it.

And I tell you what, when it really comes down to it, it’s about putting yourself on the line for others, going that extra mile, being willing to sacrifice something of yourself in order to achieve something that is bigger, in order to put yourself in a position where you can have influence in a bigger way.  And when we’re talking about influence, we’re talking about influence that is ethical, influence that is not manipulative, but that helps other people to find their path that helps other people to make good decisions.

Sometimes that really looks like bringing clarity and helping people to see the big picture.  Sometimes that means giving advice, sometimes it could be providing an experience.  There are all kinds of ways that we can have influence and make a difference with who you are with your expertise, with what you have to provide.

But when it comes down to it, like I said before, it costs something.  It costs the person, you.  It costs you something to offer it because there are things at stake.  There are often things at stake.  There are things like relationships at stake.  There are things like your ego at stake.  I mean the idea of failing in front of other people, gosh, you know when you’re voice of influence when you’re putting yourself out there and you’re going for it and offering who you are to others.  Very often you’ll fail.  You will be rejected by others and it’s just part of life.  It’s part of what it means to lead and to be a leader, to be a voice of influence.

And so, I just want to say thank you first of all, for being a voice of influence.  Thank you for being willing to put yourself on the line for your cause for other people, to love other people really well.  I know that that comes at a cost to you personally and I just want to thank you for your courage and for taking risks.  And I hope that somehow along the way we have been able to provide for you a companion, perhaps a little bit of guidance on this journey of finding and owning and using your voice of influence.

Well, today we’re going to talk a little bit more in depth about what we consider to be a voice of influence here at our company.  We have a number of models, of frameworks, things like this.  This is one thing that I have found over the course of the last few years that I’m actually really good at.  And that is to help bring order to chaos, so, where there are lots of ideas or we’re trying to figure out how to solve a problem.  I love to help companies; individuals bring order to that process.

So, for example we the model of engagement, the A2 Model of Engagement and sometimes I call it A2, I don’t know.  I haven’t nailed that one down yet, but an A2 model of engagement, which is about how do you find context and understand where people are at in terms of engagement. And we do that in the context of agency and agreement, and I would love to explain that to you sometime if you want it, but it’s pretty darn hard to do that over a podcast episode.

So, send me an email if you’re interested in learning more about the A2 Model of Engagement and how I talk about that in keynotes and in breakout sessions or training sessions.  I’d love to visit with you about that.  You can send me an email at andrea@voiceofinfluence.net, and I’d be happy to schedule that with you.

But today, we’re going to talk about the Voice of Influence elements.  These are six things that over the course of the past few years as we’ve been putting together our thought leadership around voice of influence, these are the elements that we believe are absolutely necessary to dive into, understand, and get a grasp of for yourself when you’re wanting to be a voice of influence.

And as we are moving forward on the podcast, we want you to know that the way that we are structuring the podcast and the conversations that we’re having, the things, the insights that we share, the stories that we share are going to have to do with these six categories, these Six Elements of your Voice of Influence. And that’s how they fit together.  This is how it all fits together.  And it all also, as I mentioned previously, fits together under this idea of influence and service.

So, whether that’d be customer service or serving as a leader, we are serving other people and offering our voice of influence.  And so, in that process then these things all relate to all of those kinds of interactions.

Your Purpose

So let’s talk about these six elements.  We’re going to dive in.  The first one is your PURPOSE.  Your purpose could also be called your passion, but this is really about why you care.  It is so fundamental and important to have a sense of purpose, to give you meaning, to give you a reason to, you know, go that extra mile to get over that hump, to walk through the fire that you’re going to walk through in order to really offer what you have to offer well.  Having that sense of purpose and knowing why you care is incredibly important.

We’ve talked about this in a number of episodes.  I am going to a link in our show notes.  We will link to different episodes that have tackled some of these elements so that you can easily go back and see where we’ve already covered some of these things.  For now, just know that purpose is about why you care.  You need to know your purpose and have a purpose.  Whether it’d be something that you feel like is your own purpose and calling and that sort of thing, or if it’s something that you can align yourself to.

A lot of times when we’re working in a company, for a company, their purpose, the company’s purpose may not be exactly what our purpose is or what your passion, where your passion lies and that sort of thing.  But as long as it aligns with your purpose, as long as it fits together with what you care about, then you can still harness the power that comes with having a purpose and be able to utilize that.  So, the first category then is having a purpose.

Now, the Purpose at Voice of Influence is to help connect people’s gifts and expertise with the need in the world.  So, people and companies helping them connect what they have to offer with the need that is in the world.  That is something that drives us so that is incredibly important when it comes to what we do and why we care.  We see the need in the world.  We see your gifts, your talents, your expertise, and we’re saying, “Let’s figure out how to connect that.”  “I do not like dizzy thing go unconnected.”  So, we love to help make those connections with folks, so your purpose.

Your Style

And then your STYLE is the second element.  This is about how you show up.  What is the way that you do this?  How do you show up?  It’s kind of your personality.  Sometimes it has to do with your gifting, but certainly, the way that you show up in your personality.  The thing that we find that is so important about style is that folks often feel like they shouldn’t be the way that they are, or they don’t want to fully own who they are inside and then it doesn’t show up on the outside.  And it just really depends on the person, OK?

So, there’s a spectrum of different ways that we handle this, but let’s say on one side of the spectrum, there are people who want to be chameleons and sort of fit in with everybody else because we’re afraid of standing out.  We’re afraid of looking like we want to have attention, that sort of thing.  But maybe we do want attention or maybe we don’t want attention, but we need to receive attention in order to get a message out.

So, style and how we show up then for that person could mean owning who they are and showing up in a bigger way.  For somebody else, on maybe the other side of the spectrum, it could be that they are so out there and they beat everybody to the punch.  They are bigger than life and almost to the point where they’re covering up.  On the outside, they’re so big and flamboyant or extreme on the outside that they’re covering up something very, very intimately fragile on the inside.  And that fragileness on the inside then doesn’t have a chance to come out because it’s being covered up by a show.

Now, there are all kinds of people in between or perhaps on even further in different directions; who knows.  But how you show up authentically as yourself and knowing who you are being that person with others and then also at the same time being able to communicate and meet people where they are.  This is an interesting delicate kind of a balance.

It really comes down to being authentic.  It comes down to knowing who you are, being that person with others and caring about them enough that you don’t have to be you.  You know that you can make adjustments in order to meet somebody where they are.  So, the person who is naturally maybe loud, let’s say, like I’m naturally more of a sharer, there are times when I have to be quiet in order to meet somebody where they are, because they’re not going to share as much if I just start sharing.

So, there is this interesting balance that we have to kind of consider when it comes to being authentic, owning our voice, but at the same time doing it for the sake of others means being authentic to ourselves while at the same time meeting them where they’re at.  And that can be difficult but it is achievable.  You can do that.

And what I found with my own personal style is that I do tend to be dramatic.  I tend to be deep and intense.  I talk about all these things in my book UNFROZEN: Stop Holding Back and Release the Real You. I really went through a lot of struggle in my own life to figure out what was real about all of that and what wasn’t real or wasn’t me.

What I found is that when I’m feeling tension inside, when I’m feeling fear inside, when I’m feeling shame internally and that is unresolved inside of me, then I’m going to end up showing up as something that I’m not.  I’m going to show up in a way that is more self-protective.  That is more about me taking care of me and my ego than it is about loving others and serving them.

When it comes to our style, Voice of Influence, one of the ways that we know that we’re in-step with who we are in our style and how we’re showing up is if we’re not feeling that tension, if we are feeling free to be able to offer and love well.  So that’s something that you can consider for yourself, your style, if you’re feeling that tension.

If you’re feeling resentment and anger and sometimes righteous anger is legitimate and you should consider that as something that maybe is more of a passion or a purpose.  But when it’s indignation, when it’s, “Uh, I cannot believe they would do that,” that sort of thing.  Look, these are things that indicate that you are not totally resolved inside to be able to show up in a way that is true to who you really are and what you really want, which is to serve others well, to love them well, and to fulfill your purpose.

Your Message

And so this is Purpose, why you care; Style, how you show up.  And then MESSAGE, these are the words that you say.  Words that you say and how you show up are both part of your message truly.  But when it comes down to it, you actually need real words to be able to say, “You need to know what exactly you’re trying to communicate.”  “You need to know what your core message is.”  It’s one of the first things that we started doing at the Voice of Influence was to help people find their core message and get clear on the fact that you have to have a tiny message at the top, something that is specific and helpful to somebody else in order to be able to bring a bigger message behind it.

And so I call that the arrowhead alignment of a message, and we have talked about that some on the podcast.  So, I will make sure to link to an episode in the show notes on that one.  It’s about being really clear on what you’re going to say about your message, you know, what is it that you’re actually going to say?  One of the hardest things I think for people who tend to be more creative or passionate is that they might have a lot of different ideas, a lot of different things that they care about.  And it’s hard to narrow it down.  It’s hard to get more clear.  But if you’re wanting to come across as clear, you’re going to have to get clear for yourself.

And so, finding those words that you say are super important and the core message of Voice of Influence is when you align your voice or what you do and what you say with who you are, you will have more connected relationships and a bigger impact in the world.  That is the core of what we’re saying.  We are very clear on the fact that we want to help people get to that point where they can align what they do and what they say with who they are because that is where they’re going to find their voice of influence.

We also have other messages and you should have other messages that you’re really wanting to convey that you, you know, feel like are really important to you.  And we’re going to talk about having an anthem or a real clear set of values in Episode 102, so I’ll be working out for that one.  We’re going to be talking about what it means to have additional messages that are core to who you are and what you’re bringing as a team or what you’re bringing as an individual.  So we’ve talked about your Purpose, which is why you care; your Style, which is how you show up; your Message, which are the words that you say.  So we’re halfway done.

Your Offering

We’ve gotten down your OFFERING, what you can do to help.  All of these things, words are just words.  If you do not have something to offer, if you are not actually doing something for others, if you’re not putting out something that others can actually, you know, use or listen to or if you’re not serving them in some way, if there is no offering, then it makes it really hard to communicate a message.

A message in and of itself is nothing until you actually put it into some sort of creative contribution that you’re making to the world.  And so the question then becomes, what is your offering?  What can you do to actually help?  With Voice of Influence, our offerings have to do with training and coaching and strategy and these sorts of things.  And so we have a number of different offerings including the Voice of Influence Academy that allows us to draw from different teachings and different trainings that we have in order to create custom programs for our clients.

The Voice of Influence Academy is one of our offerings, but so is coaching and so as group coaching and the Fascinate Assessment and a number of different things that are aligned with our message and our style and our purpose.  And we want to encourage you to find an offering that aligns with who you are. And with offering, it may mean that you have to say no to other things in order to be able to do the thing that you really should be doing, that you really feel called to do.

While many of us have many opportunities to say yes to this committee and that nonprofit and this one and that and, “Oh my goodness, there are so many opportunities to serve in the world.”  And if you haven’t found those, if you haven’t found opportunities to serve or places that you can offer your gifts, even aside from your work, then I would encourage you to open up your mind to the possibility that there are a lot of opportunities out there and that you have to just go out and start to explore those and see them for yourself.

But because you have a specific voice of influence, you’re not just doing everything.  Instead, you’re going to need to narrow it in a little bit and make some decisions on what is going to be most in line with who you are with your purpose, your style, and your message.  OK, so now let’s figure out what you want to offer.

Your Strategy

Then the fifth element is STRATEGY.  This is about how you share your offering.  Now, in some situations it just means getting a job.  It just means getting the right job.  But really it doesn’t just mean, “OK, now I’m on this committee,” or “Now, I have this job and now I’m just going to play this role, this is my strategy.”  But instead when you consider your purpose, your style, your message and your offering, what is the best way forward?  What are some things that you want to do that will help you to share your offering better?

So, one of our strategies at Voice of Influence is to have a podcast.  So we’re going to have a podcast, we are going to get our message out there.  It’s going to give us an opportunity to connect with guests, to connect with listeners, to potentially help them to see a lot of these things for themselves.  And maybe there are a few people in the mix who are going to eventually want to work with us as a company as well.  So this is part of our strategy.

Other pieces of our strategy have to do with going out and speaking.  I’m doing a lot of speaking and going to conferences and getting in front of audiences who could potentially use what we have to offer, not just anywhere but places and getting in front of the audiences that actually need what we have to offer.  This is not about feeding my ego and getting me in front of big audiences just to get me in front of big audiences.  This is even tackling or going for smaller audiences of people who actually do need what we have to offer.  Then we are kind of more quickly getting to the path that we’re trying to get down, you know, moving down our path.

