The Communicative Leader
On The Communicative Leader, we're making your work life what you want it to be. Do you need years of training or special equipment? Not at all my friends. Simple, yet thoughtful changes in your communication can make great strides in displaying your leadership ability. And why the heck should you care about leadership communication? Well, communication is the yardstick others use to determine whether or not they see you as a leader. Ahhh don't be scared, I got you. We will walk through common organizational obstacles and chat about small, but meaningful communication-rooted changes you can integrate immediately. No more waiting for the workplace to become what you hope it will. Nope. You, my friends, will be empowered and equipped to make those changes. Let's have some fun! Can't get enough?
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The Communicative Leader
The Path to Leadership Mastery: A Conversation with Eric Pfeiffer, a Seasoned Leadership Coach & Author
On today's episode of The Communicative Leader, Eric Pfeiffer, a seasoned leadership coach and author join us.
Eric Pfeiffer shares his background in leadership coaching and the challenges he faced in becoming an effective leader. He discusses the need for a leadership operating system that bridges the gap between theory and practice.
We discuss the challenges leaders face in creating a positive culture and addresses the common struggles leaders encounter. We also touch on the role of non-leadership employees in maintaining culture and offers insights on how to support and empower them.
Some other takeaways:
- Learning how to learn is essential for continuous growth and development in leadership. Self-awareness is a fundamental aspect of leadership and can be developed through practical tools and techniques.
- Leadership gravitas is about being a leader worth following, someone who inspires trust, respect, and empowerment.
- Culture is defined by the prevailing attitudes and behaviors of individuals in an organization.
- Leaders can transform culture by changing their own attitudes and behaviors and consistently modeling the desired culture.
Until next time, communicate with intention and lead with purpose.
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Today on the Communicative Leader, we are looking at the path to leadership mastery and with us we have Eric Pfeiffer. He shares his journey into leadership coaching and the need for a leadership operating system. Eric is the founder and CEO of MPWR Coaching and his unique approach focuses on developing again this leadership operating system. So again, more on that. But it provides a framework for leaders to solve problems, communicate effectively and make decisions. Hello and welcome to the Communicative Leader hosted by me, dr Leah O'Neillian-Hodges. My friends call me Dr O. I'm a professor of communication and a leadership communication expert. I'm the communicative leader. We're working to make your work life what you want it to be. Eric, I'm so thrilled to be chatting with you today and learning more about you and the amazing work that you do in this arena. And before we dive in, can you give us a little of your background and kind of how you got started in leadership coaching?
Speaker 2:Absolutely Well. Leah Dr O, thank you so much for having me on your show. It's a privilege and a pleasure. Yeah, so my foray into leadership coaching.
Speaker 2:It probably started, like many others, which is in my 20s and early 30s. I was just trying to figure out how to be a leader and, quite frankly, I don't think I had a handle on what that meant for me. I'd read a lot of books. Up to that point, I did a master's that did a lot of focus on leadership and organizational leadership. But what I did know is that I wanted to be able to take on greater roles and responsibility, which meant I was going to have more influence over teams and over parts of organizations.
Speaker 2:And two things kind of collided. One, my desire to be a good leader and not quite sure what that meant or what it should look like. Aside from, you know, what did my parents do and what were some of my professors? What did they do? My coaches in sports, how did they operate? A few bosses I'd had, up to that point.
Speaker 2:But that collided also with constant feedback that my influence in different areas of engaging other people wasn't always being received. Well, surprise, surprise, I was stepping on people's toes. I was making decisions in isolation. I wasn't very collaborative and a lot of that not because I was intentionally trying to be an ineffective leader. I just didn't really understand the kind of what I would call a kind of core skill set of how do you lead well and what is leadership. For't really understand the kind of what I would call a kind of core skill set of how do you lead well and what is leadership for and what's the purpose of it.
Speaker 2:So, anyways, that my personal journey, my personal struggles over many years, I think, began to open my eyes, to realize you know what in my conversations with friends and coworkers and people that I had traveled at that time to work with, were communicating very similar struggles and frustrations and everybody was, you know, picking up the latest and greatest new book on leadership, going to a conference. Back then we didn't have many podcasts back then. I'm dating myself but just trying to gather resources. But at the end of the day, we were gathering tons of great resources but still not quite sure how to bridge the gap between the theoretical, the principles that we were reading about, and our everyday practice of leadership. That created a desire in me to start asking the question well, how can I begin to bridge that gap and how can I help others maybe pick up on some of the key things that I've learned in my own journey of trying and working and hopefully, some would suggest becoming a better leader over the years.
Speaker 1:Yes, yes, excellent and good on you because I notice a lot in consulting work. Yes, excellent and good on you because I notice a lot in consulting work. People say, well, I step on toes, I make decisions in isolation, but that's me and that's it. They stop and nope, we don't need to stop there and we shouldn't stop there. And that's amazing that you're engaging those conversations and so open to that self-reflection and you're sharing it with others. I really love that.
Speaker 2:I appreciate that and I'll tell you what those exact phrases did come out of my mouth in those earlier years, because I think there's a part of us that wants to justify how we're operating by virtue of well, this is my personality, right as soon as we start learning some personality assessments and understanding our wiring. You know, we're looking really not for the rationale for why our leadership is effective, but why we don't have to change, why we don't have to become more effective than we already are.
