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BGLS3E7 - Resolving an Old Conflict - Your Big Play of the Day - Law of Solid Ground - Sea:3Ep:7

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In this episode:

• I share the story of a client who was in that exact situation, and how he was able to go back later and address the issue in a healthy way.
• I also talk about how you can get a lot done, even when you’re faced with seemingly incessant emergencies.
• I share about the Law of Solid Ground and how you can use it at work.

Resources:

HBR Article – “If your boss could do your job”

“Google Project Oxygen Reveals 8 Keys to Being a Great Boss”

Dealing with a disrespectful team member: Sea:2Ep4

Conflict resolution worksheet

Transcript:

[00:00:00]

Tom: I like what John says. He says, “Trust is like change in a leader’s pocket. Each time you make good leadership decisions, you earn more change. Each time you make poor decisions, you pay out some of the change to the people.” All leaders have a certain amount of change in their pocket when they start in a new leadership position, but when you’re out of change, you’re out as the leader. Becoming a Geek Leader, Season Three, Episode Seven.

[00:00:28]

Sponsored by BrightHill Group’s Executive Coaching Services.

CEO whisperer, Jerry Colonna, said, “If you’re not consciously, intentionally creating your culture, culture’s gonna get created around you or despite you.” I work with leaders and their team members to help create a positive culture. Sometimes this is by coaching one or more high potential team members to help them develop the skills to create the environment for their teams. Other times, I’m brought in to work with someone who needs help getting back on the path. If you’d like help creating a great culture, developing your team members or even taking your leadership to the next level, check out brighthillgroup.com/go/coaching. That’s brighthillgroup.com/go/coaching. I offer individual and small business rates. Let’s get started.

[00:01:21]

Welcome to the Becoming a Geek Leader podcast. My name is Tom Cooper. As a geek, I’m on a mission to figure out better ways to lead others at work and at home. Through the Becoming a Geek Leader podcast, I’m sharing what I’m learning so I can help make you more effective at leading people too. Ready?

[00:01:44]

Introduction

Welcome to another episode of Becoming a Geek Leader. In today’s episode, I’m gonna talk about what can you do if you had a conflict with someone a while back. Is it too late now to address it? I’m also gonna talk about how to use your “Big play of the day” to have higher productivity and more accomplishments. And I’ll also be talking about the law of solid ground, how important trust is to high productivity teams. We’ve got so much to cover. Let’s get started.

[00:02:17]

Coach’s Mailbox.

[00:02:49]

Tom: In today’s Coach’s Mailbox segment, I wanna introduce the idea of something I call your “Big play of the day.” Your “Big play of the day” is a tool you can start to use at level one of the four levels of thinking as a geek leader.

[00:03:07]

Man 1: Level one: Individual.

[00:03:10]

Tom: At level one, you may even be a superstar technical resource. Level one focuses you on improving your technical skills. Today’s email comes from Shelly. Shelly writes, “Tom, I’m working on growing as a contributor and on being more effective at work. But here’s the big challenge: even if I start my day with a good plan about what needs to be done that day, I often find my plans are completely blown up by emergencies. Is there anything I can do to stay on track and focus on my goals?”

[00:03:44]

Well, Shelly, that is a common problem. I remember I started a small company a few years back and I quickly noticed a pattern, where there was a crisis almost every day. We’d find ourselves with a bunch of our highly technical people, sitting around the conference room table, discussing what we were gonna do about that crisis. And day after day, I’d go in with an idea about what I hoped to accomplish, only to find that there was something that came up that kept me from getting anything done. It was really frustrating. Now, for us, we eventually found a way to avoid focusing that entire team on daily firefighting. Now, in that situation, I was fortunate to be in a leadership role and I was able to help tackle that. I had some control over what we did.

[00:04:29]

From your email, I don’t get the sense that you’re in a role where you have the formal authority to implement changes at work. But even if that’s true, your “Big play of the day” tool is something you can use to help you make progress towards your goals, even when you have a lot of crises. Now, this idea, the “Big play of the day,” as you look at the things that you want to accomplish, you probably have a long to do list. I know I do. In fact, my to do list is so long that I feel like I’m never gonna accomplish many of the things that are on it and candidly, that may, in fact, be true. But, what I’m suggesting you do is look over that list and identify what one thing absolutely has to happen. What’s one thing on your list that it’s got to happen that day? Maybe it’s an important meeting. Maybe it’s a time sensitive conversation you’ve got to have with another team member. Maybe there’s some project work that if you don’t get it done, there’s gonna be trouble.

[00:05:38]

Whatever it is, I want you to think about that one thing where you need to have clear thinking, where you need to have lots of energy and you’ve gotta be really organized. That one thing is your “Big play of the day.” That’s the play that you need to be ready to hit the ball out of the park. You’re gonna be at your best, at your peak, at your top energy level, ready to go after that thing. No matter what happens around you, you need to save energy, time and emotional strength for that thing. This is the key item on your to-do list.

[00:06:17]

Now, you might have two. You might have two things but you won’t be able to really focus your “big play of the day” if you have more than one or two items on your list. The goal is for you to be able to prioritize the things that are on your agenda so that you can focus your energy and your time and your strength on that thing that’s the most important. Now, this requires that you take the time to prioritize your to-do list. And here’s what’s really interesting about that, when you make the time to reflect and analyze the things that are on your list, it helps you do something really powerful. Even if you only spend a few minutes on this prioritization, on this analysis, it’s gonna unlock performance potential you did not even know you had.

[00:07:13]

Let me give you an example. Let’s say it’s a typical day. On your calendar, you’ve got four meetings and you’ve got a bunch of tasks that you wanna get done. And you really wanna knock about five big tasks off your list, but then at about 10:30, you get called in an emergency team meeting because of a crisis with a customer. And that crisis and the response to the crisis eat up all four hours of the open time on your calendar and you end up leaving the office late, not getting the stuff done that you intended to get done that day. Man, I’ve been there and it is really frustrating.

[00:07:45]

Well, what if there was an alternate take on that? Let’s say we go back and replay that day, almost like Groundhog Day. You get a chance to have a do-over for that day. And on this replayed version of the day, it goes something like this. Before work starts, you evaluate your to-do list. It would feel good, really productive if you knocked off those top five items on your to do list, but you look at your calendar and you realize you’ve got four meetings and work has just been crazy over and above the meetings that you’ve got. But as you’re evaluating your list, you realize one of those meetings is with an important stakeholder who can help you or really hurt you when it comes to your success. That meeting becomes your “Big play of the day.”

[00:08:31]

But as you’re looking at that, you’re not completely satisfied with just that one meeting being your big play of the day. So you look at your list and you find item number three on your to-do list. Now, item number three, you think, “That needs to be done. That’s gotta be on my big play of the day also.” Now, it wasn’t number three because it was less important, it became number three on your list because that’s the order you happened to think of it when you were making your list. Your evaluation reveals that task is really important to some other work you need to do later in the week and so you wanna make that your second big play of the day.

[00:09:05]

So now you’ve prioritized those two things, the meeting with the key stakeholder and this task on your to do list. What’s amazing is what happens inside your brain. Now that you’ve identified that those are the most important things that need to happen today, your subconscious mind begins to work on those things even while your conscious mind is distracted or actively working on other things. What you’ll discover is that you’ll have awareness and insights that are made possible by your subconscious mind. Your subconscious mind is gonna bring those things and make them available to you when you need them. That’s gonna help you with being effective at getting your big play of the day done.

[00:09:51]

Also, when you’ve got that conscious clarity about the urgency and importance of these tasks over the other potential tasks that are on your list, you will efficiently allocate time to work on them. Just for example, now that you know that meeting with the stakeholder is your big play of the day, you’re gonna be a lot more comfortable excusing yourself from the firefighting to get to that meeting on time because you’re able to clarify in your mind, and if somebody asks you, “Hey, where are you going?” you can clearly say, “Hey, look, I’ve got to get connected with this stakeholder. I’ve got a window of time to do it. I’m just gonna have to step out for that and I’ll be back after I handle that.”

[00:10:31]

And even if you get caught up in the team and you’re working on whatever the customer fire is, that we talked about earlier, you’re gonna find ways to make some progress on item number three as well because your subconscious mind is gonna be working on that and helping you to prioritize that. Here’s the thing, when we don’t have clear priorities, when we just absent about clarity about what is the most important, urgent tasks appear to be really important and overall, all of us, psychologically, all of us tend to use time ineffectively. But once we have clarity about the importance of the things we need to work on, you’re gonna find that you have greater focus.

[00:11:15]

Let me encourage you to give this a try just for two weeks. Take two minutes in the morning to reflect on your calendar and your to-do list. Pick just one thing, maybe two, that are just gonna be your big play of the day. Think about the resources you’re gonna need and what success would look like for that specific item. I’m telling you, Shelly, you’re gonna be amazed at how much more you begin to get done and especially what you get done of the most important stuff.

[00:11:43]

So, Shelly, I hope this helps. At the start of your day, or maybe the night before, identify your big play of the day and then intentionally reserve some of your time, some of your energy and some of your emotional strength to make sure you hit that ball completely out of the park when it comes time for that big play. Your big play of the day, that’s today’s Coach’s Mailbox.

[00:12:09]

Thought Leader segment.

[00:12:28]

John: Hello, I’m John Maxwell.  As one of my founding partners, Tom has been trained by me and my team.

[00:12:35]

Tom: Today’s John Maxwell Thought Leader segment is all about the law of solid ground. We begin to take advantage of the law of solid ground when we’re at level two of the four levels of thinking as a geek leader.

[00:12:49]

Man 2: Level two: Team member. Level two is where you work well with others and together you all succeed.

[00:12:58]

Tom: John Maxwell says, “Character makes trust possible and trust makes leadership possible.” That is the law of solid ground. Now, this is the fifth installment in the series that I’m doing from John’s book, “The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership” and we’re talking about the law of solid ground. Now, the law of solid ground is entirely about trust. I have to tell you, trust is a reason most of my clients hire me. There’s been a breach of trust, there’s a need for more trust or there’s a disagreement about trust. No matter the circumstances, if there’s a leadership problem there’s almost always a related problem with trust. Now, just last week I was brought into an organization to work with a team to help them create what we called a trust contract, a shared agreement about what each team member can legitimately expect of the other people in difficult situations. High-performing teams have high trust and low-performing teams have low trust. If you want to improve your team’s performance, probably the most effective short and long term area you can work on, is trust.

[00:14:13]

I like what John says. He says, “Trust is like change in a leader’s pocket. Each time you make good leadership decisions, you earn more change. Each time you make poor decisions, you pay out some of the change to the people. All leaders have a certain amount of change in their pocket when they start in a new leadership position. But when you’re out of change, you’re out as the leader.” That is true. People are watching you. They’re watching you in big ways and in small ways and they’re making decision after decision about whether they can trust us, based on the impact our decisions have on them.

[00:14:51]

And here’s the hard part. We judge ourselves by our intent, but they judge us by the impact we have on them. And I’ll give you a quick example. Let’s say you know a project manager expects you to get your part of the work done by Thursday. Now, you fully intend to get it done by Thursday, but then early Thursday morning you get a call from home. Your spouse is sick and you have to leave early. Your intent was good and your values are aligned properly, taking care of family is important. And if you’d been able to do it, you’d follow through on your intent. So you’ve got a good excuse, right? So you cut yourself some slack. But the project manager sees the impact that your actions had on them, not your intent. They don’t see your intent. From the project manager’s perspective, your failure to deliver is just failure. You failed to keep your commitment and that failure erodes their trust in you.

[00:15:48]

So, what can you do to improve the amount of trust that other people place in you? John says that leaders have to demonstrate competence, connection and character. Let’s talk for just a minute about competence. I was working with a client recently who had a team member who expressed significant distrust in my client. And one of the things the team member brought up was his doubt that his boss had the skills to do the work he was doing.

[00:16:16]

I recently read an article from Harvard Business Review called, “If your Boss Could Do Your Job, You Are More Likely to be Happy at Work”. And they reported on research which showed that employees who are confident in the competence of their bosses tend to be happier about their work and they may be more likely to be productive as well. Now, it’s important to be technically competent if you wanna build trust. It is important and that is backed up by Google’s Project Oxygen research which showed that productivity and technical skills rank number four and number eight when it comes to whether employees see their boss as a good boss or not. Bottom line, you’ve gotta know your stuff. That’s what competence is all about.

[00:16:56]

Now, let’s talk for a minute about connection. If you want a trusting environment, people have to believe that you care about them. I think it’s interesting. The same Project Oxygen I just referenced a minute ago, showed that coaching skills, empowering team members and expressing interest in team member success and well-being, all of those placed ahead of competence and delivering results. Think about that for just a second. Coaching skills, empowering team members and expressing interest in team member success and well-being, all more important than competence and delivering results. The connection that you’re making, that connection really matters.

