In this episode, we talk about standing alone.  We take you on a quick trip to Dragon Con and talk about the “Taco Guy”. We will share a story about the big black hole of paperwork. We will then leave you with some thoughts about the importance of authenticity and standing alone.

Show Notes:

We all have to conform to operate successfully in a group.  But don’t be a phony when the time comes to be counted. Standing alone and acting on your authentic thoughts are a necessity if you want to lead. 

But standing alone exacts a price. You must put the price aside and be willing to stand alone anyway. Standing alone means that you love the group more than you fear being rejected by the group. Standing alone means that you love the truth more than you fear the price you pay for telling the truth…even if it means you get cast out for a season, even if you lose, even if it hurts. 

Standing up and having courage means that you love the truth and you love progress more than you fear being turned away from the group. 

A group does not have to like something to benefit from something.

You can only stand alone if you are authentic. If you are a copy of someone or something else, then your opinions can be no different. You have to be yourself and have your own opinion to be authentic.  

I am certainly not asking you to dress up like Superman, Wonder Woman or the Taco Man.  I am simply saying that there is something very unique and authentic about your leadership that is telling you something is not right…it is telling you to speak up. But the risk of being cast out is keeping you from speaking up.

You have a choice to make. You can stand in the background and be safe or you can take the risk.  But you know in your heart that you can’t just watch and wait any longer. 

“Authenticity is the daily practice of letting go of who we think we’re supposed to be and embracing who we are.” -Brené Brown

Photo Credit: © Can Stock Photo / peshkova

In this episode, we have a conversation with Kim Cantrell, CEO of 2 Impact, a very successful leadership development practice.  We discuss coaching.  What is professional coaching?  Why do people resist it? What can coaching do for you?  It is a rich conversation that I hope you will enjoy. 

If this conversation has you interested in learning more about professional coaching, please reach out to me at [email protected] or to Kim at the following:

Kim Cantrell, MS, ACC

Coaching, Consultant, Speaker and Trainer at 2 Impact, LLC

A 3100 Gentian Blvd, #131 Columbus, GA 31907

706-575-5242

http://2impactlife.com

http://colscoaches.com

Please DON’T Be a Leader! In this episode, we are going to speak directly to those that are interested in being a new leader…and we are going try and talk you out of it. We will cover 10 things you should know before you make that decision to step forward and accept a leadership position.

10 Things You Need to Know Before You Decide To Become a Leader:

* Leadership is not always fun. In fact, it can kind of suck sometimes.

* People misbehave and you still have to work with their faults and failures to get results.

* Leadership magnifies and tests your character.

* Leadership means you have a duty act. You have to protect your people from hurting themselves or others even if they don’t like it.

* Leadership can make you arrogant. 

* Leadership tests your personal life.

* Leadership can make you easily lose sight of your customer for your own convenience.

* When you become a leader, it is not about your individual competence and results anymore. It is about achieving results through others.

* Leadership forces you to have an opinion and to defend it.

* If you knew how hard being a leader really was you wouldn’t do it.  

After hearing all the details of this list, you might find out that leadership is not for you. But if you have the heart to serve…then the world needs you. Please DO become a leader. 

Our subject this week is “Self-Development”. We will talk about why leaders lead themselves or no one at all. We will describe the mandatory self-development climb that all leaders are required to make. Then we will conclude by introducing you to a pack of donkeys that are holding you back from your own development. (It is not who you think).

This episode introduces you to the most common development donkeys:

* Pride

* Lack of Will

* I Don’t Know

Photo Credit:

(c) Can Stock Photo / Blueiris07

This week on the podcast we tackle the subject of humility. We will start by exploring the tricky balance leaders must find on the humility scale. Then we will talk about three things that can help you find the right place on that scale. 1) Feedback 2) Failure 3) Believing in (and acting on) something greater than yourself.

In that pursuit, I will talk about speeding signs and trophy blindness. I will tell a story about riding my bike into a building face first. I will wrap it up with a story about a Baptist deacon that changed his community through humility. All this and more on this edition of the short attention span leadership podcast.

Wired Article: “Harnessing the Power of Feedback Loops”

https://www.wired.com/2011/06/ff_feedbackloop/

Photo Credit: (This is what I looked like when I smashed into the building!)

(c) Can Stock Photo / a3701027

Cardin Consulting

706-325-9206

The subject this week is culture. Specifically, the importance of defining and repeating culture with your team. We will start with a Star Wars quiz. Then we will discuss the futility of digging holes. Lastly, we will move on to how your cultural message is just not going to cut it.

