Executive Podcast #272: Chris and Perry’s Top Learnings for 2023

Chris Goede:

When it comes to business and meeting travel in Orlando, it’s never business as usual. Sure, I could go on about all.

Chris Goede:

The incredible places to hold your meeting.

Chris Goede:

Or the innovative industries that make you feel right at home, but it’s true. Orlando is as much a business capital as an entertainment one. And when work wraps up for the day, the evening is just getting started. I’d love to tell you about all the Michelin rated restaurants or the array of outstanding dishes that’ll have you coming back again and again. But executive chef Giome Robin of Lake Nona Wave Hotel can sum it up better than me. Orlando has a world of artisans, so you can try incredible cuisines from across the globe. It’s so true, and there’s so much more. So dive in and see what’s happening in Orlando, where the possibilities for business travel are unbelievably real.

Perry Holley:

Welcome to the Maxwell Leadership executive podcast, where our goal is to help you increase your reputation as a leader, increase your ability to influence others, and increase your ability to fully engage your team to deliver remarkable results. Hi, I’m Perry Holley, a Maxwell leadership facilitator and coach.

Chris Goede:

And I’m Chris Goede, executive vice president with Maxwell leadership. Welcome and thank you for joining. Well, we have a special session for you here as we kind of wrap up the year. One of the things that Perry and I wanted to do was just to take time and go, man, what are we learning? What are we seeing from clients? And so we kind of went back and forth, and Perry’s in the field a ton, coaching and facilitating and writing content. And he’s like, man, here’s what I’m seeing. And here’s a common theme. So that’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to bring you four common themes that we’ve seen in other organizations.

Chris Goede:

Leadership principles. They’re going to be all over the place, and that we’re just going to kind of give you what our thoughts on them are and what we’re experiencing personally. Before we dive into that, though, I want to encourage you to go to maxwellleadership.com/podcast, and there you can fill out a form, leave a topic, a question. Perry would appreciate that as we go into the new year and we think about what is the content to best serve those that are listening. And if you’re listening to this personally, great. I want to challenge you to not only you listen to it, but to share it with somebody. Share it to someone that’s a peer inside your organization, maybe share it with some of your team, maybe you guys get together once a week, once every other week, maybe take five minutes. In the beginning of a team, we have a lot of leaders that do this and say, hey, bring your thoughts on the podcast.

Chris Goede:

We try to keep them short so they’re under 20 minutes or so and won’t take a ton of your time, especially if you listen to it on 1.5 speed and then debrief that with your team. So, Perry, let’s talk about the four things that we have learned from this past year, or we’re seeing themes around teams and organizations that we work with.

Perry Holley:

Great year of learning. I think the first one that really resonated with me that when we talked about this idea was the way it was phrased was we made bad habits in good times. And just to kind of put a little meat on that was, even though Covid threw us challenges over those years of 2020, 2021, even into 2022, a lot of organizations found business going up, that it became easier to sell what they sold. It became easier to do what they normally had to struggle to do. And they found that their teams resonated with the easier path. They got away from the basics, and they banked just taking orders. And now that we are back to a new normal, but normal has come back, some of that ease of selling and working with clients has gone away. We’re back to the way it was, but the team hasn’t necessarily returned.

Perry Holley:

A matter of fact, they’re complaining about how hard it is to do business now. And we realize, man, we develop some bad habits in good times. Do you remember that one?

Chris Goede:

I do. And then I think the other side of that, too, right? Is you develop good habits in bad times. And so one of the things that I think about this is I go, how, as a leader, do I create an environment and a culture to where I go, man, listen, we got to develop some better habits around here. What are the habits of what we’re doing? And so one of the ways I was thinking about was I’ve had conversations with other leaders that are like, what if we had no resources? How would we do what we’re doing? What if? And you create all these scenarios, and you begin thinking and getting your team thinking a little bit differently about, how do I develop a better habit for what we’re doing? And I know just recently, even with my team personally, we were talking about, how do we do a better job of scheduling some calls, right? Versus, oh, I’m just used to so and so responded. And so and so responded. Whatever it might be. I think as the leader, we need to make sure whether you’re in good times or bad times that you’re very aware of what are the processes and the systems, how are we looking for better ways? How are we curious about changing what we’re doing in order to make sure we always have good habits?

