8: The Committed Manager and Team Building for Potential

Welcome: 00:00

Thank you for joining me for this Episode of Mt. Nebo's Leader's Lift. I'm your host Greg Cunningham and I look forward to being a part of your leadership journey.

Intro

Today's episode is going to focus on team building. Over the last few episodes we have covered a lot of ground on individual relationships. Those individual relationships play a large role in developing a team and we will review a few of those topics but the majority of the time will be spent on the team. This episode will have more a of a professional team focus but there will still be some great insights for those of you with families, on school or community teams, etc. In story time, I'll share an example of one of the results of deliberately building a team. I have another book recommendation for you and then for a few minutes, I'll share some of the ways I have applied the principles in that book in different aspects of my life. Then it's on to the main topic.

Pre-Roll

Before I dive into story time, just a reminder to hit that subscribe or follow button if you haven't done so already. If you have, pick someone in your circle and share the podcast with them. That will really help expand to those that could use the lifting we do on this show.

I would also love to get your feedback on the podcast. If you go to www.mtneboconsulting.com/survey (link in the show notes) you will find a very short survey. Only one required question. That will also give you an opportunity to get on my email list or to receive my favorite books list.

Story Time: 01:35

In one of my leadership roles, I had spent a couple of years working on building a rock solid management team. I had two people managers, someone managing QA and another managing training and other related programs. We worked very well as a team. We were set up as a service desk, which at the time meant we were really a call center but doing internal technical support. As part of the evolution of our team and organization we were working on a ranking system that would help guide us and our technicians towards our key goals.

As we were having that discussion over the course of several weeks, we had come to agreement on all of the key areas but one. I don't remember which area it was, but it was super critical and we needed buy in (I'll share later in this episode what I mean by buy in) from everyone. We got to the point where we had one people manager (so half of the technicians reported to him) that just wasn't onboard with the plan and I didn't see a way for us to get him there.

At that point, I knew that I was going to have to make the final decision and I was on the same page as the rest of the team. I also knew that he was going to have to sell this and implement it with his team.

So what do you do in this scenario? I could have just said that I've heard enough and we are going to do x and assume everyone will be good to go. But that only has a 50/50 (or less chance of working).

The alternate approach I took was to take a step back and cover some of the core principles of our team (much of which we will cover later). I focused on trust, everyone getting a voice and then all getting on the same page. We then proceeded to talk through both sides of the issue at hand and I gave the is manager the floor to take us through is objection. It was interesting that instead of doing that, he said something like the following "I don't agree with this particular item, but I've had a chance to present my side and I see I'm not going to sway anyone. At this point, I will commit to going along with the rest of the team so we can move forward".

This was absolutely huge in my book. Not only to hear this coming from someone on the team but then to see him stick to this over the next several months as we implemented the program. Not once did he say "it wasn't my idea". Not once did he fail to do his part to support the team. He truly bought in even though he disagreed.

This is the kind of team that you want to lead. One that allows everyone to have a voice but then also have each member of the team be willing to put aside their own ideas and priorities for what is right for the broader team and then move forward as if they never disagreed in the first place. Still today, I have a huge amount of respect for how he handled this situation.

If you are managing a team and listening to this episode, this is where you want your team to get. To be willing to agree to disagree and then move forward as if there was no disagreement at all. More on this later in the episode.

Little Lift: 04:24

For today's little lift recommendation, I want to share another Patrick Lencioni book. This one is called the 3 Signs of a Miserable Job (I think it has a more positive title today). I'll put an amazon affiliate link in the show notes. This book is great for leaders of all levels but is really good for managers looking to find ways to directly influence the performance of individual contributors. It's great and I have been through it multiple times.

Mini Topic: 04:28

Instead of diving right into todays topic, I want to talk about at least one of the principles from 3 Signs of a Miserable Job and how I have applied it. The principle is immeasurement. The author jokes around that immeasurement may not even be a word but I like it. For our discussion today think of this not as the lack of a measurements in general but more of a lack of measurements that meet the following criteria: the individual can measure it themselves and they have control over hitting the measurement.

