Hi and welcome to Be The Flagship with our podcast host Jeff Parsons.
This is where we tackle the day-to-day talent management challenges you face.
And now over to our host.
Take it away, Jeff.
Hello and welcome back to Jeff's Leadership Universal Truths Part 2.
I'm your podcast host for Be The Flagship, Jeff Parsons.
And I'm excited to pick up where we left off last week.
And talking about those things that are common no matter where you go, no matter what your
position or title or level may be.
These are universal truths as it relates to being an effective leader.
So let's pick up where we left off.
We've talked about leadership versus management and the difference there.
So again, I've asked the question, can you be a good manager but a poor leader?
Yes, you might be able to manage your budget really well.
You may be able to deliver the results that your boss is looking for really well, but
at what cost?
Right?
That's the leadership aspect of it, right?
Are you doing so in a way that you have high turnover, that you have poor morale?
You know, those types of things.
Are you getting results through fear and intimidation?
Do you have employees who are alcoholics or going to mental health counseling because
of their working environment?
Right?
They need a job and they'll put up with a lot of crap until they find a better job and
someone who treats them better.
But that's the difference between being a good manager and a poor leader.
So what about, can you be a good leader and a poor manager?
It's not as often because these pieces are so interrelated.
However, I have witnessed effective leaders, they had influence with people, but you know,
oftentimes it wasn't great influence with people because you know, you look at their
boss, they're not organized, they don't get the reports out on time, you know, to their
boss, they get in trouble with their boss over transactional kinds of things, tasks,
right?
They don't get the reports done.
They don't deliver a result because it may be over the top as it relates to the personal
power.
You can develop so much personal power with a group of people that you become, you get
sucked into that group if you will, right?
And it takes away from your ability to manage and to deliver results.
So that's where I've seen people who've had good influence with others, but weren't good
at managing schedule, budgets, that sort of thing.
So let's take a quick break and when we come back, we'll cover another universal truth.
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So here's another truth for you, another leadership universal truth.
Leadership is seen through the eyes of your followers.
Makes no difference what you think, makes no difference what your boss thinks or other
people within the organization thinks.
It's solely perceived.
Your effectiveness as a leader is solely perceived through the eyes of your followers, right?
No matter your intent, your intentions is seen through the eyes of your followers.
If your followers perceive you as being an effective leader, well then guess what, you're
an effective leader.
So what should be your goal?
To increase the number of followers, right?
And that's what happens in politics and elections, right?
Because when you increase the number of followers, what are you doing?
You're increasing your level of influence within the organization or within the group.
And that's your goal, to increase your level of influence.
And this is important, followers do not have to be your subordinates.
Followers can include your boss, it can include your peers, it can include your customers,
it can include a lot of people within the organization.
It's just leadership equals influence.
It doesn't say what type of influence and it doesn't say with whom.
So keep that in mind, your job is to expand your level of influence within your organization
and within the community you serve.
So keep this in mind, effective leaders develop future leaders.
They don't develop followers, they develop leaders, future leaders, not followers.
One very important thing to remember, I am a firm believer that a person can take a set
of leadership skills and can develop a span of influence and they can take that and use
that for good or for evil.
And I'll give you a couple of examples as soon as we come back from break.
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What do we mean by the right talent?
We mean we find talent who will commit to your organizational goals and align with your
values and behavior expectations.
Talent who will perform to your expectations, talent who will stay and grow with your organization.
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To learn more, contact Jeff Parsons by email at jeff at FlagshipTalent.com or by phone
at 1-800-530-4189, extension 101.
Okay, we're back.
Let's see, where do we leave off?
Oh yeah, let's talk about some leadership examples and we'll take a couple of examples
from history.
The first example, let's take a more positive example.
So let's think of a historic character that most of us remember, hopefully, and can relate
to.
Martin Luther King.
Okay.
Now Martin Luther King had no real position power, did he?
He didn't hold any position in government or in a company or that sort of thing, you
know, other than, you know, within his church, he didn't hold a position of authority.