So for you, what choices do you want to make about your strategy that don’t have to do with your ego, but do have to do with what is the best path forward?  What’s going to turn the needle the most?  My husband is the one that’s kind of always talked about this with me, “That doesn’t turn the needle for us, Andrea.  So, it’s not worth doing it.”

And as I started our business and we’ve kept going, I started to realize what exactly he’s talking about because there are times when I have great ideas, I have lots of ideas, but what is going to actually turn the needle on our purpose and getting us closer to the goals that we have, the vision that we have, what is actually going to turn the needle?  And that’s what you need to be thinking about when you’re thinking about your strategy.

Your Community

OK, and then your COMMUNITY.  This is the last piece.  This is about who you serve, not about who you’re leading, not about you being in charge of people.  This is about who you’re serving and you’re going to serve people in different ways.  There are different people in your life who need different things from you and who you want to serve in different ways.  Maybe this friend of yours, for example, maybe they are a great friend you love having fun with them, but you’re not going to talk to them about deep things inside of your heart because they’re not the kind of person that really likes to talk about that stuff.  And they’ve shown you that that’s not something they can handle, so OK, no problem.  I will reserve that sharing these really deeper things for another situation or just, you know, share minimally.

So, with your community, you’re not just saying, who am I targeting?  That is part of it.  You know, who is this?  Who is the person who needs what I have to offer?  This is an important question to ask, not just who needs it, because a lot of times you could say, the whole world needs what I have to offer, which of course I feel that way about Voice of Influence, everybody needs to know how to have a voice of influence, right?  But that’s not the only criteria.  Here, we’re also talking about who is it that not only needs what you have to offer but is open to it and wanting it, and looking for it.  Maybe they have a pain point inside that is driving them to look for an answer and you have that answer.

You need to know who those people are and what those pain points are.  How can you help them to see that you actually do have what they need?  And as I mentioned at the beginning, one of our great purposes at Voice of Influence is really about connecting people’s gifts and expertise with the need in the world.  Well, that is a lot of this community piece.  Who is it that we are here to serve and what is it that they need from us?  Why are they looking for what we have to offer?

For us, for Voice of Influence, we know that there are customer service teams, for example, who want to have influence or who might be feeling like they don’t have influence, that they are just there to answer questions.  They’re just there to clean up the mess.  But really, we’re missing out on such an opportunity to serve and to draw in our customers and build customer loyalty if we’re not helping our customer service teams to really have a voice of influence.

Because if they know what their purpose is, they show up with their style and their message and the offering of the company and they know the strategy and they understand the customer who they’re serving, then they can come to their job with a sense of purpose and they’re going to go the extra mile.  They’re going to do what they can to help.  And all of that is going to lead to building customer loyalty.  That human element that you really can’t control, it’s something you can only release.

And so, this is something that we know that customer service teams that are really looking forward to build customer loyalty, those are the ones that we can really serve.  We can serve them, and so those are the audiences we’re trying to get in front of and that sort of thing.  But at the same time, we also know that there are leaders and executives who want to lead well, who want to do a better job of getting buy-in from their teams.  These are also things that we do at Voice of Influence, and so those are also people that we recognize we serve.

So, my question for you is who do you serve?  Who is it that needs what you have to offer?  This is your community and then the people that aren’t open to what you have to offer, they need something else from you and that’s OK.  You don’t have to be all things to all people and you don’t have to try to knock down every door to make sure that everybody gets what you have to offer.  That’s OK, you don’t need that.  Instead, what you need is you need to go through the open doors.  You need to look for the open doors.

Sometimes you got to knock, but very rarely should you ever knock down a door just to get somebody to take what you have to offer.  These are the elements, the six elements of having a voice of influence.  These are the things that we build into, the things that we address, the things that we help other people to cultivate either individually or in their teams.  And what we want to provide for you here on the podcast, we want to give you the resources to be able to think through these elements for yourself.

When you get pretty clear on these things, then you’re going to show up in a way that has more purposeful that does have a clear message with, you know, more confidence for who you’re here to help and serve or work with or collaborate with or what you’re here to truly accomplish. And so that is what we have created for you moving forward.  We want to offer you podcast episodes that are going to address these elements.  And really most of the ones that we’ve already done in the past do address these elements in some way.

And so the question for you is what are you doing right now?  How is this helping you to grow as a voice of influence in your purpose, your style, your message, your offering, your strategy, or your community?  I just want to thank you for listening.  I want you to thank you for being here.  It is an honor, a deep honor that you would listen to what we have to say here, and I counted a privilege.  I counted a huge responsibility to be serving you in this way and I hope that it’s been helpful.

If you have listened to over let’s say five podcast episodes, would you consider going to your podcast player wherever you listen to podcasts and leave us a review, particularly on Apple podcast.  That would be so helpful for us as Voice of Influence, the podcast and for helping other people to find the podcast.  I’ve not asked for reviews very often and I know I probably should do that more, but I thought, “Well, you know what, it’s episode 100, let’s go ahead and ask you to leave a review.”

So if you have listened to over five episodes, would you go and find your podcast player and leave us a review.  We’d so appreciate it and we will read them.  We will take a look and see what you have to say and you can always email us also at andrea@voiceofinfluence.net. I would love to hear from you, especially if something that we’ve shared with you here on the podcast has made a difference, we’d love to hear about it.

It’s so fun to hear from you and to hear the things that you’re doing in your community, in your place of business, in your families because of what you’ve listened to here and what you’ve heard and, and how you’re applying it.  And so that’s what it’s all about.  It’s about making a difference.  And so we wish that for you.  Go and leave that review on the podcast player that you listened to.  Take these six elements and make your voice matter more.

I know that that comes at a cost to you personally, and I just want to thank you for your courage and for taking risks.

 

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Reframe Your Company’s Future with Aviv Shahar

Episode 99

Aviv Shahar enables Fortune 500 companies to create purpose-inspired visions that bring out the best in their people and catalyze growth. As the President of Aviv Consulting and the author of Create New Futures, Aviv guides executive teams at companies around the world to dramatically accelerate the achievement of their business results. In this episode, Aviv discusses what it means to create a new future as leaders of teams and in our personal lives, how “collective stupidity” inspired Aviv’s work, the importance of creating a learning culture, why it’s difficult for leaders to listen to others and even themselves, the two layers of having an authentic voice, the four quadrants of conflict, how he helps his clients improve their introspection skills, the five levels of integrity, and so much more! Mentioned in this episode:

Play here (the red triangle below), on iTunes, Stitcher or TuneIn Radio (Amazon Alexa) or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Aviv Shahar Voice of Influence Andrea Joy Wenburg
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How to Choose to Lead With Joy with Danny Williamson

Episode 97

Danny Williamson is a communicator, humorist, Navy veteran, and poet who’s absolutely passionate about joy. He has more than sixteen years of leadership and ministry experience serving in the U.S. Navy, as a co-founder of a non-profit mission organization, as a church planning missionary in Argentina, and as an associate pastor in California.

Danny has a bachelor’s degree in Religion and a master’s degree in Executive Leadership. He is also the author of the recently released book called Where’s the Joy?: An Invitation to Look Up, Reach Out, and Experience Life’s Greatest Treasure.

In this episode, Danny discusses the three main professional activities he’s currently involved in, how he manages his time to allow room for all the things he does, how he became interested in the topic of joy, the importance of understanding that we have a choice to be joyful and to bring joy to those around us, the four main choices we make that impact our joy and the joy of others, how we can choose to be more grateful, the value of bringing joy into our leadership style, how a nun taught him one of the greatest lessons of leadership, the power of listening, and more!

Mentioned in this episode:

Play here (the red triangle below), on iTunes, Stitcher or TuneIn Radio (Amazon Alexa) or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Transcript

Hey, hey!  It’s Andrea and welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast! Today, you’re going to enjoy a lot.  I’ve got Danny Williamson who is a Communicator, Humorist, Navy Veteran and Poet, who is absolutely passionate about joy.  He has more than 16 years of leadership and ministry experience serving in the U.S. Navy, a Co-Founder of a non-profit mission organization, a church-planting missionary in Argentina and an associate pastor in California.  His educational background includes a bachelor’s degree in religion and a master’s degree in executive leadership.  And he is the author of the recently released book called Where’s theJoy?

Andrea:  And it is great to have you with us here today on the Voice of Influence podcast, Danny!

Danny Williamson:  Oh, thanks for having me, Andrea.  It’s a real honor and joy to be here.

Andrea:  It’s awesome! OK, I really want to dive into your book, but before we do that, let’s kind of give the listener a little context.  So you play a few different roles in your life.  Can you share with us the main, I guess, career things that you’re doing right now?

Danny Williamson:  Absolutely. The number one thing I love to do is motivational speaking, which ties in with authoring this book as well.  And the passion behind that is to awaken joy in everyday life, both in my life and those I’m communicating with that a sense of joy is being awakened in their life through that.  The other thing I’m involved in is called the Collective Global.  It’s a cultural consulting firm, where we help teams and companies, organizations, non-profits, large corporations, small startups; you name it.

I really help them with a simple path that we have that enhances their performance and improves team satisfaction as well as customer satisfaction and even the long term result as an increase of profit.  So, it’s exciting to do that and then come alongside teams and champion them in their efforts and help them communicate better and work with greater levels of creativity.

The third thing I do is I’m an executive director for a non-profit faith-based organization called Speaking Louder that was founded by the Christian music artist, Jeremy Camp.  And really the mission for that is to declare the hope of Jesus throughout the world with music, testimony, and service.  So those are the three main jams that I’m part of.

Andrea:  And how in the world do you have time in your life for all of these things?

Danny Williamson:  Yeah, that’s a good question.   Sometimes, it feels a little scattered.  But really, it comes down to planning out my week and just having in line what needs to be done, when it needs to be done, and strengthening those relationships that I have as well as trying to be a good dad and a good husband.  So, it all kind of ties together, but it works out.  There’s always a way.

Andrea:  Yeah.  You know, that really gets me thinking about how people do this sort of thing, like how you schedule your life or schedule these various different aspects of…do you have a system?  That is such a weird question, but do you just kind of regularly look at what you have going on and then put it into place?  How do you make sure that you tackle all the right things at the right time?

Danny Williamson:  Yeah, that’s a great question.  Ultimately, it comes down to the start of my day.  I really try not to look at what I have for the day.  You know, the first hour of my day, I really don’t even look at my phone other than my alarm clock.  And I really try to set that early part of my day as almost a quiet time, whether it’s sitting on my front porch with a cup of coffee or even sitting in my kitchen at a bar stool there and just kind of setting my heart right for the day.

I’ve been doing that for, I would say, 20 plus years every morning.  And it sets the pace for the day then 0my thoughts are organized.  I’m not trying to clutter in and jam in as soon as I wake up everything I have to do.  And then once I have that early quiet time in the day then when I am ready to look at those tasks, it’s much more organized in thought.  I’m not going at it frantically like, “OK, this is what needs to be done.”

When it does come time to looking at those things I need to accomplish throughout the day, I’m a big checkbox guy.  I love having that little square next to, you know, things I need to do and just go through one at a time and kind of prioritize them and then go from there and check them off as I go.

My wife discovered this about me early on in our relationship that I’m a checkbox guy, so she realized if she wants me to get things done around the house, she needs to put a check or like a box next to it and then I’ll get it done because it drives me crazy when it’s just open space and I need to check it off.

Andrea:  Sure.  Well, you know, overwhelm is such a killer of joy.  So just the fact that you have a system, you have this way of doing things that frees you so that you can, can enjoy life is a pretty big deal.

Danny Williamson:  Absolutely, yeah.  Coffee helps too.

Andrea:  OK, so tell us a little bit about why you got interested in this topic of joy in the first place.  Why did you decide that this would be the book?  What was the thing that you yeah, yeah.

Danny Williamson: Yeah.  I began to realize that joy is something we all want.  I’ve yet to meet a person in this world, and I’ve traveled over 35 different countries.  I’ve yet to meet a person in this world who doesn’t want joy.  And I’ve had seasons in my life where I’ve been in valleys or I’m just wondering, “Hey, where is this joy in my own life?”  And I realized I’m not the only one who wants it.  So everybody in this world wants it.