In last week's episode I talked about online banking sales early in my career. That is a good example of this. The "official" measurement existed and that was how many new customer signed up for online banking. The associates could measure this one themselves but they did not have control over hitting the measurement. Sure they could influence it by the number of offers they made, but they couldn't control who said yes, how many calls they took and several other factors. But the measurement I had them use was how many offers they made. They could control that. They could offer on every call they took, or at least most of them. And they could use something as simple as a sticky note and tickmark how many offers they made. It was very simple. Overtime, they learned about how many offers they needed to make to get a sale. With that information, they could then set daily goals on how many offers they could make.

So why was this better than just measuring the number of sales they made. I already mentioned the fact that they couldn't control the actual number of sales. So think about the call center agent that almost exclusively got calls in a given day from customers that weren't comfortable doing their banking on the internet. Remember that this was decades ago when online banking was just getting started. Those agents could go home at the end of the day frustrated that they didn't hit their sales goal for the day. Compare that with the agent that had a goal to make 10 offers (regardless of the answer) and at the end of the day they could look at their tick marks and see that they had met their goal. Which is most likely to be motivated to keep at it the next day?

This approach goes beyond just meeting a goal like this. If you have to wait for someone else to tell you that you hit a goal or metric or for your manager to tell you that you did a good job, you could be waiting a long time. It's just not a good idea to put your happiness in someone elses hands. So as an individual, no matter what the company or even your personal performance goals are, you need to have measurements that you can measure on your own and do so as frequently as possible, daily is best.

As leaders, we need to take a look at the various performance measurements we have in place for those we lead. How frequently do they have access to those measurements? Can they pull the data themselves? Those are a couple of questions we can evaluate. But maybe more importantly should be the question of how can I help them set shorter term, controllable goals that they can measure themselves and that are likely to have an impact on the larger metrics. This is what I had to do with sales in our call center.

When I have lead higher level individual contributors and other managers or leaders, this becomes even more important. The higher up you go, the more your goals and metrics are likely to spread out over longer periods of time. So it's even more important to have these self-measurable and controllable goals.

In my personal life, I don't worry so much about exact numbers. That seems to be much more on the professional side. But I still need to have goals that I can control and measure myself and I've tried to teach this to my family and to the youth that I have worked with. For example, think about working with one of your kids in a particular area, let's say they want to try out for the school musical. So it's fine to set the goal of being cast in a role. But how much of that is within their control? What if there are 500 kids that try out? What if it's a young lady and the musical selected only has 2 roles for her and there are 50 others trying out for the same role? Those are just a couple of examples.

So yes, let them set the goal. But then you need to sit down with them and set goals around things you can control. That could be how much practice they do, do they need a vocal coach, talking to the casting director, etc. None of that guarantees they will be cast but if they know what they are going to do each day to work towards their goal, then they can focus on that. At the end of the day they will know if they met that days goals or not.

If they don't get the role they wanted, of course they are going to be disappointed. But if they met all of their goals along the way, they will eventually realize that they did their best. And if they want to try again for the next musical, they can make changes to the smaller goals and the plan to give themselves a better shot.

This kind of an approach helps teach that it isn't always the results that are the most meaningful. It can help us and them realize that sometimes the journey is of much greater value than the end result or destination. That lesson is reusable in all aspects of our lives.

Next time you go to set a goal for yourself or work with someone else on a goal, think about this concept. It's fine to have the ultimate goal that isn't really within your control, but make sure there are another other measurements or goals that are within their control and that they can measure themselves. See how this changes things.

Developing Your Team: 10:10

Let's start taking about team building. I want to start with a few foundational topics and then we can talk about some examples and techniques and such that you can apply with any team you are working with.

