Damon Lembi talks with Jason Barnard about the learn-it-all leader.

Damon Lembi is the host of The Learn-It-All Podcast and the CEO of Learnit. Damon Lembi and Jason Barnard discuss the essential traits of a learn-it-all leader: humility, curiosity, integrity, accountability, and courage.

Damon shares insights on how these traits help create a flexible, adaptive, and successful leadership approach. Damon and Jason explore the importance of continuous learning, delegation, and feedback in business growth, emphasizing the balance between learning and decisive action.

Damon also shares how leveraging tools like ChatGPT has helped streamline decision-making and improve company strategies. This is a must-watch episode on how continuous learning and decisive action build resilient organizations.

What you’ll learn from Damon Lembi

00:00 Damon Lembi and Jason Barnard

01:12  What Features Did Jason Barnard Emphasize on Damon Lembi’s Knowledge Panel?

02:36 What Search Engines Can You Use to Research Podcast Guests, Potential Partners, and Clients?

03:21 What is a Know-It-All Leader?

03:50 What are the Five Distinguishing Traits of a Learn-It-All Leader?

04:09 What is a Learn-It-All Leader?

04:23 What Did Jason Barnard Highlight About Himself in Damon Lembi’s Five Traits of a Learn-It-All Leader?

04:56 What Challenges Do Leaders Face When Learning to Delegate?

05:33 Why is it Important for Leaders to Give Their Team Autonomy?

05:48 Why Did Jason Barnard Mention That He Was a Bottleneck in the Delegation Process to His Team?

06:23 Why is it Important for Leaders to Know How to Receive Feedback?

07:25 What Would a Leader Feel When a Team Member Thinks They Are Not Tough Enough?

08:25 Why is Curiosity an Essential Trait for Learn-It-All Leaders?

08:54 Why is Humility Important for Learn-It-All Leaders When Working With Their Team?

09:18 What Do Leaders Need to Do to Avoid Losing Great Talent and Allow Their Team to Grow?

09:40 Why is Courage Important for Learn-It-All Leaders?

10:08 Why Do Some Leaders Resist Challenges Once They Feel They’ve “Made It”?

10:27 Why Do Learn-It-All Leaders Embrace Challenges and View Failure as Growth?

10:40 Why Do Learn-It-All Leaders Prioritize Integrity in Their Leadership Approach?

11:24 Why Do Great Leaders Take Accountability Rather Than Blame Their Team Members?

11:41 Why Should the Leader Take Full Responsibility for Solving a Problem in the Team?

13:00 When Should a Leader Help, and When Should They Let the Team Solve the Problem on Their Own?

14:34 How Can a Leader Share Their System Effectively While Encouraging Feedback and Improvement?

15:55 How Do Leaders Balance Continuous Learning With Decisive Action to Keep Moving Forward?

19:01 How Does Adopting a Learn-It-All Mindset Instead of a Know-It-All Attitude Impact Business Growth?

19:14 Why Do Companies Need Continuous Innovation?

19:25 Why Do Leaders Need Continuous Learning in the AI-Driven World?

19:38 Why Do Leaders Need Courage?

19:59 Why Do Leaders Fear Investing in Employees?

20:14 How Do Organizations Foster Employee Loyalty?

This episode was recorded live on video February 25th 2025

https://youtube.com/live/gQKPpq_BWlU

Links to pieces of content relevant to this topic:https://a.co/d/0iX38kzhttps://a.co/d/fnrNUB2https://www.thelearnitallleader.com/podcastDamon Lembi

Transcript from Damon Lembi with Jason Barnard on Fastlane Founders And Legacy. The Learn-It-All Leader

[00:00:00] Narrator: Fastlane Founders and Legacy with Jason Barnard. Each week, Jason sits down with successful entrepreneurs, CEOs and executives and get them to share how they mastered the delicate balance between rapid growth and enduring success in the business world. How can we quickly build a profitable business that stands the test of time and becomes our legacy, A legacy we're proud of. Fastlane Founders and Legacy with Jason Barnard.

[00:00:31] Jason Barnard: Hi everybody and welcome to another Fastlane Founders and Legacy with me, Jason Barnard. And a quick hello and we're good to go. Welcome to the show, Damon Lembi.

[00:00:43] Damon Lembi: Well, Jason, I've been on quite a few podcasts and I don't think I've ever been serenaded before. So I love it.