[00:17:40]

And what does that look like? It’s you having intentionality about coaching people through challenges, finding ways to help them feel empowered to make decisions, even without you being around. And then for them to be empowered to take initiative on the decisions that they’ve made, without fear of reprisal or being contradicted.

[00:18:01]

And finally, your taking a genuine interest and concern for them as people, both at work and outside of work. All of those are factors in how connected your team members feel and they’re all components of building that high trust environment.

[00:18:19]

So we talked about connection. Let’s talk for a minute about character. Character is what you do in the dark. Your true character is revealed when you have the opportunity to say something or do something that nobody will ever find out about. Character is what you do. Character is not what you say. Character is the true you. It’s who you are.

[00:18:43]

Other people measure character using only one criteria, Do you do what you say you will do? Do you do what you say you will do? Now, are you a person that people can rely on? I just heard a politician say, “I’m a man of my word” and yet, I’ve observed this politician not fulfill his word in the past. I have some pretty serious questions about the character of the politician and my trust in him is pretty low. So, let me ask you this tough question, do you do what you say you will do? Now, most of us wanna say yes and yet, I think if we’re honest about it, our judgment here is likely to be clouded. We give ourselves credit for having good intent and we don’t count it against ourselves when we fail.

[00:19:36]

People are watching for our competence, our connection with them and our character and those combine to equal the amount of trust they place in us. Our ability to follow through, to do what we say we will do, is a measurement that people are gonna use, whether it’s a big thing or a little thing, to determine how much they trust us. And trust is essential to the law of solid ground. And that’s today’s John Maxwell Thought Leader segment.

[00:20:08]

Mentoring segment.

[00:20:27]

Tom: In today’s mentoring segment, I wanna talk about how you can go back and address a previous conflict that you’ve had with someone. This is a skill you’ll start to use at level two of the four levels of thinking as a geek leader.

[00:20:42]

Man 1: Level two: team member. Level two is where you work well with others and together you all succeed.

[00:20:52]

Tom: So I’m working with one of my executive coaching clients named Steven and he tells me, “Tom, I had a problem last week. I was onsite with a customer. I was working with a fellow employee but he was from a completely different division of our big company. Right in front of the client, John says something that completely undermines what I’m saying to the customer. His statements not only contradicted me but they also undermined our client’s confidence in our ability to deliver. I was stunned. I had no idea what to do or what to say. At the time, I didn’t say anything at all. We went on with the meeting and I think we ended up in an okay place, but the more I reflected on it, the more upset I got. Now, this is a guy I only see occasionally. He’s based in a completely different location from me. And I’m upset about it, I don’t really even wanna work with him ever again. But, what can I do? How am I gonna be able to resolve this conflict?”

[00:21:47]

Now, that sounds like a pretty rough spot for Steven, doesn’t it? I mean, John cut him off at the knees in front of a client. Steven’s perspective is that it was more than just embarrassment of being called wrong in public, that comment affected the customer’s trust in the whole company as well. That’s some tough stuff. And it’s amplified by time and by distance because if they worked in the same location, Steven could easily have a casual conversation with John in the next couple of days to try and resolve it. But in this situation, it might be months before Steven and John are even in the same location again. And conflict resolution is probably a hundred times harder if you have to do it remotely. It’s just so much easier to resolve conflict face to face.

[00:22:29]

I talked specifically about how to resolve conflict with another team member in Season Two, Episode Four. The episode was entitled, “Dealing with a Disrespectful Team Member.” I’m not gonna go into all the details from that episode here, but I would recommend you go back and listen to that episode for details about how to resolve the conflict.

[00:22:48]

So let’s take just a moment and talk about what can Steven do. The most powerful thing he can do to try and solve this is to be clear and specific. And I often talk about the X, Y, Z technique of conflict resolution. In situation X, when you did Y, it had Z impact. So what I would recommend Steven do in a situation like this is, while the incident is fresh in his mind, you take a few moments to capture the specifics. What room were you in? Who was present? When did it happen? What exactly were we talking about when the conflict occurred? The more specific you can be in your notes, the better it’s gonna be. Because if you end up needing to wait a while before you’re able to have that conversation with that person, you and the other person are probably both gonna need help remembering the specifics, our memories just fade quickly. So, what was the situation? In situation X, what happened?

[00:23:44]

Then, what exactly did John do because when you did Y? So what exactly did he do? And we’re not saying he was a jerk or even he was rude, what specific behavior did you observe? In this case, he called Steven out, directly undermined a statement that Steven had made. And again, we’re not making a judgment about his motivation or coming to a conclusion about his thinking. We don’t know what he was thinking. We’re just factually listing his specific observable behavior. And so we talked about in situation X, when you did Y, it had Z impact. How did it make Steven feel? What was Steven’s observation of the customer and what happened there? You take those notes and you set them aside. You’re gonna be ready to review them when the conversation happens, when you’ve got the time to meet with the other person.

[00:24:40]

So Steven can privately take John aside and say, “John, may I offer you some feedback?” Now, it’s been my experience that John almost universally says yes. And, at that point, Steven’s got an open door to say, “A few months ago when we were working with client PDQ, you remember that meeting we had with Sanjeet, Ralph, and Julia? You said something I wanted to bring up with you.” And then walk through the X, Y, Z technique.

[00:25:04]

Even if the conflict happened months ago, using that combination of the X, Y, Z technique and “May I offer you some feedback,” it’s a powerful, powerful tool. In fact, I heard back from Steven about this later. He reported that John was very uncomfortable during the feedback. He said, “Tom, I thought he was gonna fall over.” But an hour later, Steven got an email from John thanking him for being willing to communicate a difficult message and resolve that conflict.

[00:25:31]

Taking initiative to resolve an unresolved conflict is a key part of leadership, even if the conflict happened a long time ago and even if we were wrong in the way that we handled it. And that’s today’s mentoring segment.

[00:25:47]

Episode Hack.

[00:26:09]

Tom: In today’s episode, we talked about how to get more of the most important stuff done, we talked about how to go back and resolve an unresolved conflict, even if that conflict happened a long time ago and we talked about trust and the law of solid ground. For the Episode Hack, I want you to think about what John Maxwell said. He said, “Trust is like change in a leader’s pocket. Each time you make good leadership decisions, you earn a little more change. Each time you make poor decisions, you pay out some of your change to the people”.

[00:26:43]

Who is somebody you’ve had to pay out some change to recently? What specific action can you take to improve your connection with them? It might be as simple as saying, “Hey, I should’ve made a different call on that one. I’m sorry and I’ll try to do better next time.” And that’s today’s Episode Hack.

[00:27:02]

Closeout

If you like the podcast, can I ask you to give me a hand? It turns out it’s a big deal to have a rating in iTunes. Now, I’ve heard other podcasters asking for ratings and reviews and I wondered why they kept going after it again and again and again. Do you wanna know? Because almost no one actually does it. It only takes a minute and it’s a huge help. So why is that? Great ratings help iTunes decide that this podcast is worth promoting. And when you put a rating or a review, it helps it appear as a top podcast in the iTunes search. Would you please take a moment to do it right now? There are three simple steps. One, go to the iTunes store, podcasts, two, search for Becoming a Geek Leader and three, give the podcast a great rating. Thanks.

[00:27:59]

This is Tom Cooper. Thanks for listening. Be sure to join me next time for another episode of Becoming a Geek Leader. Join me in my mission of discovering better ways to lead others at work and at home.

Listen now!

Becoming a Geek Leader

Setting Expectations, Nonverbal Communcation, and the Law of Navigation - Sea:3Ep:6

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In this episode:

• How to get better performance from your team.
• How “the Law of Navigation” helps you lead the team to the destination and
• A little behind the scenes about how we produce the podcast for you.

Transcript:

[00:00:00]

Tom: If you want your team to be terrific, you’ve got to be specific. You’ve gotta teach team members every little thing about how they interact with other people. You can’t just assume they already know or that they will understand based on watching what you do. You gotta say it out loud. You might have to write it down. Teaching team members every little thing, that’s how you create consistent culture on your team.

[00:00:26]

Man: Becoming a Geek Leader – Season 3, Episode 6.

[00:00:33]

Sponsored by BrightHill Group’s Team Leadership Services

Tom: Dysfunctional teams are painful and cost you time and money. They also suck the life out of you and take the fun out of work. How about your team? Is it time for a tune-up? How prepared is your team for the challenges ahead? I can help create a simple development process for your team members, something easy for you to use, not another project for you to manage. Growth doesn’t happen by accident. Whether it’s through a leadership assessment or helping you plan a leadership retreat, give me a call to talk about how to set up an affordable program to improve your team’s teamwork and help your team members perform like a well-oiled machine. Check out brighthillgroup.com/geektraining, that’s brighthillgroup.com/geektraining, for quick videos on my team building and leadership retreats, then give me a call at 240-668-4799, that’s 240-668-4799.

[00:01:39]

Welcome to the Becoming a Geek Leader Podcast. My name is Tom Cooper. As a geek, I’m on a mission to figure out better ways to lead others at work and at home. Through the Becoming a Geek Leader Podcast, I’m sharing what I’m learning so I can help make you more effective at leading people too. Ready?

[00:02:01]

Introduction

In today’s episode, I’m talking about how you can get the right kind of performance from team members. I’m also gonna talk about how my dog is teaching me to communicate more effectively and I’m gonna talk about how easy it is to think you’re on target and then, all of a sudden, find yourself behind schedule. Finally, in the John Maxwell Thought Leader Segment, we’re gonna explore why one Antarctic explorer’s team reached the South Pole successfully and why the other team didn’t understand the Law of Navigation. We’ve got a lot to cover today, so let’s get started.

[00:02:32]

Mentoring Segment.

[00:02:52]

Tom: If you are in a place where you need to get top-notch performance from other people on your team or even on other teams, you can use today’s mentoring segment when you’re at Level 2 of the four levels of thinking as a geek leader.

[00:03:04]

Man: Level 2. Team Member. Level 2 is where you work well with others and together you all succeed.

[00:03:14]

Tom: We’ve all been there. We are swamped and somebody offers to help or maybe we even ask for help and we are really hoping that they will deliver so we can check that thing off our list. The deadline approaches and we get the results back from that team member and it’s just not done. Maybe it’s done but not done to our standards. Ugh, rats. This is exactly why we believe the expression “If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself.” But that’s just not true. You don’t have to do it yourself but there is something you have to do. I recently came across a study that said 57% of employees don’t know what the boss wants from them, 57%. Now, I can’t speak to specifics but I have to tell you, I actually am surprised the number is that low. In my experience, most people don’t actually know for sure what the boss wants from them.

[00:04:15]

Now, unfortunately, I don’t have the time to go deep on all the reasons this is the case, but there is one idea I wanna share with you today. More and more, I’m convinced that you have to teach people every little thing. Everything you want them to do, you’ve gotta be intentional and careful and specific in your instructions to them. Even if they’ve been in the business for 20 years, even if they’re experts, you can teach them how to do it our way. Even something like a handshake, you might need to teach a team member that, “On our team, we make eye contact while we’re shaking hands. We firmly grip the right hand of the other person. We pump three times. That’s how we do our handshake.” If you expect people to shake hands a certain way, you gotta tell them that. And you have to be specific and you have to be clear. Now, you don’t wanna be insulting about it, but you can say, “Hey, I wanna show you something. Here’s how we do this on our team.”

[00:05:11]

Now, I’m talking about the things that are distinctive to your culture. You’re not gonna teach an accountant how to do debits and credits. Your team members need to know how to do their job but you probably do have to cover things like, “On what schedule do we give feedback to internal customers?” or, “Here’s a template or a specific format we use for reports.” And if you have those formats, you need to point people to where they can find them. If you’re not clear and you’re not specific, if you don’t have criteria that defines what success looks like, you’re just not gonna get what you want, and that’s gonna lead to frustration, your frustration and the frustration of members of the team. And that’s not gonna work for anybody.

[00:05:53]

Let’s say you have a problem where team members engage in an email war. Somebody gets upset, somebody ccs somebody else’s boss, and then the other person ccs their boss, and then you escalate to an all-out interdepartmental war. Now, I talk specifically about how you can handle this situation in Season 2, Episode 9, so I won’t go into all the details of that here, but suffice to say that you as a leader need to set expectations about what to do when there’s a miscommunication via email. You gotta teach people every little thing. They just don’t know. They can’t read your mind. You’ve gotta say it out loud. You might even need to say it in writing. If you want your team to be terrific, you’ve got to be specific. You’ve got to teach team members every little thing about how they interact with other people. You just can’t assume they already know or that they will understand based on watching what you do. You gotta say it out loud. You might have to write it down. Teaching team members every little thing, that’s how you create consistent culture on your team, and that’s today’s mentoring segment.

[00:07:03]

Behind the Scenes Segment.

