Executive Podcast #309: Finding Your Leader Voice

Chris Goede:
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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, as usual, today’s topic comes right out of what we’re creating for a client of ours in regards to you’re getting ready to go do some training with them. They have a need, and that’s, that’s how this content’s coming to fruition. So just want to let you know that everything that goes on in here is real, real. It’s in the field. And so if there’s an opportunity for us at Maxwell leadership to help you or your team, your organization, we would love to do that. If you go to maxwell leadership.com/podcast, click on this podcast.

Chris Goede:
There’s a form there you can fill out, and we’ll get back in touch with you. Also, there can download the learner guide for today’s lessons. Well, today’s lesson is titled finding your leader voice. And as I mentioned, this is something you’re right in the middle of right now, preparing for a client of ours for an event. Talk a little bit about the need for this, and then where we’re going to go today.

Perry Holley:
Well, finding that as a leader, you, you have a voice, whether you know it or not. But is it one that people want to hear that they listen to? Do they carries powerful, inspiring and influential voice, or do you have less than that, a voice where people might turn away or not listen or, you know, shortchange it or, you know, you don’t. You don’t influence people. Well, when I had this request, I began researching and just looking at what my. My personal point of view on it was. But how does a leader develop the kind of voice that has this. This influential, inspirational. Follow me.

Perry Holley:
Because you want to kind of approach. So, not to put you on the spot, but it, does the voice come because of your title and position that you’re. You’re the boss? That’s a trick question.

Chris Goede:
As he’s sitting here smiling at me, knowing that our entire basis, the foundation of what we do, is off of influence. Next week, another host will be joining me on our podcast as Perry. What? I’m just kidding. No, 100%, it’s about influence. But let’s dig a little bit deeper than that, because when you talk about that, they go, oh, well, I mean, how do I influence people? What does that look like? Cause there is positive and negative influence. We talk a lot about the motive behind influence. And everything that comes along with that is going to play into your voice as a leader. And so, jot down a couple of things.

Chris Goede:
Number one, you need to be authentic. First of all, I’m a huge proponent of authentic leadership, and we often say that’s a trust accelerator. The other thing is, this is something that I’ve had to learn over time, is the EQ side, the empathy side of leading. Remember, what we’re talking about is, is how do you increase your influence in a way to where your leader voice is heard? Where. And it all starts with influence. Like, your voice is not going to be heard if you don’t go about influencing and leading people the right way. And I think the other thing is, there’s some confidence in there. I think when I was thinking about this as a leader that I would follow or that I would listen to as their voice, I began thinking about, I wanted to be authentic.

Chris Goede:
I do want them to have some empathy. I wanted to be confident, too, in a way that where I would hear, absorb, and learn from that voice.

Perry Holley:
Well, I think that as we look at this, the direction I’d like to go is that what are the components are many. But if you were going to think about love, empathy is one to talk about as well. That how you show up for people. But I think you have to start with trustworthiness or being. The trust is such a key accelerator, as you said, of all things, leadership. But trust, worthiness is fundamental to your leadership. And it’s really a function of two things. Character, and competence.

Perry Holley:
I think I got that from Covey. Some of the writing on trust, but character obviously includes your integrity, your motive, intent that you have with people, but also your competence, your capabilities, your skills, your results, your track record, things like that. So people want to know, can you do the job? But also do you do it with, with high character? How does the leader ensure they’re making, and we use this metaphor when I teach this around making deposits or withdrawals in somebody’s trust account, you’re either. I’ve never met a leader once. That said, I think I’m going to break the trust today. Nobody wants to break the trust.

Chris Goede:
You don’t do it on purpose, but.

Perry Holley:
We don’t necessarily have 100% trust with our people. How do we do that?

Chris Goede:
Yeah, I think this is. I think it’s foundational. Think it’s key for leaders, for me, around trust, there’s a couple things that are more important than others. I think that each of us probably have different rankings of what’s important to us to build trust with people. But I immediately think about doing what you said you were going to do, being reliable. You’ve mentioned here in the past we have a. On our team, right. There’s no, there’s no micromanaging.

Chris Goede:
Like a lot of. A lot of freedom. And we know. We kind of know where we’re going. We’re working on it together. And I love that because I. I love having a team of people around me that, that take that seriously of being reliable and understanding that we gotta, we gotta be responsible for our things. And when that happens, for me, there’s trust, obviously.