Speaker 1:Yes, yes, and I think that's a really nice segue. So my next question you know everyone has their own take on leadership coaching and I think you've kind of already hinted at some of this. But, eric, what is your unique approach to leadership coaching and interacting with others and helping them achieve where they want to be?
Speaker 2:Absolutely. It's a great question. As a professor, you'll know that you have all these young, bright-eyed, bushy-tailed aspiring leaders. They want to have influence and impact on the world around them. They want to feel like their engagement in the workplace is more than just being a cog in a machine, but they want to feel like they're having some significant impact. They feel purposeful beyond just their own little cubicle and their responsibilities. And that was very much a part of my journey. And, like I said earlier, you know, in reading all of these amazing books and picking up on all this amazing literature, and you know the conferences and you get all these, you're gathering all of these great ideas.
Speaker 2:The way that I like to think of it is, you know, like on our smartphones, right, we have these incredible devices that allow us to go, for example, to the Apple App Store, and there's millions of apps that we can download, and each of those apps represents a particular problem we're facing and a particular solution, and my experience in reading so much leadership content was that I was getting a lot of great, effective but very focused apps, and what I was missing and I didn't realize this until years later is that the reason these devices are so powerful is because somebody did the hard work to develop or create the operating system, which is the parental program, as it were. And now I know some computer scientists are going to you know they're going to. They're going to attack me because of my lack of knowledge in this front, but I think this is pretty accurate, that the operating system that we don't really think much about. We just know that every once in a while there's an automatic update. That happens while we're sleeping.
Speaker 2:Yes, but it's that parental program that really is responsible for leveraging, stewarding, resourcing all of the different applications. So, to play that analogy out, what I realized is I had a lot of apps, I was trying to do a lot of different things in the space of leadership, but had no kind of overarching parental program to help me understand how do I, when do I, where do I utilize all of these different leadership apps that I've picked up over the years? And so I've spent probably 13 years under a former mentor who helped me in this process, and then the last probably 10 years developing what we call a leadership operating system. And I'll just describe the unique difference between a leadership operating system, which you know, I don't know that we may have one of the only ones out there, and oftentimes what we run across is when we download a leadership app or read a great book, right on some singular idea that really kind of hits us in a great book, right On some single singular idea that really kind of hits us in a great spot.
Speaker 2:We usually develop a tool or a principle that allows us to solve one or two problems that are immediate problems in our lives, where a leadership operating system gives us the unique capacity to solve not one or two specific problems, but to diagnose, address and solve millions and millions of problems, even ones that we've not yet been confronted by. And so what I tell people, I say from your earliest years, from your parents, from your teachers, from your coaches, from your whatever mentors, bosses, we have actually developed our own internal operating system, and the way I define that is kind of the prevailing attitudes and behaviors that we carry into any situation that we're confronted by. And some of those, some of that operating system is effective and it helps us achieve great things, and some of our operating system is not so helpful and it actually creates more problems. And so our desire is to give leaders an operating system that they, their team or their organization can download, which is comprised by a set of core visual tools that, if we're all running the same operating system guess what Now?
Speaker 2:Communication, problem solving, decision making, you know all of those features which I believe are what make leadership and business so difficult suddenly become so much simpler, because we're all speaking the same language, we're all committed to operating in a very similar way, regardless of our backgrounds and our preferences and our personalities, and what we've discovered is for those teams and organizations who do the work to download this operating system. It radically transforms their ability to solve problems, which I tell people as often as I can, and for your young listeners out there, I tell them as often as I can. We think the higher you go in leadership is a bigger paycheck, which that's often true, but that it's almost like, well, the higher we go, the easier it gets, the less problems I'm going to have to deal with. I don't. I'm no longer in the trenches.
Speaker 2:And I tell people that is the absolute opposite of what happens the higher you go, the more problems you know. More money, more problems and actually that much more important that we develop our cognitive skill set that allows us to identify, diagnose and solve high-level problems, and that's exactly what this operating system does.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I love that illustration. It's so helpful and, too, as a leadership communication scholar, I just love that you're giving people a lens rather than like, here is your conflict tool to pull out and here's your listening tool to pull out, oh and you have a coaching tool and that doesn't really help. It can help us time to time and we can patch things together, but, like you said, when we're all using the same operating system, wow, talk about a powerful team.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, and again, that's. The operating system has been developed, tried tested, recalibrated over and over again, and what I encourage leaders to think about is you know, the operating systems on our phones are constantly updating, right. So you know, we're no longer using the same version of the operating system that we started with. It's continually updating and, as leaders, we need the ability to continually update our own leadership or personal operating system as we continue to face new challenges and want to grow and evolve ourselves.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly. And so with that, I bet some of what you have learned and what you're doing has come from these two amazing books that you've written Transform your Trajectory and Leadership Gravitas. So can you give us a little bit, maybe the inspiration that led to these books and just anything else that you want to share in regard to this writing?