[00:07:20]

Tom: It’s January as I’m recording this episode, and as I got ready for the end of the year, I felt pretty good about where I was. We had completed production on the episode that was released Christmas week. I’d written my weekly update and had already recorded the segments of the next podcast episode that was scheduled to launch the first of the year. When producing these episodes, what I do is I record the segments like this one and then I hand them off to my son Joel, who’s my producer. He handles all my audio editing. He combines all the segments I’ve recorded with all the music and commercials and headers and trailers and pulls a piece of the episode for the cold open and creates the MP3 file. And then we have to send the audio off to the transcription company so they can start…we can get ready to post the episode on the website with the transcript of the episode as well. And while all that’s going on, I work on my weekly email update so that you can know what to expect from the current episode, and I share some stories too on the email list about what the Coopers have been up to recently.

[00:08:18]

So, jumping back to the end of last year, I was pretty confident. I had it all in hand. I mean, I even took the time to create a special bonus episode to help with planning for Q1 2017, and if you haven’t got a really solid plan for 2017 Q1, I mean, we’re already halfway through January as I record this, you might wanna go back and check it out. It was Episode 4.5. It was a bonus episode around how you can make your Q1 a really great Q1. But I felt good enough about how we were doing on the schedule that I was able to put that bonus episode out as well. So, over the holidays, like many of you, we visited family and we drove back from visiting family on New Year’s Eve and we have a great time. We were looking forward to celebrating the New Year and getting ready for the upcoming rush of January.

[00:09:09]

But unfortunately, we had a visit from norovirus. Now, apparently, there are some folks out there who’ve never been visited by Norovirus. I won’t go into too much detail but it comes on like a steam roller and it leaves you feeling like you’re afraid you’re going to die and then you feel so terrible that you’re afraid you won’t die. Did I mention Norovirus is incredibly infectious, and once one of us gets it, it’s almost a certainty that we are all gonna come down with it? The only good thing about it is it leaves about as quickly as it attacks, but for those 36 hours that you’re dealing with it, it is a whole lot of no fun. I had to put off the final steps of posting the episode and wrapping up the weekly update until I’d got back from the trip, but unfortunately, within a few hours of arriving home, 7 out of the 10 of us, including all the adults in the house, got sick. And that’s why Episode 5 came out a week later than normal. After we finally started feeling better, I was able to get things back on track. Keeping a podcast going requires a lot of moving parts and keeping those moving parts actually moving and that’s today’s Behind the Scenes Segment.

[00:10:17]

Thought Leader Segment.

[00:10:38]

John: Hello, I’m John Maxwell, and as one of my founding partners, Tom has been trained by me and my team.

[00:10:44]

Tom: In our John Maxwell Thought Leader Segment, we’re talking about the Law of Navigation. That’s something you’ll use when you’re at Level 2 of the Four Levels of Thinking as a Geek Leader.

[00:10:54]

Man: Level 2. Team Member. Level 2 is where you work well with others, and together, you all succeeded.

[00:11:05]

Tom: Today, we’re tackling a third law from John Maxwell’s book, “The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership.” Today’s law is the Law of Navigation. It says that anyone can steer the ship but it takes a leader to chart the course. And in the book, John tells a story from 1911. The goal was to reach the South Pole, to be the first person to make it to the South Pole. And two different expeditions set out to reach the goal and each of them used different methods. Roald Amundsen originally planned to go to the North Pole, but when he was beaten by Peary, he decided to shift his goal because, after all, he wanted to be Number 1, not Number 2. Now, everything that Amundsen did was planned. To be ready to travel in that terrible cold, he invested time studying how Arctic travelers worked. He studied Eskimos to see how they were able to live in the extreme cold.

[00:12:04]

And as he prepared for this, he decided he was gonna use proven systems and proven tools. He was betting his team’s lives on dogs and dogsleds. He made up his team of expert dog handlers and skiers. He was meticulous as he thought about his schedule, about how much rest they were going to need, how far his teams could go in a day, and exactly what his team might be able to accomplish. As he prepared for this, he made sure that there were supplies available at predetermined locations. In that way, they wouldn’t have to carry everything every step along the way. Now, Amundsen’s planning and preparation really paid off. The worst problem his team encountered was that one man had an infected tooth that had to be extracted. Now, I’m not sure I want to have dental work in 1911 in the Arctic because I’m pretty sure they didn’t have a dentist chair or a dentist available. But compared to the things that could have gone wrong, that was really fairly minor. Overall, Amundsen’s trip was a fantastic success. Not bad for a bunch of guys travelling with gear that today seems positively primitive.

[00:13:16]

Now let’s turn our attention to the second team. The second team was led by Robert Falcon Scott. Scott took a different approach. He decided to use cutting-edge tools rather than proven technology. His plan relied on motorized sledges and ponies. Now, his problems started after 5 days, when the motors on the sledges stopped working and the ponies didn’t handle the cold very well either. In fact, when they got to the foot of the Transarctic Mountains, all the ponies had to be put down. Worse, Scott had not properly outfitted his team. Every man developed frostbite. Their goggles simply didn’t work and every team member became snowblind. The team was almost constantly low on food and water. Now, Scott had set up resupply depots but they were too far apart, they were too poorly marked to be able to be found, and they just didn’t have enough supplies for the men. In fact, in the last minute, Scott had decided to add a fifth man to the trip, even though they were only supplied for 4 men.

[00:14:18]

After covering 800 miles in 10 weeks–I can’t imagine 10 weeks in the Antarctic, brrr–Scott’s team did reach the South Pole but they found a Norwegian flag already flying there because Amundsen’s team had beaten Scott by more than a month. Now, Scott’s trip to the Antarctic gets even worse. On the return trip, Scott insisted they carry back geological samples, but his men were frozen. They were exhausted and they were weak from lack of food. Carrying that extra weight was just too much for them to manage. Sadly, eventually Scott and the rest of his entire expedition perished. It was a tragedy, and compared with Amundsen, it’s clear it wasn’t even necessary for men to die in that situation.

[00:14:59]

This is the idea of navigation, that leaders look for the ways that their teams will need help and they navigate their team through the difficulties. If you’re going to lead well, there are 5 key areas where you’re going to have to think about navigation. One, navigators see the ultimate goal. Where’s the team going? How are you going to know when you got there? Certainly, Amundsen wanted to be Number 1 and he knew exactly where he needed to go. He needed to go to the South Pole. Two, navigators rely on past experience. They rely on their own experiences and the experience of others. In this situation, Amundsen relied on the expertise of people who were very familiar with living and working and traveling in the cold. Three, navigators look at conditions before they make a commitment. Do you count the costs before you say yes? I mean, I know it’s hard to do but it is important.

[00:16:00]

Fourth, navigators listen to what other people have to say. Let me ask you, who are you listening to? Strong navigators listen to members on the leadership team. They also talk to people in their organization and outside their organization. They rely on the whole team. They don’t just rely on their own counsel. Finally, navigators make sure their conclusions represent both fact and faith. I am naturally very optimistic, and sometimes, I’m not realistic enough and that’s the job that leaders have to do. They’ve got to be able to balance optimism with realism. In the book “Good to Great,” Jim Collin says you must retain faith that you will prevail in the end and you must also confront the brutal facts of your current reality. So those are the five areas that you have to tackle if you’re going to be good at navigation. Amundsen looked internally and externally at how to be successful and he accomplished something that had never been done before. Amundsen mastered the Law of Navigation, and that’s today’s John Maxwell Thought Leader Segment.

[00:17:13]

Family segment.

[00:17:31]

Tom: In today’s Family Segment, I’m gonna talk about how my dog has taught me to do a better job of listening to others. The skills here are useful at Level 1 of the Four Levels of Thinking as a Geek Leader.

[00:17:42]

Man: Level 1, Individual. At Level 1, you may even be a superstar technical resource. Level 1 focuses you on improving your technical skills.

[00:17:57]

Tom: About a year ago, we added a new resident to the Cooper household. We rescued a mutt we named Shiloh. She has been a great addition. She loves each of us uniquely and it is a blast to see how she relates to each person differently and each of our kids has a special relationship with her. Now, some of my younger kids also watch a television show called “Martha Speaks,” where a dog learns how to talk, and unlike the cartoon Martha, Shiloh doesn’t speak. But if you look closely, you can get a clear message from her nonverbals. Now, Shiloh sleeps most of the day but she has brief periods of time where she is really energetic. When Shiloh wants to play, she can give us lots of messages. Perhaps she’ll bring a toy over and nudge us with it, or if we’re offering to take her out to relieve herself, rather than going to the back door, where we’re standing with the leash, she might run playfully over to the front door, telling us she’d really rather go for a run.

[00:18:53]

Back in Season 1, Episode 2, I reported on an interview I heard with Mark Goulston, who had written about how to improve our listening skills. One of Goulston’s tips was that we should work on becoming what he called a first-class noticer. That we should make every effort to notice what’s happening around us and then intentionally respond to the things we notice. Applying Goulston’s idea to Shiloh, by noticing her behaviors, some subtle behaviors and some not so subtle, we can determine what she really wants even though she can’t talk. Now, the same is true for you and me as we work with others. Now, I wanna be clear. I am not saying your coworkers are dogs, even the ones that frustrate you. What I am saying is that, by paying attention to the things they say and the things they don’t say, watching their body language, are they leaning in or are they sitting back? Are they making eye contact or are they looking away with folded arms? And when we notice that disconnection, we notice that disengagement, it’s an opportunity for us to respond to what we’ve noticed. Maybe we can say something like, “Hey looks like maybe I’ve wandered off course. Am I not answering your question or is there something I’m forgetting about? This is just one way to help get things back on track. Becoming a first-class noticer, keeping an eye on those nonverbals, it’s a great way to improve team communication. And that’s today’s Family Segment.

[00:20:25]

Episode Hack.

[00:20:49]

In today’s episode, we talked about how teaching team members every little thing about cultural norms is a requirement if you wanna get the right kind of performance from your team members. We also talked about how my dog Shiloh is helping me how to process nonverbals better and I could become a better noticer of the things that are going on. In the John Maxwell Thought Leader Segment, we talked about why Amundsen’s team reached the South Pole well and why Scott’s didn’t, because they didn’t understand the Law of Navigation. So let’s talk for just a minute about the Law of Navigation. In today’s Episode Hack, I want you to think about where your team is going. If you’re gonna help your team get there in the next several months, what are you gonna have to be optimistic about? Maybe you tend to be more pessimistic. What’s something you’re gonna have to think more intentionally optimistically about? And for people like me, who tend to be pretty optimistic, what do you have to be more realistic about? And once you’ve decided those things, how can you be more intentional about communicating that to your team? Answering these questions is a way to apply the Law of Navigation to help your team get to the destination. And that’s today’s Episode Hack.

[00:22:04]

Closeout

Is the podcast helping you? Make sure you don’t miss out on the latest info. Head over right now to brighthillgroup.com/join to be sure that you stay in the loop. When you do, you get my PDF “Become a Geek Leader in Two Easy Steps” and you’ll be notified as soon as new podcast episodes are available. Plus, you’ll get updates and ideas that I don’t share on the podcast. Head over to brighthillgroup.com/join right now.

[00:22:37]

This is Tom Cooper. Thanks for listening. Be sure to join me next time for another episode of Becoming a Geek Leader. Join me in my mission of discovering better ways to lead others at work and at home.

Listen now!

Becoming a Geek Leader

Who is in Charge, Law of Process, and Better Hiring - Sea:3Ep:5

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In this episode:

In today’s episode, I want to share with you

• What happened when one of my clients tried to land planes at an airport with two control towers. Yikes!
• I’ll also talk about the elements of building a great team, recruiting the right players. And
• In the John Maxwell Thought Leader Segment, I’m gonna share one of my favorite laws of leadership, The Law of Process.

Resources:

• Cheat sheet – what IT leaders are looking for in project managers

Transcript:

[00:00:00]

Tom: What if there were two air traffic controllers at the airport? And imagine being a pilot, hearing, “Alpha-Mike-Echo, Four-Five-Two-Three, you are clear to land.” And responding, “Clear to land, Roger,” only to hear something like this.

[00:00:16]

Man: “No. Alpha-Mike-Echo, Forty-Five Twenty-Three, fly out in Two-Two-Zero, maintain Two-Thousand.”

[00:00:22]

Tom: If one controller told you it was okay to land, but another controller told you no, it wasn’t okay to land, when would you ever feel like it was safe to land? When it comes to air traffic control, you simply have to know who’s in charge.

[00:00:38]

Voiceover: Becoming a Geek Leader. Season Three, Episode Five.

[00:00:44]

Sponsored by Brighthill Group’s Professional Speaking Services

Tom: This episode is sponsored by Brighthill Group’s Professional Speaking Services. Are you a member of a professional association? Is your regional state or national group planning their upcoming annual meeting? I can help you planners with keynotes and workshops on topics like communication, leadership, delegation, planning, or conflict resolution. Also, is your company planning an “all-hands” meeting? I can help your leaders plan a productive and memorable event. I can professionally facilitate your meeting, and deliver content that is completely aligned with your goals. Here’s what Erin Kwon said after having me speak for her statewide association.