I want it, and so I created this desire in me like, you know, I want to start awakening joy in everyday life because if we have joy on the inside happening in our inner man and who we are as a person, as a human being, then that’s going to affect the joy we have in our home setting.  And then if we enjoying our home, that’s going to result in joy at work, whatever we’re doing for our career.  So it starts in the inside then it transfers into our home and then it transfers into our work and our leadership environments.

And so this word to Joy, I think a lot of people too identify joy.  They hear it and they just think it’s rainbows and hula hoops and Cheerio’s and Easter bunnies and all those things, which yet it is but it’s so much more.  And I’ve found it to be the secret sauce of leadership.  It’s what keeps people going with their purpose and motivates even our passions this idea of joy because joy really is a strength.  It lightens the load, if you will.  And we’re able to get things done in a more efficient manner, I think when there’s a skip in our step and even a smile on her face.

So, there’s just a lot of power in joy.  And thus I was like, “Let’s dive into this.”  And me writing this book wasn’t this bucket list idea I was like, “Hey, you know what, there’s really something to this, this message of joy.”  And I began to see it everywhere.  I mean, even McDonalds is using the word joy in there tagline now.  So joy is just this desire that everybody’s really…they have a desire for it and a lot of times we don’t even realize it.  And so I want to wake in joy in everyday life.

Andrea:  You know, one of the things that we’re just talking about, it really flips motivation on its head.  So it seems to me like what typically happens is that we are driven by work, which then impacts how we feel at home.  And you’re saying, start from the inside and go to work so that your joy impacts or your attitude, whatever it might be, but hopefully it’s a joyful one, impacts your work instead of letting your work drive how you feel at home.  I love that!

Danny Williamson:  Exactly, exactly.  Yeah, you nailed it.  And also I realized that joy isn’t necessarily something we can go out and choose like, “Hey, I0 wanna be happy today.”  I call it as a beautiful byproduct of life’s most important choices.  So if we’re making choices, which I can talk about in a second, but if we’re making specific choices, like love for example, you know, if I’m making a choice to love, then the byproduct of that is this joyful life.

So there are a lot of other things, vulnerability and community and things that I talk even throughout the book.  But, it’s these choices that we make in life that contribute to our joy, which ultimately will contribute to helping our careers that will help how we operate at work. It won’t make a burdensome work environment.

Andrea:  OK, so before we go on into the choices, let’s just talk about why it’s so important that we believe that we have a choice?

Danny Williamson:  Yeah, yeah, because life is really about choices.  When you say that it comes down to, we have these choices in life that are presented before us and how is this choice going to affect this person.  How is this choice going to affect my employees if I’m in a leadership position?  And so how are we going to narrow down?  What are these vital choices that I need to make?  How is this going to impact?

I’m a big fan too when it comes to choices.  I don’t know if you’ve read Man’s Search for Meaningby Viktor Frankl, but I’m a big fan of that logo therapy types of thought where you’re looking at your life backwards in a sense of like, OK, if I’m 80 and if I’m looking at my life as if I was 80, would I be making the same choices I’m thinking about making right now?  So it really helps and contribute.

Andrea:  Yeah, I think that one of the most important things that you seem to be bringing to the table here in this discussion with joy is that people do have a choice to be joyful.

Danny Williamson:  Yeah.

Andrea:  And instead of feeling like this sort of the whole thing, and we were talking about just a minute ago with how work can make us feel a certain way then we carry out throughout our life instead of being the person that then has the agency and the ability to make a difference because we’ve made these choices.  And so what are some of these choices that we actually have that we may not even realize that we have?

Danny Williamson:  Yeah, I like to call them “dambusters” if you will, these choices.  And four main dambusters that I really try to narrow in on, the first would be vulnerability – choosing to be vulnerable.  And vulnerability, it’s more than transparency.  Transparency is letting the word out of who you are and being an open book.  But vulnerability goes even deeper to that where you actually beginning to let people inside.  You’re beginning to let people inside who you are.

For example, Donald Miller wrote a great book called Scary Close.  And in that he said, “How tragic would it be to come to the end of your life and you realize that those who loved you the most never really knew you.  They never knew the poems you had up your sleeve.  They never knew the dreams you had.”  And so this choice of vulnerability, it just has a way of breaking open this river of joy in our life.

It was Brene Brown who said, “Joy really is founded and the birthplace of joy is found in vulnerability.”  And so if we’re willing to be vulnerable, it opens up this wide world of joy.  So vulnerability is huge.  And this one’s a little bit tougher, but it goes more to the heart and this is the idea of forgiveness.  And a lot of times we can be so wrapped up with those who hurt us and made bad choices against us, and we’re not willing to let them go.  And so if we’re willing to forgive, it has this wonderful effect on our life in regards to joy.  And all forgiveness is just a release of those who have hurt us, releasing them.  It doesn’t mean what they’ve done to us is by any means right.  It’s very wrong what’s happened, but we just release them.

And then the third thing is community.  The reason I’m big on community is if you think about it in regards to laughter, it’s really hard to belly-ache laugh when you’re all alone.  We really need people, you know, and so if there’s going to be a sense of laughter and sense of joy in our life, we need to make this choice of community, like let’s not isolate ourselves.  And if we’re in a working environment, let’s not try to do everything ourself.  Let’s really connect with our employees.  Let’s have this relationship where we’re communicating well with one another and then let’s open up this wonderful door of joy.

And then the last thing is just gratitude, having an attitude of gratitude, if you will.  So that’s just a choice to be thankful; a thankful hearts, a joyful heart.  So let’s be thankful for what job we actually have.  You know, let’s be thankful for the position we have, whether we’re flipping burgers or up in a C-suite.  You know, let’s look at life for what it is and make that choice of gratitude.  It has a marvelous way of opening up a door of joy.

Andrea:  I’m curious what you would say to this question about how does somebody choose to be grateful?

Danny Williamson:  Uh, yeah.  It’s actually the subtitle of my book, you know, an invitation to look up and sometimes I just think we need to put our phones down and this is very practical way to be grateful.  Put our phones down because comparison is literally a thief of joy.  And when we have our phones and we’re stuck on our social media, and I like technology just as much as the next guy, I appreciate my iPhone all that kind of thing.  But at the same time, a simple way to just begin to operate this idea of gratitude is just to look up, “Wait a second, the sky’s blue today.”  “Oh my goodness!”

And you know a way to practice gratitude is showing how thankful you are for other people.  And I like to challenge people and like, “Hey, tell somebody, a stranger if you will, or tell an employee how awesome they are.”  You know, it’s amazing to see what happens to their face and their countenance just literally lights up when you say, “Hey, has anyone told you you’re awesome yesterday?” And they’re like, “No, well thank you! And you know, “You are!”  And I think our employees need to hear that.  Our coworkers need to hear that.  Our family members need to hear that.

You know, for example, “Andrea, you’re awesome!  You are.  You really are. You’re crushing it,” you know.  So people need to hear that and so that’s this whole idea of gratitude.  You just become to be thankful for those around you and it makes some marvelous impact on where you are.

Andrea:  It sounds like you’re saying something along the lines of do the thing that those people who are grateful do.  So it’s like you start with doing it so that maybe it’ll change the heart.

Danny Williamson:  Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, it’s absolutely true.  Now, if we’re to lead into like leadership, if you will, how these ideas of joy come into leadership.  Because you can look at joy as just a feeler and that kind of thing but something can happen when we can bring in joy into our leadership, how we lead.  If we’re able to lead with a joyful countenance, it’s much easier to follow than someone who’s there with a sledgehammer, will you agree?

Andrea:   So, so true!

Danny Williamson:  Yeah.  And so I think of a joyful bosses I’ve had.  I’m like, “Man, I want to keep working for you.  This is inspirational.”  And so that’s why we want to bring in, you know, in regards to consulting and those things like, “Hey, let’s bring this atmosphere of joy and helping even redefine this idea of joy.”  People think it just means like putt-putt golf in the lunchroom.  It’s like, “No, let’s go beyond that where it’s like there’s actually an attitude of joy.”

And this comes out through having things like the joy of grit, like there’s a joy and satisfaction of sticking to something.  You know, I think of navy boot camp and when I was in the navy and boot camp was rough.  I mean, I remember my drill instructor had tattoos up all the way up his neck wrapping around his ear.  And I’m like, “Man, this guy’s gnarly,” you know.  But I pressed on and made it through that boot camp and then went on to my next training and made it through that.  And then I was able to look back at the six years I spent in the navy, I was like, “You know what, that just taught me a lot of grit.”  And some of it was painful and some of it was so difficult, but there was such a joy in completing that work.

And so that’s what I call the joy of grit that we can really begin to apply for our leadership.  And then there’s the joy of gentleness, which I think we can forget about in leadership that there’s such power in just gentle leadership.  But the only way we can have a gentle approach in leadership is if we’re operating from a place of rest.  And that rest is so vital because you know, we can actually get so much more done if we operate from a place of rest than if we’re just striving and striving and striving and striving.

So if we can tap into this idea of rest, sometimes it’s literal rest, like are we taking our lunch break to just check on her phones and do all these things.  And as we’re taking a bite of salad we’re looking at our phone at the same time or we’re actually pausing in our day, you know.  Say, we have a 10 minute window, let’s step outside for a second, take a quick walk around the block of wherever our offices at or wherever it may be, and just get outside of that space we’re in and just to create some space in our head, that white space, if you will.

So that rest contributes to this joyful gentle leadership because if we’re tired, we’re going to be grumpy.  And so, we really need that sense of rest.  And then the last part I would say in attitude is when it comes to joy in leadership is the joy giving.  And I would say, one of the greatest lessons of leadership I ever learned came from a nun. I had the opportunity to sit next to a nun in an airplane for about two and a half hours and it was an amazing interaction.  She was humorous and she’s just really delightful to be around.

And what was interesting, I asked for her name and said her name was Beatrice.  That name actually means the joy giver.  So I was like, “Oh my goodness, I have to know more about this.” “So tell me what it means that joy for you.”  And really what it all came down to what I learned from her is the joy of giving.  I mean, she gave up everything and she lived a very, very just simple life and she lived in Ireland serving this small village, you know, community and it really narrowed it all down to the joy of giving.  She just found such treasure in giving.

So, if we, as leaders can just begin to give of ourselves, give of our hearts, give of our wisdom, give of our insight where we’re not afraid to give, there’s such joy in that. It really is better to give than to receive.

Andrea:  Well, I think especially when you really believed that there is plenty to give.

Danny Williamson:  Yeah, absolutely!  Like that nun didn’t have a penny to her name. She really didn’t, but she had so much to give.  And so, you know, giving is far than just writing a check, you know, let’s give of our time.  Let’s give of the treasures, the things we’re gifted with we know we’re good at, let’s give those things.  Let’s share those things.  We don’t just have to hoard it to ourselves so that we can climb the ladder.  Let’s give of those things to bring people on the ladder with us, if you will.

Andrea:  When you’re working with leaders in the Collective Global and you are helping them to incorporate joy into their team performance, do you have any practical sort of suggestions that somebody could maybe apply to their own team?

Danny Williamson:  Yeah.  One thing I ask and I keep it real simple and I would say is listening.  Just this simple art of listening is so vital to our leadership.  And that’s something we try to do whether it’s consulting, even in motivational speaking, there’s an atmosphere of listening that I need to do as a communicator, or in Speaking Louder in my non-profit, I need to be listening to what the culture needs if we’re going to do an effective mercy project.

So, it all comes down to this idea of listening.  It literally can save a team if a leader is just willing to stop for a second and telling all these people, do this, do this, do this.  He needs to stop or she needs to just stop and listen.

And one of our clients is really fascinating.  They have a CEO switch recently and the guy who is coming as a new CEO.  He’s created this thing he’s calling listening rooms where he’s actually creating an environment for teams to come in and he’s just sitting there quietly as the CEO listening, whatever they want to say, whether it’s event session, whether it’s a praise session, whatever it is.  He’s just opening up the door for people to talk. And in that, he is creating such an atmosphere of trust.  He’s showing him open to what you have to say.  He creates a sense of value.  You see when were listened to, we feel valued.  And so I just think there’s one word if we could just listen, it does so much. It might even save a life.

You know, a personal story real quick with me, I think of how my mom, when I was in my young teenage years, I really battled with some major depression and different things and even got to the point of contemplating suicide and those things.  I’ll never get what saved my life really was my listening mom.  She just sat next to me and just listened to my heartache, to my fears, to my girl problems, you name it.  She just listened.  And so listening can be so powerful in the home.  It can be so powerful at work.  The most effective leaders throughout the world are those who learned and tapped into the art of listening.

