Episode 7: Believe in Somebody

Who believed in you? Looking back in your career, in your life, in your education, who invested in you, poured into you, helped you become who you are today?

Now let’s flip that question around – who would come back to you and say “thank you for what you’ve invested into me, you helped me get to where I am today.” Anyone? Are you proactively building the next level leaders in your midst?

Welcome to Episode 7, Believe in Somebody on the New Generation Leader Podcast, building your leadership toolbox to unlock your true potential.


New Generation Leader Mastermind Challenge

Don’t know where to start? Don’t have a plan to invest in your team?

Join our New Generation Leader Mastermind Challenge and discovery tools you can start using today to invest in your team.

Ready to believe in somebody? Start your free challenge today on the New Generation Leader Network.



Project Aristotle + Psychological Safety

Google’s Research into “the secrets of effective teams at Google” highlighted Psychological Safety as a key component of effective teams:

In a team with high psychological safety, teammates feel safe to take risks around their team members. They feel confident that no one on the team will embarrass or punish anyone else for admitting a mistake, asking a question, or offering a new idea.

More on Project Aristotle from Inc Magazine.

Listen More, Talk Less

One of the key highlights of Project Aristotle is “listen more, talk less.” This highlights our experience with teams, that 82% of team members feel misunderstood or undervalued.

Explore your Voice with our Free Assessment and discover how to unlock the true potential of every Voice on your team.

Managers aren’t doing enough to support anxious employees

As a manager, you might hesitate to ask employees directly how they’re doing because it feels overly personal. Less than half of respondents in a 2020 survey, 47%, said their manager is actually attuned to their wellbeing.


Full Episode 7 Transcript

Who believed in you?

Looking back on your career, in your life, in your education, who invested in you poured into you, helped you become who you are today?

Now let’s flip that question around: who would come back to you and say, “thank you for what you have invested in me. You helped me get to where I am today.”

Anyone are you pro actively building the next level leaders in your midst?

Welcome to episode 7, Believe in Somebody on the New Generation Leader podcast

If you’ve heard me talk, you’ve probably heard me tell the story about sitting down for coffee a few years ago with my friend Norm, who’s a few decades ahead of me in life. We sat down in a coffee shop and I said, “Norm, looking back over your career as you get closer and closer to retirement, what leadership lesson do you wish you had learned earlier in your career?”

This is a really powerful question to ask because it allows us to think about what we have learned earlier in life and that pathway is part of the New Generation Leader process. It’s what I talk about in the book, it’s what we talk about time and time again with teams, because we start with the problem, we start with the problem of teams and leaders who get into a leadership position, but managers/leaders aren’t truly prepared to know how to lead.

They’ve been identified as someone who could take on a role, but they aren’t given the skills the tools to succeed. So how do we overcome this? How do we preemptively meet people where they’re at and help them put the tools in their toolbox so that they can become the leaders that the world needs around us? This is why we are in business. This is why I do what I do because I’m so passionate that we all need to believe in somebody.

We need to pour in and invest in those leaders around us. Did you know that only 30% of employees believe they are being given opportunities to learn and grow? Only three out of 10. And if we aren’t taking the opportunity to invest in our teams to invest in our people to give them the skills, the tools, the resources that they need to succeed, then are we really doing our best to make them their best? Let me say that again,

Are we doing our best to help them become their best?