Speaker 2:Absolutely yeah. So there's a variety of reasons that somebody might write a book, and in my former organization, which was also a coaching business, I was fortunate enough to be a part of the team that was in charge of content development and curation, and so we wrote a bunch of books and I learned a little bit like, wow, there's a lot of different reasons to write a book For myself, for our coaching business. We started the coaching business and we're really focused on the proof in the pudding. Is this going to work? Is this operating system going to transform leaders, teams, organizations? Are people going to be willing to pay? Uh, which is an important part of business, um, those entrepreneurs out there.
Speaker 2:Somebody needs to want to pay for this. And once we were a few years in and realized this is actually working, um, I realized, um, we need to basically introduce ourselves, um, to this industry and to the world. And so the first book, leadership Gravitas, was written with the purpose of kind of like to act like a calling card. You know when we would run across people. We're just handing this book out and saying this is who we are. If this conversation sounds interesting, if the problems you're personally facing resonate with the problems that we address in the book, then a conversation may be helpful.
Speaker 2:The second purpose is one of my overarching life missions is to put these tools from this operating system there's eight core tools into the hands of as many leaders as humanly possible, and therefore the book allows us to disseminate.
Speaker 2:You know that that first book revolves around, kind of our first core tool, our DNA tool, which gives us a framework for the kind of leader we want to be and the kind of culture that we want to create. Book was written in the same vein. We just basically said okay, it's time to put the second core tool out into the world, to give people access to that, and so Transform your Trajectory again revolves around another core tool that gives us an opportunity to identify the opportunities in our lives, in our daily kind of going-ons, where there's opportunity to learn, to respond, to experience personal transformation and communal transformation. And so the hope is we're going to release each of the core tools book by book. But I just recently somebody said, hey, eric, you know what, if the next book you could just release a kind of brief introduction to the entire operating system, because that, that, that concept is so unique and I thought that's a great idea. So the next book that I've already started on will a brief introduction to this leadership operating system.
Speaker 1:Congratulations. And what an impressive calling card. So most people will hand you a business card or maybe a shiny fact sheet, but like I really appreciate the effort and thought that went into into that, that is really cool. Well, you, you've written books.
Speaker 2:You know it's a labor of love. Is anybody going to?
Speaker 1:care about really love. Anybody want to read this. It's gonna help anybody.
Speaker 2:Every sentence I pause and I have a moment a crisis of confidence. Yes, so obviously you know it's a labor of love, but at the same time, it is still one of the key ways that we're able to share ideas and give people who may not be able to afford the high level coaching that we provide for large organizations an opportunity to be exposed to these, the high level coaching that we provide for large organizations an opportunity to be exposed to these ideas and actually to experience their own personal transformation.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So let's think more about your most recent book, transform your Trajectory. Can you share a key insight that leaders and organizations can implement right away, something that? Can you know that everyday talk or group functioning? What would? What would you say?
Speaker 2:I'd say, oh, there's so many, I'll pick, I'll pick one. So the book again revolves around one of our core tools called the Kairos circle, and the word Kairos is a Greek word that some people are familiar with, but it's it's the, it's the one of the Greek words for time, the word we have for time. And the other Greek word is chronos, which we're more familiar with because that's where we come up with chronological and so chronos time in the Greek culture is really sequential time, it's calendar time, stopwatch time, it's linear time. But the Greeks understood the importance of identifying that in our chronos timeline of life, every day, every hour, every month, every year, a lifetime that we are constantly experiencing significant moments in that chronological timeline that are important for us to slow down to pay attention to them. Why? Because the experiences of our life. So this is just a little caveat, for, for you know young people out there that are still in, you know, schooling, um, or leaders who, once they left school, have kind of bought into this idea that, like, that season of my life is over, I've learned what I need to learn, now it's time to go be a professional. And I tell people no, the goal is to be a lifelong learner.
Speaker 2:So this Kairos circle, this tool, equips us first and foremost with the ability to identify those experiences in our lives that are absolutely ripe with learning, with opportunities for personal growth, development, transformation, with new insights, with wisdom. So when people ask me, how do I increase my wisdom, my understanding, my insights, my capacity as a leader? And I said you can continue to download all the latest content and just shovel that into your mouth, and that's not bad, because a lot of good content out there. The problem is we don't always know how to this is not the right word, but I don't know why to matriculate or to process or digest the content and the life experiences we're having. So what this tool does? It gives us a simple process to identify these Kairos moments in our everyday lives and the ability to digest those experiences or things that we're reading in a book or hearing on a podcast so that they actually benefit us, that we actually get the nutrients from that learning into our minds and into our inner persons, so that they actually help.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I love that. I was thinking. The other day someone asked me what is the single most important thing a leader can do, which is such a big question, but I boiled it down. I said self-reflection, and that's what you're really getting at, and giving people the tools, because telling someone to go reflect I mean from sending a small child to timeout to having a manager say, well, maybe we think about that.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's so obscure and abstract, and so thank you for helping people think through what that actually can look like and how to do that.
Speaker 2:Well, it's the phrase that I often encourage people with is we have to learn how to learn. Yes, because we've learned in a particular methodology. Now, no offense to the academic world, but we all know that a lot of our experience, at least through our undergrad and college, is a lot of information acquisition and regurgitation. We're memorizing bits of information so that we can pass a test and then a lot of that stuff just goes out the window. But how do we actually develop the cognitive skill set to learn from whatever it is that we're experiencing?