Perry Holley:

Yeah, I think the big lesson I learned from that as well was that a leader, call it focusing on the basis, but does everybody in your team know what the outcome they’re supposed to be driving? And then we always have the lagging indicators, which is the scoreboard, which is how are we doing? Did we make the number? Did we drive the revenue, did we hit the subscriptions, whatever it is you’re doing. So we start putting in what are the leading indicators and so does your team know? For instance, one of the clients we dealt with had a sales organization and said, do you know what are the leading indicators of hitting that scoreboard? Lagging indicator? Well, yes. X number of prospecting calls a week, x number of customer lunches, x number of product demos and x number of presenting proposals. Great. If you know, if you did those on a weekly basis and you track that, you know that you’ll eventually get to the number. And it has to do with knowing what are the key indicators for our success and then doing them daily. But what we find in good times, I don’t need to do all those prospecting calls. The prospects are walking, they’re calling us and you’re thinking, no, you still need to be doing those leading indicators that drive the success.

Perry Holley:

And I thought, man, that was really an eye opener to me, was I think about Bill Walsh. He was the coach of the 49 ers back in the day and he wrote a book called the score takes care of itself. That what football coach ever said that? But if you read about Walsh, he said he didn’t worry about the score, the scoreboard. He worried about the small things that every player must do day in, day out. Do your job is what Belichick calls it. Now do your job. Do you know what that is? And if you do those small things, execute on our standard, we’ll get there.

Chris Goede:

I want to come back to your example because I was sitting there listening to you and I go, oh, yeah, no, that’s exactly right. We know that it takes to get to that number on the scoreboard when we have good habits. But what ends up happening? That scoreboard starts going up and you haven’t been doing all this and you’re just like, so this is where it starts right here. This is where you let the slippery slope, you let the bad habits go. Okay, so now instead of 100 prospect calls, I only did 60 this week. And the number on the scoreboard still showed up.

Chris Goede:

Yes.

Chris Goede:

I saved myself 40 calls. And then what ends up happening? As it shifts, time shifts. It always will. By the way, it’s going to ebb and flow. All of a sudden, you’re not doing those 100 calls, and you look up there and you’re like, man, I’m nowhere even close to where I need to be. So just as you were talking about that, I was thinking through, what does that look like in real life? To allow myself to get into a bad habit. It’s not a quote unquote bad habit. Right.

Chris Goede:

You’re not going to get in trouble for, but you’re going to allow yourself to start slipping like that and it’s going to change the scoreboard smiling because.

Perry Holley:

I’m thinking about in our team, they’ve had a great year, but they were showing, you always make them report on how many prospecting calls they did. So they’re doing those leading indicators. But then you didn’t stop. There he goes. I know that because you saw the green numbers, all the green on the report. You go, tell me about next week’s call schedule. I thought that was a great movie. So I saw the calendar.

Perry Holley:

He was flipping the calendar going, oh, yeah, it’s a little lower, but I’ve got, let’s get those calls. Because just because it’s showing up green now doesn’t mean we back off on our daily disciplines, do the things we know, lead to the success to do that. Great lesson.

Chris Goede:

I thought yesterday ended last night. Yes. It’s always that same.

Perry Holley:

Good.

Chris Goede:

Well, I think the second thing that we have learned, and it’s been a common theme and has really been a topic of conversation with a lot of our clients, is this leading the multigenerational workforce? Right. I was fascinated by this as I began digging in. Especially, well, not especially. I saw it more than not in the manufacturing world, in areas where there was five different generations in the same organization, in the same family. I was on a call a couple of weeks ago with a manufacturing client of ours that’s located here in South Carolina, but it’s an international based company. And we were talking about this content piece and how we want to help them with this in 2024. And the guy started laughing. He’s like, you’re not going to believe this.

Chris Goede:

I was like, what? He said, we literally have a, he called her, a young lady that’s 80 years old that is doing the same job. She loves it. She’s like our plant mom, grandma, for that matter. He said, would you believe we have four generations of that family inside this plant working? And obviously, she’s the oldest, all the way down to somebody that had just gotten out of high school. And so this is real. This is real. And Tim Elmore and you put together an incredible course, and it was something that we talked about a ton.