[00:01:26]

Erin: I really enjoyed working with Tom because he is practical and down to earth. He brings really good content. He’s very engaging as a speaker, and I think the audience really connects with him. They not only get the content but they also get an entertaining presentation. So I would definitely recommend working with him. I will certainly call him in the future for any events that I have.

[00:01:47]

Tom: Check out BrighthillGroup.com/Speaking, that’s BrighthillGroup.com/Speaking, for testimonials, videos of me on stage, information about my most popular topics, and more.

[00:02:02]

Welcome to the Becoming a Geek Leader Podcast. My name is Tom Cooper. As a geek, I’m on a mission to figure out better ways to lead others at work and at home. Through the Becoming a Geek Leader Podcast I’m sharing what I’m learning so I can help make you more effective at leading people too. Ready?

[00:02:23]

Introduction

Welcome back to work! I hope your time away was great, and now you’re rested and ready to jump into some powerful stuff. In today’s episode, I want to share with you what happened when one of my clients tried to land planes at an airport with two control towers. Yikes! I’ll also talk about the elements of building a great team, recruiting the right players. And in the Jon Maxwell Thought Leader Segment, I’m gonna share one of my favorite laws of leadership, The Law of Process. Let’s get started.

[00:03:00]

Thought Leader Segment.

[music 00:03:08]

[00:03:20]

Jon: Hello, I’m Jon Maxwell, and as one of my founding partners, Tom has been trained by me and my team.

[00:03:27]

Tom: The Law of Process is something you can start to apply when you’re at Level One of the Four Levels of Thinking as a Geek Leader. But you’ll continue to apply it for the rest of your career.

[00:03:42]

Voiceover: Level One, Individual. At Level One, you may even be a superstar technical resource. Level One focuses you on improving your technical skills.

[00:03:56]

Tom: In our continuing series from Jon Maxwell, I wanna share Law Number Three from Jon Maxwell’s book “The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership.” Now, Law Number Three is the Law of Process. The Law of Process says that leadership develops daily, but not in a day. Leadership develops daily, but not in a day. Simply put, what it means is you can’t become brilliant at leading other people overnight. But you can get better, and it requires that you make the right choices every day.

[00:04:37]

Let me give you an example. I had a client who worked in a bank. He wanted to get promoted, but he only had experience in one area of bank operations. If he wanted to move ahead, he would need to find a way to learn new things. So what did he do? He went to the commercial loan department, and he asked if he could take a look at all the new loans as they were approved. Now, this was a process he began to follow to help him get equipped to understand what a good loan looked like. Now, following this process, he became smarter about his business, and that helped him professionally. When the opportunity presented itself for him to be able to step into a role as a loan officer, he had a lot more information than he would have had before.

[00:05:28]

I’ll give you another example that Jon Maxwell shares, about the story of Theodore Roosevelt. Jon’s story goes like this. In the United States, President Roosevelt is remembered as a man of action. While in the White House, he was known for boxing, Judo, and horseback riding. Earlier in his life, he was a cowboy in the Wild West. He was an explorer, a big game hunter, and a cavalry officer in the Spanish-American War. He was a man of great intellect, a deep thinker, and a visionary. He created the National Park System because of his belief that we would need to protect natural habitats. He was a Renaissance Man, for sure, but he wasn’t always rough and tough. He grew up in a prominent wealthy family in Manhattan. As a child, he was puny and sickly, had asthma, bad eyesight, and was weak. His father told him, “You have the mind, but not the body. Without the help of the body, the mind will never go as far as it should. You must make the body.” Roosevelt began spending time every day building his body and his mind. Lifting weights, horseback riding, ice-skating, boxing, and more, combined with reading, study, and learning from good leaders around him. This daily, diligent preparation opened doors for him that would not have otherwise been opened to him. The Panama Canal, the Park System, the negotiation of peace between Japan and Russia, and under his leadership the U.S. emerged as a world power. Teddy Roosevelt lived the Law of Process, and you can too. When we decide to move forward, when we decide that we want to grow, we have to put a process in place that’s gonna help us, just like Roosevelt did with his lifting weights and activities that he was involved in.

[00:07:28]

Another leader, Jim Rohn, said that success is a few good choices repeated daily. He also said that failure is a few bad choices repeated daily. Now the fact is, that’s true for you and it’s true for me. What are you hoping to accomplish? What are you planning? And then what process can you use to support yourself as you move toward your goal of growth? Maybe you need to create a template or a checklist. I use those all the time when I’m preparing these podcasts and the other things that I put together, the emails that I send out. Maybe it’s a change to the way you operate. When I decided I wanted to eat healthier, and I know my willpower is low at night, I was a lot more successful when we simply didn’t have ice cream in the house. So the way I applied the Law of Process to healthier eating was I didn’t buy ice cream when I went grocery shopping. I want to encourage you to think about what it’s gonna take for you to achieve what you wanna reach next. Maybe it’s a plan or a schedule to help you prepare for what’s next. And if you need help with some planning, the bonus episode I just put out last week is a great resource to help you get a jump-start on your new year. I use systems and processes all the time. I probably overthink some of my processes, but the fact is that I find that those processes become tools that I can use to make it easier to execute each time. Here’s a rule of thumb: If you find yourself doing something a third time, it’s likely a good candidate for you to take the time to create a system or a process to support you. The Law of Process teaches us that leadership develops daily, but not in a day. What process can you apply to help grow your leadership in the next six months? And that’s today’s Jon Maxwell Thought Leader Segment.

[00:09:42]

Mentoring Segment.

[00:10:01]

Tom: In our Mentoring Segment today, I wanna tell you a story. And in this segment, we’re talking about collaboration. And the skills you need are skills you can use at Level Two of the Four Levels of Thinking as a Geek Leader.

[00:10:15]

Voiceover: Level Two, Team Member. Level Two is where you work well with others, and together you all succeed.

[00:10:26]

Tom: Our story today is about offshoring and subcontracting, and it goes something like this: One of my clients had a need to roll out a big new capability, something they had never done before. And there was just no way to get to market quickly enough using their internal team. So they went out to the market, and they found a vendor who had a product that was close to their needs, and then they contracted with that vendor to provide customizations to meet their specific requirements. Sounds like a great plan, right? The vendor delivered their core product with a couple of minor customizations, and my client rolled it out to the marketplace with the promise of continuous incremental improvements coming from the vendor. As they prepared for releases, they had some significant stresses. Feature requests were not communicated clearly from my client to the vendor’s engineering team, or from engineering to my client. With each release, they found a large number of must-have features just not included. Not only that, but many of the features they didn’t request showed up in production. What’s worse is the new features didn’t always work as advertised, and that led to lots of help-desk tickets as paying customers who were very frustrated when the solution didn’t work called my client to say, “Hey, fix this!” Now, frustration is what happens when there’s a gap between what you expected and what you experienced. With each release, my client got more, and more, and more frustrated because what they expected wasn’t happening, and what they experienced wasn’t matching what they expected. That added up to a lot of stress. And what happened naturally was their trust level with their vendor dropped over and over again, eventually leading to some tense meetings with lots of shouting. Now, this challenge was compounded because the vendor was from a place in the world where shouting and disrespect are simply not a part of their cultural experience. It’s simply not done. And yet, my American client was letting their frustration get the better of them. Now this process goes on for numerous releases. And over time, the vendor and my client are getting more and more hostile toward each other. By the time I got involved, tempers were short, trust was non-existent, and neither side expected goodwill or good performance from the other. My client said to me, “This is a big mess. These guys are completely incompetent, but we’ve got a long-term contract with them. Is there anything that can be done?”

[00:13:17]

Now, from our description so far, things look pretty bad for the vendor, right? Inconsistent releases, poorly tested code, a very angry client… I mean, what kind of bozos are these people anyway? Well, when I was brought on board, rather than start with that conclusion, I decided to become intensely curious about the vendor’s perspective. I interviewed numerous onsite and offshore team members from the vendor to see if I could understand what was happening from their side. I sat down with members of my client’s team to inquire with them about their perspective, to figure out what was happening. Now, as you might imagine, the vendor’s point of view was significantly different from my client’s point of view. They found themselves absolutely baffled by the unpredictability of my client. They didn’t understand why the client was so upset. Over time, they had increasingly committed more and more resources to try to make the customer happy, but it just wasn’t working. As I continued in this assessment process, I discovered one significant thing that may have been the root cause of all of the problems. The significant thing I discovered was there was a different set of expectations on the part of my vendor and the part of my client. My client expected that the vendor would deliver the features they requested in the order they requested them. Now, what they hadn’t counted on was the fact that this vendor was selling this product internationally, and they had been for a long time before my client entered the picture. The vendor had a mature product management and software development lifecycle in place. But each party, the vendor and my client, believed that they were the product owner, they were the decision-maker, and they were the priority-setter for the new features coming to market. Now, this is a little bit like having an airport with two control towers.

[00:15:21]

All over the world right now, air traffic controllers are making decisions about what’s gonna happen next, and they tell the pilots what to do, and the pilot’s job is to follow the commands of the air traffic controllers, period. Now, imagine an airport that has two control towers. Two air traffic controllers, each of whom believes they have the authority to make the decision about plane altitude, plane direction, runways, take-offs, and landings. What if there were two air traffic controllers at the airport? And imagine being a pilot, hearing, “Alpha-Mike-Echo, Four-Five-Two-Three, you are clear to land,” and responding, “Clear to land, Roger,” only to hear something like this.

[00:16:07]

Man: “No. Alpha-Mike-Echo, Forty-Five Twenty-Three, fly out in Two-Two-Zero, maintain Two-Thousand.”

[00:16:13]

Tom: If one controller told you it was okay to land, but another controller told you no, it wasn’t okay to land, when would you ever feel like it was safe to land? When it comes to air traffic control, you simply have to know who’s in charge. And in my work with clients, I see over and over again, in big projects and in small ones, there’s just not a clear answer to who’s in charge of what. Now it seems like it’s a pretty simple thing to solve, but it turns out that unless you’re really, really careful and intentional about it, you can screw that up. And it even happens at my house! There are times that my wife and I have to pause in the middle of a frustrating time or conversation, maybe even a heated conversation, to say, “Whose project is this?” And in fact, it would have been a huge help to my client and the vendor if they had spent the time to clarify who’s gonna do which thing, and by when. In this case, I think they actually both failed to communicate. Neither one clarified roles and responsibilities. Each of them acted as if they were in charge, and each of them got mad when they were frustrated by the experience they had as a result. Now, this was compounded because this particular client was fairly new to a software development process, and their process was actually pretty immature. And they weren’t using any sort of project management methodology at all. And when it came to their feature request process, it was inconsistent at best.

[00:17:46]

Now, it’d be easy to point fingers at the client, and certainly the vendor did, but the vendor blew it, too, because if they had been more transparent about their product management process and how they set priorities and how they approved code that went into production releases… If they’d been clear that they weren’t forking the code base for my client, but my client’s bugs and features requests were added to all of their other clients’ bug reports and feature requests. If they had documented their development process and improved their communication with the client, everybody would have been a lot happier. At least, they would have been less unhappy.

[00:18:19]

So, to wrap up, I think the key question when you’re preparing to take on a major project… You have to understand who owns what. Who gets to make the decisions, and how conflicts will be resolved. It’s really important to ask the question, “Whose project is this?” And that’s today’s Mentoring Segment.

[00:18:42]

Coach’s Mailbox.

[00:19:14]

Tom: Today’s email is on the topic of how to hire great team members, and this is something you’re gonna do when you’re a manager or Level Three of the Four Levels of Thinking as a Geek Leader. But, even if you’re not a manager, you can play a strong role in improving hiring for your team even if you’ve just started in your first job.

[00:19:36]

Voiceover: Level Three, Team Leader. Level Three. As the boss of a team, your job is to recruit and develop individuals and team members who follow your lead.

[00:19:52]

Tom: In today’s Coach’s Mailbox segment, I’m answering a question from Jeb. Jeb writes, “We finally had to let a team member go. She just wasn’t working out. We have had a terrible time finding the right person. HR struggles to find good candidates, and even when we find people with the right skill set, we struggle to be able to get those people to deliver. How can we find the right people? Any thoughts?”