Speaker 2:Because reading a book is not the same as learning, listening to a podcast is not the same as learning, because we can hear a lot of information, but without the ability to properly digest that information, extract, like I said earlier, the nutrients and leverage that to work for us, then what I find is people stop learning, we plateau in our learning. And so, like you said, self-awareness that's leadership 101. We all have to practice. Then you ask people, how do you practice self-awareness? And they're, oh, I don't know. I said, okay, no problem. That's why we've developed these simple tools, this operating system that equips people with practical, very simple practical handles on how to do these things that matter so very much yeah that is incredible.
Speaker 1:And now let's think about your first book, and I haven't had a chance to read this and I can't wait to read it, and I just love the title. So Leadership Gravitas. So I'm wondering if you could share with us your philosophy on developing gravitas, and why is it so important for leaders to possess the quality?
Speaker 2:So the title Leadership Gravitas was a phrase that I stumbled upon many, many years ago, because gravitas is not a kind of a common word in most people's vocabulary.
Speaker 2:We have a sense of what it means, but I got it from the imagery of kind of the laws of physics that in planetary orbits it's the planets of smaller mass that revolve around the planets of larger mass, and that became an image in my mind of gosh. I want to be the kind of leader that other people feel safe, feel confident, feel encouraged to revolve around, to follow. In other words, a phrase that we often say is we ask the question are you a leader worth following? Because a title and a position in an organization does not necessarily mean you're a good leader. It doesn't mean that people trust you, it doesn't mean that people respect you, it doesn't mean that people feel empowered by you. And so I remember in those early years of my own leadership struggles which, by the way, they never end. I'm still struggling in my leadership to get to new levels. But I remember thinking I want to be the kind of leader that other people are thankful for, are grateful for, the kind of leader that younger or other leaders aspire to say I want to be like that person, like Eric, as a leader.
Speaker 2:And so I set out on this adventure to ask the question what are those qualities, what are those characteristics that the leaders in all of history? So I did a lot of research, a lot of study, a lot of reading to ask the question what are those qualities? And not just there are certain qualities in our contemporary culture that we latch onto and we would suggest well, if you don't have these qualities, like Elon Musk, or if you don't have these qualities like a Mark Zuckerberg or, you know, like a Jeff Bezos, then you can't be an entrepreneur, you can't be an effective leader. And what I realized? That's absolutely not true. They may have some unique qualities that I do not have, but those are not the qualities that determine the effectiveness of a leader. And so what I did was just basically acquire those characteristics and those qualities and began to aggregate them and then eventually developed what we call the EQ matrix EQ standing for emotional intelligence, because that became kind of a banner or phrase, you know, created by Daniel Goleman, that I could say yeah, leaders who operate with gravitas.
Speaker 2:In other words, when the world is unstable or uncertain around you, with an ever-changing landscape, where everything is always in transition especially nowadays with technology, things are changing a mile a minute? How do we keep up? What is our ability, under mounting pressure, to continue to operate as the best version of ourself? And I mean the best version of ourself today, because I want to be a better version tomorrow. But today, in the midst of all the pressures and all the uncertainty and all the challenges that we're facing as humans and as leaders, what is my ability to maintain the best version of myself? To maintain the best version of myself because that will likely determine other people's ability, their sense of safety, security to be able to follow me, to participate, whatever it is that I'm running after.
Speaker 2:And, quite frankly, it was also a study of all of the leaders that I had had up to that point in my life and realized some of those leaders I loved for particular qualities. There were very few of those leaders that I thought I trust them, I want to follow them, I want to participate or be a part of whatever they're doing. And so extracting those characteristics and then attaching them to a simple visual tool so that any person, at any age, in any context, can begin that journey of asking the questions how do I develop these skills, how do I increase these qualities? And what we find in my own life journey and with the leaders we work with is, guess what?
Speaker 2:As they focus not on trying to quote unquote be a better leader, because that can feel like an enigma, but as they focus on growing and developing these simple skills, these simple qualities, guess what the testimony of the people around them is I feel like you're more trustworthy, I feel like you're safer to be around, I feel like I respect you more, I feel like I'm willing to go with you into difficult times, I want to participate in what you're up to and where you're going, and so that's. The beautiful thing is that we're all wanting to be better leaders. We don't know what that means, and I think we need a different pathway that says hey, let's first and foremost become the kind of people yes, the quality of people that other people want to follow, and that is how we develop our leadership.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yes, the quality of people that other people want to follow, and that is how we develop our leadership. Yeah, yeah, and exactly, and I'm just thinking too like when we're focusing on being the best version of ourselves, we're modeling that for those on our team, right, and then, like you said, we have trust, we have respect, we're more committed, even when things are really challenging, and that's magic. The amount of time we spend at work or working is staggering, and to be able to have someone like that at the helm is a gift.
Speaker 2:Oh gosh, and here's an interesting Leah. A question that I get asked very often by leaders is, first of all, what the heck is culture? That's one question I get all the time, because there's a million books out there and everyone's talking about the importance of transforming or creating a healthy or a psychologically safe culture, an emotionally intelligent culture.
