Executive Podcast #310: Leaders are Readers

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. As we get started, I want to remind you to visit maxwellleadership.com/podcast. Click on this podcast and there’ll be a form there that I’d love you to fill out. One of the greatest things that Perry and I, we get to do, we’d love to do we get to do it, is to work with organizations to develop a common language around the leadership inside their organization. It drives culture, and it’s a great way to start. And it’s around John’s five levels of leadership. Not only do we training consulting, we do coaching around that and really go deep there.

Chris Goede:
So if that’s something that’s interested or your team needs that, if you’ll fill out that form, let us know. We would love to serve you in any way as we get started. Today’s topic is developing intuition. Leaders are readers. Now, you need to understand, I. I need help in this area. Intuitiveness has been something that I’ve had to learn over time. Over time, right.

Chris Goede:
That’s not what my wife says. She’s extremely intuitive compared to mine. But I love that where we’re going. Yeah, I love where we’re going here in regards to the readers part of this. Right? Leaders are readers. So we’re going to dig into this a little bit today, and John likes to say that. John says leaders are readers and readers are leaders. We attribute that to reading books, and we make a lot of assumptions around that.

Chris Goede:
And I have to just be honest. I do, too. And I see that. I’m like, oh, yeah, I got to go read more books to be a better leader. But. But what John’s really talking about is how do we develop skills and intuition by reading other things? That’s what we’re going to talk about today.

Perry Holley:
Yeah, there are several things. I’m with you. This word, leader’s intuition, is, uh, can be a little slippery about what? What is it? How do I have it? And, um, you know that some people are born with more leadership ability, some natural tendencies of leaders. Others may not be, but we believe that it can all be learned and so based. Your intuition is either going to come from some of your natural gifting, or you can learn it and I think today I really wanted to speak into us another, I would consider this another classic John Maxwell teaching around about how do you develop your intuition as a leader, and what are your thoughts on that? Do you, can you tell when somebody has it or doesn’t have it?

Chris Goede:
Yeah, I think you can, John, when you talk about this being a classic John, so intuitive, and, and I’ve been around him for about 25 years and continues to, to be intuitive, um, I think it is important. I think it saves time, uh, with the team, it, you’re, you’re thinking out ahead of the team. But I do think that, um, if you’re not born naturally, or even if you are, have a little bit of intuitive spirit in you. I think the more experience, the more exposure that you get to things, the more intuitive you become about certain situations, even if it’s not an identical situation. But you have some type of intuition about something that has happened in the past. So I think you can see it in people. I think you can sometimes feel it in decisions that are being made. But what about, what about you, Kenny?

Perry Holley:
Well, we teach a lot about self awareness. And then I thought, well, I need to definitely need to be self aware, and then I need to be, from my own learning, was I need to be better, more others aware. So not just me self aware about me, but I need to be others, what’s going on with others. And then I need to be situationally aware. So I kind of expand his self awareness to be others awareness, to be situational awareness. Am I paying attention to what’s going on? What John would say is that leaders, you know, leaders are readers. So what the first thing was, leaders are readers of the situation. Are you reading what’s going on? Pick up on the details that others might miss.

Perry Holley:
Read the situation before you get all the facts of what’s going on. Does that resonate with you? Do you think it does? How that applies in the work world? Do you read situations?

Chris Goede:
I think that this is an interesting point. You know, when we think about the intuitive side of leaders, what you’re really going after is, am I able to see patterns? Like. So here goes my logical brain, right? Some other people like, no, I just feel it like, what are you talking about? Patterns, right. And I go a different way. I think it’s us being proactive to solving problems before they get really, really bad instead of reactive. And then also, you just develop this people insight, like on the people over time that I think you can develop that. And so as you think about their situations, you go hmm. Am I being like.

Chris Goede:
Am I observing everything that’s going on? Am I aware of what’s going on around me? Am I aware of how Perry’s treating so and so? Am I aware of how Perry’s facilitating that class? What does that look like? And then I also think, in regards to the situation, this, again, comes back to my personality. I think I can be more intuitive, which just may be a little bit of an oxymoron. But the more information that I gather allows me to maybe have some take that information, take my observation, and then can intuitively. Is that right, or is that too many facts there? I’m like, am I stretching this? But I think we’re in that mode, right, of receiving. And then what ends up happening is the more you do that, you’ll become more intuitive.

Perry Holley:
Down the road, I’m flashing back to, we homeschooled all the way through. And so when our kids were teenagers, I’m coming in from the office, I’m coming home, and I open the kitchen door. I’m walking in, and I notice my wife is kind of forcefully putting dishes in the dishwasher. And I look across, and my daughter’s got her back and her. Got her arms crossed, and she’s on the edge of the sofa. My son is looking like he’s trying to get away from. I go, okay, I’m reading the. Something going on here doesn’t feel right.

Perry Holley:
My intuition tells me that my first words ago, daddy’s home. I should be a little more careful about that. But, you know, you learn to read the situation and watching things. The second one, John would talk about, I really want to hear what you think about this. Leaders are readers of their resources, and that instead of trying to do everything on your own, you focus on mobilizing people and leveraging resources to reach the goal. I think this is huge when it comes to being the type of leader that sees things work without you instead of because of you. But how does it play into intuition? How does that. I’m making that leap.