[00:20:20]

Jeb, I wish I had one single thing that would magically fix it, a silver bullet that would make all your hiring problems go away. The fact is, there are lots of layers to this issue, but I think I can offer a couple of ideas that may help point you in the right direction. The reality is that most of the time, we are crazy busy when we have an open position. Maybe we’ve been overworked for a long time before management agrees to let us add a new team member, or maybe we’ve been overworked for a long time because somebody left and we’re shorthanded. Not only that, but we’ve had little training on how to recruit or how to hire. We’re buried, and then we complain to HR that we need to get them moving on the process. And what is the first thing they ask us for? HR says, “Give me a job description.” So, what do we do? We go find an old job description, we make a few changes. Now the thing is, standards are good, but usually we end up with job requirements based on edits from the last time we hired. And those requirements may bear little resemblance to what we actually need. What’s worse, the job requirements are almost exclusively focused on technical skills. Can the person do the technical work that needs to be done? Here’s the big problem with that: Stanford Research International found that 87% of success in our work comes from people knowledge and 13% comes from technical skill. So if I can get just a little math nerdy for a second, we can say that our ideal candidate probably only has 65% of the skills we’d love for somebody to have, because we know that a lot of time a job description is more of a wish list than it is a requirements list. And so let’s say a candidate comes in with 65% of the things that we want in our ideal technical skills for our candidate. Well, if they’ve got 65% of the 13% of success that comes from technical skills, that means their chance of being successful is 65% of 13%. No wonder we have trouble finding good candidates! And here’s what we know: When somebody doesn’t have the right people skills, we say things like, “They just don’t get it,” or, “Well, they’re not a fit.” Or maybe we say, “They’re not a team player,” or, “They’re just weird,” and that weirdness plays out in a thousand little ways. They might not work at the right pace. They might not work at the right quality level, and when it comes to quality, quality too high or too low is a problem. Not only that, but we can’t articulate what it is that would make somebody a good fit or not. And we’re really kind of flying blind when it comes to the part of the job that makes up almost 90% of their success! Now, ideally, you’d have a good baseline of assessments that show you the key characteristics that good team members have. And those key characteristics are different by role. So you would have good data about the skills that make you a great QA person. But the thing is, the skills that make you a great QA person or an auditor would be terrible skills for a salesperson, and vice versa.

[00:23:41]

So in the absence of solid, statistically significant, relevant data by role, what can you do? Well, I’ve got a few suggestions. First, spend some time to define what actual skills the team member needs. Now, I’m not talking about “College Degree in X” or “eight years of related experience.” I’m thinking about the specific types of roles or experiences you want them to have. What are the skills and contributions you really need? And I’ll tell you, it’s easy, but it’s a bit of a cop-out to expect that somebody’s gonna come in the door with direct experience on every platform and every version of everything you already support. Even still, if they come in with all the technical knowledge, they’re not gonna know all the nuances of your business. Whoever comes in the door is gonna need to come up to speed on the stuff you’re working on, so you want to focus not so much on the technical skills as you do on the soft skills. I want you to think about looking at this opening as an opportunity to make your team better. When you think about the overall team, what are the areas you’d like to see be even stronger? And when you put your list of skills together, put those gaps that your team currently has first on the list of the skills that you’re looking for. This is an opportunity for you to transform your team with greater and better skills. What you wanna do is find the best person for the team. They may not be strong in the same areas where your team is already strong, but you can make your team better by finding somebody who’s strong in areas where the rest of the team isn’t strong. So think about what actual skills your team member needs.

[00:25:28]

Now, second, think about what makes your team a good team today. Spend some time to think about stories you can tell where your team performed well or maybe where a team member did something exceptional. I call these “hero stories,” and hero stories help you put into words the things that make your team unique or special. These are the things that represent your actual values. And they’re the things you want to look for in a candidate. Making the time to come up with a few stories, a few hero stories, is a good way for you to prepare for a behavioral interview with a prospective team member. You can ask them to, “Tell me about a time when you had to…” and listen to see if their approach, their values, their pace, their quality, and more match your team’s expectations that are already in place. So think about what makes your team a good team today.

[00:26:20]

Next, think outside the box. Rather than look for somebody who already has the exact title you’re looking for, consider people who have maybe less experience or different experience. Consider people who would be making a lateral transfer in from another department or another discipline. The social science studies are very clear. Diverse teams come up with better solutions. So I want you to look for somebody who doesn’t look or think or act like the rest of the team. Now, it’s true that diverse teams take longer to gel and longer to come up to speed, but when they’re running well, they outperform teams who have similar education, training, and experience. So you wanna think outside the box.

[00:27:03]

Next, think beyond technical qualifications. Remember that most success comes from people knowledge. What kind of people skills should they have? And then, how can you tell? How will you know when you see those skills? The smaller the team is, the more important each hire becomes to the team’s overall success. Make the time to hire slowly. If you’re really clear about the skills you’re looking for, it makes it a lot easier for everybody throughout the entire process. Also, always be on the lookout for great people. I remember when I was leading a team, we didn’t have any openings, but I made a point of keeping my eyes open and building relationship with people that I thought would be a fantastic addition to my team. And I would go to them and tell them, “Look, I don’t have any positions open right now, but when the time comes, I would love to have you on my team.” Now, for some of these people, I’ve stayed in touch with them every couple of months for a year or longer. But I was able to recruit and build strong teams because I found the right candidates when I met them. And also, instead of relying on HR to source your candidates, why don’t you use your network? Think about somebody you respect. Once you know the kind of skills and capabilities that you’re looking for, the types of cultural expectations you have, go talk to people you know. Start asking everybody you know if they know anybody like this. And tell them what you’ve discovered, and ask them to keep you in mind and to make a connection for you. Now most of the time they’re not gonna know anybody, they’re not gonna have anything for you. But here’s the crazy thing, over time, they will think of you when they come across somebody who’s like that. And then they’ll call you up and say, “Hey I just met somebody you ought to meet.” You’d be amazed at how the people you know make connections for you. And really, what do you have to lose?

[00:29:01]

Now, each of these suggestions could be a separate podcast on their own, and I know I’ve just barely scratched the surface. But the key idea is for you to set aside time to develop a clear picture of exactly what you’re looking for in your team members. Once you have that picture, it’s going to be much easier for you to know a great candidate when you see one. And that’s today’s Coach’s Mailbox.

[00:29:25]

Episode Hack.

[00:29:48]

Tom: In today’s episode I talked about what happens when you try to land planes at an airport with two control towers, and what happens when you don’t have clarity about who’s actually in charge of the project. We also spent some time talking through how to recruit the right players for your team, and I introduced you to the Law of Process. For today’s Episode Hack, I want to go back to the Law of Process because I think that once you have a good process, you can use that to grow your skills in lots of different areas. So, right now, I want you to make a decision about some growth you’d like to achieve. Maybe you want to communicate more clearly, or maybe you want to have better leadership skills. What if you decided right now on a process? Maybe it’s, “I’m gonna read one book a month or take one online course a month,” on that topic. Now, some of you might be thinking, “One a month? What are you, nuts? I don’t have that kind of time!” Okay, maybe one a quarter. But the idea is that you’re gonna commit to a process that’s gonna give you the skills that you need. Making a plan about what you’re gonna think about and work on for the next several months is a great first step to applying the Law of Process to your success. And that’s today’s Episode Hack.

[00:31:02]

Closeout

If you liked the podcast, can I ask you to give me a hand? It turns out, it’s a big deal to have a rating in iTunes. Now, I’ve heard other podcasters asking for ratings and reviews, and I wondered why they kept going after it again and again and again. Do you want to know? Because almost no one actually does it! It only takes a minute, and it’s a huge help. So why is that? Great ratings help iTunes decide that this podcast is worth promoting. And when you put a rating or a review, it helps it appear as a top podcast in the iTunes search. Could you please take a moment to do it right now? There are three simple steps: One, go to the iTunes Store Podcasts. Two, search for Becoming a Geek Leader. And three, give the podcast a great rating. Thanks!

[00:31:57]

This is Tom Cooper. Thanks for listening. Be sure to join me next time for another episode of Becoming a Geek Leader. Join me in my mission of discovering better ways to lead others at work and at home.

[upbeat music 00:32:10]

Becoming a Geek Leader

Bonus: Your "2017 Personal Offsite Planning" tool Sea:3Ep4.5

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In this episode:

• Understand the three simple questions to answer as a part of making a great plan
• A one page process to follow and
• Your great foundation for personal achievement in 2017

Resources:

• Here’s a set of powerful planning tools to help you get clear, and make progress, too!

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Becoming a Geek Leader

Burning Bridges and Team Meetings - Sea:3Ep:4

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• Helping Geeks curriculum

• Powerfully Simple Meetings – Thought Leader Interview with Bryan Field – Sea:2Ep:10.6

 Transcript

[00:00:02]

Child 1: Daddy, I want to know, can I set up a lemonade stand?

[00:00:09]

Child 2: Dad, can I use a tape measure to measure my jump rope?

[00:00:13]

Announcer: “Becoming a Geek Leader,” Season 3, Episode 4.

[00:00:19]

Sponsored by Bright Hill Group’s Professional Speaking Services.

Tom: Are you a member of a professional association? Is your regional state or national group planning their upcoming annual meeting? I can help your meeting planners with keynotes and workshops on topics like communication, leadership, delegation, planning or conflict resolution.

[00:00:43]

Also, is your company planning an all-hands meeting? I can help your leaders plan a productive and memorable event. I can professionally facilitate your meeting and deliver content that is completely aligned with your goals. Here’s what Erin Kwan [SP] said after having me speak for her state-wide association.

[00:01:01]

Erin: I really enjoy working with Tom because he is practical and down to earth. He brings really good content. He’s very engaging as a speaker. And I think the audience really connects with him. They not only get good content, but they also get an entertaining presentation. So I would definitely recommend working with him. I will certainly call him in the future for any events that I have.

[00:01:21]

Tom: Check out brighthillgroup.com/speaking, that’s brighthillgroup.com/speaking for testimonials, videos of me on stage, information about my most popular topics and more.

[00:01:36]

Welcome to the “Becoming a Geek Leader” podcast. My name is Tom Cooper. As a geek, I’m on a mission to figure out better ways to lead others at work and at home. Through the “Becoming A Geek Leader” podcast, I’m sharing what I’m learning so I can help make you more effective at leading people, too. Ready?

[00:01:59]

Introduction

Wow. I just wanna take a minute to say thank you. I was just going over the stats for the podcast and November has been my biggest month ever. It’s a privilege to be a part of your day so thank you for inviting me along. If the podcast is helping you, would you please take a moment to pass it along to someone else who would appreciate it?

[00:02:20]

All right, let’s talk about today’s episode. We’re gonna talk about how tech is a small world so it’s a good idea to stay on good terms with everyone. You never know where you’re gonna see that boss of yours again. I’m also answering an email about how to run meetings more effectively. Also, our John Maxwell “Thought Leader” segment is all about influencing other people, and we’ll wrap up with a “Family” segment where I talk about how to communicate with others more effectively. Let’s get started.

[00:02:51]

Mentoring segment.

[00:03:09]

Announcer: Level one, individual.

[00:03:11]

Man: At Level one, you may even be a superstar technical resource. Level one focuses you on improving your technical skills.

[00:03:23]

Tom: I wanna talk about the topic that is near and dear to my heart. It’s the fact that the technology world is a small world, seriously. I was talking with the head of HR for a company recently and she’s been working on the issue of what they call regrettable churn. Now, regrettable churn is a term that HR folks use when they talk about when talented people, people they would love to have continue to be a part of the team, it’s when those people choose to move on.

[00:03:51]

And just today, I was talking to some team members of the client and I heard several stories about how they’d each chosen to leave prior jobs. And we know that people move on. Sometimes, it’s a good thing for you and a good thing for the company. Sometimes, they just can’t give you what you need in order to be successful. Maybe you’ve outgrown the position or the opportunity or the pay grade that they’ve got for you. That’s really happened to me in my career. But sometimes, they change their priorities and they end up letting you go through no fault of your own.

[00:04:21]

I’m working with a client right now that’s doing some prioritizing of resources in different places around the globe and they’re moving jobs from one part of the world to another part of the world. And some people are being let go not because they’re bad performers but because of other decisions the company is making. And sometimes, the fact is, they let you go because you’re not delivering. But regardless, I wanna talk about how to leave a job well.

[00:04:45]

We know that in a tech world, there are lots and lots of opportunities, and it’s difficult to make technology work. It’s difficult for systems to work. And there’s plenty of grass out there that certainly looks greener. Just to wrap some numbers around that. A while back, I did some work with the Charlotte Chamber of Commerce and discovered that there is a systemic and persistent deficit of good candidates in this market. In fact, there are more than 18,000 jobs a year that go unfilled because it’s so hard to find good team members. So it seems like if you’re a technology person, there’s always an opportunity out there.

[00:05:22]

But let’s get back to that head of HR who was telling me about a team member who chose to leave. This was an engineer who was smart and hard-working. After several years working for this employer, she decided to go to find greener grass someplace else. She negotiated her new deal with the new employer and then she went to her boss and she gave her two weeks’ notice.

[00:05:43]

That’s normal. That’s right, isn’t it? Except for the fact that she refused to communicate with anybody at her current employer about her future plans. “I’m leaving.” “Where are you going?” “I don’t have to disclose that.” And she didn’t. And she’s right. She doesn’t have to disclose it. But here’s the funny thing. As I was preparing for this episode, I’d spent literally less than 10 seconds to find out exactly where she went. She wasn’t helping her relationship. She was just being rude.