Speaker 2:That's the first question. Is it possible for me as a leader even if I don't have the ultimate authority is it possible for me to actually have significant influence and be a transformative agent in this culture? Because I think a lot of times people are excited to jump into a new team, a new organization, a new division, a new career, and they get involved and in the beginning it's man, optimism and bright-eyed, bushy, tailed, and we're just going to be amazing, everyone's amazing. And then, after you know a few hours or a few days, it's like man, this place sucks, everyone's grumpy and frustrated and people gossiping and talking behind people's backs. There's, you know, power playing going all over the place, and so here's, here's the two things.
Speaker 2:The way I define culture is simply this, and it's going to sound silly, but bear with me. I define culture as this. This is how we do it. This is how we do it. The prevailing attitudes and behaviors of the people in any context will determine the prevailing culture. Culture is just the kind of some expression of the prevailing attitudes, behaviors, and so what I tell leaders is that if you want to change culture, then you have to understand how bread is made. Right, because it's as a southern californian you know we, we don't we go. Vegetables grow on the shelves of the grocery store.
Speaker 2:Bread somehow appears in the bag in the grocery store we have no concept usually how this is made, and so I remember one day my wife making homemade bread at home, and the first thing that surprised me was that there was only a few ingredients. Right, because?
Speaker 1:if you look at a package of bread, it's like 25 ingredients. It's all preservatives.
Speaker 2:And so she's got the flour and the water and the eggs and she mixes it all together and it turns into this big lump. And then she goes into the refrigerator and she pulls out this little bottle and on the bottle it says yeast, and I think that sounds disgusting.
Speaker 1:I've only heard that word, associated with a few things Babies is okay, I'm not interested.
Speaker 2:And so I said to my wife I said what is that? And she said oh gosh, I'm surprised you don't know this, I won't explain it. She said this gosh, I'm surprised you don't know this, I won't explain it. She said this is the yeast, this is leaven. And having spent a lot of years in kind of more of a religious context, I'd always heard this parable of Jesus where he teaches a little leaven leavens the whole lump. So she takes this very small dash of leaven and she puts it into this very large lump of dough and then she begins to knead the leaven in and I think that little bit of leaven isn't going to make any changes. And then she sets it aside, she covers it up, and she comes back an hour later and that little lump of dough has expanded. Right, it has expanded because it's created all these air bubbles within the bread. It's expanded and is now so much larger than it was previously.
Speaker 2:And so I tell people I said don't underestimate your unique ability to transform the culture of your workplace, of your household, of your friendship group, of whatever context you find yourself in. But here's the first order of business you have to change the way that you do things. You have to commit to a set of attitudes and behaviors that reflect the kind of culture that you want to fight for and then you have to commit to operating by those attitudes and behaviors consistently and you're going to go against the grain and you're going to feel like you're swimming upstream. But as you continue to do that, guess what? You will be the leaven that has a catalytic, transformative impact on your environment. Because guess what?
Speaker 2:People are drawn to health. People are drawn to life. If what's coming out of you is more life-giving, it's healthier, it's, it's more effective, it brings more joy to people's lives. If it's more productive, then people will be drawn to it and we'll begin to ask gosh, what are you doing different? And that's what gives people an opportunity then to begin to say I want to adopt those attitudes and behaviors. And I've seen it happen so many times, leah, where one leader who works with us says my organization, my team, doesn't want to go through this coaching process. No problem, you focus on you. And as they focus on themselves and they experience transformation, they become the new culture and then they're consistently in that old culture. It begins to catalyze transformation.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I love all those illustrations. I'm very visual and that's so helpful. And, yeah, letting someone know you're going to be the love and it doesn't take a lot.
Speaker 2:We're going to give you our books, leah, because our books revolve around visual tools, because I can't remember anything that's not attached to women. Consistent, yes, revolve around visual tools, because I can't remember anything that's not attached to a window, exactly, yes, I love that.
Speaker 1:So now I'm going to think a kind of big scale, very broad. So, across all of your clients, what is the most common challenge? And maybe it was culture, maybe it's something else, but what is it that you hear most frequently? That people are emailing or reaching out to you, and then you know what is a follow-up step to addressing that challenge.
Speaker 2:Most leaders when they come to us right, because very rarely do leaders come to us on the front end of their career, of their job, responsibility, to say, hey, I want to get ahead of the eight ball and I want to lead as well as.
Speaker 1:I possibly can.
Speaker 2:Right, because I think we're all every one of us is operating out of some measure of an imposter syndrome, right, I think that's normal. Imposter syndrome, I tell people, is just a fancy word for feeling insecure, okay, and so we're all feeling a little bit insecure when we step into any role and responsibility, and so we muster up all of our strength and all of our leadership tools and skills and we kind of go at it and eventually what we find is we run into ongoing frustrations, we run into ongoing struggles, difficulties, challenges, dysfunctions, and what happens for leaders is, over time, their inability to understand or diagnose the particular problems that are happening in their organization. And right now I'm not talking about system structures, processes, sops that's important too but I'm talking about the way that those human beings in any team or organization are interacting together, because I like to think that people are the engine of any business, not the product, not the service, not the computer systems, right, I mean, ai is going to take over some things, but not everything. We're still going to need people to run stuff, and so people are the engine, and how people operate individually and collectively determines oftentimes the effectiveness, productivity of the organization. So when the engine of any team or organization is not functioning well.