Andrea:  Very good.  Danny, you know, just the fact that you had been in that place at one time and now have come to the point of writing this book about joy and then letting this be your message is really powerful.  And I’m sure listeners, it’s a really important thing to understand that you have a choice, that you have the ability to make a change in how you’re feeling.  I guess I would suggest going out and getting this book and listening to what Danny has to say or reading what Danny has to say more about this and allowing your heart to be moved and to make these practical changes that you’re talking about, Danny, to do these things that could lead to the heart change.  That is really powerful!

Danny Williamson:  Uh-huh, thanks!

Andrea:  How can people get a hold of your book?

Danny Williamson:  Sure, sure.  It’s on Amazon.  It’s any place that you can order a book, you can find it.  A simple way to get in touch with me or to get a hold of the book or anything, it’s just go to my website, dannywilliamson.com and you can find the book there.  You can find your requests for speaking engagements there.  You can find out about are the Collective Global.  There’s a link there you can find out about Speaking Louder.  There’s a link there, so everything can kind of be narrowed down to dannywilliamson.com.

Andrea:  Awesome! And we will make sure that we have all of that information in the show notes so that people can quickly access that if they have any questions.  So, Danny, thank you so much for sharing your message with the Voice of Influence podcast listeners, and we wish you well on your book.

Danny Williamson:  Thank you so much, Andrea.  I really appreciate it.

 

END

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Setting Ego Aside to Achieve Exponential Growth with Johnathan Grzybowski

Episode 95

Andrea Wenburg interviews Johnathan Grzybowski of Penji about setting aside ego and exponential growth. They also talk about getting good graphic design at affordable prices.

Johnathan Grzybowski is the Chief Marketing Officer and Co-Founder of Penji, an on-demand graphic design service that is fast, simple, and affordable. Penji was named “Top Start-Up to Watch” by Philadelphia Magazine and has been mentioned in major publications like Success Magazine, Huffington Post, Forbes, and INC. Prior to Penji, Johnathan founded multiple marketing-related start-ups and worked for Apple. He is also the host of the Blind Entrepreneurship podcast. In this episode, Johnathan discusses why he started a graphic design service he says he’s the “least qualified” person to do graphic design work, what he believes helped Penji take off so quickly, what it’s been like to grow his company to nearly 50 team members in such a short period of time, how he helps his team members adopt the company culture, how he came to realize he needed to keep his ego in check, the two questions he always asks during the hiring process, and more!

Mentioned in this episode:

Play here (the red triangle below), on iTunes, Stitcher or TuneIn Radio (Amazon Alexa) or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Johnathan Grzybowski Voice of Influence Podcast Andrea Joy Wenburg

The Penji Process

As mentioned by Johnathan, Penji is an on-demand graphic design service. It offers unlimited graphic design, which means you can submit as many requests for design as you can. They also provide unlimited revisions to ensure that you get the exact design that you need.

And all that for a flat, monthly rate. You don’t have to pay for each project you need. Their plans are inclusive of the designs and revisions. Their design team consists of professional web designers, illustrators, app designers, and many others ready to take on a design job you may need.

They have made their design process straightforward. In just four easy steps, you can get your design anytime between 24 to 48 hours. Here are the steps:

●    Create

When you sign up for any of Penji’s affordable plans, you’ll get access to their platform. This is where you’ll submit your design requests and communicate with the designers. You’ll be asked to write a brief description of your project. You can attach references to let the designer know what you have in mind.

Your request will then be automatically assigned to the best designer for the job. What this means is that your project will be given to the designer most capable of creating that specific design.

After the turnaround time, you’ll get your first draft. You’ll be sent email notifications about the progress of your project.

●    Review

You’re then asked to review the draft and send them for revisions if you’re not entirely happy with it. Penji has a unique point-and-click revision tool that allows you to tell your designer exactly what to change. They have made their system simple so that you don’t have to go through a lot of back and forth emailing with your designer.

Wait for 12 to 24 hours for the designer to make the revisions.

●    Download

Once satisfied with the design, you can download it directly from the dashboard. You don’t have to wait for emails to come with your design. In addition, you get full ownership of the designs and use them whenever and however you want.

Who is Penji For?

Johnathan tells us that Penji is ideal for agencies and marketing companies. But they also cater to individuals and businesses of all shapes and sizes. Here are a few examples of who Penji is perfect for:

Agencies

A majority of Penji’s clients are agencies that are focused on creating strategies. They’d rather give the small tasks to Penji to give them more room and energy to do just that. When they have an overflow of work, agencies will benefit from Penji as they no longer have to hire additional staff. When the workload is manageable, they won’t have to let go of people.

Marketers

People in the marketing industry will understand how important graphic design is to get ahead. For marketers that need a constant supply of design, Penji is perfect for you. You don’t have to pay for every design that you’ll need, Penji can create them for you. From social media graphics to promotional print materials, you can send requests for it.

Bloggers

Almost everyone you know today has a blog. What used to be a hobby has now become a full-time endeavor. And to stand out from the crowd, stock images won’t do anymore. What every blogger needs are eye-catching images to emphasize their content and make them more relevant.

But as we commonly know, graphic design can be expensive. For bloggers, Penji is a dream come true. You can have amazing graphics for each blog post—all for a fixed monthly rate.

Startups

For startups that need effective branding identity as well as design assets, Penji is a smart choice. Hiring an in-house designer can put a strain on its limited resources. With Penji, they can get all their branding visuals without breaking the bank. They won’t have to rely on websites that create templated designs that look similar to everyone else’s.

Penji Pricing

Penji has three available plans. These are:

Pro Plan

For individuals such as bloggers or independent marketers, the Penji Pro plan is a solid choice. For $399, you’ll be getting unlimited graphic design and revisions. You and another team member can use it and have a daily turnaround. If you pay the subscription rate per quarter, you’ll only be charged $359 per month. A yearly payment will get you a 15% discount, which means you’re getting the service at only $339 per month.

Team Plan

For medium-sized companies and organizations, this is the plan for you. Penji’s Team plan includes all of what the Pro can offer and more. You can send requests for web and app designs, as well as custom illustrations and infographics. You can add four additional users for a total of five. The Team plan is $499 per month, but if you pay quarterly, it will be down to $449, and $424 if paid yearly.

Agency Plan

As the name suggests, Penji’s Agency plan is created specifically for agencies. It is ideal for businesses that require no less than 10 hours or more of design work per month. For $899 per month, you’ll get all that the Team plan offers and more. You will have two designers assigned to you, plus ten users and prioritized support. This gets you double the output, which is excellent for crunch times. You’ll also get discounts if you pay quarterly or yearly. You pay only $809 per quarter or $764 per year.

Penji Services

Penji covers a wide area of design categories. Take a pic from the list below:

  • Digital and print ads
  • Web and app design
  • Logos
  • Magazines, books/eBooks, newsletters
  • Social media content
  • Business cards
  • Brochures
  • Billboards and other outdoor advertising
  • T-shirts
  • Catalogs
  • Custom illustrations
  • Postcards
  • Restaurant menus
  • Banners
  • Landing pages
  • Stickers
  • Leaflets and flyers

 

If what you need isn’t on this list, don’t worry. They can custom create them for you. That’s how versatile their graphic designers are.

Transcript

Hey, hey!  It’s Andrea and welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast.  Today, I have Jonathan Grzybowski with me and I’m so excited.  We just have been chatting a little bit beforehand; you’re going to really enjoy him.  He’s the Chief Marketing Officer and co-founder of Penji and on demand graphic design service that is fast, simple, and affordable. Penji has been named as “top startup to watch” according to Philadelphia Magazine and has been mentioned in major publications like Success Magazine, Huffington Post, Forbes, and Inc.  Prior to Penji, Jonathan founded multiple marketing related startups and worked for Apple.  Jonathan is also the host of Blind Entrepreneurship podcast.  

Andrea:  So Jonathan, welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast!

Jonathan Grzybowski:  Yeah, thank you so much for having me.  Excited to share as much value as I humanly possibly can.

Andrea:  Oh my goodness.  Ok, well, we better get started.  So why don’t you tell us first of all, a little bit more about Penji?  What is it?  How did it get started?

Jonathan Grzybowski:  Yeah.  Well, to get started thing has been like a freak accident to be perfectly honest with you.  Penji is an on-demand graphic design service.  Businesses hire us to do all the graphic designs that they need.  Some companies hire us because they need some type of ancillary design team.  Maybe they have designers in house, but they just have so much work that they just don’t want to do it themselves anymore, or maybe they have some of the projects that are a little bit above them, so they give us kind of the dirty work so to speak.

It’s expensive to hire a graphic designer, and it’s really hard to hire a good one.  It also takes a lot of time.  So, what we want Penji to be and what Penji is, is we want people to go on our website, feel, I guess enough trust that we’re able to do the work, and then we need to be reliable enough to complete it. 

So, you sign up for Penji, you get access to our team of designers that are all in-house.  We don’t freelance or outsource.  They’re all in-house graphic designers, and you can submit a design project and receive it in under 48 hours.  And you could do that as many times as you like throughout the course of the month.

And when it comes to actually finding it, we were an agency for several years and we had our ups and downs, lost clients, gain clients.  But every time we lost a client, they always said, “Hey, you’re not able to deliver results, but your design is kickass, and it’s really good, and it’s something that we really regret that we’re not able to work with you because the marketing side of your business sucks.”  Or “the development side of your business isn’t good.”

So, we explored that a little bit, and then we started testing it out and saying, “OK, this person said it and that person said, and more people said it, what’s the problem here?” 

So then we started interviewing our closest friends, interviewed close to about 200 people, and we asked them the same question.  We said, “Hey, what is the biggest problem that you’re having in your business today?”  

“OK, well, it’s graphic design.” 

“Alright, well, let’s figure that out.  If we built this type of service, would you buy it?” And there’s a bunch of other questions that we asked too, but that was kind of like the main ones.  “What is the problem that you have and if we built this, would you buy it?”  And the problem overwhelming, believe it or not, the people that we talked to, they all had a problem with graphic design or some form of variation of marketing. 

And then they said, “Well, if we build it, would you buy it?”  And again, that answer was yes and then we use that as like the basis of our initial customers.

Andrea:  Wow!  OK, so were you a graphic designer in the first place?

Jonathan Grzybowski:  If you asked me to design something, it would be the worst possible graphic design you will ever experience on the planet.  The answer is no, I’m not a graphic designer.  However, I was an agency owner that did all the graphic designs, even know he knew that he was awful at them and I did it for years.  And it wasn’t up until we started to grow when we really found some really good graphic design talent.

But for the most part, I did the graphic designs, all of the graphic designs for our business for years, and I’m the least qualified person to do so.  So feeling that internal struggle that I had and being able to translate that to like an actual business alongside my co-founders, it just was the perfect marriage and the exact business that we were meant to build.

Andrea:  So what was the agency before that?  I mean, what were an agency for what?

Jonathan Grzybowski:  We did SEO.  We did social media marketing, advertising management, web design and development, and app design and development.

Andrea:  Yeah, stuff like that.  OK, gotcha.  Alright, cool, so what you realized was that this was the big, big huge need and you’re just going to fill it however you had to fill it.

Jonathan Grzybowski:  Yeah, exactly.  Yeah, that’s exactly right.

Andrea:  Wow!  Yeah, interviewing 200 people is a lot too.

Jonathan Grzybowski:  I think you have to if you really want to like there’s so many startups out there that are just like have this idea, and I need a $100,000 to do so.  And then my first question is how many people did you talk to in order to make sure that this is a valid idea?  

“Oh, I didn’t know I was supposed to do that.” 

OK, well, I don’t even want to talk to you until you start putting any effort because if you get discouraged at like let’s just say 50 people and they all say that your idea is crap then how are you going to be able to see this idea to fruition?

Andrea:  So true.  Alright, so you guys got started with Penji then and from what I understand it took off pretty quickly.  How and why?

Jonathan Grzybowski:  I think, to be perfectly honest, I think luck is definitely on our side for sure.  I definitely think it has a lot to do with our skill as well of course.  But I think it was solving the problem.  

We’ve created something that had a huge need in the marketplace, and we are at the right place at the right time.  We started, as I mentioned before, our initial customer base was the people that our friends, like the people that we interviewed.  And a lot of them said, yes, that they need it, and then we kind of just grew from there.  