Perry Holley:

It has been very well received. We’ve delivered it a pretty good amount. And I was just doing it a couple of weeks ago with a client, and I noticed the highly productive team that came into the room kind of going, why are we here? What is this about? I don’t have all this time to give to this. And by the time we were about 45 minutes into it, they were totally energized around, yes, we are dealing with this. And if I could sum it up, it was, how do I drive? Collaboration on a team that comes from a very diverse background when it comes to generational, how they see things. And so we’ve joked about, I’m a baby boomer, you’re a Gen X, and we have Jake in here is a millennial. And then just in this room right now, we have three generations represented that can have different lenses, different come froms, different ideas, different ways of thinking that happen. How can we stop making fun and driving wedges between us? Tim Elmore would say, stop putting a wall up between us and instead build a bridge.

Perry Holley:

And what you’ll know about walls go up very easily. You can make a wall out about anything around here and throw it up between you and someone else. A bridge requires an engineer. It requires work, it requires effort to build a bridge to someone. And that’s what we do in the class, is look at what are the differences, and then how do we build relationships and value what each generation brings to the workforce? So once you begin to see that we can make fun, that’s okay. But even you, a Gen X brings something valuable to the workforce.

Chris Goede:

It may not be podcast content, but it’s something.

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Chris Goede:

So let me ask you a question real quick on this, because I know that you helped with Tim develop this for us. You’ve led the way out in the field. When you think back to the organizations and the teams you’ve worked with on this, and it’s been several now, what’s like one takeaway? What’s one man? You’ll never forget that moment, that conversation, that dialogue between a team member or with you about the relevance of that content.

Perry Holley:

Yeah, it’s easy. The effect that Gen Z, the youngest, so it’ll be your 20 somethings that are on your team right now. And how different their upbringing has been from, especially me, a baby boomer, and much from you, that Gen X, even a y, that you can’t think of a z as an extension of a millennial. They’re not. They’re completely different. But the executives that have come to me and said, please help me, they’re speaking a foreign language to me. And it’s funny because Tim, in the book, actually uses it. Said, when we travel internationally, I just went to Dubai recently.

Perry Holley:

When I came off the plane in Dubai, I expected it to be different. I expected it to be different culture. I expected to be different languages. I expected it to be different customs. And I prepared myself for that. And when I came off the plane, maybe I’m a little more quiet. I’m not so bold in my ways because I know there’s some differences. Tim says we should think about that with these generations, is that they’re so different from you.

Perry Holley:

It’s like being in a foreign country, the languages they use, the words they use. So this executive know these z’s, these youngest of us, they’ve been here nine months and they want a promotion. What are we supposed to do with that? And I can’t give them a promotion, but they say they’ll quit. I’ll say, well, first question, do you want to keep them? Yes, we want to keep them. They’re great teammates. Well, then, here’s some strategies we can do to work on helping the Z. And again, a Tim Elmore habitude, a picture would be they’re thinking like a microwave. You want to think like a crock pot.

Perry Holley:

So how do you get them into the crock pot of leadership development. Let them know they have a future here, help them with the path to get there. Show them that you love them and you need them and you respect them, and not get them out of that microwave that they want to be in. It’s got to happen fast. It’s got to happen now, or I’m quitting. And I thought that’s been the biggest aha in the room. Was, this is not unusual. It’s common.

Perry Holley:

It’s kind of normal now. But you have to be able to respect and value who they are and to bring them to the table to do that.

Chris Goede:

Good.

Perry Holley:

Another topic, if we could just switch quickly, would be, I thought we got a lot of learning. I’ve heard this quite a few times. You added a lot to this conversation. Was somebody saying that, at my level, I’m not getting a lot of the attention from my bosses, from the next level up in the organization? The statement was, I want a seat at the table. They’re not giving me a seat at the table. I want to kind of pounding their fist. I want a seat at the table. To us in the Maxwell world, we would say this is an influence situation.

Perry Holley:

Tell me what you remember about this one.

Chris Goede:

Yeah, so I would tell you this. I would say people that are asking for that are more title driven than they are influence driven. Yeah, could be and could be. Yeah. But they also don’t understand that. I think the more value that you would add to those leaders around that table, the better chance you’d have, maybe potentially, of having a seat at the table. The other thing is I thought about is make sure you really want a seat at the table. That’s another lesson we’ll go off on care of what you ask for, and then if you do get a seat at the table, make sure that you’re adding value.