Speaker 2:Right, think of the engine when I'm driving my car. I'm not a mechanic, I just know it's in there, it's under the hood somewhere, it powers my vehicle and helps me get from point A to point B, and I'm really grateful for it. But the most frustrating thing is when there's a light on my dashboard that comes on and it says, hey, you're low on oil, or hey, you need to get some maintenance. Or hey, there's tire pressure that's lower. Hey, you need to get the engine checked. Or hey, you're due for a maintenance. You know a session, and all I can say that I'm sure there are other people who feel this way. I always feel slightly annoyed, disrupted, inconvenienced, because I I just think, why can't that engine just keep doing its job? Well, we as individuals and as teams are like that engine. We need maintenance. We need, like our operating systems, we need continual upgrades and updates so that we can continue to operate effectively, especially with everything changing in the landscape of organizations. We need to continually upgrade and update our ability to face new challenges and overcome obstacles. And so when they're coming to us, it's because usually there's enough of the lights on the dashboard of their car that are now blinking at them and saying, hey, you got to pay attention to what's happening in your organization and it's usually in a place that they're not familiar with.
Speaker 2:So now that begins, you know insecurity, inadequacy sets in. Leaders start thinking I'm getting paid to be the leader and I don't know how to transform the culture here. I don't know how to deal with the dysfunction of my team. I don't know how to deal with all this. You know all the drama going on and that just continues to perpetuate this sense of I'm inadequate. If anybody actually finds out that I don't know how to solve these problems, maybe that will disqualify me as a leader. And sometimes leaders sum up the courage to say you know what? I didn't learn this in school, because that's the truth. I was never trained or equipped to understand the engine of an automobile, because that's not taught in your MBAs nowadays.
Speaker 2:And so when they invite us in, it's what we do is we come in and we basically begin to equip them with the simple tools so that they can learn how to diagnose the engine of their business, the people and how those people are operating together, and the simple maintenance procedures, the simple solutions, fixes that will get that engine running optimally again, at full power, at full strength, at full efficiency. And so that's essentially what we do with leaders, teams and organizations, and the best part is that we want to, you know, we want to equip them and serve them and empower them until they can do for themselves what only we could do at first, because we don't want them to depend on us forever.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that is incredible. So this next question is a little bit of a pivot. And I've been, you know, just in anecdotal conversations. I've had more people and this is, you know, at soccer games or in the grocery store, but saying, you know, after COVID, I'm taking a step back. I don't think I want to become a leader, I don't want that, the headache that comes with that. So I'm wondering, from your perspective, what can our titled leaders in organizations do? How do we continue to support and empower these employees who don't have those leadership aspirations but are still valuable in maintaining culture and, you know, fueling that work group?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I'm assuming you're speaking to the people who are in roles and responsibilities with a title of some kind of leadership. Yeah, yeah, I would say this this is probably the simplest way to say it I think we need a significant paradigm shift. That is, I think, happening, like we've got what I call the prophets of our culture, the Simon Sinek's, the Brene Brown's, these people that we're all listening to, going, yes, something needs to change in the culture of how we operate in our organization.
Speaker 2:I'm dissatisfied, I'm frustrated, I'm unhappy. I feel like I'm just a cog in the machine, whatever people are saying.
Speaker 2:But there is a significant amount of displeasure for most people, for a very high percentage of people, in their experience in the workplace experience in the workplace and oftentimes what they end up doing is blaming it on their particular role and responsibility, when I think it's actually has far more to do with the relational experience they're having within the workplace. That's what I think is where most of the stress and headaches are coming from. Well, if you look at and you weigh out the amount of time, energy and resource that most organizations give to what I call the delivery of the organization Selling, serving, producing, manufacturing, packaging, whatever it is you know lawyering, doctoring you know there's the delivery. The mission of the organization is to deliver a particular product service for people's consumption, and I think that's very important. And then there's the other side of the scale, which is development. In other words, how do we attend to the time, energy and resource that we're investing into the development of the engine of this organization? And I would suggest that and this is probably a very conservative and generous guesstimation, but it's probably around 90% of our time, energy and resource, if not more, is devoted to the delivery side of our business and maybe 10% is devoted to the development side. And the development side that is happening is largely people coming in for three hours to do a quick workshop and then that person's gone and we get a new person coming in every six months because, you know, it's just like let's get the newest idea and the newest thing.
Speaker 2:And what I find when I interview these organizations well, how's that been going for you? We've spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on, you know, all of these amazing personalities and brand people to come in and inspire and motivate and and and I think okay, and how's that working? Well, we haven't really seen any significant changes. I'm like well, so basically that was a poor ROI and in the world of business we should know better. We should look at that ROI and say that's not delivering to us, that's not giving us the kind of qualitative experience and help that we actually really need. And so, for most organizations, the thought of because I would say we're more coaches than consultants we like to come in and, over a period of time, partner with leaders, teams, organizations in a kind of significant process that is going to equip them with new tools Right, and of course, you know what does every leader say to me? We can't afford to meet every week for an hour. On zoom I can tell you what after two or three months of working with us.
Speaker 2:Here's what they start saying I can't believe we didn't do this before oh my gosh, we can't afford not to work with you guys every week, and that's because for the most part, I think that the ideas that are being kind of spread in the world of leadership are fantastic, largely rooted in significant principles, many repackaged to new and fresh and titillating ways.