Let's start off by defining your team. I'm not going to the dictionary for this but want you to think of your team as any combination of individuals you associate with and work towards a common set of goals. This gets pretty straight forward in the professional world as we generally have multiple teams we are part of. In our personal lives it might be a bit less obvious. I think of my wife and I as one team. I think of us and my kids as a team. You can expand that analogy out to extended family as well. You may also have a group of friends that you consider a team. I watch a lot of RV videos and I follow a family that is currently traveling in Mexico with three other families. I would say that is a team even if it's not a permanent one and they even talked about that in one of their episodes.

I mentioned above that in the professional world, we may belong to multiple teams and I'd like to just briefly talk about that subject here. If you are a leader, you most likely have a manager and peers. That would comprise one team. Then you have your direct reports. That's another team. And then if they have direct reports that make up your department, that is yet another team. Why is it important to recognize the various teams you belong to? Let me have you think about a question - if all three of those teams had competing priorities, which ones take precedence?

Let's say that your managers have come to you and said that the IC's working for them are burned out and just can't keep up the pace of work. They too are feeling burned out and you can feel it as well. Your boss then comes to you and states that due to a massive set of orders, your teams are going to have to step up even more. How do you handle that situation?

This is a concept called first team. Who is your first team? In most situations I would argue that your first team would be your boss and your peers. That doesn't mean in the scenario above you don't have a discussion about the impact of the extra workload and try and find a solution. But ultimately that is where your priorities have to start.

In a personal context, this gets more difficult and might be more fluid but for me, I would argue that my wife is a higher priority than my kids, parents, etc.

I won't go into this any deeper but just wanted to put this out there.

After you have defined and got settled into your first team, then you can start working on developing the team or teams you are responsible for. Your first step should be to define your role in the teams development. Options may include direct responsibility, guidance, support, etc. But make sure that you are not putting your self in the do their development category. Let me lay out a couple of examples.

If you are a leader of managers then you could have a few of these roles when it comes to guidance. For more experienced managers you may take more of a guidance role. For less experienced you may start out with more direct input into their development plans and then back that down. For both you would certainly provide support. If you are also trying to help managers develop their own teams then it may be in more of an advisory role when they come to you and ask how to work with a particular individual. In this latter scenario, it's extremely important that you don't take over for them, even if it may not be the way you would do it or you can see that it's probably not going to work. I talked about this in my last episode. It's important to let folks learn on their own, even if it means letting them fall or fail just a bit. This is especially true for other managers or leaders as then need to become more and more self-reliant to keep making progress. More on this later in the episode.

Regardless of any of these scenarios, one of your key roles will be to ensure that the direction is clear to everyone. This ties back into the discussion earlier on your first team. You would get your overarching goals and direction from your first team. Then you need to translate that into goals, direction and even meaning for the other teams you are responsible for.

Let's focus on defining meaning for the expanded team. Your job as a leader is to understand where the meaning is in your own responsibilities. Hopefully you recognize that one of those is to create the right environment for your teams. You can do that in several ways. One is to help those you directly lead understand how what they do makes a difference. Then you you need to be available to assist them in doing the same for those they lead. Ultimately ever member of the team needs to know how what they do makes a difference for someone else. That could be the team, just their boss or another individual.

Another way you create the right environment for your team I talked about last week. That's to create an environment where best effort is expected, even demanded (intense) vs. a tense environment where only the results matter regardless of your best efforts.

Building trust is also crucial for all of this work. Episode 6 was all about trust so I don't want to do dive too deeply here. Just as a refresher, the trust I'm talking revolves around have a mutual relationship that can assume positive intent, give benefit of the doubt and assume that the motives and efforts of each other are about what is best for the team, not just for the individual. As the leader, you need to build relationships of trust with everyone that you lead. That's more obvious when it comes to your direct reports but requires more deliberate action to build it with their staff that you may not interact with as much. Department and team meetings are a way to build this trust. So are skip levels. But the number one way you will build trust at that level is by building rock solid trust with their manager. If you have that level of trust with those closer to them in the leadership chain, they will be more likely to give it. In addition, you need to ensure that you practice what you preach.

That leads into the need to be humble and transparent. You will make mistakes. That's actually a good thing because that gives you an opportunity to show that it's ok to make mistakes. That is key to the intense and not tense environment. If your direct team and then those that report to them believes that you never make mistakes, they will assume that you have the same expectations for them. We all know that is not realistic.

