3 Leadership Lessons I’ve Learned Through Podcasting | Episode 200

Scott McCarthy [00:00:00]:

On episode 220 of the peak performance leadership podcast, I’m going solo, and I am talking about your greatest leadership struggles as stated by you. That’s right.

Scott McCarthy [00:00:14]:

It’s all about you today. Are you ready for this? Let’s do it. Welcome 1. Welcome all to the Peak Performance Leadership Podcast, a weekly podcast series dedicated to helping you hit peak performance across the 3 domains of leadership. Those being leading yourself, leading your team, and leading your organization. This podcast couples my 20 years of military experience as senior Canadian army officer with world class guests bringing you the most complete podcast of leadership going. And for more, feel free to check out our website at movingforwardleadership.com. And with that, let’s get to the

Scott McCarthy [00:01:14]:

Leaders everywhere. How are we doing? Yes. It is your chief leadership officer, Scott McCarthy. And for the people watching this live, welcome to the live stream recording of this week’s podcast episode. That’s right. I’m live streaming this into our free Facebook group, leadership skills for managers who to be leaders, not bosses, And this is live. So this is what’s happening this week on the show. Is that a couple days ago, I threw a question out to the group, And I am going to give some responses to their responses of the same question.

Scott McCarthy [00:01:59]:

And if you’re watching this live, feel free to check-in. Let me know where you’re coming in from. And if you haven’t had chance to answer to question. Feel free to answer the question. And that is, what is your current greatest leadership struggle. And let me tell you, we had a huge, wide range of responses out there. It was pretty incredible, from everything, from the great resignation came up to distribute remote work came up to, what else? Retention, of course, communication, all kinds of different responses. And I went through, and I grabbed 3, sorry, just 3, to respond to today.

Scott McCarthy [00:02:56]:

And I want to throw my perspective. And it’s really hard. Like, I do my best to type of my my ideas in a Facebook comment, but you can only do so much. Right? So And with, I think, something like 57 comments on that post right now and growing literally by pretty much a minute, I can’t answer them all because this podcast episode would probably be longer than a Joe episode of the Joe Rogan show. So I picked 3, And here we go. So the first question out there was from Scott Christensen, and he mentioned bridging the gap between expectations and performance. And wanted to dig a little bit deeper into this question because I wanted to exact or response, I should say. Because I wanted to understand the core of his problem that he’s facing right now.

Scott McCarthy [00:03:53]:

And as I ask more questions about his problem, he basically what it boils down to is man his management, his senior leaders’ expectations of his team’s capabilities or their performance. So what’s happening here is is that there’s a disconnect between his senior leaders’ expectations, what’s achievable by his team, and what the team is actually able to achieve. So Let me tell you, Scott. This is not an uncommon problem, especially if you’re in a large corporation, large organization, or if there’s distance between you and your senior leaders, or if your senior leaders are disengaged in the 1st place. So If they don’t engage with you and your team, my quest my first suggestion to you is Try to get them out and get them to engage with you and your team. Invite them to come and see The work conditions, see how hard the team is working, see what they do on a day to day basis. This is something I do in every job I do. As you guys may or may not know, I this is my side hustle.

Scott McCarthy [00:05:13]:

Buddy. I’m a senior cane army officer. I’ve commanded over 200 members. I’ve been in war zones. I’ve been over the world leading teams. And right now, I’m leading a relatively, from my standpoint, a small team of 25 of us. But we’re super diverse in what we do, and I have to have an understanding. So I am constantly checking in on my teams, And I also have a team that’s just located from where I where I work at every day.

Scott McCarthy [00:05:46]:

They’re actually an hour down the road. So I have to take time and go down and check-in on them and see how things are going and have an understanding of the struggles they go through day to day So I can adjust my priorities and adjust the workload that goes down there based off of the reality that’s on the ground. So if your senior leaders aren’t doing that, then may I suggest to you to invite them to start doing that? Because that is going to help them understand, what it is your team does and how difficult it actually is. Here are a few different ideas that may work for you as well. Can you quantify the work? You know? If you’re in an engineer and, again, for the audience listening, Scott didn’t get into this level of detail, but if you’re an engineering firm, let’s say a software developer and an average app takes, let’s say, a 100 hours of work and you have 10 coders, well, then it’s 10 hours of work per coder to develop an app. That is super simplistic. I know it doesn’t work that way, but please work with me. So if you can quantify and go, well, listen, we have this project, it’s gonna take us a 100 hours, it’s, 10 hours per person, We can’t do it feasibly at 5.

Scott McCarthy [00:07:08]:

We just can’t it can’t be done. It’s impossible. It takes 10 hours worth of work per person. It takes 100 total. We can either add more coders in or we can take things off. But the moral story is that What you’re expecting is just not possible. So if you can quantify the work, that really helps because we are right now really data driven society. Supervisors love their data.