Chris Goede:

And I think oftentimes, about your comment, right. About your boss, of saying, well, hey, Perry, if you think the same thing I do, then one of us not needed at this table anymore. So there’s a lot of responsibility that comes with people wanting a seat at the table, but a lot of people want a seat at the table. And so that may be another lesson for another year. Once you get a seat at the table, what does that look like, and how do you add value? But I think in regards to this, I think you got to back up and say, what’s really driving you to want a seat at the table, and what’s the motive behind that? Because you got to make sure the motive behind that is pure first. And I think if it’s really pure, what you’re going to look at is you’re going to go, man, my leader that’s sitting at that table, I know that I can add value to him or her and what they’re doing to help them at that table. And whatever we’re working on as a team, I know I want to be able to have a voice at that table and be able to help move the need a little bit faster. Well, how do you do that? That comes right back to our 360 degree leader content that we talk about in there under 360 leader.

Chris Goede:

You know, we talk about how do you lead across, how do you lead down, how do you lead yourself, and then how do you lead up. So immediately? I think a little bit about my situation where I was just on a trip with Mark Cole, our CEO. And what I want to know is, first of all, I want him to know in a way, not because I’m going to tell him, but the organization is telling him that I’m doing my job. All right. So if there’s not anything coming across the bow that, hey, Chris, Godie’s department’s trouble with this, this and that, all of a sudden, then we’re going to have a different conversation. But I want him or her as a leader to know I’m taking care of my job. That’s my responsibility. And by the way, that’s the best thing my team could do for me as well.

Chris Goede:

People ask me at times, hey, what can I do for you, man? Just keep doing what you’re doing if you’re taking care of your job. So I need to make sure I’m doing that. I also need to make sure I understand my leader. I need to understand Mark, what is important to him, how is he wired, what matters, what doesn’t? Right. Like, are there little things that could just add value to him periodically? And so I’ll give you an example. This is a silly, cheesy example. I can’t believe I’m sharing this with you. So he and I have been buddies for a long time, so I know him really well, and I always give him a hard time because he likes this.

Chris Goede:

He calls it Coca Cola classic. I’m like, mark, it’s a right, like. And if you’re from up north, it’s a pop or a soda. No, he talks about it like it’s Chris finest thing or Coca Cola classic. So I was picking him up from the airport at 09:00 in the morning, and I went by the store and I wanted to get something to drink and eat. And I was like, you know what? I know he loves Coca Cola classics. So I just had one waiting in the rental car for mean we again goof around having adds that means something to know. And so how well do you know your leader down to that level? Maybe some of you don’t want to know.

Chris Goede:

I have the privilege of just being a friend as well as him being my leader. So think about this. Do your job well. Understand your leader. How are they wired? What are their natural behaviors? Right? What are their strengths? How do they like to communicate? How do they like to process? And then I think the final thing is always saying, hey, what can I do for you? Right? And when you begin doing this with the right motive and for the right reason, you’re going to find leaders, by the way. You can do it with all leaders in the organization be going, man, you know what, Perry? I wonder what Perry would think about that. And the more they’re saying, I wonder what Perry would think about that. The more chances you’re going to have potentially having a seat at the table.

Perry Holley:

I love it. I think motive matters. So we call it leading up. Not sucking up was the title of the lesson and not that, why are you doing this? So I love your points on that. I think about how I lead myself is that my boss is going to be influenced positively by me or not. And so if I’m leading myself well, if I’m doing the small things, I’m managing my time, my priorities, my energy, my words, that when they’re around me, they know that I’m to be taken account of. I do have a seat at the table, whether figuratively or physically. They see me as someone to be heard.

Perry Holley:

Also just lightning my leader’s load to say, I’m not here to fix my leader. I’m here to add value to my leader.

Chris Goede:

That’s good.

Perry Holley:

And so you were hitting all over that. Is that what are you doing to bring value to the leader, to help make their. You do your job well, that’s number one. But you also help them take some things off of their plate that may be weighing heavily on them. Most of us, I’ll be honest, don’t think about. I’ve been doing it a lot lately because I’m close with you and seeing what’s weighing on you, you’re being pulled in a lot of different directions. I’m trying to think, how can I help with that? And would that help me with my influence with you or lessen it? I think it helps so small things that we don’t normally think to do with our leaders says I want to see to the table. I need to make myself valuable that they can’t not invite me to that table to do that.