On the flip side, think of the power of you stepping up in an all hands for your department and talking about a mistake you made. I'm not talking about you just saying you were wrong and apologizing. But take that to another level. You can explain what led you to make the decision in the first place, what results you expected, what had to happen for it to be successful. Then you can share what actually happened, your thoughts on why it went sideways and then what you learned from it and would do differently the next time.

This kind of example from can go a long way to helping your various teams realize that they too can own up to their mistakes. And that will remove some of the pressure that they will naturally feel around striving for perfection. It also teaches them how you expect them to cope with their own mistakes and reinforces that if they back good decisions, give their best effort that if it doesn't go according to plan, they can own up to it, learn from it and move on without fear of extreme punishment (getting fired).

This kind of an approach also reinforces the need for transparency from all. If you combine this with being willing to admit when you are struggling, when you believe the team is struggling or just when things aren't going well you can continue to create the kind of environment where folks can work without fear.

,: 2023

So those are several foundational items we should be working on as leaders to develop our teams (professional and personal). Each item needs to be applied in a way that is best for the individual circumstances. Figuring out which, when and how might require some trial and error so don't be afraid to experiment. For the remainder of the episode I want to talk about some practical topics that I believe all of us have, are or will encounter multiple times in our lives.

Mid-Roll

Before we dive into part two, just a quick reminder that if you are enjoying this episode, remember to subscribe (it's free) and share it with others in your circle. Reviews are also a great way to spread the word. If you want more leadership and personal development resources, be sure to visit my website at www.mtneboconsulting.com and while you are there, sign up for my email list.

Practical Application: 19:36

I want to start off with a slight expansion of last weeks story time discussion on putting ourselves in the place of most potential. As a leader, one of your primary goals should be to put those you lead in the place of most potential, that applies to the team as a whole as well as each individual. You have direct responsibility to do this with those for whom you are directly responsible. For those you report up through your direct reports or those you may have matrix responsibility for (think about project teams), it should be your goal to help in this area as well. In our personal lives, this is also critical. In family relationships, you would think that this falls 100% on the parents. But that just isn't a realistic expectation. I remember reading a western novel that talked about the relationships and responsibilities that aunts and uncles had in some of the American Indian tribes. In today's world, we are seeing a sharp increase in the number of grandparents raising their grandkids or at least taking a much larger role in their upbringing. I've worked with youth enough to know how much a leader that is not part of the family can also influence their development. One of the reasons I loved scouting so much is that it gave the leaders and opportunity to interact with the youth outside of church and other influences. Some of the youth had great home environments. Others had much larger challenges at home. So working with them in an environment away from those challenges gave us an opportunity to talk about what they wanted out of life and to help them develop the life skills that would help them get where they wanted to go. Sure they learned how to pitch a tent and cook, but they also learned what it meant to plan, to problem solve, to work with others and to lead. Those skills will be with them the rest of their lives.

When it comes to professional teams, here are a few things that you should consider when trying to put the team in the place of most potential. First you need to know the individuals similar to how I have talked about knowing yourself. You need to know what they want out of life, what their strengths and weaknesses are and hopefully know a bit about each of their personality styles. This should give you an idea of the role that they can play on the team, not just how effective they will be at their more traditional duties. Let me talk through an example here. Let's say you are the leader of a management team. You have 3 managers and two individual contributors. So each of them either has a team to manage or a set of individual responsibilities that they need to own. That's about as far as a lot of folks will go. But if you really want to help the individuals and the team move to their place of most potential, think about some of these questions. What unique skills do they each have? One manager is really good with numbers. One individual contributor is passionate about recognition. Another manager likes the social aspects. So if you really want to maximize the team's potential, those types of skills need to be taken into account and you should get creative on how to give them these "extra" assignments that they will flourish at but will also benefit the whole team. For the IC that loves recognition, you could assign them to work with one of the managers to develop the departments recognition program. For the manager that loves numbers, you could assign them to work with the IC that is responsible for all of the metrics. And then the manager that loves the social aspects could take ownership of all of the social parts for the department.