Because truly that is our role as a leader. That is our role, an opportunity to help resource our teams to truly make them successful. Now, if we want to build our teams, if we want to make them more successful, we’ve got to have a plan, we’ve got to have a process and if you don’t have training for your team or you don’t know how to train your team, that’s an opportunity where we can get stuck. I had a friend recommend a book to me who not how by dan Sullivan and here’s the magic behind this book dan writes who not how about this philosophy that he teaches to all of those, he consults with that. When you come across a problem, don’t figure out how to solve it on your own, but figure out who has a passion about this interest. And then a really interesting thing about this book is that dan didn’t write it. He found his own who Ben hardy to write the book for him with him, not figuring out how to write the book on his own. So if you’re figuring out who is your who, who can help you unlock the potential of your employees, who can ask these questions when you don’t know and don’t have the training for your team who does. And let’s talk about the problem a little bit more. If you don’t have training for your team or don’t know how to train your team, you might end up having high turnover, your people are leaving and on this cyclical rotation in and out the revolving door and maybe they’re in pursuit of somewhere where they believe they will be given opportunities to learn and grow. Maybe your team doesn’t do development. Well, maybe you don’t have this pathway, this system, this process to build your team members up. Maybe you find yourself in a problem where you’re promoting people to quickly because of a gap because of a revolving door or because of a growth trajectory that you’re on, you’re trying to fill seats in your organization based on who you already have and you have to promote people before they’re ready. Maybe you find yourself with managers who who really just don’t know how to lead. They were experts at the doing, they were the expert sales manager, but leading a team of salespeople isn’t their forte. And if you don’t have a deep leadership bench, you don’t have a number of people in your team, your organization who you are ready to promote. Or when you identify a team member to fill a role and you recognize you need to develop them. Maybe you just don’t have the process to do that. Let’s talk about how you do this. I know not a hoob but how we’re going to flip this. We’re going to talk about the how we do this, how you might do this, what you’re going to overcome and then we’ll talk about what it would look like for you to install this process with your team. So a few years ago, google set out to research what leadership looks like, what healthy effective leadership looks like. What is it that managers are doing that unlocks the potential of their people. And one of the key hallmarks of this was psychological safety. Here’s what google says about psychological safety in a team with high psychological safety, teammates feel safe to take risks around their team members. They feel confident that no one on the team will embarrass or punish anyone else for admitting a mistake, asking a question or offering a new idea. Here’s a number that I think describes this perfectly. 82 of your team members feel misunderstood or undervalued. Think about that for a minute. What if that is true? What if 82 of your team members don’t feel like they have a voice, don’t feel like they can speak up, don’t feel like they have a contribution to make to the team. What impact does that have on your bottom line? This is exactly what project Aristotle set out to identify. But the challenge for google came in that they were only able to identify the problem. They identified what needed to happen, what health looked like, but they didn’t have who And instead of trying to continue the research and develop their own how google set out and said, you know what? We’re going to find out who is already doing this. How do we build psychological safety in our team? Now, let’s talk about one other challenge that has arisen here lately. In a 2020 survey, 47 of people said their manager is actually attuned to their well being. So only about half of employees feel like their manager or leader understands their well being and is attuned to how they’re doing on a day in day out basis. If we are building healthy, highly effective, highly productive teams, we’re going to have to build in psychological safety, we’re going to have to make sure we are attuned to the well being of our people, managers aren’t doing enough according to leadership coaches. And this story from CNBC a few months ago, managers aren’t doing enough to support anxious employees. And as a manager, you might hesitate to feel like you even have the authority or the open door or the opportunity or the trust to ask your employees directly how they’re doing because it feels overly personal, but you can do this, there are ways to talk to your team, to develop a common language in your workplace, in your team and this is what you want to build. You want to build a process, a culture, a communication framework where your people feel safe to bring their best, they can speak up, they can offer their perspective and here’s what Sundar Pichai from Google said as we quoted on episode five of the podcast, the emotional intelligence from Google Ceo, he says this is so key because to get the most out of your team, you need all the voices including the quiet introverted ones, especially those that offer an alternative perspective or contrarian view feedback like that should always push teams to at least consider going in another direction. And even when the decision is to remain on the current path, those voices can help the team refine its work and clarify its messaging. Now when we talked about this back on episode five, we were talking about intern boot camp, how do we develop that next generation of leaders to join our team? But today we’re talking about believing in somebody and in order for us to believe in somebody, we need to identify them, we need to say I believe in you, I want to invest and pour into you and how you do that is vitally important to the future, the success of your team and your business as we talked about in intern boot camp, there are three components to building the next level of leaders, the new generation leader if you will, and those three components are building healthy foundation. We want to build a foundation in our next level of leaders where they