Scott McCarthy [00:07:34]:

So the more that you can actually show and give that to them, then that will help bridge that gap between expectations and performance. Second thing to look at 3rd thing, actually, is the work aligned with your people’s strengths and responsibilities. So If you have someone who is not let’s keep with this Coder thing. So if you have an individual who is not great at front end graphic design and making things look pretty and you constantly give them those tasks, then they are obviously gonna have performance issues. That as well, if someone is whose job role is supposed to be, managing of, you know, tasks and time and kinda doing administrative stuff for your team in the background, and you hand them coding tasks, That’s not gonna fly either. That’s not aligned with the responsibility. So actually having a look and making sure the tasks that go down to your team are aligned with, 1, their strengths, and 2, their actual job responsibilities is gonna help bridge that gap. Now If people are weak in certain areas and they have to be strong, you know, they have to go about doing those role those tasks, Then how might you, you know, develop their skills further? Can you get some mentorship with them? Can you partner them with someone who’s really strong? You put them on extra training? Can you outsource some of the aspects? There are 50,000,000 different ways to skin that cat.

Scott McCarthy [00:09:12]:

So the moral of the story is to not just think solely in the box per se of looking at an individual and saying, hey. I need you to get better at this, but how might we get you better at this? And actually have that conversation with the person. If they’re apologies. If, they’re the ones that are actually having difficulties. Alright. And then the final thing is How effectively are you communicating up to your senior leaders about what’s going on on a daily or weekly basis? Excuse me. It is full on allergy season right now here in Kingston, Ontario, and I am congested as hell. Alright.

Scott McCarthy [00:09:52]:

So, anyway, how effectively are you communicating with your supervisors and your senior leaders? Are you making them aware of The different things that are going on. Are you checking in with them on a regular basis, giving them update briefs on the different things? That will then in turn Give them a better understanding of everything that’s going on and manage their expectations from a performance standpoint. So, Scott, there’s 4 different ways For you to try to, help bridge that gap. And Meredith just says the same in Illinois, Meredith. Thank you For watching, yeah, allergy season. Gross. Blah. Alright.

Scott McCarthy [00:10:35]:

Let’s go into, the second, I guess problem. This was Kareem Clyburn. It’s very similar, to Scott’s problem in that he says dealing with the leadership above me. Now I didn’t get a whole lot of extra detail from, Karim, so I kinda swing in at the fence with this one, but I do got a number of different ideas for you. And the first one I want to throw at you is that your job, you know, being in this middle area per se, is that you have to shield your people. Those that work for me, below you, you know, for you, you have to shield them from any of these bad relationships that you may have with your supervisors. Okay? And the reason for that is they can’t be factored. Right? As much as you can.

Scott McCarthy [00:11:27]:

They can’t necessarily see what’s going on in the background because you don’t want to give this overarching sense of distillability and as well as dysfunction amongst the team. The team needs to work solidified. Now that being said, I don’t recommend lying. I don’t recommend, you know, withholding information, so on and so forth. But the moral of the story is You want to shield them from any negativity that’s coming down as well as showing them that there is resilience And that your job is really to enable them to do their job, and shielding them is Really, one of the ways that you can go about doing it. Okay? Second thing is what I want you to do is look from their lens. Look from their standpoint looking down to you and your team. And if you were your supervisor or your superiors, the things that were going on.

Scott McCarthy [00:12:26]:

Would that make more sense to you? And would you be happy with what’s going on? And would you want changes? And, again, you didn’t get into too much detail, but I’m throwing some generic ideas out at everyone here So that if they’re in this scenario, it can help them to just understand. You need to understand your supervisor And where they’re coming from and their standpoint. You know? Seek to understand before seek to being understood. So try to look from their standpoint. And Meredith is a rock star today. Holy cow. She’s got a great point here. If she sees stress see, if I panic or stress, so does my team.

Scott McCarthy [00:13:11]:

I try to keep the stress to my private office space. That is a great, great, great way to go about it for sure. Don’t disagree with it. And then sometimes, actually, I would even suggest, you know, when it’s not so bad, a lot of your teams see it from time to time just so that they know, guess what? You’re human too. And that helps kinda build that bond between you and your team. So but still, Meredith, great point. Love it. So alright.

Scott McCarthy [00:13:38]:

So first off, back to Karim, shield your people. Second thing is look from the lens. And then the third thing is try to improve communication with your your leaders above you. No matter what, you should strive to improve that communication. I see my supervisor daily, multiple times a day. I don’t need to. He doesn’t need to. But it just helps that constant dialogue between him and I intelligence.