I think I have mentioned this before, but the social and recognition pieces are not something that are always top of mind for me. But I am really good with numbers and analysis. So I always look for someone on my teams to handle the more fun things and I take on more of the analytics. This is an example of how once you understand the individual strengths and weaknesses of your team, you then need to roll that up to the team as a whole. You should identify gaps and make a plan to fill them. Let's say no one on the management team is really passionate about the social stuff. How do you fill that gap? My guess is that one of their direct reports would be willing to take on an assignment to fill that gap. That's a great development assignment for a high potential looking to take the next step. The other approach would be to look to hire someone that has that passion when the opportunity arises.

Overall, this rolls up something like this. Get to know your folks as mentioned above. Roll up the strengths and weaknesses of the team. Then you build individual and team development plans. Most leaders are at least somewhat familiar with individual development plans. Those individual plans should roll up into your team development plan. The plan should include goals and action plans to fill gaps in skill sets and how you as a team are going to work towards your collective goals.

The other thing you need to do as the leader is to help your managers (think of the same example I just mentioned) learn how to put their folks in the place of most potential as well. It's the same basic steps, getting to know them, identifying the right opportunities for them to grow and then providing support. But if you have a younger (meaning less professional experience) management team, they may have never seen this happen. It's unfortunate but there are just not enough leaders that will focus on putting those they lead in the place of most potential. So they may never have experience it. Your job will be to help them understand how you are doing this with them and then help them apply these same principles to those they are leading.

One last topic on potential and that is what do you do in the situation when the place of potential is not within your organization or when you can't even identify the place of most potential. In those circumstances, it's time to practice courage. If you have a high potential performer that is absolutely crushing it, then you need to have the courage to help them find the right next step somewhere else. Don't let fear or your ego get in the way of helping them move on. If your top performing manager is ready for the next step and you are unable to provide it, help them find that next step. The other side of this is when you just can't identify the place of most potential because there are so many performance issues. If you have done all you can to help them get to a stable point and they just aren't going to make it, then you need to have the courage to help them find success elsewhere. I'm not saying you give up on them and I'm definitely not saying you just let them go. There is a way to have these performance discussions and turn it into a positive for them. That's probably a much broader topic than we have time for here.

Another circumstance we are all going to run into is the need to build consensus. I want to approach this a little differently than maybe you have heard in the past. I don't see building consensus, meaning everyone is on the same page, as the real goal. What I work to achieve, especially with high performing leadership teams, is buy in. For me, buy in is a willingness to engage in the discussion and then support the ultimate decision regardless of whether you agreed with it or not. Think about the example from story time earlier in this episode. That manager did not agree with the decision but he was engaged in the debate and then fully supported the final decision. That is what we should be looking for as part of developing our team. If you can get your team to the point where they can all buy in even when there is disagreement, you can accomplish some great things.

In our personal lives, this might be just a bit different. Think about the family trying to decide what to do for a family vacation. The parents just want to be able to spend time with the family doing something memorable. The teenagers are going to prioritize staying connected to their friends while the younger kids just want to have as much fun as possible. So how do you get buy in in this type of a situation? It's not always easy and in this case you may end up with a compromise that gets everyone at least some of what they wanted. Maybe it's a camping trip to a lake but you make sure that you stay somewhere that has cell connections but you set rules around smart phone usage. Or you decide on a trip out of state to the beach, amusement parks, etc. If you can at least give everyone some of what they wanted, you can get buy in and hopefully have a not so tension filled vacation.

When it comes to getting teams to buy in, here are some things you will need to do to get buy in. These principles apply regardless if this is our professional team or our families.

First, start up front with a clear articulation of what you are trying to accomplish. For the family, it's we need to decide on where we are spending our family vacation. For work, let's saying we are trying to decide on who to promote.