I do consulting and speaking work outside of my day job and I have relationships with other consultants and coaches that I trust to help even if I can’t. If you have a business problem you are struggling to solve, or you are looking for a speaker for your next event, consider me as your solution. Reach out to me and we can talk about a coaching or problem solving arrangement.

You can contact me at [email protected].

Show Notes:

If you were to ask your team members to fill in the blanks of the following phrases, how would they answer?

* Our three key results that were are going to focus on in 2018 are ______.

* These results support our culture because _______.

* The most important problem we need to solve in this business right now is ________.

* We value ______ above all else when it comes to who we are and what we are all about.

* The most important thing we can do to support the business right now is _________.

* To illustrate our culture, remember or favorite story about ________

They would fill in the blank. But would they fill in the blank the same way you do? For most teams the answer is “no”. People do not know the basics about what is important to the business, the leader and to the culture.

Digging Holes:

James E. Lukaszewski, management and communication consultant, shares the following illustration:

A farmer, while sitting on his porch, noticed a highway department truck pulling over to the shoulder of the road. A man got out, dug a sizable hole in the ditch, and got back into the vehicle. A few minutes later, the other occupant of the truck got out, filled up the hole, tamped the dirt, and returned to the truck.

Then the men drove forward on the shoulder about 50 yards and repeated the process – digging, waiting, refilling. After a half-dozen repetitions, the farmer sauntered over to them. “What are you doing?” he asked.

“We’re on a highway beautification project,” the driver said. “And the guy who plants the trees is home sick today.”

A strong definition of your business culture matters. If you don’t have a strong cultural message, your people are just digging holes. They don’t see the bigger picture. They don’t understand why they are doing what they are doing. It is just a job.

Example of a strong cultural definintion:

The Banks Five Responsibilities

The First National Bank, Columbus, GA

William Ford Pearce

Estimated 1971

“Our Credo”

We believe that our first responsibility is to our customers

Our service must always be the best

We must constantly strive to improve our services

We must not say “No” until we have exhausted every facet and explored

every avenue of approach to the question

Our second responsibility is to our community we serve

We must be good citizens—support community projects

We must maintain in good order the property we are privileged to use

and respect the rights and property of others

We must participate in promotions of civic improvement, health, education and good government and acquaint the community with our activities.

Our third responsibility is to those who work for us

The men and women in each department of our bank.

They must have a sense of security in their jobs.

Wages must be fair and adequate.

Junior officer supervisors, and department heads must be qualified

And fair minded.

Episode 18- Culture- This week we are going to begin a series about “Culture”. We will start with the story of the 100 MPH goat. We will define what a culture is and who shapes it. Lastly, we will describe the consequences of a weak culture in any organization and how it can be like a celebrity hotel room.

For more on this subject, please listen to E7- “Living the Values”-The Springer Theatre Academy, The Sea of Galilee and Aligned Decisions

Show Notes:

As a leader, I bet one of the things you struggle with is commitment. When I say commitment, I mean having team members that are “all in”. You have some people on your team that are clearly holding back or doing their own thing.

How do you get people to commit to you, the work, the organization and to each other?

The answer is quite simple. Leaders create commitment when they craft a strong culture.

What is culture? Culture is the set of formal and informal social norms that dictate how people operate in a particular setting. Culture answers two questions 1. What is acceptable and rewarded here? 2. What is not acceptable and gets punished here?

In other words, culture allows people to self-direct the right behaviors that get the desired results of the business. Culture is not a set of goals and objectives. Goals and objectives are what you what to accomplish…our results. Goals change.

Culture is about how people treat each other and how people treat customers and clients. That is enduring.

Who shapes the culture? It is the leader’s job to shape culture. They shape it when they create a clear description of what they want the culture to look like and when their actions and decisions match their words.

Leaders need to be aware of how important it is for them to craft the culture they want intentionally. Without an intentional culture, people just do what works regardless of whether is right or not.

In cases where there is no culture guiding people to own the bigger picture, people act like with a short-term mindset. They do what they want. They treat the business like they have no ownership and people act like a bunch of celebrities that just checked into a shiny new hotel room with a fifth of Jack Daniels.

Without strong messaging from the leadership of an organization, leaders at each level of the company begin to define their own subculture in their part of the business. This is going to happen to some degree anyway, but when there is no strong central rudder people install their own culture so they can keep on sailing. And when that happens you have strong subcultures that begin to dominate the larger corporate culture. Behaviors become inconsistent and conflicting.

