Podcast

The next wave of the pandemic is set to rewrite the landscape of the workforce. The return to the office building and in-person meetings will disrupt companies and upend teams.

The COVID-19 pandemic has pushed wave after wave worldwide, wreaking havoc in every corner of culture and work. When employees return to the office, it’s likely not to look anything like what they left.

Welcome to The New Generation Leader, Episode 14 – The New Wave of the Pandemic.

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Full Episode 14 Transcript

The COVID-19 Pandemic has pushed wave after wave worldwide wreaking havoc in every corner of culture and work. When employees returned to the office, it likely won’t look anything like what they left. The next wave of the pandemic is set to rewrite the landscape of the workforce. Change is hard enough, but when we don’t expect it then it’s that much harder. Welcome to Episode 14 of The New Generation Leader Podcast: The New Wave of the Pandemic.

Welcome to the New Generation Leader. We are giving you the tools you need to lead in the digital world. Ready to reach your true potential? Let’s get started. Welcome to The New Generation Leader Podcast.

Have you seen that meme floating around Linkedin and Twitter?

That’s the kind of work environment so many employees left in March of 2020 but, what will they go back to? That’s the million dollar question that we are asking right now. And watching company by company, client by client, it’s a big question mark of what the workforce is going to look like. And that’s what we’re going to dive into today in talking about the new wave of the pandemic.

Last year in 2020, Jeremie Kubicek described the pandemic as a tsunami. Not one massive wave but a tsunami is a series of significant waves that come ashore one after another. And he wrote, “Whether we realize it or not, we’ve been hit by a multi-set of tsunami waves that started with a global pandemic, which quickly spread to economic lockdowns, layoffs due to the economic declines and a U. S. Political presidential fight didn’t help, while social-justice waves merged in with the whole. We have experienced a global tsunami of wave after wave that has adjusted the way we live and the way we lead. Stress for many has been at an all-time high as people have experienced forced change. Change is hard enough but, when we don’t expect it, then it’s much harder.”

Looking at the waves of the pandemic through an employment lens, we see these phases of the impact to the workplace. Businesses closed their doors at the outset; they pushed their employees to work from home or had to cut employees altogether. After these initial closures stabilized, employers announced more layoffs and furloughs. When employers had a better grasp on recovery, many industries re-opened key positions and formalized their remote work processes. Now, with the recovery in full swing, new hiring rebounded and more businesses plan to reopen the office to all employees.

But now that the return to the office is on the horizon, it’s gonna drive monumental shifts all on its own. Shifts in expectations, patterns and job satisfaction. But many employees will never, in fact, return to the office because they’ll change jobs instead – if they haven’t already.

One local, Fortune 500 company has already announced to their employees plans to downsize: to sell property and, instead of everyone having their own desk, they’re going to move to one office building with shared space. There’s going to be a ripple effect. Some of our largest clients and local employers have schedules all over the place and the Delta Variant making it’s waves right now isn’t helping these plans.

The debates are running: How do we relaunch? What does this new phase look like? The more prolonged this uncertainty lingers, the greater the angst and pressure on employees’ engagement. Some companies are going back now, some waiting till’ the fall. Some are still trying to figure out if they even need to go back to the office. But here’s the big key for most employers, if the employer’s plan for returning to the office doesn’t line up with an employee’s expectations, the likelihood of this employee changing jobs and leaving the employer has likely never been higher than it is right now.

In 2020, we had monumental job losses. 21.9 million jobs were lost. Fast forward a year, the labor statistics from June of 2021, show that 850,000 new jobs have been posted. That’s less than 5% of the jobs that were lost. But, there’s a recovery. It’s happening. It hasn’t recovered job losses, but new opportunities are opening every day. And it’s easy to picture and imagine that the unemployed workers, those who lost their jobs in 2020, will pick up a new job in 2021 as it’s replaced. But the issue is probably going to be more complex. Rather than simply a 1:1 replacement, the employment cycle is set for a significant domino effect. And with this, the newest wave of the tsunami is about to hit.