[00:06:15]

Now, Maya Angelou said, “People never forget how you make them feel.” People never forget how you make them feel, and I think that is absolutely right. But so what? I mean, there are tons of jobs, especially in a city like Charlotte. It’d be easy to find another job. Now, that’s true. But in spite of the fact that over a million people live in this metropolitan area, the number of people who make decisions at the senior levels is actually pretty small. And I’d been in this town for about a year when I was reminded of that.

[00:06:50]

I had connected with a tech guy and we had several conversations. And during one of our conversations, he said, “Oh, Tom, Elizabeth was here over the weekend and she saw that card you sent me. And she said, “Hey, I know Tom. I knew him first.” And it’s true. I had met Elizabeth through a non-profit she works with after I’d been here only a couple of months. But here’s the thing, it never occurred to me that even though they shared the same last name, they might be related.

[00:07:14]

It is a small world and you don’t realize how small it is because just like “Six Degrees of Separation” from Kevin Bacon, there’s fewer degrees of separation between the people who work in the tech world no matter where they are in the world, seriously. Now, as you move up in your career, how you end things is just as important as how you start them. And if you leave on a bad note, especially when there’s not a good reason to leave on a bad note, it leaves a bad memory about how you made someone feel bad. And that’s gonna be as big a factor in their communication about you as the quality of your work was, even if your work performance was amazing.

[00:08:03]

Now, you might say, “Well, they shouldn’t care. My work was excellent. And if they say something bad, I’ll just sue them.” Well, maybe. But you’d lose and you’d waste a lot of time and energy in the process. And not only that, but you’ve got to realize that the people you report to in your new company, they probably have a connection to the people in your old company. They might live in the same neighborhood. They might be in the same volunteer organization. They might go to the same church. Their kids might go to the same school.

[00:08:34]

They both might be members of the same professional association. And in their outside-of-work world, they might have an off-the-record conversation where they say something not so great about you. And they might even say something that’s factual that’s not so great about you. “You know, the quality of his work was pretty good, but I don’t like the way he left.” That’s all they have to say and it’s amazing the impact that that has. But what if you left your employment in such a way that they were actually sad to see you go?

[00:09:08]

Now, I’ve changed jobs many times over the course of my career and I’ve not done it perfectly every time. But when I left my first job in Washington DC, that must’ve been back around ’92, I know they were sad to see me go. I know because they ended up hiring three people to replace me so I was pretty confident I’d been delivering good value for them. I didn’t realize how much of a difference that made to them until probably 15 years after that. I got an email from my former boss and he told me how much he appreciated my work ethic, my integrity, and my commitment.

[00:09:43]

Now, let me ask you. If somebody asked about you from even 10 years ago, would your former boss remember you? And would their memory be a good one? All I’m saying is it’s a small world, a really small world. Just yesterday, I had an email from somebody I worked with before. We were in the same IT organization more than 10 years ago. He reached out for help with a problem his team is facing. It’s a small world. We just can’t afford to burn bridges. If you’ve got the opportunity, take the high road. The high road is worth it. And that’s today’s “Mentoring” segment.

[00:10:21]

Coach’s Mailbox.

[00:10:51]

Tom: In the “Coach’s Mailbox” segment, today, I’ve got an email from Gail. Now, this topic that Gail brings up is something that you’ll be able to use when you’re at Level two of the four levels of thinking as a geek leader.

[00:11:05]

Announcer: Level two, team member.

[00:11:08]

Man: Level two is where you work well with others, and together, you all succeed.

[00:11:14]

Tom: So Gail writes, “I’ve just been assigned to be the project manager for my first big project at work. They’ve been having team meetings, but I just can’t get people to show up. And when they do show up, I feel like I’m herding cats. I can’t get them to focus, they won’t pay attention, and they just don’t participate. Do you have any tips about how I can get these people to show up and pay attention?”

[00:11:40]

Gail, I feel your pain. Back in the day, I was a young engineer, my boss suggested I run the team meeting, and I thought, “How hard could that be? We just sit around and we talk. I like to talk.” Turns out it wasn’t anywhere near as simple as it looked. Running a meeting, it’s a skill and it’s something that you will need to hone and develop in your career. I don’t have time to get into all the aspects about running a meeting but I do wanna share some key points with you.

[00:12:11]

Now, when it comes to your meetings, why are you meeting? There are three different goals that you might have for a specific meeting. One, you might need to make a decision. So decision-making is one reason to have a meeting. Two, you might wanna broadcast update information out to people. You wanna let them know what’s going on. So that’s the second reason for a meeting. The third reason for a meeting is collaboration or problem-solving. So when you’re getting ready to have your meeting, you need to understand, what is my goal?

[00:12:46]

Most project meetings are really about collaboration or problem-solving, and that might be your goal. With that goal in mind, are you inviting the right people? If you are inviting the right people, are you using their time efficiently? Do you have a plan, a written agenda that you send out before the meeting? And I’ll tell you, just creating your agenda is gonna make your meetings better, and the time you spend thinking and planning that agenda, that’s gonna help you have a clear focus on your goals for the meeting and helping the team.

[00:13:23]

When you get ready to have the meeting, at the very beginning, start off by going over your agenda and the goals for the meeting. Just like when you’re getting on an airplane, they said, “This plane’s going to Dallas. If you’re not going to Dallas, now’s a good time to get off.” When you start your meeting, you can go right in and say, “Here’s what we’re gonna do today.” And that way, people can be engaged in the process.

[00:13:45]

At the end of your meeting, you wanna do a quick recap of the decisions that were made and the assignments that were given. You might say, “Thank you for your help today. Just a quick wrap-up and then we’re all gonna get out of here. Susie has the lead on Y and she’s gonna give us C by next Thursday. Susie, is that right?” You see, what we’ve done here is we’ve identified the decision, we’ve identified who’s going to do it and when they’re going to get it done. You might say, “Unfortunately, we didn’t get to Z today but I’ll bring it up at the next meeting.”

[00:14:15]

So here’s how you’re laying it out to make it easy for people. Let’s say you had something that was totally off-topic that was brought up and you put it in the parking lot. You could say, “All right, as I look at the parking lot, Roger brought up D. I’ll schedule a meeting in the next two weeks to talk specifically about D. Roger, will that work for you?” And now, you’ve elaborated on the things that everybody was supposed to do during that meeting.

[00:14:40]

As I mentioned, there is a ton that I could say about this topic, and unfortunately, I can’t squeeze it all into a single segment of a podcast episode. I do actually have at least one podcast episode with Bryan Field talking about meetings and how to make meetings better. And I also have another resource I can tell you about. If you’re looking for more help with this, here’s the good news. I’ve got a free course on how to run meetings that’s available at my website, brighthillgroup.com/helpinggeeks, that’s brighthillgroup.com/helpinggeeks. You can sign up for that. It’s free, and I go into more detail. And also, that course includes some templates that you can use for your meetings. Gail, I hope that’s a help to you. And that’s today’s “Coach’s Mailbox.”

[00:15:31]

Thought Leader segment.

[00:15:50]

Announcer: Level one, individual.

[00:15:53]

Man: At Level one, you may even be a superstar technical resource. Level one focuses you on improving your technical skills.

[00:16:03]

John: Hello, I’m John Maxwell. And as one of my founding partners, Tom has been trained by me and my team.

[00:16:10]

Tom: In our John Maxwell “Thought Leader” segment today, I wanna introduce the law of influence. This is our second law from John’s book, “The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership.” It’s a great book on leadership and I just wanna kind of dip our toe in the water of what that means. So the law of influence says, “The true measure of leadership is influence, nothing more, nothing less.” The true measure of leadership is influence, nothing more, nothing less.

[00:16:44]

Now, you think about leadership, I heard a quote from Margaret Thatcher. She said, “Being in power is like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you’re not.” The more influence you have, the stronger your leadership is going to be. If you have low levels of influence, you’re gonna have low levels of leadership. Leadership is influence and your ability to influence people comes from valuing people. Now, I know it’s an old expression, but people don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care about them, about their problems. And if you take a genuine interest in others, your influence is gonna grow with them.

[00:17:24]

I have to tell you, when I first got started, I thought leadership was all about me. And then I began to recognize that people didn’t think the same way I did and maybe that wasn’t right. So I shifted and I pretended it was all about others, but secretly, I still thought it was about me. And then many years later, I realized that I had been entirely wrong, that it was all about them, that it’s influence, that it comes from adding value and really caring about other people.

[00:17:52]

One of my mentors is Zig Ziglar. My dad pointed me to him years ago. He’s a sales guru. And Zig Ziglar said, “You can have anything in life that you want if you help enough other people get what they want.” And a lot of people just don’t understand that. Now, how do you help other people get what they want? Well, it really comes from thinking differently. Instead of thinking about, “What have you done for me lately,” you start thinking about, “How can I help you? What can I do to make a difference?” When I change my focus from me to you, all of a sudden, it’s different. And what if you ask questions like, “Are you getting all the support you need from me? What support do you need from me? What can I do to help you grow?” When you begin to do that, all of a sudden, the amount of influence you have with others begins to just skyrocket forward.

[00:18:45]

Years ago, I was teaching a class on leadership and one of the participants said to me, “Tom, leadership and management are the same thing,” and I said, “Steve, I am so glad you are here.” It gave me the opportunity to share with him that that idea, that management and leadership are the same, is one of the five most common myths about leadership. And people frequently do get management and leadership confused. Management can be a part of leadership. But just because you can manage something efficiently, that doesn’t mean you’re a leader.

[00:19:16]

Management is about doing things right and leadership is about doing the right things. Management is about doing what we did yesterday more efficiently and consistently in control, managing risks. But leadership is providing direction, enthusiasm, and inspiration. It’s really about influencing other people. People often think management and leadership are the same, but they’re absolutely not the same thing.

[00:19:42]

If you’re focusing your time and attention on the little things, to make sure that people are coming to work on time, or how long they’re at lunch, that’s not leadership. It’s just not leadership because it’s very different to work for a boss who’s watching the clock all the time from watching a boss or working with a boss that is inspiring a team and that where the team is focused on delivering towards an amazing goal.

[00:20:05]

All right, another myth is the entrepreneur myth, that entrepreneurs are great leaders. But if you stop and think about that, that doesn’t make any sense. Just because somebody identified a gap in the market and created a new product, that doesn’t mean that they’re actually leading other people. There are plenty of people who are inventors and entrepreneurs who aren’t making a dime, or who can’t grow their team past a certain point. And we touched on that last week, when we talked about the law of the lid.

[00:20:31]

How about knowledge, that knowledge is power? Now, I’ll tell you, as a geek, oh, my goodness, this one is so rampant. “I’m the smartest guy in the room about Technology X. Therefore, I have all the power about that.” Yikes. That is totally not true. You cannot force people to follow you. And you know that’s true because you have found in your career, there were plenty of times where you had the right answer but people just wouldn’t listen. And you found yourself going back a while later going, “They should’ve listened to me. They just should’ve listened to me.” And maybe they should have, but your knowledge didn’t give you the influence that you needed.

[00:21:13]

Next is the pioneer myth. You know, whoever got there first, the pioneer, the one who’s carving a new trail that they’re a leader. But that’s not true. There are plenty of people who are pioneers who are loners, who are off on their own. And it’s not the same thing at all as taking initiative. And finally, the position myth. Now, this one is the biggest misconception of all, that once I get the position, I’ll be a leader. I can tell you, I have held positions with a leadership title where I have not led very well. And I have held positions where I did not have a leadership position where I actually did a halfway decent job of leading and influencing others.

[00:21:50]

The same is true for you and it’s true for everybody else. It’s not the position that makes the leader. It’s the leader that makes the position. If you’ve got a position, it might give you a temporary head start when you first meet new people, but it’s not gonna keep you there for very long. If you don’t have influence, if you can’t lead, you just won’t be effective. Leadership is influence. That’s the law of influence, that it’s our ability to influence others, nothing more, nothing less. It’s a simple point when you stop and think about it but it’s so easy to miss until you do that. If you wanna be a leader, you’ve gotta have followers.

[00:22:32]

And here’s the thing. In today’s world, people are not gonna follow you unless they want to follow you. The law of influence, the true measure of leadership is influence, nothing more, nothing less. And that’s today’s John Maxwell “Thought Leader” segment on the law of influence.

[00:22:52]

Family segment.

[00:23:10]

Tom: Now, in the “Family” segment, what I have to talk about today is something that you can use at Level one of the four levels of thinking as a geek leader.

[00:23:18]

Announcer: Level one, individual.

[00:23:21]

Man: At Level one, you may even be a superstar technical resource. Level one focuses you on improving your technical skills.

[00:23:32]

Tom: In today’s “Family” segment, I wanna talk about how other people think differently than we do. Our priorities are frequently very different from theirs. And I wanna illustrate that by some early-morning visits from my seven-year-old and nine-year-old daughters.