Second, as the leader you need to set the parameters. For the family, it could be things like when the vacation will be, is it option or required (set this expectation up front with the older teenagers), etc. For the promotion, you may want to set the criteria over who could be considered and ensure that they team knows what the promotion entails (responsibilities, etc).

Third, make sure everyone is clear on how the decision will be made. For the family, ultimately mom and dad will decide as they have to pay for it and manage most of the logistics. For the promotions, make sure the team knows if you are making the ultimate decision or if it will be something like majority rules.

Fourth, let everyone have a voice. This is probably the most important thing. Everyone, including the youngest kids or the newest manager need to have an opportunity to express their opinion and give input. That doesn't mean everyone's opinion or ideas have equal weight but they need a chance to express them. This is the step where hopefully on a solid team, you will see productive debate and conflict. In our promotion example you would want each manager to feel like they could advocate for those who they have been working with to get that promotion. They also need to feel empowered to point out the positives and challenges they see with anyone being considered (not just their own folks). For example, the QA manager should feel empowered to say that while individual a has good scores that they just don't seem to have that positive of an attitude when talking with customers. The manager may not be aware of this but if the team trusts and feels safe, they can have a debate about it.

As the debate happens, regardless of it being in the family or manager scenario, your role as a leader should be to facilitate the discussion and make sure that no one feels like they are getting run over. This may mean you have to hold some back (those that always tend to jump right in) and draw out opinions and input from those that are quieter. If you have a teenager that absolutely doesn't want to go on the vacation they might just sit there and try and be silent knowing that they are going to resist no matter what. It takes some finesse to get them to at least share their opinion. This same thing happens in a professional environment if trust is not there. But it can also happen if someone is just struggling. Learn to get good at drawing out all opinions.

Once you believe that everyone has had a chance to express their opinion then you need to move forward with how you said the decision was going to be made. If the majority of the team votes for the individual to be promoted then move it forward. If it's the family vacation, make the decision and then start letting everyone participate in the planning to the extent that it makes sense. This may be a way to help even the grumpy teenager to move forward (maybe from grumpy to sulky :)).

Sometimes you really can't get full buy in. The case of the family vacation is a good example. But you can't always hold up decisions for 100% buy in. When you do have someone that won't buy in, it's a good idea to tackle that one on one. One thing to evaluate here is if this is an isolated incident or if there is a pattern. If you have a manager that is never going to support someone on another team getting promoted, then you have a bigger problem that you need to address. If it is an isolated incident then a private discussion with them to figure out what is going on could hopefully set you on the right path.

As for the sulky teenager, that's also something you need to address, but I'm going to refrain from giving advice there. I have had four kids go through all of those phases and each one needed to be handled differently. But I will say that you need to be deliberate and not just let what happens happen.

Dealing with entitlement

One of the things that I think you need to do to develop your team is deal with the sense of entitlement that seems so prevalent in the world today. This is something that I struggle with so let me see if I can lay it out. In the generations previous to mine, most everyone had to work so hard to manage to just get by in life. Everything was a struggle. I grew up learning that if I wanted to make it or have it better than my parents, I was going to have to work for it. And when we first got married we certainly struggled. My wife still remembers going to the grocery and adding up the total as she added things to the basket. I know a lot of you had similar experiences.

So with that background, I struggle to understand the sense of entitlement, the idea that I don't have to work or do my part but I still get the reward. I saw this a lot in youth sports and I certainly saw it when we were hiring young folks into our call center environment. Some of those individuals got extremely upset when you told them they needed to improve something. Or were surprised when there were consequences for not showing up to work and not telling anyone. At times I really struggled to stay cool calm and collected when having some of these conversations. They were the same individuals that were upset when they got passed over for raises or promotions when they were barely performing well enough to keep their jobs. It was like they expected to have the same perks or benefits as the person that was the top performer. They didn't seem to think that they had to work for those opportunities. I hope that gives you an idea of what I mean by sense of entitlement. If you want more examples, just take a look at social media or news sites and see how many stories are about situations where someone thought they could do whatever they wanted with no consequences. You'll see plenty of those.