We said, “OK, well,” and this was before we even had software, by the way. So this is like two years ago, two and a half years ago.  We had no software.  We just knew that like this is something that we thought we could do.  So we had like 10 customers.  We’ve got those 10 customers pretty quickly and they’re paying us like I think it was $2.99 at the time.  And so we’re like “All right, we got ourselves some stuff here and the service is not what it was.”  

So, it was like a diet Coke version of what it is now.  And then we got our initial customer base, and then we asked for referrals that we built this awesome platform that now allows us to communicate and scale our business. And then fast forward, we used variations of like cold outreach.  

We were heavily connected.  I know you’re in Nebraska, heavily connected toward geographic region, which is right outside Philadelphia, so like a 30 mile radius of Philadelphia.  I can confidently say that there’s a large majority of people that are in our tri-state region that know what we do and know who we are, and we’re completely OK with them just knowing it, even though we have customers all over the world. 

But we’re trying to dominate our local sector first and then figuring out how to do it and then being able to scale it in other cities later on and in advertisements in SEO.  To some people that are maybe listening and think that SEO is dead, they couldn’t be more wrong.  A large majority of our traffic is generated and conversion is generated through SEO, which is higher ranks on Google.

Andrea:  Sure.  OK, so when you’re growing that fast and you’re having to put together a team, how many people are on your team at this point?

Jonathan Grzybowski:  I’d say like around a little under 50.

Andrea:  Wow!  OK, 50 people really quickly.

Jonathan Grzybowski:  We’re hiring more people, so it’s like 45-50.

Andrea:  Yeah, yeah.  And you continue to have to hire I’m sure as you grow.  So what’s been one of the biggest challenges in the short period of time in recruiting and then also just getting everybody on board with your whole process, your company DNA and that sort of thing?

Jonathan Grzybowski:  Yeah, it’s a great question.  When it comes to hiring, I don’t think we necessarily had an issue when it comes to that.  We’ve partnered up with a lot of great organizations that are in our area, one of them, particularly, is Hopeworks.  We’re in a technically an underserved community, which is a Camden, New Jersey.  And they help kids, youth, students, and residents kind of teach them job-related skills in the world of tech.  And so, we’re able to work with that organization in order to help these students and residents obtain jobs and we hired them.  So that’s definitely one area.

Andrea:  Really cool.

Jonathan Grzybowski:  Yeah.  We’re really proud of it.  We are definitely a community conscious organization, and we consistently believe in our community, and we believe in our people. 

But when it comes to our scaling, I think we’re a cash flow positive business.  We’ve never received an ounce of funding.  We don’t need funding.  We don’t want funding at this moment.  When the timing is right, maybe we’ll think about it, but we don’t need it.  So why go after it?  With that in mind, when you’re growing this by yourself, you have all these systems and processes in place that work really well for yourself because you’re the only one that’s doing it, you’re the only one that’s looking at it.

And then when you actually have to hire people to do the job, you really have to think about it like, “OK, if somebody has no idea even what the English language is and they’re learning it for the first time, would they be able to understand what it is that I’m trying to say to them?”  And being able to cookie cutter it for that individual that is for that job that was probably one of the hardest things to do just because you have so many processes and systems in place that work really well for you.  Now you have to be able to amplify that times a million.  That’s definitely one of them.

And then the last thing would be leadership.  I think it’s incredibly difficult to lead a team without having to ever really led a team before.  This is like my first “I’ve only had really one another job outside of this.”  So you really have to rely on reading, interviewing, talking to people and then just trial by fire.  There’s a lot of mistakes that we made, but I’m really proud of where we came from.

Andrea:  Wow!  OK, so, yeah, leadership.  Leadership is huge.  I know that you’re not the only leader at your company.  What is the leadership structure?

Jonathan Grzybowski:  So, I’m the CMO.  I do a lot of the sales and lead generation for our business, and I get the message out there as much as I possibly can.  We have my co-founder, which is a CEO, and he does the day-to-day operations in order to make sure that everything runs smoothly and is cohesive, but it’s safe to say that my job, in particular, is the lead generation and sales.

Andrea:  Gotcha.   So when it comes to making decisions together, and I know you co-founded it, when you’re working like this and you’re working so fast on something that’s growing so fast, and you’re with somebody else, you’re bound to come up against things that you disagree with each other about.  I mean, is that safe to say?

Jonathan Grzybowski:  Yeah, all the time.

Andrea:  OK, so how do you handle those things so that you can move through it and come to decisions?  How do you actually decide?

Jonathan Grzybowski: You really have to just completely check your ego at the door, and that is like so freaking difficult because you’re an entrepreneur because you feel like you have some form of ego that you could do it better than somebody else, right?  That’s always like the stature why you start a business or at least like, long story short, it’s ego, right?  You have to be able to check your ego at the door.  You have to be able to understand that, you know what, this person has put in this place for this particular reason.  And even though you may not agree, write down the thing that you said that you want to push forward, and it may not be right now, but make sure that you at least remember the decision that maybe like your co-founder made and be able to reach back out to them and say, “Hey, you know, I see here that the thing that you tried to push a couple of weeks ago just isn’t working correctly.  Do you mind if we give this thing a try instead?”

I think that has worked really well, but there are tons of disputes that we have even on like a, not so much anymore because we just have more dialogue and conversations, but at the very beginning, it’s just like, “I want my idea to go through.”  And he’s like, “I want my idea to go through.”  And now we’re butting heads.  

But I think at the end of the day you also have to understand that each of the ideas that are being presented are coming from a good place.  But I think where a lot of things butt heads with partnerships is that reluctant attitude of, like, always being right.  You constantly want to be the right, and you want to be like, I guess the star that comes up with the silver bullet so to speak. And I think, personally, it’s like giving him full reins of “This is the company that you’re leading, and you need to be able to do that. And as a co-founder, yes, I do have a say but this is why you’re in this position.  You focus on your job, which is leading the company.  I’ll focus on getting a crap ton of sales and growing the company through sales.”  And having, too, clear defined roles, I think is also very challenging to maybe do at first.  But you really just have to understand, like, what your strengths and weaknesses are.  He can’t do some of the things that I can do, and I can’t do some of the things that he can do, and I’m OK with that.

Andrea:  Was it pretty obvious to you when you started who was going to do which role?

Jonathan Grzybowski:  I would say, yeah.  I’d like to say that, like, I’m a millennial, so if you couldn’t tell.  And I would say that I’m, like, to give a millennial reference, I am like a level 19 Charmeleon that is on the path to becoming a Charizard.  To put it in layman’s terms, I’m just not there yet when it comes to my intellect and my ability to lead.  And I think that he is incredibly intelligent in particular, and I think that he’s just the better suit.  So I’ve come to terms with that. I’m OK with that.  And there’s going to be a time where, you know, maybe he takes to X degree, and I’d be able to come in, and I’d be able to help with the latter half.  So again, it’s just that open conversation and that transparency you need to have with your team.

Andrea:  Yeah, I love that.  I mean, it’s a hard conversation.  It’s a hard thing to figure out when you first getting started, there’s so many big bumps in the road.  Was there like a certain point in your life when you just really realize that, “Oh my gosh, my ego is getting in the way.  I’m done with this.”

Jonathan Grzybowski:  Oh yeah.

Andrea:  What was that for you?

Jonathan Grzybowski:  It’s not done with it because, like, you still have to have it, you need to have some type of backbone.  But, you know, I just think of like self-reflection is really important, like why do you constantly get into these silly arguments and you really have to like think about like what started it, right?  And then once you’re able to determine and have that conversation with yourself and look at yourself in the mirror and you’re like, “You’re the reason this argument started because your damn ego.” It takes a really long time to understand that and you really have to be OK with it and I think that’s why a lot of relationships fail.  Beyond this business is just relationships in general.  They fail because you’re not able to look at yourself in the mirror in the right light and then you end up just destroying whatever the good things that you have because you just want to be right all the time.  I’m OK with that.  I’m OK with not being right.

Andrea:  Yeah.  That was a hard thing for me too.  I think that is something that you kind of figure out sometime in your 20s probably.

Jonathan Grzybowski:  Yeah.

Andrea:  It’s just not the end of the world to not be right.

Jonathan Grzybowski:  Yeah.  And then is it right to like if you think about that, like at the end of the day, say you’re right.  Like “OK, what are you gonna get out of it?  Do you feel better about yourself?”  Maybe for a little bit, but I don’t know, I started asking myself really serious questions, like, “What is the point of this?  You know, what is the point of this argument?  Where does the point of this conversation?  What is the end result going to be?”  Large majority of the times these conversations are just there to destroy the relationship and if you see that going down that path, you need to be able to have the foresight and to say like, “Hey, like this isn’t going the right way that I wanted to, like I need to stop.”

Andrea:  OK, that’s great.  I like that.  I’m still kind of in awe of startups and how you have to grow in scale so quickly.  I’m particularly interested in how the people that are working, you know, for the company, how they’re dealing with customers, how you are making sure when they are dealing with customers that they’re using, you know, the voice of your brand and that sort of thing?  Is that something that has been a challenge that you’ve found a certain sort of solution for in your company?

Jonathan Grzybowski:  So the question was more so along the lines of how are you able to have a consistent brand image throughout the entire organization?

Andrea:  Yeah, especially when it comes to, you know, the frontline people working with customers.

Jonathan Grzybowski:  I’ll be honest, I don’t think we had that much of an issue with it and this could be _____, I’m not sure.  But at Penji, we’re a really tight-knit family, and we don’t call our team members employees, we call them team members, as I’m saying.  We don’t necessarily say that I’m the boss.  We discourage them from calling us bosses even though they do it as a joking matter.  But we just are a very well-oiled machine.  We don’t let our ego get in the way when it comes to leading.  And that, I think, has transpired in the way that we’re able to communicate with our customers, with our members. We have guidelines that we give our team, and it’s up to them to figure out like what their voice is.  And I’ll give you, like, an example.  We have a call every time somebody becomes a customer of ours.  We call them up and we say, “Hey, you know, welcome to Penji, welcome to the family.”  And like my swagger in doing that is going to be completely different than somebody else.  And so you kind of have to just say like, “Hey, this is the goal that we want to obtain from this particular conversation.  It’s up to you to make it your own.”

Andrea:  I love that.  I really do.  I love that.  We do a lot of work with customer service in helping customer service teams own their voice and that sort of thing.  And it’s so great when you come up, and you find a company that is so willing to let their people have a voice and own their own voice.  There’s something really significant about that.

Jonathan Grzybowski:  Yeah, I mean, the reason why you hire people to take over a particular job is because you believe that that particular individual is better than you or they could at least do just as good, if not a better job than you can.  And so, like, who are we to just shun that particular individual from being able to accomplish that?  It’s as simple as that.  We had a conversation about this.

In Philadelphia right now, there’s a thing called Philly Tech Week.  And my business partner and myself, we’ve had opportunities to speak.  We didn’t even realize it until like a couple of days ago, like the core message that we’re talking about is like we’re treating humans like humans.  It sounds so silly to say that out loud because you’re like, “Oh yeah, duh,” but it’s really difficult.  People don’t do that.  People don’t treat other humans like human beings.  They treat them as employees.  They treat them as sales.

Every time that we interact with people, we treat them as they want to be treated.  Do you want to receive a cold email?  Hell no.  Do you want to receive an email that says, “Hey, I really noticed that you love to Philadelphia 76ers, and they just won yesterday, amazing!  That’s awesome!”  You’d probably want to have that conversation versus like a sales call, and then maybe you can open up a conversation about sales or maybe you don’t.  It’s completely up to you.  

But I think that at the core what we do, and I think that what makes us successful and separates us from faster, I guess, startups that are able to succeed than others is that we’re really understanding of, like, who the people are that we’re working with and what their strengths are and what they bring to the table and letting them run.

And I just want to throw one more thing out there that I think could be really good to the audience is every time we hire somebody, there are times where we aren’t a good fit for this particular individual.  And there’s a time where they’re not a good fit for us.  And what we do is every time we bring on a new and new team member, we asked them two questions, what is your dream and how can we help you get there?  And there are times where we just can’t help that individual, simple as that.  There are times were like “This is the perfect fit, and this is exactly who we’re looking for.” And those two questions, in particular, give us a great understanding of what motivates that individual.  Do they want to make a $500,000 a year?  OK, well, you know, maybe that might be a little bit unrealistic, but let’s see what we could do.  And then maybe they just want to be able to provide a better life for their family, then that’s great.  We could definitely help with that, but at least we have an understanding of what motivates that individual from the beginning.