Chris Goede:
It also is with your communication and with consistency and all those things that you would think about, but there’s probably certain ones that you rank differently and that’s okay, but they’re real. And so one of the things that, since we talked about communication, I think another one in developing this voice is do they effectively communicate leaders? How many of us have been in a situation where we’ve had leaders and we’re like, what? They just say, yeah, or, you know, what are we doing? Or we don’t hear from them? This also could be something that I need to work on a lot of schedule and things going on, not to communicate enough frequently to the team. And so we have to be doing that because we have to share information and the team’s got to know, not most importantly, teams got to know what’s going on, but more importantly, what they’re doing and how that’s tied to the bigger part of what’s going on? Like, I, I wrapped up a meeting today before we started recording and super proud of our marketing team for our an event that we have coming up called data grow. A lot of challenges over the last five months, and a lot of excuses could have been thrown around. Maybe they were, they worked through them and continued to just improve and get better and better and better, to the point where I told them at next week’s event that we’re about to hit our goal, which none of us would have thought was doable. And so I looked at, you know, each one of them and. And I just, I just told them, I was like, man, listen, super proud of where you’re at and what you guys have, have accomplished. And by the way, when x result happens from them being at that event, that’s tied directly to everything that you guys worked on and everything you went through and everything you pushed through.

Chris Goede:
So being able to communicate that effectively to teams, I think is also helps your leader voice. Now, one thing that could hurt a leader’s voice when it comes to communication is that I mentioned earlier because I’ve been there. What did she just say? What did he say? So you get confused. It reduces commitment from people. They get stressed. And again, when that happens, people are filling in the empty space with what they know it to be versus what they’re hearing from their leader.

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Perry Holley:
Yeah, another one on the communication. I think that can hurt your credibility and your influence is lack of ability to listen to people. If I don’t feel like you hear me or you’re not listening to me, then you’re whatever you say, I don’t really care.

Chris Goede:
That’s right.

Perry Holley:
At that point, you make me feel small in doing that. I think actually listening is number one way to show value to someone. So if I listen to you and give you that undivided attention. I’ve just increased my ability and my voice with that.

Chris Goede:
I agree with that.

Perry Holley:
A third one I found was very important for having a leader’s voice was approachability. And you think this has nothing to do with voice? No, it’s about how people see you. And this, an approachable leader encourages dialogue. And so that by me feeling like I can come in your presence, I can see you, you’re not too big or too out there for me, that I’m welcome in your presence, you want to be seen, makes me want to open up. And it’s easy to be friendly and easy to talk to. Um, it really increases the likelihood that people want to see you that way. So you go back to that. Being, being friendly, being nice enough for people to want to connect with you is that there’s no so many ways not to be approachable.

Perry Holley:
Uh, what are some things you’ve seen of people that. What hurt? What’s hurts? Approachability.

Chris Goede:
Yeah. Pace of what you’re doing around the office. Right. Being too busy. Um, to your point, I love the listening. Isn’t that interesting? Not using your voice positions you, in a way, to have a greater voice by listening. So I love that.

Perry Holley:
Oh, I’m sorry.

Chris Goede:
No, go ahead.

Perry Holley:
I just think about one that I came from a very large corporate environment, fortune, ten type hierarchies and lots of people, that sort of thing. And I thought what killed approachability when you were just, when you started hitting me, their title, their position, they didn’t have influence. They had biggest, you know, senior vp type subtitles that you couldn’t. It was like talking to royalty. You have to have an appointment. You can’t ever, you’re not approachable. You’re, you’re too big for me to do this.

Chris Goede:
Yeah. And we’ve heard it said, to your point, that your title, you need to be aware of this. Leaders, this is, this, this is real. Your title walks in the room before you do. And so there’s already a preconceived expectation one way or another, and it’s your responsibility to break that, to be approachable. We, we tell organizations that we train and coach all the time. Sometimes we don’t want the leader in the room depending on the situation, because when that comes, they’re not approachable. So what, everybody shuts down.

Chris Goede:
So that’s, that is real. And so leaders, you gotta fight that depending on the level that you’re in the organization in order to be approachable so that your voice is heard. It made me think, too, of an event that I was at. And, you know, if you’ve ever been in the event business, the day of the event, things are chaos and you probably walk. I get my 10,000 steps before I get home, which is great, but I remember having to walk through a lobby a couple of different times at a pace that was pretty fast. Head down. I didn’t want to talk to anybody. I was trying to get some things done.

Chris Goede:
Then I had a buddy of mine call me out on it after the fact, and he’s like, hey, like, man, I don’t usually see you, like, walk through a crowd of people and not even stop, say hi and acknowledge. Right. And so, and he said, I could just tell you weren’t approachable like you were on mission. And I was like, well, I was, right. But. But that’s just super awareness of me to have now, even though all that’s going on in here, it’s like a duck on a pond.

Perry Holley:
Yeah.

Chris Goede:
When you’re around people, you got to make sure they’re watching you all the time. And so if you want your voice to be heard, you got to make sure that you’re approachable. So. Well, you mentioned feedback earlier. Let’s take this a little bit further. Let’s talk about responsiveness to feedback can be another way that your leader voice is heard and your influence increases. Leaders who respond to team members input demonstrates that they value those contributions. Let me give you an example of what this looks like on the other side.