He based his leadership and he achieved great things through his leadership skills on nothing
but his level of personal power and openness with his followers, right?
Did everyone follow MLK?
No.
So what helped him be so successful?
How was he able to influence a group of people that much?
Well, he knew what it was like to be in their shoes.
When he said, I have a dream, everyone he was communicating with could relate to that
and could understand what he meant.
Right?
So he had lived their lives.
He had walked a mile in their shoes.
So he saw the world and he saw their needs.
He was able to demonstrate true empathy with that group, not sympathy, but empathy, you
know, putting himself in their shoes.
And it's difficult to do that if you haven't experienced it yourself.
If you haven't experienced the pain, the hardship, the discrimination, all those things,
he had been there, done that, he could relate.
And as a result, when he communicated to his group of followers, that was the message he
communicated.
I know where you are.
I know where you've been and let's work together and fix it.
He had walked those tough miles.
He had been in those shoes.
He had been involved in those race riots and those protests and that type of thing.
He could communicate a message that resonated with his followers.
They knew that he knew what their life was like.
He knew what a day in the life was like for his followers.
And he spoke to that work with me, follow me.
We can make things better.
Now that's a powerful message.
Now let me take a leader that's also famous, historical, not so positive.
In fact, he's a negative example, very controversial figure.
His name would be Adolf Hitler.
So before you end this podcast, just hang on for a couple of minutes.
Adolf Hitler, he utilized for the most part the same set of skills that the positive leaders,
MLK is an example.
Did he have a vision?
Yes, he did.
Did he have strategies?
Yes, he did.
So, you know, did he use position power?
Yes, he did, but not all the time.
He didn't have the time of the people to force people.
People think about him and say, oh no, he was just nothing but an evil man and used
position power.
That's not true.
He was elected in the office by popular vote.
He used position power when that was his main, but that wasn't typically with his followers.
That was typically with people who weren't following him.
He had a great level of influence with his followers.
He did the same way MLK did.
He spoke to the needs of his followers.
Follow me and we'll fix this.
I have been there.
I have walked in those shoes.
I mean, Hitler was a part of World War I.
He was a foot soldier in World War I.
He was thrown in prison.
He knows, you know, the Treaty of Versailles and how the German people felt about that
and the economy was really terrible and people were without jobs.
Babies were hungry and crying.
He knew that.
He understood that and he was able to speak to that at a level where his followers understood
or felt like he knew what their life was like.
And if they followed him, he would make life better.
Now, what was the difference?
Same set of leadership skills, same communicating a message that resonates with your followers
and what happened.
One leader led a group of people in a very positive direction.
The other leader led a group of people and led an entire country to nothing but ruin.
So what's my point?
My point is that you can take the same set of leadership skills and use them for good
things or for things that aren't so good.
So you want to lead your team in the right direction.
You want to lead your team in a positive direction and to achieve great things, right?
And how do you increase your level of influence with a greater number of people?
You make sure that you communicate with those followers and you can't do that unless it's
true that you have a great deal of empathy with them, that you understand what a day
in their life looks and feels like, right?
So empathy is such an important leadership trait.
Work on empathy, work on asking questions, the right types of opening the questions so
you begin to feel what that other person feels, right?
And the more empathy you can demonstrate and the greater the empathy that's perceived by
your followers, the greater the influence you'll have with a greater number of people,
which means the more effective leader you'll become because you'll be able to rally the
troops around those shared goals and objectives and strategies, vision, mission, that sort
of thing.
That makes sense?
I don't know why I'm asking the question because you can't answer it.
I hope it makes sense.
So we'll take one more short break, I promise, and then we'll come back and I want to wrap
up today's episode with what we can do, what are some key components for leadership development,
good things to think about?
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Our approach is always customized to your specific organizational needs.
We utilize a leadership coaching approach for individual managers, identifying their
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To learn more, contact Jeff Parsons by email at jeff at flagshiptalent.com or by phone
at 1-800-530-4189 extension 101.
Your managers have the greatest impact on employee engagement, performance, and retention.
What are you waiting for?