Chris Goede:
Yeah. The resource part of this is interesting, and I think I’ve seen John live this out so many times, everything from whether it’s a project, a skill set, or whether it’s the people side of things, whatever it might be, as a resource, data. And it’s fascinating to watch. But what I have known is that, again, this goes back to knowing and having knowledge and understanding the resource. Right. And understanding that, also understanding that there’s so many resources. I think today, more than ever, we have so many resources at the tip of our fingers, you can get extremely distracted by those resources and miss the intuitive opportunity to make a decision, whatever it might be. And so it’s being able to prioritize those resources in really truly how to help you make that decision or to lead in that area.

Chris Goede:
So it is interesting, there’s so many resources out there. I think we can tap into all of them in order to help you become more intuitive.

Perry Holley:
It’s a really good point there about, we have a lot at our fingertips. Are we distracted by that?

Chris Goede:
Yes.

Perry Holley:
The intuition comes in there. Can you intuit the best use in every situation about how to leverage the team, the tools, the techniques, to get things to where it goes back to. I’ve heard you say this about, are you doing the things that only you can do? And so if you find yourself doing things that others could be doing, are you intuitively putting everything to work, leveraging those that are at your fingertips, to put a team to work, delegating if you need to delegate, taking things that only you can do, getting resources, funding.

Chris Goede:
Tools, don’t reinvent the wheel, whatever those.

Perry Holley:
Types of things, you got to be able to read that situation. Another intuition builder John would talk about is that as leaders or readers, leaders are readers of trends and that you can tell when conditions are changing, you can tell when there’s trouble coming or an opportunity coming. They seem to be able to look into the future a bit. I don’t think leaders do this enough, but I know you, you and I, we kind of challenge each other on keeping up with what’s going on in our market and around us. But it’s bigger than just knowing what’s going on in learning and development or what’s going on in leadership. There’s so many more things, but you have a pretty structured approach, a daily routine about reading and things. But do you get a lot of your intuiting about what the future may hold for us and others?

Chris Goede:
Yeah. The first thing I’d say about that, to your point, um, is you can get into a routine right back to the resources, but also even in trends, um, and stay very, very strict to your industry. And I would challenge you to even maybe go outside your industry. One of the greatest things I learned from a CFO we had here at Max leadership years ago was, um, what are you, what are you observing, watching in trends of other industries that potentially could affect ours? Maybe an arm’s length, but, or how are they reacting? And, and so again, just thinking a little bit differently there. This is a word we we’ve actually done some content on this before. I think you become more intuitive, the more curious you are, right? Like this is a word that you talk about a ton. And so that curiosity will drive you to learn more, to study more, to ask questions more. Which then leads to my last point around here of trends is you can only absorb so much information.

Chris Goede:
But when you begin to network and to connect with people in your industry or aware of your industry, you’d be fascinated. Be like, for example, you’re like, man, I read this book on culture the other day, and then somebody else was like, well, I read this book on, you know, leading a different generation, and all of a sudden we’re having a, well, what do you think? The next two years and you’re going into a conversation because you’re networking with other people that are in the same industry, somewhat like minded. That may help you with the trend. So that as you begin to then retreat back into what you’re leading and what you’re doing, you can begin to intuitively see or maybe observe what’s going on and then to make some decisions. So I think it starts with curiosity. I think you’ve got to do some of your homework, the market research, to just then take all that. That’s just remember, these are just tools that help you become more intuitive. Those are just tools.

Chris Goede:
What’s going to happen is you’re going to become more intuitive because of those tools, but you can’t rely just on those tools that make sense. So I think you can definitely learn it, but by doing a couple of these things that we’re sharing with you.

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Perry Holley:
I’m in the leadership space and I love it. And so I do a lot of reading around that. So my book reading is mostly around leadership, management, productivity, those types of things. But I know that there’s a bigger picture. So part of my morning routine was I just expanded to, I’m going to, every day before I wrap up my morning time, I click on LinkedIn and I just watching and I tried to follow people. They’re different and they’re not all in leadership, but what are people talking about? What are they writing about? And I’ve, I picked up a couple of really cool trendy things that I didn’t know were happening. I’m using Instagram or something like that, too. And I’ll also have people near me.

Perry Holley:
I don’t do a lot of TikTok, but I’ve got people that I know that do. And I said, if you see something and I’ll, somebody will flip me something. I go, that’s interesting. I think that’s how I learned about the great resignation or something like that. We talked about it here. I’ve also looked it at YouTube a little bit every day to say, what are people talking about? What are the little stories, like a minute type things? What are people? Much of it right now is political. I don’t really want to get into that, but I think you should pay attention to what’s going on politically. If governments are doing things, if laws are coming in, how is that going to affect, if a government has a new plan for something, the Green New Deal or whatever, if that goes in place, how’s that going to affect you? And so you don’t have to agree or disagree, but you need to know what’s going on.