So how do you deal with it? For me it starts when you hire someone. When I do an interview I have three goals. First is to identify if the individual is a good fit for the team (putting aside skills). Second is to identify if they have the potential to do the job (this is about skills). Third is to make sure that they understand clearly what will be expected of them so they can decide if the environment is going to be a good fit for them. I used to be able to say something like "my expectation is that you will do the job we ask you to do. For that, you will get your paycheck. Period. End of story." I'm not recommending you use that verbiage any more but you do need to find a way to help them understand what the minimum performance should be and what they will get in return for it. And then help them understand that anything beyond that depends on effort and how we work together.

Not helping so much that you hurt them

I was going through some materials from a church small business class and one of the things that it cautioned was that we have to be careful not to help people so much that it ends up hurting them. Essentially if there is something that they can do for themselves, we should not do it for them. We can provide guidance and support, assistance when they get stuck, but we have to allow them to maintain ownership otherwise we could completely stop their progress. This applies to professional teams for sure. If we have a manager that is excited to try and new approach with one of their associates, let them (assuming it's not a against policy or something like that). In life, parents can do this without even thinking with their kids. I mentioned the whole process of applying for colleges and scholarships. My mom did most of that leg work for me and I've heard that over and over. I chose to do it differently with my kids. I was there to help them, answer questions and of course provide information they could only get from me. But I let them take ownership.

I heard a church leader talk about the pride he took in maintaining his yard. When one of his sons got old enough to help, it was all he could do to not just do it himself. It took a lot of time and patience before the yard started to even remotely look like it used to. But the point was that the son needed to learn how to do it himself and maybe his way wasn't his fathers way.

When we take on too much from others, we take away their ability to continue to become self-reliant. Here is another story.

When I was working with a church group we were going to spend a week or so touring a bunch of church sites. We expected this to be an amazing spiritual experience but to also be a ton of fun for the hundreds of youth attending. One of the debates we had as leaders was around cell phones. You and I both know how attached the youth are to their cell phones and there as a portion of the leaders that wanted to insist that we ask that all electronics be left behind.

I lobbied for a different approach. Instead of mandating they stay home (and then dealing with most of the youth having snuck them into their luggage anyway), why not use this as a teaching opportunity. We would set an electronics policy and allow the youth to still have them to communicate, take pictures and enhance their experience. Then when there were key moments where electronics were not appropriate we would just ask that they be put away.

That is what we ended up doing and it worked out just fine. I kept working with many of those youth long after that event and we rarely had issues with inappropriate electronic usage. Why?

Instead of mandating something that we knew would be resisted, we taught them that there was a time and a place for them and then other times they should be put away.

This applies in our professional world. If we take ownership of an associates development then we are taking away from them the opportunity to learn and become more self-reliant. And we are also taking away their ability to teach others the same lesson. We are just creating dependency on the leader that already knows it. Not a good way to spread important skills.

Wrap Up: 36:37

I think that will do it for today. If you are hearing this closing message, you probably have a lot to think about. Hopefully you can see how the relationships fundamentals and the concepts of trust and potential lead up to developing individuals and teams to meet their fullest potential. Ultimately it all comes down to the relationships you have with each individual and then your personal relationship with the group as a whole. I don't profess to always get this kind of stuff right, but when I have focused on building the right relationships based on trust and mutual respect and then worked to help those I lead move towards their fullest potential, I have seen some amazing things happen. If you will work on this, you will as well.

I do want to make an offer out to you. If you are struggling to identify and/or work towards your own potential or to get your team or individuals on your team to do the same, I'm here to help. Feel free to reach out via the contact form on my website, www.mtneboconsulting.com/contact. I'd love to see if I can help lift you and those around you.

Post Roll

If you want to be notified of future episodes, hit the subscribe or follow button or follow ldrslft on instragram. You can also visit our website for more great content and resources to help you on your leadership journey.

Check out the show notes for all the relevant links and takeaways from this episode.

Thank you again for tuning in. Now go out there and keep lifting.