So what happens in an organization with a culture weak? Two things… 1)People don’t act.  2) People act with blatant self-interest.

With a strong culture, the problems of inaction and self-interest are managed. A strong culture cures inaction and brings our self-interested nature in check and make us accountable to behave more collectively. Culture creates commitment and not just involvement.

“A leader creates an atmosphere for growth and feels an obligation to create a culture that has pride, confidence, fairness service and creativity at the heart of its philosophy. Most people hate work but love accomplishment. The goal of the leader is cooperation, not coercion. Communication is essential to creating such a culture.” –A Journey Towards Servant Leadership by Bill Turner.

© Can Stock Photo / Smileus

This show is about stewardship. In this episode, I sit down with Robert Flournoy and we talk about his dad Bobby Flournoy. This time we talk about Bobby’s approach to taking care of the things that were important to him. Robert tells the swimming pool story and we get the true origins of “Old Blue”. We end the episode with Ken Blanchard’s ” Monopoly” story.

Sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reebok_Pump

Episode 16- “Managing Conflict” Part 2- When a fire is burning, people can smell the smoke. Avoiding conflict does not make it go away. It is your responsibility to manage it. We will start by exploring the mysterious case of the exploding phones. Then we will talk about the tools you need to manage conflict. In that pursuit, we will tell you about meatloaf assumptions, escalator moments and bubblegum thinking.

Sources:

http://www.businessinsider.com/how-samsung-overcame-its-galaxy-note-7-fiasco-2017-10

https://www.centeredrecoveryprograms.com

Photo credit (and a great recipe for meatloaf):

https://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/meatloaf-232972

E15- “Managing Conflict” Part 1-  In this episode, we start by exploring the fate of a powerful Samurai lord that paid the price for not managing conflict well. We will give you a recipe that you want to avoid for baking a nasty batch of conflict cookies in your organization. We will wrap up with a reflection about how managing conflict is a responsibility, just like delivering the mail.

Show Notes:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Sekigahara

 

Recipe for “Conflict Cookies”

* First get a big bowl and fill it full of people.

* Next, add a teaspoon of conflict over an issue in the workplace. This teaspoon is the inevitable conflict that occurs when people work together. It looks like a disagreement on a process, a time sheet, who gets the last cup of coffee, who has to do someone else’s work…It can really be anything.

* Add a cup full of “making it personal” to the disagreement. (You can find “a cup of making it personal” in all human beings. Sometimes it is because one person is not being heard, one person is stepping into someone else’s territory or there is some change outside of their control has them frustrated and they direct it at someone. Sometimes “making it personal” is just that. People have conflicting personalities or they just rub each other the wrong way when under stress.

* Put in a full stick of “someone acts nasty to someone else” into the mix. This really makes the conflict cookie dough start to rise. This is when people act nasty to each other. And what I mean by nasty is being rude, uncivil, passive aggressive or outright hostile.

*  You need to add a pinch of public interest to the batter. Word gets around that there is a fight, and people gather around it and talk about it like it is a fight between two 10-year-old boys on the playground after school. Gossip and speculation become the output of the organization for a while as people circle like vultures to see what will happen next.

* Now the recipe calls for the application of heat. That heat is leadership. Heat is applied when leadership does nothing about the conflict. Leadership observes the conflict or is made aware of it yet they do nothing to address the conflict and the bad behavior.

* The disagreement is long-running and escalates. It only gets worse and more out of control. That is really where the heat happens and the conflict is really baking in the organization. As that conflict cooks, there are winners and losers. People are distracted and their brains are flooded with negative stress chemicals. The conflict is all they think about.

* People begin to count the cost and feel the effects of the conflict. They feel like they are “on their own” in a hostile work environment. They begin to resent the person that they are in conflict with AND they resent the leadership that did not address it.

* The conflict is done baking and the leader now gets to pull out the treat they baked. Conflict cookies are a hard-baked, burnt, foul tasting cultural norms that yield a cookie sheet full of hot steamy failure. Here is what it those cookies look like.

* The results are short-term. Without a sense that a leader will provide a safe environment, productivity goes down and results are harder and harder to get. Everyone is focused on their own problems.

* People begin to leave the organization. Usually, it is people that get tired of getting pushed around. Usually, it is someone that is talented and produces for you. The bad apples seem to stick around because they don’t have as many options to leave. NO one feels safe. So no one speaks up. No one feels like the boss will protect them. No feels like they should take a risk and speak the truth because they will be on their own.

* The leader ends up with an organization full of people that are nasty to each other.