[00:23:47]

Now, I should say that morning is not my best time. I’m often groggy until I’ve been up for an hour or two. So if you wanna get something from me, it’s probably best for you to give me a little bit of time to get moving. Nevertheless, it’s not an uncommon experience for my kids to be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and be raring to go and excited about opportunities to start their day. Here are a couple of recent burning questions that necessitated an early-morning knock on my bedroom door.

[00:24:20]

Child 2: Dad, can I use a tape measure to measure my jump rope?

[00:24:26]

Tom: Let me assure you, measuring a jump rope was not the top of my priority list when that question was asked. Another question was…

[00:24:37]

Child 1: Daddy, I want to know, can I set up a lemonade stand?

[00:24:43]

Tom: Just like I wasn’t particularly interested in jump ropes or lemonade stands when those questions were asked, when you approach somebody else, it’s likely that their minds may be preoccupied with other thoughts. As I was getting ready for this episode, I was reminded of commentary that Dale Carnegie provided on an advertising letter he received.

[00:25:03]

In the book, “How to Win Friends and Influence People,” he recounts, after the author of the letter wrote, “Our company wants,” Carnegie commented, “Who cares what you want? I’m worried about my own problems. The bank is foreclosing the mortgage on my house. The bugs are destroying the hollyhocks. The stock market tumbled yesterday. I missed the 8:15 this morning. I wasn’t invited to the Joneses’ dance last night. The doctor tells me I have high blood pressure and neuritis and dandruff. And then what happens? I come down to the office this morning, worried. And I open my mail and here’s some whippersnapper in New York yapping about what his company wants. Bah.”

[00:25:40]

Before you ask your question, you should ask yourself, “What does the other person want?” We get so wrapped up in thinking about the things that we want that we overlook the things that might be important to the other person. If you can put your brain in their position, if you can think about the things that matter to them, it changes the interactions that you have.

[00:26:07]

So certainly, you can’t be responsible for handling somebody’s medical problems or their financial problems or their family problems. But you know what? You might be able to listen to them talk about those issues because in our culture, people don’t listen very often. And even if you can’t address or solve those issues, you might be in a position where you could at least connect with them about those issues. And they’re gonna want to do things that matter to you if you can make it a priority to hear from them before you launch into your request.

[00:26:42]

In fact, one of my clients said to me he did an exercise where he made it a point one day to say, “Every time I make a statement, I commit to asking three questions.” So instead of just talk, talk, talk, he would say something and then intentionally ask a sequence of three questions. He said it made a dramatic difference in the type of interaction he had with other people. I thought it was a great idea. So the fact is people are thinking about things that are not the things that matter to you. And the more you can do to get inside their head, the more likely you are to get the kinda response that you want.

[00:27:20]

Now, for the record, the jump rope turned out to be 6 feet 6 inches long and that particular day was too cold for a lemonade stand. And that’s today’s “Family” segment.

[00:27:30]

Episode Hack.

[00:27:54]

Tom: So to recap. In today’s episode, we talked about how technology is actually a small world, and we have to be careful not to burn our bridges because people never forget how you make them feel. We also covered a couple of aspects of effective meetings, how having a solid plan and doing a quick recap at the end of the meeting is a powerful way to close it out. In our John Maxwell “Thought Leader” segment, we talked about myths of leadership and how important influence is. And in the “Family” segment, we talked about how other people are distracted by things unrelated to our concerns and our priorities.

[00:28:31]

For today’s “Episode Hack,” I want you to think about who do you need to influence and what are they being measured on? What are they worried about? When you can wrap your brain about the things that matter to them, you’re gonna find there much more willing to help you with your stuff. Focusing on the needs of the other person will increase your influence with them. So who is it you need to influence and what specifically can you do to connect with them on the things that matter to them? And that is today’s “Episode Hack.”

[00:29:06]

Closeout

Is the podcast helping you? Make sure that you don’t miss out on the latest info. Head over right now to brighthillgroup.com/join to be sure that you stay in the loop. When you do, you’ll get my PDF, “Become a Geek Leader in Two Easy Steps,” and you’ll be notified as soon as new podcast episodes are available. Plus, you’ll get updates and ideas that I don’t share on the podcast. Head over to brighthillgroup.com/join right now.

[00:29:39]

This is Tom Cooper. Thanks for listening. Be sure to join me next time for another episode of “Becoming a Geek Leader.” Join me in my mission of discovering better ways to lead others at work and at home.

[00:29:51]

[Music]

[00:30:05]

Listen now!

Becoming a Geek Leader

How to Get More Recognition and 3 Hats You Need to Wear - Sea:3Ep:3

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In this episode:

• Three hats you need to wear as an effective geek
• How to get the recognition you deserve at work
• Why you’re not getting the results you want

Resources:

• https://brighthillgroup.com/recommended-resources/
  
• https://www.gartner.com/doc/2835119/renaissance-developer-skills-guidance-modern
• 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership

Transcript

Tom: Steve writes, “I’m an engineer in a manufacturing company. I’ve been working professionally for a few years now, and if I do say so myself, I’m smart and hard-working. I care a lot about my work and I’m passionate about my ideas. My problem is my boss doesn’t listen to me. Not only that, but I’ve been told by my boss and HR that my directness and attitude are getting me in trouble. I don’t understand what they’re talking about. Even if I’m making a critical comment, what I’m saying is true. There’s nothing wrong with speaking truth, is there?”

[00:00:29]

Announcer: Becoming a geek leader. Season three, episode three.

[00:00:34]

Sponsored by Brighthill Group Executive Coaching Services.

Man: This episode is sponsored by BrightHill Group’s Team Leadership Services. Dysfunctional teams are painful and cost you time and money. They also suck the life out of you and take the fun out of work. How about your team? Is it time for a tune-up? How prepared is your team for the challenges ahead? I can help create a simple development process for your team members. Something easy for you to use. Not another project for you to manage.

[00:01:02]

Growth doesn’t happen by accident. Whether it’s through a leadership assessment or helping you plan a leadership retreat, give me a call to talk about how to set up an affordable program to improve your team’s teamwork and to help your team members perform like a well-oiled machine. Check out brighthillgroup.com/geektraining, that’s brighthillgroup.com/geektraining for quick videos on my team building and leadership retreats. Then give me a call at 240 668 4799. That’s 240 668 4799.

[00:01:40]

Tom: Welcome to the Becoming a Geek Leader podcast. My name is Tom Cooper. As a geek, I’m on a mission to figure out better ways to lead others at work and at home. Through the Becoming a Geek Leader podcast, I’m sharing what I’m learning so I can help make you a more effective at leading people, too. Ready?

[00:02:02]

Introduction

In today’s action-packed episode, I’m going to talk about growing your career by wearing some new hats, getting the recognition you deserve, a hard limit that may be keeping you from more success at work, and a story about my son embracing failure that led to a great Thanksgiving outcome. I guess Ms. Frizzle from “The Magic School Bus” book series was right when she said, “Take chances, make mistakes, get dirty.” So, let’s get started.

[00:02:33]

Thought leader segment.

[00:02:53]

Announcer: Level one. Individual.

[00:02:55]

Announcer: At level one, you may even be a superstar technical resource. Level one focuses you on improving your technical skills.

[00:03:06]

John: Hello, I’m John Maxwell and as one of my founding partners, Tom has been trained by me and my team.

[00:03:12]

Tom: Starting with today’s episode, I’m adding a new element to the podcast. Now, many of you who know me know that John Maxwell has had a huge impact about my thinking when it comes to leadership. And one of his most popular books is called “The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership”. It’s a good book and it’s well worth your time to read. And starting today, I’ll be including a brief description of one of the laws as part of the podcast.

[00:03:42]

In today’s episode, I want to introduce you to The Law of the Lid. The Law of the Lid says that leadership ability determines a person’s level of effectiveness. So what does that mean? It means that each of us has developed a certain set of skills. We do what works. Everybody does what works. When something works, we repeat it. And as a result, we perform at a certain level. But what if? What if we could learn things that worked even better that got us some more results? And to help illustrate that, I want to share with you a story of two brothers.

[00:04:20]

In 1937, brothers Dick and Maurice started a drive-in restaurant in California. Now, they were good restaurateurs. In fact, their restaurant was a success. It was so successful that after just three years, they were splitting profits from the restaurant of \$50,000. Now, you can only imagine how much \$50,000 was in 1940. These were good times. In fact, just 10 years later, things were going so well for them, that now they were splitting \$100,000 a year. That’s good stuff. They had…they were smart at running a restaurant.

[00:04:59]

They had developed repeatable systems for every element of…in the restaurant. And they were good managers. They ran their restaurant really efficiently, Now, based on their success, they thought, “You know what would be really smart for us to do? We’ve got these systems, we’ve got success as restaurateurs, we should franchise.” And they decided to sell franchises. And you know what happened? It did not work. They only sold 15 licenses to franchisees. And of the 15, only 10 actually every opened up a restaurant. Now, why didn’t it work?

[00:05:33]

Well, Dick and Maurice were really good at running a restaurant, but there weren’t really good at taking it to that level of franchisee-ing. They ran straight into this idea of The Law of the Lid. Their leadership ability limited their effectiveness. So, let me ask you this. Have you ever had a really good thing that should have scaled, but it didn’t? Have you ever had a really good idea that other people just wouldn’t buy into? And you think about this, you’ve got a good idea and you’ve got all the important elements that are there, but, for some reason, all the pieces don’t add up to a whole. And this is exactly what happened to Dick and Maurice. They just didn’t have the leadership skills to make it go.

[00:06:22]

So, looking back, how do we know now that their idea was actually a good idea? Well, in 1954, Dick and Maurice met Ray. Ray was a milkshake machine salesman. And he was very happy to sell milkshake machines to Dick and Maurice. They were his best customer. And so, he looked at the potential in franchising and he negotiated the rights to sell the franchises based on the work that Dick and Maurice had done.

[00:06:55]

In 1954, Dick and Maurice McDonald sold franchise rights to Ray Kroc. Over the next four years, Ray Kroc opened 100 McDonald’s restaurants. In the next four years after that, Kroc opened an average of 100 restaurants a year. Kroc had a leadership lid that was higher than McDonald’s leadership lead. And he was able to apply his leadership skills to create the juggernaut that became the McDonald’s franchise chain.

[00:07:30]

Looking at you and your situation, what if you could raise your leadership lid? What if you could improve your leadership ability by, I don’t know, 1% a week? Just 1% a week. That compounding interest would really add up, wouldn’t it? How would that change your career? How might it change your life? That’s The Law of the Lid. And that’s today’s thought leader segment from John Maxwell.

[00:08:00]

Coach’s Mailbox.

[00:08:32]

Announcer: Level two. Team member.

[00:08:35]

Man: Level two is where you work well with others, and together you all succeed.

[00:08:41]

Tom: Today I’m answering an email from Steve. Steve writes, “I’m an engineer in a manufacturing company. I’ve been working professionally for a few years now, and if I do say so myself, I am smart and hard-working. I care a lot about my work, and I am passionate about my ideas. My problem is my boss doesn’t listen to me. Not only that, but I’ve been told by my boss and HR that my directness and my attitude are getting me in trouble. I don’t understand what they’re talking about. Even if I’m making a critical comment about somebody or something, what I’m saying is true. There’s nothing wrong with speaking the truth, is there?”

[00:09:16]

“I really do have great ideas, and I think my boss ought to implement more of my ideas, and I should be rewarded. I’m saving the company tons of money and helping them do things that, without me, they would completely fail at doing. I’m so frustrated that I’m thinking about quitting. So, should I quit and go find a company that values good ideas and that will reward me fairly for being a great contributor?”

[00:09:44]

Steve, I feel your pain. In previous episodes, I’ve said that, early in my career, I believed that my brain power and my geek work, combined with my own two hands, was gonna be the key to my success. And the rest of everything at work was in a sliver of percentage that I called politics/BS. I do understand what it’s like to not be heard. My second job at a college, I had some conflict with senior leaders. I was working for a small mom-and-pop company. I worked directly for the vice president Pop, and Mom was the president of the company. It was many, many years ago, and I don’t really remember the details of this incident, but what I do remember is I was so offended by something the president said about my work that I left her an angry and critical voice mail defending my position.

[00:10:35]

Now, I’m pretty sure that, if you’d asked me, I would have said that everything I said in my message was truthful. She just couldn’t handle the truth. That’s her problem, not mine, right? Here’s the thing. As engineers, we like to think of ourselves as rational thinkers who make decisions on facts and logic. The fact is that even engineers are strongly affected by our emotions. In you email, you described passion for your ideas, and that’s an example of your emotions coming into play. And why do you care? It’s because your ideas are good, they’re helpful and they move the company toward its goals. And that’s good. But in order for people to hear your ideas, you have to be able to communicate those ideas in a form that other people feel good about.

[00:11:23]

Maya Angelou once said, “People never forget how you make them feel. People never forget how you make them feel.” And that’s one of the core lessons all of us needs to consider. I’m reminded of that joke where an engineer decides to apologize for upsetting someone. And the engineer says, “I’m sorry you got upset when I told you you were stupid. I thought you already knew that about yourself.” Now, how do you think that made the so-called stupid person feel? I guarantee you they are never gonna forget that.