Chris Goede:
I recently saw an email exchange between a couple of leaders, and one was giving some feedback to this other leader, and all of a sudden the leader comes back and doesn’t own it, doesn’t accept it. There’s no change, there’s not going to be any action, and literally just calls the other one out. And I’m like, what’s going on here? So the one that we were originally addressing in the email is losing their voice, is losing their credibility because of the way that they responded to that feedback. And one of the things right now that I hear John Maxwell and Mark talk a lot about in attributes of leaders that they’re really just digging in on and looking for is the whole responsibility and coachability. If someone’s responsible and coachable, they’re going to have a voice, they’re going to gain influence. And so just think about that as. As you receive feedback, absorb that, respond in the right way, and your voice will continue to be heard and have influence inside your team.

Perry Holley:
That’s really good. I can’t let the empathy comment go from earlier. I think another way to ensure your leader’s voice is to show up with compassion and respect. And that compassion, I think, acknowledges empathy, that you understand the feelings and perspectives of other people we talk about. Do they know that you care for them and how do you show care for them? And one of them is understanding what they’re going through. So I think you can really hurt your voice as a leader by being coming across as uncaring. I don’t think I know many leaders. I don’t care.

Perry Holley:
They care. They care, but they’re so busy with other things, they’re so preoccupied. They don’t really stop and walk slowly through the lobby.

Chris Goede:
Yeah, absolutely. It could have 100% been see who’s.

Perry Holley:
There and what the feelings are going on there, but it kind of feeds your emotional intelligence, your EQDH and are you one in control of your own emotions? But do you also recognize those that are going on in others?

Chris Goede:
Yeah, it’s good. One other way that I’ll share with you in regards to leaders voices, if you don’t have a vision and you’re not clear about the mission of your team and of the organization, you’re not going to have much of a leader’s voice. A clear vision helps align the team, motivates them to where they’re going. You got to be able to. To articulate it. We come back to this whole, you know, communication thing. Right. Effectively, and it’ll make your voice more impactful.

Chris Goede:
If people don’t know. I love this. If you don’t know where we’re going, what we are trying to accomplish, and why you’re trying to accomplish that, then there’s no doubt your voice is going to be diminished. And this statements, this part of it reminded me of a really simple exercise that we do sometimes when we’re facilitating content around this or that, and one of them is, you know, as a leader, is it more important to you to be a good communicator or a good listener? It’s always fun conversation in the room. What we’re driving is understanding that everybody has different perspectives in the room. We talk about conflict management and team dynamics and culture around that. But I love that because most of the time, I would say there’s very few hands that go up around communication, and then the rest go up for, you know, listening. And as we work through that, we begin to hear conversations like, well, I mean, if they can’t tell us where they’re going, maybe it is communication.

Chris Goede:
Well, right. Well, and then I get the old, well, listening is part of communication, and as Perry said earlier, it really is. Does help with your voice. But I do think it’s important for us to understand. We’ve got to be very clear on what is our vision, what is our mission, and be able to communicate that to the team to keep the voice.

Perry Holley:
The last one I’ll share is a little more personal to me. I pay attention a lot when a leader amplifies the voices of others on the team. And I noticed, I think you do this really well, is that you definitely have a point of view. You have a strong point of view. You’ve been doing this, and you see this. You’re at the top, you have a lot more visibility, but you always include the voice of others, and you call out their voice. You don’t just take other people’s ideas. You say, hey, Angie said this, or, Amanda would like to voice that.

Perry Holley:
I just think by ensuring that all of the voices are heard, that people feel like they have a voice, they’re more likely to listen to your voice. It also leads to a more inclusive environment where we have a diverse team, and that diversity is a real advantage to us because of the amplifying of those diverse voices. You can really lose all the advantage of diversity by making it all about your voice and others just holding back. I’ll just salute and stay mute. I’ll assimilate to be like you. I’m not going to play in this. And you lose all of that.

Chris Goede:
I love. I love that. Thinking about the fact that your voice is heard, you find your leader’s voice, it carries more influence. The more you’re able to amplify other voices and. And begin to put them on a path of their voices being heard. So I love that. Well, as we wrap up, leaders, you need a voice, right? Like, I mean.

Perry Holley:
Well, you have one.

Chris Goede:
You have. Yeah, you. Yeah, yeah. I don’t.

Perry Holley:
You’re not listening to it.

Chris Goede:
You can leave, you know, by being mute. They’re probably not extremely effective way to do it, but, man, you have a voice. But we got to make sure it is coming with the right motive. You got to make sure some of these Perry and I shared with you today, you use it in a way that increases influence. It’s not about a power, it’s not about title. And I think it’s also, too, allows you to create. If you have a voice that is respected, it allows you to create rallying cries, you know, for the team to where you’re able to use your voice to help the team achieve things that they maybe would have never achieved without listening to your voice. And they don’t listen to it unless you’ve created influence the right way, so well.

Perry Holley:
Great conversation. As a reminder, if you’d like to learn more about our offerings, about to get the learner guide for this episode. If you’d like to leave us a comment or a question, you can do all of that at maxwellleadership.com/podcast we love hearing from you, and we’re very grateful you’d spend this time with us. That’s all today from the Maxwell leadership executive podcast.