Speaker 2:But I don't know that there are a lot of significant transformative processes that are being offered in the world of coaching, at least that I've been exposed to, and part of that is because it's a lot of hard work, it takes time, it's inconvenient and uncomfortable right, because everyone's going to have to get out of their comfort zone and learn and grow and develop and stretch their leadership muscles. But for those leaders, teams, organizations that choose that path, what they discover is, in a very short period of time, the quality of transformation across whatever scope we're working with, is radically beneficial. Like the ROI, the return on investment that they experience is so significant that they literally are over the moon, and that's how we've grown as a business is by word of mouth.
Speaker 2:And we really haven't needed time to go market ourselves as a coaching business because, you know, one leader says to another leader my gosh, you know what happened. You've experienced all this transformation. Your business is operating better, you're. You no longer seem stressed when you come to the golf course or you know when we're playing bingo or whatever you know it's like.
Speaker 2:Well, we've been working with this coaching group and it's literally transformed the atmosphere, the culture, the way that we operate. Our business is better, Our bottom line is better and, quite frankly, I like my life better, which?
Speaker 1:is really really.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean talk about the best compliment and not something people not having to actively try and push and market and having that plan is virtually unheard of, so that is really, really incredible, Eric, I think this will be a nice segue to this. I want to ask about a success story, something that you really are proud of whether it's an organization or particular leader or particular team but what kind of stands out as something that you know you've seen a lot of change and it just, you know, brings a smile to your face?
Speaker 2:Oh, my gosh Leah I have. I saw that question and my brain was flooded with so many amazing stories. And I say that because in our coaching business we were very disciplined to take time to recognize, acknowledge and engage the challenges we're facing with clients right, because it's hard work.
Speaker 2:I call it the grind. It's a grind, but the successes, the breakthroughs that we get to see, not only for individual leaders but for teams and for organizations at large. So I'll give you, can I give you, the three really quick, short ones. She had an incredible fitness organization that was growing all over Southern California. It was booming and she kind of dialed in the formula right and she was crushing it.
Speaker 2:We started working with her and then COVID hit, which is an unexpected I mean significant impact on her in-person fitness business. And so she didn't know what to do, and in working with her, we did not solve her problem. We just simply walked with her, equipped her with the tools to diagnose the problems she was facing and to begin to search out for the creative solutions. And so she transitioned during COVID to an online business, which required a new skillset from her. I mean, it was still the same core business of wanting to give people a chance to increase their fitness in a healthy, holistic way, but through COVID, just really for a year and a half, fought, battled, really more than anything else, to overcome her own insecurities, sense of inadequacy. Can I do this? Do I have what it takes?
Speaker 2:And I just spoke with her a few weeks ago and her business is like 50 X. She never had even considered the possibility of what moving her business into an online format would do for her. She is reaching more people across a much greater scope of the world. She's got clients in almost every continent. Now she's just absolutely crushing it, which is so encouraging, and she always looks back to that time where she says Eric, whether it's COVID or a downturn in the market or some impact in our whatever, in our getting all of our products. You know, gosh, I never realized that that challenge, which I would have thought was would have killed our business, was actually an opportunity.
Speaker 2:And the second story is a young man who became, who was named and became one of the youngest general managers in the NBA and those who know about NBA basketball professional basketball will know who I'm talking about. But he was named as one of the youngest GMs and entered into an organization that, by all accounts, was moving in a lot of different directions and he was tasked with the responsibility, because, really, in professional sports, all anybody really thinks about is we want to win a championship, we want to win a championship.
Speaker 2:Who's going to help us do that? And everybody wants overnight success. Nobody wants to do the hard work over a period of time. And so, working with him to begin the process of transforming his front office, the process of creating a culture where people were more collaborative, they were no longer hoarding information, they were no longer siloed, and that took probably a year to do that, but sadly, letting, jettisoning, you know, employees that were not interested in operating in this new culture, bringing in new people, formed the way that that organization now operates, where you know, from anybody who go in there would say if you, you know, spent a day in those offices, you know, two years, three years ago, and then you went today, you would say this is an entirely different organization.
Speaker 2:And what I loved about him is that he chose to embrace this simple idea that we're not here to win a championship. We're here to build a championship caliber program that has the opportunity to potentially vie for multiple championships.
Speaker 2:Right, and that's the whole idea that we have to become the transformation that we want to see in our teams and our organization. He did the hard work that that organization has been doing, the hard work which has been just so fun to watch and so. And then the third organization is a distributor of raw commodities wheat, flowers, all that stuff. And I remember when I, when we first started working with this organization it's it's family owned and run, multiple families involved a lot of just your classic power struggles and divisions and siloing and fractures in the infrastructure. But they were wildly successful. And I tell people all the time just because you're financially successful does not mean that you are relationally or culturally successful. And over time, every organization finds out the hard way that ultimately the culture will catch up and undermine the effectiveness of the organization. Right, I think it's Peter Drucker who said you know, culture eats strategy for breakfast. It's absolutely true. And so they got to the point where they were suffering from a lot of internal dysfunction, and so they brought us in, we started working with them.