The pandemic forced us to reflect on our rhythms and our patterns. It oriented are thinking in a different direction. In some cases, it directly impacted our brains for those who are affected by the virus and have still been fighting those impacts. The virus, the pandemic, this new environment pushed us to redefine our personal life goals. It brought us to more focused conversations, game nights at home, family dinners around the table, a closer-knit view of the community. We lived more intentionally, more tightly-knit with the people closest to us and we centered ourselves, again, around the power of our people. While this appears maybe too good to be true, too optimistic, too pollyannaish on the surface, Jason Pfeiffer, in The Build for Tomorrow Podcast says this is what our brains have done. It’s focused us on fading-affect bias. In short, well, I’ll let Jason tell you:

“Science has a term for this. It is called: fading-affect bias. In short, it means that bad memories fade faster than good memories.”

We are naturally wired already to have more positive memories from the impact of the pandemic, even for those of us who lost a family member, experienced illness in our inner circle, we still remember the better things from it. Jason says that’s not an accident. That’s, in fact, the way it’s supposed to be.

“I’ll translate that out of science-speak for you. Our brains do not even attempt to remember things perfectly. That is impractical. It is too much information and we couldn’t store it in our brains if we tried. Instead, our brains store what are like fragments of information. If you go on vacation, for example, the vacation is not retained in your brain as a singular memory like a film reel you can rewatch. Instead, a bunch of bits and pieces of it are stored separately And a year later, when you’re reminiscing about the vacation, you’re not remembering ‘the vacation’ in full. What you’re doing is your brain is literally reassembling those bits and pieces into a coherent narrative for you at the time. Like it’s not stored, it is reassembled, every time.”

And that’s what our brains are doing on the backside of the pandemic. As we continue into this new phase of recovery, though the impacts of the pandemic have been horrible, for all the friends, the family, the co workers and neighbors we lost to a horrific virus, our brains are wired to filter through the extreme and adverse events we’ve experienced and focus our memories on the more optimistic, positive outcomes. Even our negative views will take on a less negative perspective according to Pfeiffer’s discovery.

So as we push into the newest wave of the pandemic tsunami, our memories of the last year will influence our responses to the world around us. So as work turns to a new wave, there’s research now: The Prudential found that 1 in 4 employees – 1 in 4 – plan to look for a new job with a new employer once the pandemic is over. And more than 40% of the global workforce is considering leaving their employer this year. In another study, The Pulse of the American Worker, 49% of employees are worried about career growth pathways. Gallup’s 2020 Workplace Survey indicated only 30% of employees believe they have opportunities to grow.

All of a sudden, on the backside of the pandemic, questions are rising: What do I want to do next? Where do I want to go? Who do I want to become? What kind of career do I want to lay out for myself in the next 5, 10, 15 years? And the growth disconnect that we see right here will push many employees to explore their roles and opportunities to work in a new light in this post-pandemic world.

I want to take a look back in my own personal life to two, previous roles that I have held. One: I am an ordained minister. I talk about that in some crowds, in some audiences, when it’s applicable. And so I’ve spent a lot of my career around clergy, around ministers and local leaders of churches and faith communities. I want to look for a minute at clergy as ‘canaries in the coal mine.’ If you know the story of how coal miners used canaries as an indicator, – if there was an issue, the canaries would fall victim to any problem that was about to happen in the coal mine. If things got to an unsafe level, they would see the canaries fall. And I am wondering if clergy are a canary in the coal mine here as we are on the backside of the pandemic.

You know, every wave of the pandemic tsunami impacted clergy and faith leaders in their work. It raised questions about faith, belief. How we even have conversations about politics, race. How they cared for their parishioners in a dispersed environment – in an increasingly diverse environment – when they couldn’t get around a table. When they couldn’t have a conversation or gather in person. And the caretaking role of clergy parallels the posture of care offered by medical personnel but, in a less-urgent environment. There’s not the urgent crisis of saving a physical life right now, in this moment that medical personnel take on.

So while medical personnel shouldered the community’s burden to respond to the illness, The Pandemic, COVID-19, clergy were operating in a more abstract environment. They were providing immense care, but under a significant burden. They bore the brunt of complaints, conflict, and they finally said enough is enough. I don’t have to put up with this. I don’t have to be treated like this. And so now we’re watching a significant turnover take place in clergy and church-based ministers and support staff throughout the second half of 2020 and into 2021.

