October 28, 2021

#24: Leadership in the Wild with Brandon Harding

28 minutes

Brandon Harding is a military chaplain and relationship coach with two decades of experience. His passion is assisting people and organizations in their pursuit of purpose and meaning, leading to greater productivity, healthier work cultures, and deeply satisfying relationships. He also has a coaching business, Reset Coaching, where he fuses experiences in the wild with the Immunity to Change process in order to facilitate personal and organizational development.

Top 3 Takeaways

Don’t fear vulnerability—Just because you’re acting in a leadership role doesn’t mean that you have to be perfect or impenetrable. Make yourself human in order to connect with your team members in a deep and meaningful way.

Develop resiliency—Things aren’t always going to go your way. What’s most important is how you bounce back from work and life’s inevitable challenges.

Put people before performance—It takes a bit of trust, but your people will perform for you if they know you’re developing them. If you focus on performance at the expense of people, you’ll get neither.

From the Source

“Within the Marine Corps, there's this culture where you can't be vulnerable, you can't express any kind of weakness, and that infuses up and down the chain of command. The irony is that the best leaders that I've experienced go against that. They do have vulnerability“

“The focus question is ‘What's the one thing that you need to change about yourself as a leader?’ The takeaway they were going to take back to their command was ‘To be the most effective leader, I've got to be human. I can't just be this automaton robot. That's harsh and demanding. I have to be a human to be really effective.’”

“Personal resiliency is the ability to bounce back in a healthy way from challenges. We all have challenges. So if I have resiliency, I can have setbacks at work—I can have personal setbacks—but if I'm resilient, I'm able to kind of stay calm in the moment.”

“When you shift away from outcome-focused versus people-centric leadership, the outcomes happen. The outcomes just sort of naturally come along, because people will perform the best for you when they know that you're interested in developing them rather than just you're fixed on the outcome, whatever that might be.”

“On a retreat, we share meals, we share hardship, there's no digital distractions. Just being in nature without any other responsibilities out there just creates an environment where people can really connect. The outcome is a deep sense of connection.”

Connect with Brandon

Website: http://www.resetcoaching.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brandon-harding-a6aab858/

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By Matt Poepsel, PhD

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