[00:11:57]

So here’s my feedback to you. I’m willing to bet that you’re right. That you are smart, and that you are hard-working, and that you’re adding a great deal of technical value to your employer. That is really good. Keep it up. You are investing in one part of your career success, in technical skills. Stanford Research International reported that a study showed the importance of technical skills to your career success. Their study proves that technical skill are critical to your achievement. And continuing to invest in those technical skills is an important component of your overall success.

[00:12:35]

However, the study showed that 13% of your career success is technical skills. Thirteen percent. The other 87% is made up of what I used to call politics/BS. Now, back in the day, I thought it was 2%, and actually, it’s 87%. It’s not really politics and BS. It’s actually about understanding how people work and how to relate to others. So, let’s get back to that voice mail I left for the president of this small company I worked for.

[00:13:09]

My boss, the husband of the company president, sat me down for a tough conversation. At the end of that conversation, it was communicated clearly to me that I needed to apologize for my insubordination and my disrespect. It was a tough message to hear. And it was tough for me to actually do it, too. I remember having that conversation. I remember going home and thinking about it and trying to decide exactly what I was gonna do, and eventually I did go and confess my insubordination and disrespect, and she was gracious to me. But it was a tougher choice for them, too. Because they could have fired me. They could have fired me immediately and I would have had no recourse at all. And so, I’m grateful that they invested in me and they helped me grow through that season.

[00:13:56]

Here’s the thing. If you continue to invest in your technical capability but you don’t invest in your people skills as part of your growth at work, it’s not gonna matter which company you work for. You’re still going to be frustrated. Let me just say that again. You are gonna be you wherever you go. If you’ve made big investments on the technical side but you have not made the right investments on the people side of things, no matter where you go, you’re gonna face the same problem.

[00:14:28]

So, do you wanna have other people support your ideas? Recognize you for your contributions and reward you? Then let me encourage you to invest in the 87% as well. Learn how to communicate, how to delegate, how to manage conflict, and how to plan you work with others. And you’re gonna see a great deal of success. Steve, I hope that’s of help to you. And that’s today’s Coach’s Mailbox.

[00:14:54]

Thought leader segment.

[00:15:13]

Announcer: Level two. Team member. Level two is where you work well with others, and together you all succeed.

[00:15:22]

Tom: That’s true. Earlier in my career, I believed that 98% of my success as a geek came from geek work and the other 2% was a category I called politics/BS. Now, I’ll tell you that I invested heavily on the 98% and I really did not invest much on the 2%. But I recently came across an article from “Gartner” that was called “The Renaissance Developer: Skills Guidance for Modern Application Programmers”. If your company has a “Gartner” subscription, I highly recommend you read the article. It was…it’s well worth your time. I’ve included a link to the article on the “Gartner” website in today’s show notes on the web page. Now, this article is specifically directed at software developers. But I would suggest that it’s applicable to anybody who does technical work.

[00:16:11]

In the article, Danny Brian, the author, makes the case that you’re gonna need to wear three different hats based on the work that you’re doing. You’re gonna change hats from time to time. The first, you need a coder hat or a geek hat. Second, you need a communicator hat. And third, you need a hat that lets you be a suit. When you’re wearing the geek hat, you’re gonna need to invest in your technical skills. But as you move up the ladder, as you begin to have more influence in the organization, you’re gonna need to shift your thinking from deep technical knowledge in one area to a more broad-based definition of success. You’re gonna need to think about learning and applying things cross-functionally. Things that are outside your wheelhouse. Outside you technical wheelhouse, perhaps. And if you’re a coder, you might need to learn a new language or a new framework. Some other platform.

[00:17:11]

You may need to understand more about how people use technology. If you’re networking person, maybe you need to think about databases, or maybe you need to think about coding languages. Not to become an expert in those areas, but just to get a sense for what those other areas do. Because your ability to deliver value in the organization is going to require your technical excellence as applied in multiple disciplines. Expanding the scope of your technical knowledge does matter. Now, one thing I wanna point out, there’s a consequence to doing this.

[00:17:45]

The more broad your thinking is and the wider your ideas are across different technology platforms or across technical areas, you’re less likely to continue to be the smartest person in the room within your chosen area. Now, it’s actually okay, but it’s something you simply have to come to terms with. When you realize that you can have more impact, you can have more growth, you can get to more success by broadening your understanding and giving up some of the depth that you’ve previously had, you begin to see it’s okay for somebody to know more than you about a specific technical area.

[00:18:25]

I’m working with a client right now who’s an auditor by trade. And he said to me just last week, “I recognize that I’m not going to be the smartest auditor in the room. That somebody’s probably gonna have more auditing skills than I currently have. But I’m gonna have to be okay with that as I move forward.” And that client is exactly right. So you’re gonna have to be willing to no longer be the smartest guy in the room. But you’re gonna be smarter because you’re gonna know more about areas outside your discipline. And that means if you are a project manager, maybe you need to learn more about technology.

[00:18:59]

If you’re a technology person, maybe you need to learn more about business process, or maybe you need to learn more about technology to solve business problems in a particular area. Maybe if you’re in one department within an IT organization, you need to have lunch with people who are in another department and understand the kinds of problems that they’re running into. The kinds of needs that they have. And that begins to lead us into hat number two.

[00:19:24]

So let’s talk for a minute about the communicator hat. The only way great ideas can ever get implemented is if they’re communicated in a way that other people can understand. When you’re growing your skills as a communicator, Danny suggests that you need to look for ways to improve your communication and collaboration. Now, one tool that I would recommend is the book “How to Win Friends and Influence People”. It’s a great starting point to help you become more persuasive. And the higher you go on the ladder, the more your communication and persuasion skills become important.

[00:20:01]

I just want to take a second here to say I talk to senior leaders all the time. I cannot emphasize enough how much people at the sea level struggle to find people who have great technical skills and can communicate and collaborate with others. And you know that’s true. You know there are plenty of highly technical, very smart, very capable people that you don’t let talk to customers. They say, “Give me the specifications or let me go do the work and get out of my way. But don’t make me talk to customers.” And I’m telling you, if you can develop skills when it comes to communicating well and collaborating with others, it will transform your success in your career. It is going to be worth your time, I promise.

[00:20:46]

Now, the third hat that Brian talks about in the article is the suit. And this is all about understanding the business drivers. Seeing where your solutions fit and why does the business need your help. Years ago, I worked for a software as a service company. And we had a software tool that easily generated 5X ROI. That means that if our customers paid us \$1 million, we could prove demonstrably they would see at least \$5 million in cost reduction. And because of this, it seemed obvious to us that customers, A, needed this tool, and, B, could easily seize so much return that everybody ought to buy. Right? I mean, if I made you a deal where you put a \$1 bill in my hand and I would put a \$5 bill in yours, you’d take that deal all day long. Right? You’d have to be an idiot not to. Right? Well, not so fast, and this is where the suit hat comes on.

[00:21:40]

Because the business guys, or our clients, did understand the ROI, but they also understood that it takes time and effort to make changes based on the reports from our tools. Even if they could…even if it cost them another \$1 million. So, \$1 million to us for our software and another \$1 million in labor, so they still got \$ million extra back. Not a bad deal, right? You give me \$1, I give you \$3. That’s a deal you should be able to take all day long. Or you give me \$2, I give you \$3, either way, it’s a win.

[00:22:12]

It wasn’t worth it to them. Why? Why wouldn’t it be worth it for them to get demonstrable return on investment? Because, in that industry, our clients often had parts of the business where they were losing \$100 million or \$200 million a year through waste and inefficiency. And if they could take that same time and attention their team members put…instead of putting on the \$5 million-a-year problem, or the \$1 million-a-year problem, right, they could be focusing attention on these much, much bigger problems, and that would be far better off for them than just getting a \$5 million return on investment.

[00:22:48]

For us to be successful, we had to become better suits if we were gonna address our clients’ needs. Now, eventually we did develop products that tackled some of the bigger problems our clients felt, and we were successful. But if we hadn’t learned about their business and about their priorities, we’d have been left in the dust. As a suit, you need to recognize business value. You need to intentionally step outside your comfort zone and connect with people in the business, and then think of ways that your technical skills can be applied to the highest value and most urgent business problems. As a geek leader, if you really want to grow your influence, you need to grow skills when you’re wearing the geek hat, the communicator hat, and the suit hat. And that’s today’s thought leader segment, thanks to “Gartner”.

[00:23:37]

Family segment.

[00:23:52]

Man: Level two. Team member. Level two is where you work well with others, and together you all succeed.

[00:24:01]

Tom: As I record this episode, it is Thanksgiving week in the United States. Thanksgiving is one of the favorite holidays in America. I love this holiday. It’s all about making the time to reflect on the blessings we have and invest time with family and friends in celebration. Now, in most American families, we put out a great feast for Thanksgiving day. With turkey, stuffing, potatoes, cranberry sauce, and many other delicious treats.

[00:24:27]

This year, one of our Boy Scouts decided he wanted to grow his skills in Dutch oven cooking. Now, for those of you who don’t know, a Dutch oven is a large cast iron bowl that’s got a heavy cast iron lid. Scouts learn to prepare dishes, even complete meals, using the Dutch oven, by placing the Dutch oven on the coals of a fire. To make the heating even, what you do is put coals on top of the oven, too. It’s not quite as simple as just setting the oven in the kitchen for a specific temperature. And my son Joel prepared a sweet potato casserole to contribute to our family feast.

[00:25:03]

And he started a charcoal fire in our fire pit, and he put the Dutch oven on the coals and put the coals on the top. Now, his coals started to burn out earlier than he planned, and now the temperature wasn’t gonna be hot enough. What was he gonna do? Well, fortunately, we still had some more charcoal and he was able to scramble to get some more charcoal lit to put back on to heat the casserole back up. Now, I think he was disappointed that things didn’t go perfectly. But eventually, the sweet potato casserole was done and it provided a delicious element for our family meal. I’m proud of him for stepping outside his comfort zone and for trying something new. And his experience yesterday reminds me of two thoughts about learning.

[00:25:47]

First, the head of Pixar, you know, the folks who put out Toy Story, he said, “Failure is an inevitable consequence of trying something new, and, as such, should be seen as valuable.” He’s saying that failure is valuable. Let me just read that quote to you again. “Failure is an inevitable consequence of trying something new, and, as such, it should be seen as valuable.” Failure is a part of our journey, and when things don’t go perfectly, we don’t need to get upset about that. We need to remember that struggle is normal and struggle is to be expected.

[00:26:26]

Secondly, I’m also reminded of the proverb that says, “The master has failed more times than the student has even tried. The master has failed more times than the student has ever tried.” This proverb teaches us that mastery comes through trying, stretching, learning, and failure. I just wanna wrap up by saying, the sweet potato casserole, yum. And that’s today’s family segment.

[00:26:55]

Episode Hack.

[00:26:57]

Man: In the Episode Hack segment, Tom shares one action-oriented takeaway from this episode. Something you can apply right away.

[00:27:16]

Tom: Man, we have covered a lot of ground today. We talked about three hats you need to wear as a technical resource. We talked about The Law of the Lid. How your leadership ability is directly related to your success, and how making mistakes is part of the journey to success. And then how you can improve your influence skills to get more recognition and reward at the office. So, in today’s Episode Hack, I wanna encourage you to make a plan about how to grow your skills as an influencer. What I want you to do is take a few minutes to set a specific goal, identify the smallest possible steps you can take toward that goal, and then give yourself a deadline.

[00:28:02]

For example, you might say, “I wanna be a better influencer. I’m going to read three books in the next three months on influencing people. I’m gonna take a look at Tom’s website, brighthillgroup.com/recommended-resources for a list of books to choose from. I’ll read one in December, one in January, and one in February. And each month, I’m gonna pick at least one idea from a book and work to apply that idea in my work.” Creating a specific, measurable, and action-oriented plan to grow your influence skills. That’s today’s Episode Hack.

[00:28:40]

Closeout

If you liked the podcast, could I ask you to give me a hand? It turns out it’s a big deal to have a rating in iTunes. Now, I’ve heard other podcasters asking for ratings and reviews, and I wondered why they kept going after it again, and again, and again. Do you wanna know? Because almost no one actually does it. It only takes a minute and it’s a huge help.

[00:29:02]

So why is that? Great ratings help iTunes decide that this podcast is worth promoting. And when you put a rating or a review, it helps it appear as a top podcast in the iTune search. Could you please take a moment to do it right now? There are three simple steps. One, go to the iTune store, podcast. Two, search for Becoming a Geek Leader. And three, give the podcast a great rating. Thanks.

[00:29:34]

This is Tom Cooper. Thanks for listening. Be sure to join me next time for another episode of Becoming a Geek Leader. Join me in my mission of discovering better ways to lead others at work and at home.