Speaker 2:I'll never forget this, this little story. We were teaching them the tool that is introduced in Leadership, gravitas how to identify the moments when we're triggered, our default responses and how that impacts our environment. And then what would it look like if we chose to embrace different attitudes and behaviors, what we call the pathway of personal responsibility? And so we're doing, we're leading them through this tool. We get into a call two weeks later and, before we jump into any more tool training, I just say, hey guys, I just want to hear what's going on In light of what we've been talking about. Are you experiencing anything, any changes or any challenges? Was accidentally sent to all of our vendors with all of our price margin breakdown in the email, which would show the person that they're trying to purchase stuff from how much we're making on them.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And so it was a massive disaster. The fear of breaking trust with these people. Are you taking advantage? I mean, there was so massive disaster, the fear of breaking trust with these people. Are you taking advantage? I mean, there was so much trauma.
Speaker 2:And he said, eric, when I had to jump into the meeting with my executive team to address this problem, he said I said, well, what happened? He said it was night and day difference to how we would have normally. I said, well, how would you have normally? And I said, normally we would have jumped into that room. We would have immediately been pointing fingers looking for a scapegoat. Who are we going to throw under the bus? Who sent that email? Just fire them right now.
Speaker 2:And he said, instead, we realized we're all triggered. Would it look like if every one of us took 100% personal responsibility for this situation? And just that shifting of their paradigm and perspective led to, he said, an incredibly different type of conversation where they were able to work together, they were able to each own whatever little part they might have had in that situation and they were able to solve the problem. And guess what? We can't always control the external factors, but that leaked email ended up not really causing any significant issues, and the team from that point forward realized wow, how we operate individually and together really does matter for how we run this business. That person who would have been fired stayed on and has been wildly successful, and the relational atmosphere I like to call it the air we're breathing when we're in the office, just radically shifted at that point and they've just been getting healthier and healthier ever since.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that is incredible to go from finger pointing to everyone accepting their portion of the blame and saying, okay, how do we collaborate, how do we fix this instead of what did you do? Excellent, yeah, those are really incredible stories. So, eric, two final questions for you, and this is is how we end all episodes of the communicative leader. So you know, a tip advice challenge. So for our titled leaders are, you know, our managers, directors? And then advice for all employees, across all ranks. So what do you want to leave our listeners with, across all ranks?
Speaker 1:So, what do you want to leave our listeners with?
Speaker 2:Yeah, for those people who currently have titles, roles, responsibilities that you know would suggest leadership responsibility I would say to them, wherever you're feeling imposter syndrome, inadequacy, ill-equipped what I would say to them is you should. And it's not your fault. You were trained for 20 plus years in an understanding of business that did not include perhaps one of the most important features of business, which is the engine, which is the people. And so, instead of beating yourself up and trying to cover up whatever you're not sure, quite sure how to do, instead choose to go on a learning journey and to equip yourself with the needed tools, skills that will allow you to continue to raise your game as a leader and to be a leader worth following.
Speaker 2:For those people who are not titled, or even for those people, like you said earlier, who would kind of think you know, I don't even know if I want to be a leader, here's what I would say we're all leaders, because the way I define leadership is influence.
Speaker 2:So you have influence in your home, in your friendship groups, and if you're at the golf course, if you're at the grocery store, if you're on the freeway, you have influence over the other people in the different lanes, Like as human beings, we are all walking around every day with significant opportunities to lead to influence, to impact people. The question is is our influence and impact an asset or a liability, in whatever context we find ourselves? That's a really important question to ask ourselves. Secondly, to choose to own the responsibility, as a human being, that you are a leader. You do have influence and impact. Therefore, to go on the journey of developing your leadership gravitas, your leadership acumen, your skills, your capacity Because if it's not just for the business world, it's for your marriage, it's for your kids, it's for your extended family, it's for your friendship circles, it's for society, please, let's all recognize we are leaders.
Speaker 1:Yep, yep. I could not agree with you more Exactly. It's like you're in this role, whether you like it or not, so taking the time, even like a tiny step back to think about what that means in these different arenas, can really have some positive outcomes. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And not to underestimate the power of our ability, as individuals, to transform, to influence the context and the cultures that we find ourselves in Exactly.
Speaker 1:Eric, thank you for sharing your time, your expertise. This has been such an energizing conversation.
Speaker 2:For me too.
Speaker 1:Oh, thank you, yeah, and thank you for the great work you're doing. Really, you know from what I'm doing in the classroom from this leadership perspective. It's so nice to see people doing the good work so that organizations can fit better and feel better and be more human centered of my dreams is that there would actually be college courses or graduate courses offered.
Speaker 2:in introducing this leadership operating system to young leaders. Because I just say it's never too early to start developing your leadership acumen. And if we could download this leadership operating system into people in their late teens, 20s, even their 30s, before they've reached higher levels of leadership roles and responsibility, I just think we have an opportunity to see a vastly different cultural landscape across corporate America, because I think corporate America quite frankly needs saving.
Speaker 1:Yes, yeah, yeah. Well, that one is transform your trajectory and then the new one you're writing Right. So we're going to keep our eyes out for that one, please do yeah, thank you, eric.
Speaker 2:Thank you, Leah.
Speaker 1:All right, my friends, that wraps up our conversation today. Until next time, communicate with intention and lead with purpose. I'm looking forward to chatting with you again soon on the Communicative Leader.