Chris Goede:

Of all the things you and I just talked about, the statement you made that I want our listeners to take away that’s so important is motive matters, right? Everything. Motive matters on why you’re doing that. Well, the last thing I’ll just share, and this is more personal, and I know you have a client that you can talk a little bit about. This too. For me is I begin to look at my growth this year and I go, man, I really want to do a better job of leading leaders. I have a pretty good system connection and leading individual contributors, but I think when you lead leaders, leaders of other people and other teams, that I think, I know it’s much different. And so that has been something that I’ve been doing a lot of work on, a lot of research. What does that look like? How do you lead differently in that area? Talk a little bit about what you’re hearing out in the field in regards to that with people.

Chris Goede:

It’s amazing. We read all the time that people get promoted to their first leadership position ever with no training. Right. The percentages are off the chart and then they get in there and still organizations don’t develop them. And then all of a sudden, if you’re lucky enough to have enough initiative and intentionality behind your growth, you’re growing all of a sudden. Now you got to start leading leaders and you’ve never been taught. So this is coming up more and more with organizations as people move up the ranks. Talk a little bit about your perspective on this one.

Chris Goede:

Yeah.

Perry Holley:

John calls. You went from being a soloist to being a conductor of the orchestra. I have no idea how to conduct, but I do know how to be a soloist. So I’ll be super soloist and I’m not effective conductor at all. So we’ve been talking a lot about, we’re trained very much since youth of the leader, follower, model. You’re the leader, I’m the follower. Yada, yada, yada. Tell you what, what if we thought leader, leader, and you’re the leader, but you’re also incentivizing me to think like a leader.

Perry Holley:

Most of our fault in this area is we all think of leadership and trained to think of leadership as title and position. What we teach is leadership is influence. So it really doesn’t matter if you have a title or position. We should all be developing influence. So for me, if I’m a leader, leading individual contributors, those individual contributors need to think that they are leaders. What are they doing to increase their influence with me up with their peers across? They don’t have anybody down yet, but they can be developing influence and thinking about leadership and so doing those small things to infuse leadership into your team. You mentioned a while back about having reviewing a podcast, five minutes, ten minutes on your call, we have one organization that reads the Maxwell Daily Reader 365. So one page or two paragraphs takes about, I don’t know.

Perry Holley:

We witnessed it. You and I witnessed it last week, two weeks ago. Would it take about seven minutes, six minutes? Yeah. That included discussion.

Chris Goede:

Discussion.

Perry Holley:

But the entire team is on one topic for six minutes. Does it matter in that day? No, but it happens day by day over the year 365 of those readings. I guarantee you somebody took something from there to apply to their leadership. So small things done daily, consistently over time, big results. But getting leaders to think about others, about leading leaders is a huge jump in the engagement and performance of your team. Because if they’re sitting around waiting for you to lead, that’s problematic. It’s not going to drive engagement.

Chris Goede:

I love the example you just talked about the Daily reader, and what was awesome was the leader of that team was not even the one reading it right. It’s like, hey, pass it around and you begin. And what’s awesome to watch in that shift that’s happened in that culture is highly driven by results. Highly driven. And they would have stand up huddles in their offices all around the country and it would all be about, hey, what was the production yesterday? And then all of a sudden like, hey, we’re still going to do that. That’s important. But that’s going to be number two. Number one is going to be, we’re going to talk a little bit about leadership.

Chris Goede:

We’re going to talk about people. And you begin to see that shift, and people begin to think like leaders. Ultimately, at the end of the day, you just want people around you that feel like they’re the owner. Right? They spend money as if it was their money. They make decisions as if it was their business. And you begin thinking, how do I lead people to get to that point? Well, as we wrap up, I know this has just been an incredible year for us and the growth that we’ve had, the partnership that we had. I just want to say thank you to those that have listened, that have downloaded, that have shared, that even braved beginning to watch the two of us on.

Perry Holley:

A warning back here. We got a YouTube plaque somewhere.

Chris Goede:

Yeah, bless you for doing that. But continue to communicate with us. Continue to let us know how we can serve you. Our goal is to help you add value to leaders around you, to help you create powerful, positive change inside your organization because we believe that everybody deserves to be led well. And so we appreciate you being a part of this podcast.

Perry Holley:

I echo that as well. And thank you to you for adding so much value to my learning in this environment. We’re so grateful that you would join us. As Chris mentioned, if you want to learn more about our offer, if you’d like to leave a question or a comment, if you want to give me an idea for a topic, please do. You can do all that at maxwellleadership.com/podcasts very grateful that you spend this time with us each and every week. That’s all today from the Maxwell leadership executive podcast.