Anecdotally, personally, I have seen so many friends, former colleagues, make a change right now: an early retirement, leave a position, make a transition or change. They’ve been over-burdened and stressed by the tsunami waves and can more easily step aside without worrying about the survival of their clientele as medical personnel do. So, many have made a shift. But does this provide a foreshadowing of the workplace of 2022? I wonder. I wonder if this is a foreshadowing of things to come.

One of the things that we learned throughout the years in disaster response, which was my other role: as we interacted and connected with faith communities following natural disasters, we brought volunteers to help clean up – to make amends, to help residents and survivors get back on their feet and rebuild their communities. One of the things that we found was, just like we’re experiencing right now, on the backside of COVID-19, clergy increasingly turned over in their positions in a disaster-affected community within a few years after disaster. The burden of holding and caring for the people around them, the people closest to them, was taxing. It weighed on them significantly. And so, I want to turn our conversation to thinking about disasters:

“I am in Tappahannock this afternoon where our crews are getting started helping residents clean up here as you can see behind me. The destruction is significant: houses ripped to pieces, you can hear the chainsaws in the background.”

That was me in a social media post in 2016 after tornadoes devastated a community about an hour away from where I live. And I traveled to that site, I posted a video, because the destruction that that community saw was so staggering, so immense and I knew that people would want to offer their care: to provide support, encouragement and help that community rebuild. And, that was the case. Thousands of people watched that video clip that I shared through our organization at the time. So, thinking about this crisis, the COVID-19 Pandemic, through the lens of a disaster, and I want to go back to the idea of a tsunami. If a tsunami warning comes, and there was one just last week in Alaska. It often comes after an earthquake in the middle of an ocean or somewhere offshore. But the environment doesn’t always lend itself to a tsunami actually developing.

You know, the environment of our workplaces really has been on the brink of disaster for some time but the conditions weren’t optimal. Companies continued to survive, employees stayed in place and persisted despite concerns about culture and leadership. There have always been questions about workplace culture, job performance, satisfaction and employee benefits and investment are not new. But The Pandemic added the final ingredient to create this perfect storm.

So when a natural disaster strikes a community, the initial phase where I was on that day in Tappahannock Virginia after tornado, the initial phase focuses on ensuring life safety: Is everyone okay? Who needs treatment and care? And do you have a place to sleep tonight and a meal to eat and clothes on your back? The clean up then begins the long road to recovery. Tearing down trees as you heard in that clip, the chain saws buzzing in the background. How do we clean up the debris and help homeowners get back home? And once the cleanup has re-established a solid foundation to build on, that rebuilding effort begins. In most disaster-affected communities, that road to recovery can last up to two years. And after two years, the community finally, closely resembles the pre-disaster state but, in a new normal. Things will never be the same as they were before.

This disaster timeline applies to The Pandemic as well. In the initial phase of the pandemic, in March/April maybe May of 2020, the global response centered around stabilizing our neighbors’ health, safety and well being. And once we reach stable ground, we began to adjust and adapt. Things slowly began to reopen or reorient. The strict quarantines were dialed back a little bit. But many of us still worked from home. We were still working in a remote environment.

During the clean up after a disaster, remnants of the storm still linger: down, trees, flooded out homes, piles of contents cleaned out from these homes, sitting by the roadside. The Pandemic’s cleanup phase, maintained signs of the crisis as well: mask requirements, physical distancing, shuttered businesses awaiting their full reopening. With the vaccine, we’ve now entered a new phase of recovery. Now that we’ve experienced this reorienting shift, we can start building towards a recovery and that new normal. But as in a natural disaster, the recovery period will last considerably longer than that initial relief phase. And what we find at the end of this road, will look different than what we ever would have expected.

Many employees have taken an introspective look at their world in the recovery phase and throughout this process. They’ve evaluated their lives; their hopes may not be the same as what motivated them pre-pandemic. They may desire opportunities beyond their current job, which, could push them into new frontiers, new opportunities.