know what health looks like, what psychological safety looks like and how we can build on this to take this to the next level out of a place of deep self awareness are next level leaders can become adept at making strong decisions at a moments notice and replicate key leadership behaviors. So on a healthy foundation then we help them know themselves with a deep sense of self awareness. They are able to apply what they know about themselves to make sure they are bringing the best out of the people around them. We have to know ourselves and then we can lead ourselves. How do our own tendencies, our own ways of thinking about processing information? How do these impact our relationships with the people around us? Emotional intelligence is a key driving factor two new generation leadership to bringing your best. And that is the third component, leading yourself, leading yourself now based on a foundation of health and knowing yourself now you can lead yourself and carry this out into the world and the workplace around you. So on these three foundational components we take our key people, give them the tools that they need so that they can go out and succeed so they can be successful. And if we invest in our people in a way that they know they understand they recognize that we are investing in them then instead of promoting people to quickly we promote people right on time and our managers now know how to lead. Because we have a leadership bench, we have training for our team, we know how to train our team and because we’ve invested in our people, they’re not going anywhere. But as the leader of the team, as a leader in the organization, we have to accept that mantle of responsibility. We have to take on that key hallmark of workplace culture in building a strong team that we know we want to invest in the people around us. We want to say to the people around us, I believe in you and there are all sorts of ways we can do that. We can do that through interns, even having people come into our midst and investing in them for a season. I recognize in the back of the new generation leader, a few key interns who I remember Matt, taylor, Corbyn, Lindsay, Patrick, sarah Andrew another sarah, kino, timothy daniel turn in jewels luke for years and years in as many ways and as many in as many opportunities as possible. I’ve welcomed interns into our midst but I’ve also made sure that the team members who I’ve worked with have had an opportunity to grow and develop to take on a new skill set or to develop themselves as leaders. So how do we do this? We are doing this in a variety of ways. And I would invite you into an opportunity for yourself to take on that opportunity to grow yourself because you can’t give what you don’t possess, you’ve got to start with you. But if you want to believe in the people around you, invite them on this journey with you, give them an opportunity to jump into the new generation leader network, join our mastermind challenge and join our next mastermind cohort, join us on a journey. We are implementing this cohort in businesses so that teams who work together are on this journey together and the teams that are most productive, most efficient, most effective in doing this are the ones who the leaders from the top to the bottom, anyone has access To this pathway, anyone has access to this three part system, a building a healthy foundation, knowing themselves and beginning to lead themselves. And that’s a key hallmark that not many leadership development pathways adopt as I look back in my own life. There are opportunities I had where people invited me in, they gave me the keys to unlock my own potential, they gave me the keys to start investing in trying something on working on something, working on a project, developing myself and I have been in multiple leadership pathways and pipelines where we were able to reflect on ourselves. I’ve joked with numerous people that the list of leadership assessments and self awareness tools that I have used. I’ve developed a pretty lengthy list in Evernote and that list also has a condensed version because I realized at some point my self awareness was so deep that I needed a summary just to be able to remember all of this. But the key in our new generation leader process is that it’s not just about knowing about ourselves, but we need to be able to translate that to multiply that to let that live out beyond ourselves. We need to invest in the people around us. So as you think about those around you, whether it’s interns, whether its employees already on your team, whether it’s an employee, uh business owner, somebody else you are mentoring or have an opportunity to connect with. Are you letting people know that you believe in them? Are you setting them up for success? Calling them up to unlock their true potential? Are you calling them to that place? Are you highlighting that place for them? Are you looking at this as an opportunity for them? Not just for yourself? Not just for your business, but for the sake of the people around you? Are you truly unlocking their potential, their true and greatest potential that they have within them. If you unlock that potential, who knows what the possibilities will be? Who knows where those people will go and who knows at the end of the day, at the end of the year, at the end of the decade, who will come back to you and say, Hey, remember that conversation? Remember that season we had where I walked shoulder to shoulder with you and you invested in me and you poured into me? Remember that that changed my life? That’s the conversation I hope you get to have And I hope you start laying the groundwork now so that in 15 10, 20 years you will have more and more of those conversations as people come back to you believe in somebody, they’re worth it. They have that potential. Start unlocking that potential today, download the show notes for this episode at New Generation Leader dot com slash seven. Thanks for listening to episode seven. Believe in somebody, you know what we believe in you. I hope you will take the opportunity to believe in someone else. Okay. Mhm. Yeah, thanks for listening to the New Generation Leader podcast. Subscribe today on your favorite podcasting platform, ready to reach your true potential, join our network of like minded leaders in the New Generation Leader Mastermind Group, find all the tools you need. New generation Leader dot com. Thanks for listening today and we look forward to seeing you next time on the New Generation Leader podcast.

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