Andrea:  Yeah, those are really great questions, and I can imagine that it gives you a sense of who they are, what they care about, also to make sure that it’s in line with what you care about.

Jonathan Grzybowski:  Exactly.

Andrea:  So what does the company care about?  I mean you said being human and treating people as humans, do you have a mission?  Have you actually outlined these things for your…

Jonathan Grzybowski:  Yeah, we have.  I would say that like if I were to give like a mission/vision statement, so to speak, it would be helping those who help others.  We have a lot of initiatives that help our community and that helps those who help others.  I just think that that is, like, the core philosophy at the end of the day, it’s just helping those who help others.

Andrea:  That’s very cool.  So then you probably get a sense from the beginning then on if your team members or potential team members would be able to resonate with that, if they care about that, and if they’re in line with that?

Jonathan Grzybowski:  Yeah, absolutely.  And we ask questions specifically around that too.  If they don’t care about their community, then there’s a strong chance that we may not be a good fit for them.  And that’s OK, like, they can go and be successful at another company.  It’s just they may not be successful with ours.

Andrea:  So, who are some of the big influencers that have really spoken into your life, whether that be, you know, people that you’ve read or YouTube videos or whatever, like, who are some people that you’ve followed that have really influenced you, and your style, and, yeah, your voice of influence?

Jonathan Grzybowski:  I have been asked this question quite a bit, and I have never figured out a good enough answer for this question.  My family, my mom, and my dad are very blue collar individuals.  My mom is a lunch lady.  My Dad is a truck driver, and so you can probably put the two together that I didn’t come from money.  I grew up in a relatively poor neighborhood in Philadelphia.  And so, I don’t necessarily can look at those particular individuals as like inspiration because, you know, they worked really hard, but they’re not where I want to be.

And so, like, a lot of the things that inspire me, believe it or not, is kind of just like a self-motivated underlying tone of just having a better life for the people around me and having a better life for my future family, if that even comes up.  That’s kind of like the thing that motivates me.  

There are books that have inspired me, but I really try my best to kind of have my own voice and my own style. I definitely think early on in my career, there are people that I watched and listened to that I kind of just took everything from them, and I became like a carbon copy of those particular individuals.  But now, a little bit older, I’m realizing that, you know, I need to be my own self, and people need to either like it or love it or hate it.  That’s fine.  But at least I’m me at the end of the day.

Andrea:  Hmm, cool.  So Jonathan, is there anything in particular that you would want to encourage Voice of Influence listeners with?  Any kind of parting words of wisdom that you believe are really important when it comes to somebody wanting to build their voice of influence?

Jonathan Grzybowski:  Yeah, I would say, you can be an influencer, you can have a voice of influence, it could be to those people that are very specific and near and dear to your heart, which is right around you.  Or if you want to be more, so like a voice of influence to a general audience, you really have to look at yourself in the mirror and have a good understanding of what are your goals, and what is the plan that you want to take in order to become whatever it is.

In the very beginning for me, I thought to myself like, I want it to be the center of influence.  I wanted to be this like thought leader when it comes to millions of followers and all this and all that.  And I realized that like, you know what, if that comes, so be it.  If it doesn’t, I’m totally OK with it.  I don’t need that.  

What I do need is to be the voice of influence to the people that are trusting me with their lives, which is being a team member of a startup.  Startups are risky to work with. I definitely think that we’ve broken that path of riskiness now, but you know, there is a point in time where it was risky to work for us.  And I think that if you’re able to just have a conversation with yourself and have a better understanding of what you want to accomplish once you’re on your deathbed and be able to, you know, not to be morbid, but be able to look back at your life and be like, “You know what, it was all worth it.  All those risks were worth it.”  I think that’s how you could be the center of influence.

Andrea:  Awesome!  If I remember right, you have a deal, or what should I call it?

Jonathan Grzybowski:  Yeah.  Deal is fine with me.

Andrea:  Sure, OK.  You’ve got a deal for the listeners.

Jonathan Grzybowski:  At the end of the day, anytime you’re able to share your story, you have to be able to ask for a sale, and I think that’s the most important thing.  And so, this is our ask for a sale, if you like, whatever it is that I said, if you need any form of graphic design support, we want to be your go-to solution for graphic design.  So if you could head over to penji.co, enter the coupon code podcast15 and you’ll get 15 percent your first month of Penji.

Andrea:  Awesome!  Thank you so much for being here with us, Jonathan.  This is a really delightful conversation.

Jonathan Grzybowski:   Yeah.  Thank you so much!

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How to Build a Fun Feedback Culture

Episode 94

When you carry influence, there will be opportunities for you to speaking into the lives and others and others might see this and you being critical of them. As people of influence, we need to find ways to turn feedback into a situation that actually builds people up instead of making everyone as if they need to defend themselves. In this episode, I provide three tips for making a feedback culture normal and natural in your organization. Mentioned in this episode:

Play here (the red triangle below), on iTunes, Stitcher or TuneIn Radio (Amazon Alexa) or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Voice of Influence Podcast Andrea Joy Wenburg

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How to Master the Inner Game of Leadership with Daniel Kimble

Episode 91

Daniel Kimble is an executive coach, keynote speaker, motorcycle road race winner, and a 30+ year veteran of Silicon Valley. He is also the author of Unshakeable Influence: Mastering the Inner Game of Leadership and the CEO of Resonance Executive Coaching; a global executive coaching firm. In this episode, Daniel talks about the importance of mastering the “inner game” as an executive or leader, the difference between having a short-term mindset and a long-term mindset as a leader, the common symptoms leaders might experience if they’re not focusing on the inner game, why he believes we need to slow down so we can go faster, how a mindset focused on the wrong things limits our performance and the performance of those around us, the importance of the language we use when we speak to ourselves, his advice for helping leaders navigate the lonely road of leadership, and more!

Mentioned in this episode:

Play here (the red triangle below), on iTunes, Stitcher or TuneIn Radio (Amazon Alexa) or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Daniel Kimble Voice of Influence Podcast Andrea Joy Wenburg

Transcript

Hey, hey!  It’s Andrea and welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast.  Today, I have with me Daniel Kimble who is an executive coach, keynote speaker, motorcycle road-race winner and 30+ year veteran of Silicon Valley.  He’s also the CEO of Resonance Executive Coaching, a global executive coaching firm.  He holds executive MBA degrees from UC Berkeley and Columbia University, an executive coaching certificate from UC Berkeley, and an undergraduate degree in computer science from UC Santa Cruz.

He lives with his wife, Marianne and son Indiana, in the San Francisco Bay area.  And Daniel has a new book out, and I’m so excited to share that with you today.

 

Andrea:  So Daniel, welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast!

Daniel Kimble:  Yes, thanks for having me.

Andrea:  So tell us a little bit about your book.  What is the actual title?

Daniel Kimble:  It’s called Unshakable Influence:  Mastering the Inner Game of Leadership.

Andrea:  Okay.  So, Daniel, tell us about your book Unshakeable Influence:  Mastering the Inner Game of Leadership.  Where did this come from?  Why did you write this particular book?

Daniel Kimble:  That’s a great question.  It came from my years of experience helping leaders be the best version of themselves and really understanding what it takes to be the best version of yourself.  And the inner game of leadership in my view is the most important aspect to being an influential leader.  So you really need to focus on mindset and heartset in order to be influential and be the most effective leader you can be.

Andrea:  Yeah, sure, mindset and heartset.  So can you dive into that just a little bit more, because I love this idea of the inner game of leadership?  I certainly believe it’s important, but maybe you could share with us a little bit more about why, why does it matter that an executive leader is able to really master this inner game?

Daniel Kimble:  Who you’re being on the inside has the biggest impact on how you influence other people.  So the way you show up, the way you carry yourself, do you have compassion for others? Do you show up with discernment versus judgment for example, meaning that you care about them but you’re still discerning between different skill sets, et cetera?  And are you showing up in a way that inspires other people and brings out the best in them?  I mean that’s really mostly an inner game versus an outer game.

Andrea:  Hmm.  But then it shows up in the outer game.

Daniel Kimble:  Yeah.  It’s so much of what we experienced with other people and especially the leaders in our lives as nonverbal.  Approximately 60 to 80 percent of our impacts on others is nonverbal, and so we need to pay attention to who we’re being to maximize that aspect of how we’re showing up and how we’re impacting others.

Andrea:  Hmm.  I really enjoyed your book.  First of all, I loved your personal examples and you use a lot of models and other examples.  And it seems really practical but really speaks to the inner game but it’s bringing into that practical level.  And I know that you even started out the book with really a business case for why it matters and why people should focus on it.  And so I was wondering if you could share a little bit about why, you know, obviously it’s a big piece of what we’re doing but, why does it matter that someone actually invest or a company actually invest in helping their leaders with this inner game?

Daniel Kimble:  Yeah.  I tried really hard to make the book practical and hands-on.  It’s a gap, I would say, in the marketplace in terms of books that actually show you how to be a master of inner game of leadership in a very practical kind of way.  And there’s so many missed opportunities if we’re not doing that as individual leaders and as a leadership team.  For example, people when they leave a company, it’s most often that they leave their boss or a poor relationship with their boss.  It’s the most common reason why they leave and it’s very costly when someone leaves the company.  It hits the engagement, hits the morale, productivity, et cetera.  It really_____ on leadership more than anything else.

Andrea:  And I know that that part of what you’re talking about in that section was had to do with the difference between having a short-term mindset and the long-term mindset.   What is the difference between having a short term and a long term mindset?

Daniel Kimble:  Yeah.  Sort of what I touched on there is that it’s easy as a leader, especially in today’s world with investors, either public or private, putting a lot of pressure to meet short term financial metrics.  Definitely, I want to meet the short term metrics but sometimes the short term gets maximized and the medium to long term gets overlooked, I would say.  And the best results come from a medium to long-term focus.  And then if you’re doing that right there, the short term results would show up but it can be easy as a leader to focus too much on the short term, not enough in the medium to long term.

Andrea:   Let’s take a minute here and go back.  I want to hear a little bit more about your personal origin story.  We might even plug this in at the beginning, now that I’m thinking about it, because I don’t want to tell your story.  You tell your story in the book and that’s so important.  But can you share with us what got you into the leadership game in the first place?

Daniel Kimble:  Yeah, it’s a very personal thing for me where, for all of my life, I’ve really been just sort of wired that way where I notice what’s happening inside of people, what’s happening between people, what’s happening in terms of what makes a great leader, what makes a great team, what makes a great culture.  I could see the issues as well as the things that were working well, like very, very clearly from a very young age.

One of my earliest memories as a kid is actually noticing my mom and a friend of her having a bit of an argument and I could tell exactly, at the age of five or six, what was going on in that conversation.  I just didn’t know how to articulate it to them in a way that could help.  But I could see that they were actually miscommunicating.  They didn’t really disagree.  They just weren’t able to communicate effectively.  And that’s been a key part of who I am for forever really.  It was always a natural draw for me to be on this line of work because I’m just wired that way.

Andrea:  Hmm.  So you noticed even in that conversation with your mom that they were not communicating appropriately.  They weren’t actually communicating.  What did you see?  You weren’t sure how to articulate it or how to help them, but you could just see that they were not, you know, tell me what you mean by that?  What do you mean by they weren’t communicating?

Daniel Kimble:  It’s like the words that they were using versus what they were really trying to say were two different things.  And those gaps between what they really wanted to say and the words that they were choosing was the root cause of what was happening versus them actually disagreeing.  And I see that again and again, like in leaders, teams, and cultures that such a common challenge we all face.  And again, for me I can so quickly notice that and now I have tools to help people quickly address those gaps and on how they communicate and shift to they’re being in such that they come across in a different way and be more influential and have less differences with other people because they’re communicating more effectively.

Andrea:  What do you suppose led you to that place where you started to be able to articulate and be able to help people in those situations?

Daniel Kimble:  You know I like that question.  I don’t know if I could point to any one thing, I would say it’s a lifelong journey for me.  I’m really seeing the gaps and then over time doing a lot of reading, a lot of practice, a lot of trying different things, helping other people try different things and seeing what works and what doesn’t work and just honing it over time is what I would say.