Perry Holley:
I think over time, as you said, you were at the top of our recording, you said, I’m learning. And I think that is a great reminder right there. Is that you. But by doing small things daily with some consistency, over time, you can develop an amazing intuition about things people say. How do you, you seem so wise. How do you know these things? I just listen and read and study and pay attention to a lot of different things over time to do that.

Chris Goede:
It makes me think about even as a parent, right, where you may be in a situation where you’re coaching one of your children and you’re like, hey, listen, I feel like this is what’s going to happen. She’s going to say that this is going to happen. That ain’t ever going to happen. And then a couple days later, how’d you know that? How’d you know that? Right to your point, time learning experience is going to drive our intuition.

Perry Holley:
John also says that, and I love your thought of this one, that leaders are readers of people. This has got to be the biggest one. You can sense a level of buying and engagement of the individuals around you have. This could be at home, it could be at work. They tell when someone’s troubled or if someone’s doing well. When you see people, it’s reading people at home or work is you’re going to have difficult connecting and influencing people if you can’t read them. So how have you seen this one play out over the years?

Chris Goede:
For us, this is all about level two influence and John’s five levels of leadership. And there are so many assets out there for us right now to be able to better understand our people, whether it’s a free tool, whether it’s understanding their values. By the way, in one of our trainings, we do an incredible exercise where I was just with a group on Monday this week and took a team through a values cards exercise. And it’s amazing, and you know this, that people go, I’ve worked with you for 15 years. I had no idea that was one of your values. And so that whole being able to now understand, like, oh, now I know why, you know, Bob made that decision because that’s part of his values, which is a decision making filter. So I give you that as an example. There are all kinds of resources out there to assist you in being able to read people, to become more intuitive.

Chris Goede:
I also think that as you’re gaining influence and leading people, you need to be actively listening. You need to work on your EQ. You need to have regular check ins with them. The last one I’ll say, you have to understand how they’re motivated. Again, it goes back to intuitively being able to lead certain individuals because you know how they’re motivated. So you have some data behind it, and so you don’t really, you don’t lead necessarily. I heard a statement one time, I think it was Chris Fuller, one of our executive facilitators. He said, hey, we always want to lead from data, not with the data, you know, like, so you’re going to have some things that you have in your head, but then intuitively you’re going to have to make a decision.

Chris Goede:
How do I motivate Perry? But it’s based off of some of the work that I’ve done ahead of time. So. But I think this is huge. We’re in the people business. Everybody’s in the people business, but I think for us, this is probably the biggest one that John talks about here.

Perry Holley:
I know the biggest growth point for me on that one was to be able to read people. I had to get myself out of the way. I am so into me. I’m so knowing about me. I am so focused on me. I don’t really look at you. If I can get myself, and John talks about this and the laws of communication is that you’re not the star of the show. It’s others.

Perry Holley:
That’s why I said it. For me, I added self awareness, then I added others awareness and then situational awareness. And if I can get, if I can do those three pretty well, I can get myself out of the picture. Last one, it’s a big one, but it’s about, John says leaders are readers of themselves. This is all about self awareness. It’s all about knowing your strengths and your weaknesses, your blind spots. Being 100% about knowing that you, I need to know you and being honest with yourself that I have this strength, I have this weakness. I know in the past I’ve had these blind spots.

Perry Holley:
We talked on a previous episode about the inner circle, people that can help, you know, you. But what’s your thought about reading yourself?

Chris Goede:
Yeah, I think your example leading into that was the timing was perfect. Right? It’s like, hey, I realized it was all, all about me. Oh, wait a minute. No, it’s not all about me. Right. The world consists of a lot of other people, not just you. And so 100%, it starts, it starts with self. And as we wrap up, you know, we start off by saying, hey, we want to help develop intuition and that leaders are readers.

Chris Goede:
Readers of what? Readers of situation, readers of trends, reading of people. Right. We went through all these different things. Here’s what I’m going to leave you with. Know that if you begin to look at these different categories and begin thinking of them a little bit differently in some of the thoughts and ideas we had, you’re going to become more intuitive. You’re going to look at things a little bit differently. You’re going to have experience with that experience. I want you to reflect on that experience.

Chris Goede:
What did you learn? What did you see? Be observant from that. You’re going to learn some things like you just talked about. I mentioned early on. I just, I’m always want to be learning so I can become more intuitive and then be open to feedback. Because sometimes your intuition is not going to be right and be open to the feedback about what happened right there. Where did I miss it? What did, what feedback did they give me? A, and then again, by the way, that’s going to be experience that you need to reflect on, that you need to learn from and it’s like this cycle that’s going to help you become more intuitive as a leader. But you gotta, you gotta have your eyes wide open going into it, and you can become more intuitive.

Perry Holley:
Love that reflection. I think self reflection is one thing that I added over the years that I didn’t used to do to say, how did I really do there? What did I miss? What could I do differently? Well, great stuff, Chris. Thank you. And just a reminder, if you want that learner guide for this episode, if you want to learn about our offerings or the other of our podcast family, you can do all [email protected]. podcast you can also leave us a comment or a question there. We love hearing from you, and we’re very grateful you’d spend this time with us today. That’s all from the Maxwell Leadership executive podcast.

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