Scott McCarthy [00:14:05]:

He understands where I’m from. He I understand where he’s coming from, and we have that constant communication between us that enables us to be on the same page most of the time. I will never say always because it’s impossible to be always on the same page. So most of the time, you want to be on the same page. Okay? So, again, show your people, look from a different lens and then strive to improve communication. The final one that I wanted to discuss on the show today is a statement from, Nicole Day. And Nicole stated getting my people on the same page work and communication barriers. And we dove into that one a bit more.

Scott McCarthy [00:14:54]:

We’re trying to understand exactly what she meant with that because as very broad. And lo and behold, Nicole leads a team of women, and they’re diverse in their ages. So you had a multi generational team going on, and that really hit home for you because last week Sorry. The week of 18 8. Sorry. 8 to 14. Nope. Not that week.

Scott McCarthy [00:15:23]:

First two, 7 a. There we go. In the leader growth mastermind, we were actually talking about leading different generations. So that was the whole point of that week. We got together and we discussed leading different generations. So here are some tips for you from that, those Discussions and that content. And the first thing is you have to understand different generations prefer to be communicated in different ways. K? So for example, baby boomers who are 1945, 1960, prefer either face to face or the telephone.

Scott McCarthy [00:16:06]:

Generation x, which are 1961, 1980 prefer email text message. This is the preferred communication media. Generation 1, my generation, 81 to 95, online, mobile, and text messaging. And then you got generation zed, which is after 95, which prefer, you know, video chat and so on and so forth. But there are also different ways that they prefer to get accountability. So gym. Baby boomers tend to want it more, structured. They tend to want it more in, like, you know, those re performance reviews, that kind of facilitation whereas generation zed and even why they prefer it more, you know, on the spot.

Scott McCarthy [00:17:00]:

If I do something wrong or if I need to change something, let me know, and I prefer you just telling it to me face to face. Now how you go about doing that, of course, matters. So, obviously, calling people out in front of big groups, never on per se. You wanna, you know, do that privately. But the moral of the story is generation zed don’t want, you know, a week, even multiple days in between the event and when you’re providing that feedback. So these are the type of things you want to look at, And this is literally what we went through in the Leader Growth Mastermind. So for everyone out there, For your benefit, we did recently well, 2 months ago, launched the leader growth mastermind, which is a paid mastermind community where We get together and we discuss different types of content each week, which I facilitate. And this obviously, It was the beginning of May’s content.

Scott McCarthy [00:17:59]:

We follow the theme, the 3 domains leadership every month. So upcoming in June, if you’re watching this real time we are actually going to dive into leading ourselves and with productivity prioritization so on and so forth. So we get together Thursdays and we discuss the content and as well we have our own little individual group where people can, comment and discuss throughout the week. So that’s what the leader growth mastermind is all about. And if you want to check out more, Just go to lead built boss.comforward/mastermind, and that will bring you to the landing page where you can check it all out and apply because We only have so much space. So, anyway, to wrap things up, I plan on doing these a bit more in the future because I think they’re great, episodes to really dive deeper into what’s going on in your lives. And the moral of the story is this, if you have leadership questions you want to post, please go ahead post them in the group. If you want to have questions answered on the podcast directly by me, feel free to reach out to me, shoot me a message, Shoot me an email.

Scott McCarthy [00:19:14]:

I am here for you. Remember, I am your chief leadership officer. I do this for you in my spare time while my kids are sleeping right now, because I want to rid the world of evil bosses. And I want to inspire and motivate and bring forth leaders that are in all of us out there because I believe everyone is a leader, can be a leader in their own way. So if you got questions, I may have answers. And if I don’t, I will see them. Alright, ladies and gentlemen.

Scott McCarthy [00:19:52]:

Thank you for

Scott McCarthy [00:19:53]:

tuning in. Thank you for the, live viewers this evening. Meredith, you win the golden war for most comments. A rock star. Love it. And anyway, as always, lead the boss, and we’ll see you next time. Take care now.

Scott McCarthy [00:20:17]:

And that’s a wrap for this episode, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for listening. Thank you for supporting the peak performance leadership podcast. But you know what you could do to truly Report the podcast and know that’s not leaving a rating and review. It’s simply helping a friend, and that is helping a friend by Sharing this episode with them if you think this would resonate with them and help them elevate their performance level, whether that’s within themselves, their teams or their organization. So do that. Help me. Help a friend win win all around, and, hey, you look like great friend at the same time.

Scott McCarthy [00:20:56]:

So just hit that little share button on your app, and then Feel free to fire this episode to anyone that you feel would benefit from it. Finally, There’s always more. There’s always more lessons around being the highest performing leader that you can possibly be, whether that’s for yourself, your team, or your organization. So why don’t you subscribe? Subscribe to the show via moving forward leadership .com Forward slash subscribe. Until next time, we don’t boss, and thanks for coming out. Take care now.