Andrea:  Hmm.  OK, so let’s jump back into the book.  What problems have you seen come up with your clients when they’re really not focusing on that inner game of leadership?

Daniel Kimble:  The problems or the symptoms that tend to be talked about are things like other people are not so keen to work with them or they, maybe, will say like he or she doesn’t understand me or doesn’t work well with me.  Some hits to engagement, some hits to maybe attrition or maybe some people are leaving the company given how this leader is showing up.  Those are the kind of the external circumstances that tend to show up in terms of why someone would start to work with me in the first place.

Andrea:  And do they recognize that like the leader themselves, is it hard for them to see that in themselves or what do you hope for when they start working with you in terms of their own awareness?

Daniel Kimble:  Yeah.  I think a lot of times it is hard for people to see their own limitations.  That’s the one of the biggest challenges we, as people, have.  I do talk about that in the book as well.  You have to be willing to be vigilant, with yourself, honestly in order to be the best version of yourself.  And I would say, that by the time someone agrees to work with me, they have enough awareness to see the need and go forward.  The ones who don’t have enough awareness, probably, wouldn’t go forward.

Andrea:  Sure.  And do you have any suggestions for people when, maybe, they have a leader or they see a leader who is probably causing problems with the way that they’re leading and they would like somebody, like you, to come in and work with them, but they’re not sure, you know, how do they bring this to that leader’s awareness?  Do you have any suggestions for that person?

Daniel Kimble:  It’s a tricky thing to manage because I’m a big believer in that we need to be the change that you want to see in the world first.  And so my first answer to that question is to look inside of ourselves and ask, “Well, what can I do differently to help this leader be more effective?”  Or “How can I work better with this leader by showing up differently myself?”

Andrea:  Yeah, I love that.

Daniel Kimble:  And then the other piece of that, if you want to have a conversation with that leader, which is definitely under the right circumstances, probably a good thing to do if they’re having a significant negative impact, you want to be mindful of how you approach that.  So, I would say over time, establish a stronger relationship with that executive and get to know them, it’d be would be better.  Give them a chance to get to know you and slowly over time give them some feedback about how they’re impacting other people and see what the response is.  And hopefully, there’s some openness now or they could become some openness overtime to hearing it and doing something about it.

Andrea:  You know, I know that one of the things that kind of comes up for folks is they feel like they’re already so busy.  Why add something else to the plate?  But one of the things that you said in your book, and of course this is something that I hear or have said before as well, but it’s so important and I’d love to hear you talk about it a little bit more and that’s the idea of slowing down so that you can go faster.  What in the world does that mean?  Tell us more about that.

Daniel Kimble:  Yeah.  First of all, this saying comes from motorcycle racing that’s when I first heard it.  I used to race motorcycles and ended up being very good at it, and I share a lot of stories throughout the book and map that to leadership and that’s a sign that comes from that arena.  What it means as a motorcycle racer is that you need to slow down in order to go faster.  You need to learn the right lanes on the track, meaning the fastest lanes versus the ones that are the shortest distance in order to really grow the fastest you can go.

As a leader, it’s the same thing.  Maybe leaders feel like they’re going as fast as they can go but they’ve probably chosen the wrong lanes.  If you actually have learned how to lead in a different way, you can go faster.  We have to slow down in order to do that. If you slow down and evaluate what you’re doing, how are you doing it, and who you’re being and then change those things to maximize your leadership, now you can go much faster in a much more compassionate kind of way.

Andrea:  And have you seen that really play out with the leaders that you’ve worked with?

Daniel Kimble:  Yeah.  When I’m coaching someone one on one, typically about three to four months into the process, they really start to feel like it’s paying off now.  They’re actually getting the multiplier effect.  It does slow down initially because any new thing that you’re learning, you do have to slow down to learn it.  But once you get that far enough along that learning curve, you get your time back and then overtime it multiplies.

Andrea:  And when you’re doing your coaching, I know that the book is full of so much, you know, even your coaching clients will be able to get a lot out of it on its own. But how much of the content that you share in your book tends to work its way into the coaching process?

Daniel Kimble:  All of it.  Everything in there is based upon my experience.  And definitely going forward, now that the book is published, it’ll be required reading for people I work with as a starting point and will start from a higher foundation, if you will.  And the coaching can go that much further but everything in there is based on my work.

Andrea:  Sure.  Do you incorporate all of it into every coaching situation, do you think?

Daniel Kimble:  Oh yeah.  There’s a lot in there.  So we wouldn’t necessarily cover all that territory with one individual executive but we pull the right pieces at the right time for that executive.

Andrea:  Sure.  And so it’s just based sort of on their needs and what they’re experiencing and that sort of thing?

Daniel Kimble:  Yeah.  What they’re needing at that point in time and there’s a lot more stuff they can do overtime in the book too but wouldn’t necessarily do everything.

Andrea:  Uh-hmm. OK, so how does a mindset focused on the wrong things limit our performance and the performance of those around us?  I really liked the way that you put that “That mindset that’s focused on the wrong things limits our performance and the performance on those around us.”  Can you share both why it impacts us and why it impacts the people around us?

Daniel Kimble: Yeah.  It’s another thing that I pull from motorcycle racing, a saying called, you go where you look.  In racing, it means that where you focus your vision is where your bike will tend to go.  So if you’re focusing on the apex of the next corner, which is where you want to go then that’s what the bike will tend to do.  If you’re focused on the concrete wall on the side of a truck, it will tend to go that direction whether you like it or not.

And the same thing is true in all aspects of life to where we focus our mind is where we tend to go.  So as a leader you want to focus more and more on relationship, more and more on inspiring others to do their best work versus getting stuff done yourself.  Individual leaders oftentimes get promoted based upon their ability to get stuff done.  Now, they need to scale themselves as a leader by doing stuff done through others.  That’s a key transition and you need to focus on that versus getting stuff done yourself.

Andrea:  And so when you’re focused on the wrong things then they’re going to end up being drawing themselves to those things as well because that’s where you’re headed.

Daniel Kimble:  Right.  So for focus as a leader, for example, a common challenge for people who did get promoted up in the ways that I described, they’re often focused a lot on control.  And as a leader, you don’t have direct control over much of anything anymore.  You have to accept that.  So if you’re overly focused on control, you’re going to drive people towards burnout and maybe leaving the company.  Whereas, if you’re driving towards or focusing on inspiring other people by focusing on relationship, now they’re wanting to do their best work versus feeling like they have to do their best work.

Andrea:  Hmm.  I like that.  And I like your focus on this relational component and how important that is.  I know that you’d mentioned kind of page 67, 68; you’d talked about an exercise that you use called the bestfriend exercise. And I know that so many leaders really end up, I don’t know, being self-critical and it’s really difficult for them to not hear their own voice criticizing themselves all the time and beating themselves up because we should be better, “I know I could be better.”  So would you mind sharing with us a little bit about that bestfriend exercise that you do?

Daniel Kimble:  Yeah.  It’s really a focus on changing our inner self-talk to be more positive and more supportive of us being our best self.  We will, by default how we’re wired as well as conditioning over the years, tend too much towards the negative.  We all have a negativity bias in us.  It goes back to our need to survive and also, to significant degree, the way we we’re conditioned as children, oftentimes, and if the exercise is intended to shift that mindset to be more positive.

So, imagine if you have a presentation coming up and you want to really do great on this presentation.  How you talk to yourself makes a big difference in how you show up.  If you’re telling yourself you have to do well versus I want to do well, it’s a very different way to think about it.  So what I ask people to do is to look at from the perspective of, if you were talking to your bestfriend, what would you say to them to support them in that moment versus what your inner critic would automatically say and then change your self-talk to match that bestfriend dialog.

Andrea:  Could you give us an example?

Daniel Kimble:  So for example, just going the one I said, if you have a presentation coming up, you’re telling yourself I have to do well, I have to nail this.  If I don’t, I’m going to be in really bad shape and that kind of stuff.  Instead say, it’s a constant learning curve.  I’m getting better all the time and how can I best do this presentation in this moment given who I am at this point in time, right?

Andrea:  Sure.  Yeah, it’s so tempting to be hypercritical, I think. And, you know, we ended up comparing and then feeling bad about ourselves and all that.  This idea that we would be kind to ourselves as though we were being kind to our bestfriend I think is a really, really powerful one.

Daniel Kimble:  Yeah.  It’s based also on a self-compassion versus self-esteem.

Andrea:  Yeah.  Go ahead and share.

Daniel Kimble:  Self-esteem is kind of understood.  I think it’s a widely accepted term these days, at least in the United States, I think probably are everywhere else to some degree too and there’s some challenges with that kind of framing of it.  Self-esteem tends to be more conditional based upon how you perform at any given day.  If you believe that you did well that day, you tend to feel good about yourself.  If you think you didn’t do well that day then you tend to feel poorly about yourself.

Self-compassion is about treating yourself well no matter what.  Again, bestfriend exercise, how would you talk to yourself as if you’re your own best friend?  And it tends to create better results is the interesting thing.  So, inner slave driver doesn’t actually work.

Andrea:  Sure. Why shouldn’t we put people on a pedestal?

Daniel Kimble:  Yeah.  That’s a rich topic.

Andrea:  Yeah, it is.  I like it.

Daniel Kimble:  Yeah.  I highlight some of those things on the book.  But it’s about if we’re putting other people on a pedestal or putting ourselves beneath that person and thereby letting ourselves off the hook, for me, not our best self.  Like that person or that set of people that we put above us they’re somehow superhuman and we’re not is what we’re telling ourselves.  But yet, they’re human just like we are.  They’re just as flawed as we are.  They just, maybe, have some skills or experiences that we don’t have, but we can definitely get there if we want to.  So, we actually give ourselves an excuse not to try harder to be our best self by putting other people on a pedestal.

Andrea:  I think that that is really fascinating.  I see it a lot and I like the way that you talk about it because it’s something that it can get in the way of so many things, like you said, being your best self. But then also you turn it around as well in the book and you talked about, what about when people put you on a pedestal?  And I’ll just read a little quote from the book if you don’t mind.  Is that okay?

Daniel Kimble:  Sure.

Andrea:   You said, “As we get better and better at mastering the inner game of leadership, we will become more prominent and more influential.  As a result, we will attract more people who will put us on a pedestal.  We need to be as weary of anyone putting us on a pedestal as we are putting others on a pedestal for the same reasons.  Elevating us to an exalted status will likely prevent them from being totally honest with us.  They will struggle to own their personal power while in our presence and as a result, they will be less effective.  And at some point they may find a reason to tear us down from that pedestal and suddenly go from believing that we can do nothing wrong to believing that we can do nothing right.”  I absolutely love that paragraph.  Where have you seen this happen?

Daniel Kimble:  It happens all the time in life, really, and in so many aspects, you know.  Bring it back to leadership in the business world; it’s easy to put a senior executive if we’re not a senior executive ourselves on a pedestal.  It’s easier if we are a senior executive, we will attract more and more people who will have a tendency to put us on a pedestal and then they won’t be fully candid.  They’ll be worried about saying the wrong thing.  They’ll be less effective because, again, they don’t know their power in our presence.  So it’s not good for anybody, whatever direction it goes.

Andrea:  I really love it because you’re speaking to the idea of helping other people find their voice.  So how do you keep them from putting you on a pedestal, I guess?

Daniel Kimble:  It’s a mixed thing. First of all, there’s only so much you can do because they have to own their own mindset, right?  But you can also influence them by helping them.  If you’re that senior executive for example, help them feel more at ease.  Your role by itself, no matter who you are as a person, isn’t intimidating to a lot of people.  So recognize that and try to meet them where they’re at as much as you can and put them at ease.

And the last thing you want to do as a senior executive is to in any way, especially, with your body language, your nonverbal communication, communicate that anything that’s “bad news” is something you didn’t actually want to hear.   You want to welcome that as much as you possibly can because so many people will not share that with you and you need that information.

Andrea:  OK.  Say that again because I think that’s really important.  You’re saying that that when other people have something to share that they don’t think that you want to hear that you should welcome that.  That’s kind of what you’re saying, right?

Daniel Kimble:  Exactly, because as decision makers in an organization, we need to have timely accurate information or else we’re making decisions based upon untimely and inaccurate information and then that’s how strategy decisions go wrong.  That’s how all kinds of bad decisions end up happening based upon and/or untimely information.  And so, people are conditioned, again and again, to be concerned about looking bad, feeling embarrassed saying something to a senior executive that might add some personal repercussions, you know, “bad news.”  But as a senior executive, we need to make sure that we are welcoming that because, otherwise, we won’t get it.  And then we’re making decisions based upon untimely inaccurate information.