[00:00:50] Jason Barnard: Super. And I'm going to love the topic today. The Learn-It-All versus the know-it-all leader. Helping people to lead better, delegate better, manage better. Hugely interesting topics for entrepreneurs, business leaders, and even kind of different people in management. I've learned a lot from a guy called Mads Singers and I think I'm about to learn a lot more from you. But before we get into that really quickly, I always show the Brand SERP or ChatGPT results people today. I chose to show the Brand SERP and what I found interesting here, I've marked in three green arrows is number one, you've written books.

So Google's using the Google Books description and that description is almost impossible to get rid of. So once you've written a book, you're stuck with the Google Books description that you submit. Number two, you put a great piece of information in there, which is 1.8 million professionals. So when you're writing your description for your book, always put some really cool information. Hopefully that won't go out of date. And the subtitle there on the left is Author. And I find that it's really nice. But then once again, Google Books is dominating.

Instead of saying you're an entrepreneur and a CEO, it's saying you're an author. How do you feel about that? Do you feel author is accurate or would you rather be entrepreneur?

[00:02:05] Damon Lembi: I'd rather be an entrepreneur or CEO than author. And I hope the 1.8 does go out of a date because it keeps going up.

[00:02:14] Jason Barnard: Very good point. Yeah, we do find a lot of our clients come to us and say, well, I'm tagged as an author or somebody was an SEO professional, I'd much rather be seen as an entrepreneur. And we can switch that for them. That's part of what we do at Kalicube. But you said you actually use Google and ChatGPT to research guests for your podcast. You also use it to research potential partners and clients.

[00:02:36] Damon Lembi: A hundred percent. I use Google, ChatGPT and like I mentioned to you before, Perplexity, to go through and research potential guests, partners, and even YouTube, to be honest, you know, to go through. Because, I mean, I think YouTube is a great search engine as well when you want to find out information or watch short clips on people.

[00:02:56] Jason Barnard: Yeah, I think kind of a lot of us forget that we research people on Google, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, maybe even Alexa and Siri, and we don't realize that other people are doing it to us. So I didn't realize you'd been researching me yesterday and you know way too much about me already. It's scary. But let's talk about delegation. Describe to me the Learn-It-All versus the know-it-all to kick off so we know the difference.

[00:03:20] Damon Lembi: Okay, so let's start off with the know-it-all. Okay, so the know-it-all we all come across. These people, they have all the answers. They're stuck in their ways. They're. It's my way or the highway, especially, you know, for a leader or a coach or whatever. And they're just not open to being adaptable and hearing diverse opinions. And on the flip side of that, what I talk about in my book, The Learn-It-All Leader, is a learn-it-all mentality.

And there's really five traits, I believe, that make a great leader when it comes to becoming a learn-it-all. And those five traits are humility, curiosity, integrity. You think you don't have to tell people to lead with integrity, but you really do. Accountability and courage. You know, courage to get out of your comfort zone and have. And make tough decisions. So really a learn-it-all is somebody who's open, adaptable, and humble enough to say, look, I don't have all the answers, so I'm going to surround myself with people I can tap into who can help me get to where I want to go.

[00:04:24] Jason Barnard: Right. And is that something you can learn? Because that list of five, I can see myself in most of them. But I have always had the tendency of thinking I know how to do things better than other people. And it's something I've had to let go of. I've learned. Can you learn the whole lot?

[00:04:40] Damon Lembi: Yeah. Well, first of all, I think nobody's 100% learn-it-all. And I don't think anybody's 100% know it all. I think it kind of ebbs and flows. And like, for instance, as a parent, when it comes to bedtime for the kids, I'm a know it all. There's no that. That's just way it's going to be. And.

But from a work perspective, I think that you mentioned delegation earlier. I've become a lot better at that over the years. You know, running my business, learning. I have about 100 employees. But for a long time, all the decisions had to come through me. Right. Like, I wanted to be involved in everything. And even though I had a great team, I didn't trust people enough, really, I guess.

And I thought I had all the answers. And it took me a while to realize, Hey, if you really want to scale and grow, if you're a know it all as a leader, then, Jason, you're just a bottleneck. You're the bottleneck for everybody around you and can't get things done. So you have to be able to give people the autonomy and the space to. To take on tasks and responsibilities and just, you know, if there's failure, hey, great, let's. Let's just learn from those mistakes, move on and get better next time.

[00:05:48] Jason Barnard: Right? You mentioned bottleneck, and that's something that struck me when I started to try to let go. And I mentioned to you earlier on, intellectually, I could understand that I had to let go and give work over to other people,