Let's take your managers and create leaders.
Okay, we're back.
And what I'd like to do for this episode is wrap up with a few things for you to keep
in mind when you're developing your leaders.
Just some key things to think about.
Pieces of the leadership puzzle, if you will.
One thing and one thing that's critical and you can't really increase your effectiveness
as a leader until you gain this and this is a level of self-awareness.
Remember earlier I mentioned that leadership is seen through the eyes of your followers.
It's about their perception of you.
And so you can't really improve until you understand how you're perceived by others
and how their perception compares with your perception of yourself and how it compares
with how your boss perceives you and is that different than how your peers perceive you
and your employees, your team members perceive you and so forth.
So your level of self-awareness is critical to enable you to increase your effectiveness
as a leader.
If you don't have that level of self-awareness, you may have a great level of self-denial,
but you don't have a great level of self-awareness and you can increase that self-awareness through
assessments like a multi-source feedback 360 assessment.
And there are various assessments out there that you can utilize to help you as a leader
or help the person within your organization you want to develop as a leader increase their
level of self-awareness.
That's a critical thing.
That should be the link pin.
You know, the foundation of leadership development is gaining that level of self-awareness.
Other components include your level of emotional intelligence, right?
Call it EQ, right?
Your level of emotional intelligence.
And what does that mean?
What is EQ?
How well do you manage your emotions as a leader?
Can you control your emotions when you're really, really upset at someone or at something?
Do you have the ability to control your emotions so that other people don't even know that
you're upset or that your emotion.
So a high level of EQ is really important to be an effective leader.
Your ability to stop and count to 10 or a hundred or a thousand or whatever before you
address an issue that your emotional wealth is critical and being perceived as an effective
leader.
All right.
You don't want that, you don't want that seagull manager persona, right?
You don't want to be perceived as that person who flies in and yells and screams at people
and flies back out again.
That is a person with a low EQ.
You want a high EQ.
You want to be able to manage emotions and show a level of presence as a leader within
your organization.
Your ability to communicate, your willingness to communicate openly and honestly is important.
Oftentimes we say something and we just expect and assume that people understand exactly
what we're, what we mean.
And that's almost never the truth.
Right?
So asking, opening the questions, asking, you know, for people to repeat your communications
so you have a better feel that they get it, that they're on the same page with you and
that they understand the communication.
So level of communication is important.
Your ability to delegate smartly is really important to be an effective leader.
What do we mean by delegate smartly?
You don't delegate to someone who doesn't have the skills to be successful in the role.
What do you do?
You develop the person to the point where you can delegate to them or you develop the
team to the point where you can delegate tasks to the team.
You don't just throw things over the fence to someone and say, there you are, good luck.
Right?
And then beat them up when they don't perform well.
You have to develop to delegate.
All right.
So your delegation skills, your resistance to micromanaging.
Don't be a micromanager.
You want to delegate, but you want to develop your people so that you can delegate to them.
Your ability to resolve conflict in a positive manner.
Not all conflict is bad, by the way.
There is good conflict, right?
But your ability to develop a team who can work through conflict positively can resolve
conflict in a way that helps the organization move forward as opposed to splitting session.
As a leader, are you a change leader or are you a change manager?
Most leaders are responsible for implementing change, but there's a difference between managing
it and just dictating things and forcing things down your organization's throat.
Or are you leading the change?
Are you demonstrating what you expect others to do?
Are you a change leader?
Are you a change agent?
That's an important concept for leadership.
And how about team development?
What do you do to develop your team?
What do you do so that the team perceives you as someone who cares about their development
and their growth within the organization?
So what are you doing today to develop tomorrow's team?
What are you doing today to develop tomorrow's leaders?
Those are key questions I want to leave you with for this episode.
Thank you for listening.
I can't wait for the next episode when we talk about that CEO level.
CEOs, it's your turn in the barrel, but don't fret.
Everyone will have their turn before March is done.
Thanks so much.
Be the flagship within your industry, and we'll be back soon.
Bye now.
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Until next time, take the step to become the flagship in your marketplace.