Andrea:  So, essentially, don’t shoot the messenger

Daniel Kimble:  In any way, you know, your words matter of course, but who you’re being, your nonverbal is more important than that situation.

Andrea:  Hmm.  And you go on a little bit later to talk about giving people emotional gifts and I feel like that really ties to that, “Giving people an emotional gift when you interact with them.”  So can you tell us what that means and what it would look like in even that situation?

Daniel Kimble:  Really, yeah, there are many ways you can do it.  The one that comes to mind right away is body language, be open with your body language, make warm soft eye contact, smile a little bit, show openness with your arms and your legs, don’t cross your arms, et cetera.  Try not to frown.  Some people, by default, will just kind of have a frown on their face.  It’s not that they necessarily intended that but be aware of that if that’s your default, you know, facial possession and try to pick something that feels more warmth to other people.

Andrea:  OK, so I want to close this little piece.  This is a difficult one and this is that leadership can be such a lonely road.  I always had a mentor that would tell me that.  What advice do you have for leaders to navigate this potential loneliness?

Daniel Kimble:  Yeah, it’s interesting, almost a paradox.  But the more effective we are as a leader, the more lonely we are likely to be because there’s fewer and fewer people who appears to us in that sense of where we’re at in the organization.  And so what we want to do is to consciously, throughout our career, throughout our lives, be cultivating relationships with people who we do feel are good peers for us, ideally, outside of our organization.

Because we’re not necessarily likely we can trust somebody fully that’s in the organization, especially, for in a very senior role.  And have those kind of coach-mentor-peer relationships outside the organization that we felt like we can really share openly, candidly exactly what we think and feel and be willing to say in those settings like, “I don’t know what to do here, tell me some of your experiences to help me out.”  In a leadership situation, you don’t necessarily want to say that to people because you want to make sure that you’ve got the air of confidence, if you will.  You only want to be transparent of course, but you also want to be confident in what you’re doing.

So having those outside relationships goes a long way towards solving that loneliness problem.  As you become more and more effective as a leader, you get more lonely, you have to have other relationships to rely on.  If you don’t have that, the risk is that you’ll lose touch.

Andrea:  Hmm.  Is there any last thing that you would want to say, a piece of advice that we might have missed in your book.  I know there’s so much in there.  It’s so good, guys, you really need to go out and get it, Unshakable Influence.  And you can tell us where to get it here in a minute, but as far as, you know, is there any one more thing that you would want leaders to hear from you today?

Daniel Kimble:  I would say there’s so much in the book, but the key thing I want to leave people with is to try to view everything in your leadership life as a mirror back to you.  So whatever you’re experiencing, how can you influence that situation for the better because you have the most control over yourself?  And always look to how you can improve yourself to improve the situation versus trying to change other people. That’s the first place you want to look.

Andrea:  Very good!  OK, so Daniel, where can people find you and your book?

Daniel Kimble:  You can find me on my website resonanceexecutivecoaching.com. The book is on Amazon, it’s called Unshakable Influence: Mastering the Inner Game of Leadership.

Andrea:  Alright.  Well, thank you so much for being on the Voice of Influence podcast today and sharing more about Unshakable Influence.  We appreciate it!

Daniel Kimble:  Yeah, thanks for having me.  It was a great time.

 

END

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How to Navigate Two Sides of Respect with Andrea Joy Wenburg

Episode 75

Do your employees feel respected? Business leaders know respect is important but there’s often confusion as to what that respect looks like and what it really means. In this episode, I cover the main points of Kristie Rogers’ article; including the distinction between “owed respect” and “earned respect”,  how a recent experience with one of my sons is the perfect example of these two types of respect, what needs to be considered when deciding how to balance the two types of respect in an organization, and more! Mentioned in this episode:

Play here (the red triangle below), on iTunes, Stitcher or TuneIn Radio (Amazon Alexa) or wherever you listen to podcasts.

 
Transcript Hey, hey, it’s Andrea and welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast. Lately, I’ve been working on a project.  It’s a little training or an offering that I am putting together that would help companies or organizations be able to get really clear on their values, their mission, their vision, and their purpose in order to be able to share that with the rest of the company so that they can help people connect their purpose to the purpose of the company.  So a feeling like it matters “What I do really matters here.” And in the process of working through this and working on this and testing it out with people, I’m also putting together a talk to use at conferences.  So in the process, I’m reading some articles.  And I came across this one from Harvard Business Review.  It is by Kristie Rogers who’s out of Marquette University, and I really appreciated what she had to say about respect. So today, we’re going to a look out what she does say about respect just like a couple of things that she says and discuss what that looks like or what it means for us as people who are trying to help others connect their purpose to the company, help others be able to feel like we matter and that their voice matters because this is something that we talk about a lot here, you voice matters, but you can make it matter more. This is sort of the tagline that we’ve been working with the last year or so and this idea that your voice does matter.  It matters inherently.  You’re a human being that matters. But on the other side, you can still make it matter more in a different sense.  And I talked about this a number of times.  You can do things that make your voice have more influence.  So there’s an inherent quality but then there’s also this quality that has to do with your performance and what we do, what we say, and how that actually impacts our influence. So what Kristie Rogers says in this article is that that there is kind of a consensus that people know, business leaders know that respect is important.  They kind of know that.  We’ve been talking about it quite a while, but maybe there’s confusion around this idea of what it really, really means and what it looks like.  So she makes a distinction between owed respect and earned respect. Let me read to you her definition.  This is from the article Do Your Employees Feel Respected?  Show Workers that they’re valued and your business will flourish.  This is from Harvard Business Review, July-August 2018.  And owed respect as she defines it is accorded equally to all members of a work group or an organization.  So this is for everybody.  It meets the universal need to feel included.  It signaled by stability in an atmosphere suggesting that every member of the group is inherently valuable. So, owed respect is really this general overall feeling and this general overall consensus that everybody matters.  It’s this idea that your voice matters, inherently you are valuable.  But earned respect recognizes individual employees who display valued quality or behaviors.  It distinguishes employees who had exceeded expectations and particularly in knowledge work setting affirms that each employee has unique strengths and talents. Earned respect meets the need to be valued for doing good work.  So earned respect has to do with performance.  I think that is so important.  I love this distinction.  I think it’s so important because you have to have a sense of owed respect.  Everybody like that people matter and if they don’t feel like they matter at all, they’re not valuable, that they don’t _____ value then how are they supposed to feel like what they do matters? Or maybe they get kind of stuck on this cycle of trying to climb the corporate ladder in a sense or be more and more and more successful because they’d be more valuable if they’re more successful.  So we don’t want people to find their inherent value in success.  That is something that is just there that everybody is valuable as a human being.  But when there is a distinction between that and earned respect that means that the people can truly outperform somebody else. I know that one of the things that gets confusing in schools for example is you know, do we give everybody the same grade?  Do we kind of make grades a deal an issue at all?  Or do we reward for things like, you know, your grades or your test scores, or do we need to just make it about attendance and the only things that you get rewarded are your behavior, you know, being quiet in class and being there. Well, students just as much as any other human being needs to know that they are valuable and that being there is important.  And at the same time, they also need to be rewarded for hard work or their abilities of what they do, with what they have and outperforming themselves essentially but it could be outperforming others as well. So it becomes tricky though, right?  It becomes tricky as a teacher, as an educator, as somebody who’s trying to decide what to recognize and what not to recognize because you don’t want to have people feeling bad and then giving up but on the other hand, you don’t want people feeling like, “Gosh, it doesn’t really matter what I do with my abilities.  It doesn’t matter what I do with them so I’m just gonna give up as well.” There is a need for both owed and earned respect.  It kind of also made me think of a story with my son.  So we went out to eat as a family and it was actually…let me think about this before telling you but this particular meal, we went out to eat, it was a celebration because one of our children did really well on a test and one of our children did really well with their grades, and we wanted to celebrate that.  This was a moment of earned respect. There are many times that we just do things with them and for them because we love them, because they are our children and they don’t have to do anything to earn that love and so we’ll rotate them out.  We’ll do special something with them just because they’re our kids, but this was a particular celebration. So we wanted them to know that we were recognizing, that we recognized how hard they’d worked and that it’s important and it’s good to do that.  And so this was a moment of earned respect.  So we decided; we were playing games at our table while watching a football game and eating and that sort of thing.  That was really fun. And then our son realized that he had forgotten something in the car.  So we gave him the keys.  He’s 9 years old, we gave him the keys and he walked out.  We kind of looked at each other hoping he doesn’t get hit you know.  We warned him before he left, you know, “Make sure you’re watching for the cars,” because he kind of tends to be oblivious to his surroundings sometimes.  He looks down and walks instead of looking up.  So we were a little concerned about that, you know, sending him out there by himself. But pretty soon we saw him coming back in the door.  We were across the whole entire restaurant.  We see him walking in the door.  He opens the door and he’s kind of looking down and he opens the next door and he sees an older gentleman that is kind of struggling to walk, and I was like “You guys, what’s he’s gonna do?”  I actually said that.  I wondered, you know, “Will he really do something?  Is he just going to walk right by or is he gonna notice?”  And you know what he did, he actually opened the door for this gentlemen and I was like “Oh, yes!  I’m so glad that he noticed.” We were sitting there and just kind of like “Oh this is awesome.  Good for him.”  He can’t see us.  He doesn’t notice us.  And then I said “Do you think he’ll open the second door?”  I really wasn’t sure, and sure enough he did, he opened the second door.  And my mom heart just beat out of my chest.  I was so happy that he did that.  It just elevated the level of respect that I had for him in that moment. And so he came back to the seat or the table with us and we told him, we’re like “Grant, we are so proud of you.”  Like him doing a good job on a test, but he didn’t actually worked too hard at was one thing.  But Grant actually paying attention to another human being and giving him owed respect, opening that door for him. He didn’t notice the gentleman _____ so it’s not like he earned their respect in the sense that he had done something for Grant, instead he gave him owed respect because he’s a human being and he could see that he needed help, he opened the door.  And this made me so proud of him, and in that sense, Grant, earned more respect from me. When it comes to how we apply this to our work environment or to our organizations, we need to, and these are some of the things that Kristie said in her article but also some things that some of my thoughts as well kind of make _____, we really need to provide an atmosphere where everybody knows that they matter, that they are valued and their contribution does matter. So when I’m doing a workshop or I am helping a company come up with their values, we make sure to do things and to integrate ideas that will help bring out the voice of the people that are working there, not just the executives but also those who are kind of on the frontline and doing work with customers and things like these.  So we capture their voice.  We give them an opportunity to speak then we go and have conversation with the executives then we get more clear from their perspective. You know, we kind of hear both perspectives and what kind of the executives kind of do some of that real work of determining which things we’re going to really highlight in terms of values or initiatives that they’re wanting to move forward and then we go back again to the people and we say “This is based on what you said and what the executive said and do you have any ideas of how we could implement this?” So in each instance, we’re making sure that these folks feel like, and that truly are respected, that they are giving a voice.  But at the same time, a voice doesn’t necessarily carry as much weight or influence as another voice because some people are in a position where their voice, their influence is greater simply because of their job position and they earned that position.  And so they do have greater influence over the whole entire process; however, that doesn’t negate the fact that everybody has influence.  Everybody has a voice in a sense and all of those voices do matter. But we do have to acknowledge both and that when somebody does put the extra effort that they should be rewarded.  So it is a balance.  It is a balance of certainly understanding what the people need in terms of respect and owed respect as well as rewards or celebration or the opportunity to take new opportunities to explore new options or to have more influence. Another important point that Miss Rogers makes is that when you’re trying to decide what the balance should be of owed and earned respect in your organization, there are some things that you should take into consideration.  If you are trying to produce a collaborative result perhaps it has to do with innovation or coming to consensus on something then owed respect should be given more weight. However, if you’re in a situation where there does need to be some competition or it’s more of an individual situation where individual effort and success needs to be measured, well maybe then earned respect needs to carry a little bit more weight. But it is certainly true that every single place you go, owed respect is absolutely important.  It’s imperative.  If you want to have a voice of influence, if you want to make your voice matter more then you will give voice to others.  That is how you make your voice matter more. So respect all and give even more respect or celebration to those who have gone above and beyond and make your voice matter more!