So here are three things that we found in the lives of employees during the recovery. One, employees found their passion. As we adapt to our surroundings and employment situations, we tend to learn, grow, change and, at times, stop doing (or close off) our true passions. Even having kids limits are free time for our personal pursuits. Extended workdays, busy schedules can stifle our ability to continue pursuing our dreams and recharging our batteries. I

n the changing pace of the early pandemic, our newfound free time, opened possibilities to find new passions, training new technology or skills. Despite the challenging nature of The Pandemic, as Build for Tomorrow reminded us, we put aside the highly-negative impacts and we recall the positive changes. When employees discovered a passion different from their role within the company, this opened the door to changing what the recovery phase looked like for them. The second area is employees gained clarity on their personal priorities. So, they discovered their passion, then they gained clarity on their priorities. New paces, rhythms, schedules brought on by cancelled events, a slow paced home-centric, community oriented world. It aligned our awareness to our physical space, the people around us and our sense of purpose. It wasn’t all good but, we tend to remember the better lessons from that season. And the shifting obligations during The Pandemic, opened the door of possibility and it allowed a deep, introspective look, finding a new passion. For some, their energy around key relationships, personal values and internal drivers provided the push to make a change.

Now, we’ve got the ripple effect of what’s new. For the dreamers, the visionaries, the networkers, The Pandemic opened pathways to invent, adapt and implement. As these individuals found new passions, gained clarity on their priorities, pushed their business through a virtual environment into new geographic regions. Implementing these new plans means closing the door of a previous role or function. Perhaps the new launch is a brand new company, a role in a different industry or a shift to an employer with other priorities. Regardless of the why, the trickle-down means employees will be leaving. What employees want is going to drive them: remote work, less commute, different location, different mission. And for many of them, there’s nothing you can do to keep them on board.

So where do we go next? How do we survive and thrive through this latest wave of the pandemic? Leaders are telling our team of coaches every day about the mounting responsibilities, the need to accomplish more with less, with fewer resources, with fewer people, with unfilled rolls on their teams. And they’re telling us about the ever-growing burden and stress on the backs of employees and teams who have stayed. “Now you’re telling us we may have to do even more with even less?” they ask. We are resilient as people, but we can’t do this on our own. When we build new teams, even changing one person, adding a new person, removing just one person, we, functionally, have a new team. And if you experience this across every team in your organization, the impact will be significant. The opportunity to build a radically successful, thriving organization is right in front of you, i you will seize it. You can build a resilient team.

So here’s four things that we’re encouraging teams, leaders and organizations to consider in this season.

1. Ask: “Who are you?” Don’t just reflect on this for yourself, but ask this for every person in your organization: “Who are you?” Help your team discover their true sense of self. “What drives you everyday? When a team member steps down, filling in gaps, will you push outside of your own comfort zone? Don’t lose what makes you uniquely you. Spend time outlining your growth potential. Understand who you can become. Let’s have a conversation, talk about a growth plan and get yourself on a solid foundation to make sure you know where you’re headed, what you can do to get there, and what barriers, hurdles and gaps may stand in the way.
2. Second, you’ve got to focus on this team. Remember, even losing or adding one person drastically changes the environment of your team. The threat of the possibility of even losing one, can change the relational dynamics. High-performing teams build on 5, key performance indicators. If you try to start working and producing immediately, working harder day after day, your team will never unlock its true potential. The dynamics each person brought from their previous team will create conflict and discord and the results will be less than you dreamed or imagined. Spend some time building your team. We’ve got a great 5 Voices Boot Camp that can help you do that in 90 minutes. Once you uncover, as you work on building your team, we’ll take your team to new heights, we’ll reinforce the environment that your team has, the culture that your team has and take your team to new heights that are only possible if you’re intentional.
3. One thing that you learn in that team focus is keeping an eye towards your long-range planning. That’s our third goal for teams right now in this season. Leverage your dreamers, find out who your dreamers are and keep your eyes looking at 2022, 2025 and beyond. Our natural reaction is to return to normal after The Pandemic but we will never return to the world of January 1, 2020. We won’t do it. Just like after a disaster, the end of that road to recovery is a new normal and a new normal is coming. So how are you preparing for it? Keep dreaming, keep your head up, find your dreamers on your team and help them take you to new heights.
4. And then the last, but not least: you need a rapid hiring process. You need to remove all doubt with the increasing complexity of how many people we are trying to put in fill roles on our teams throughout organizations. The hiring process is cutthroat right now. How can you hire faster and with greater efficiency and a greater indicator of success with that person in that role? Rebuilding your hiring process with a behavioral assessment can ensure you build a robust position profile, that you know exactly who you need for this role and you hire a candidate who best matches what you need in that role to accomplish what you need. As much as the headlines and hallway banter keep telling us The Pandemic is over, we are going to feel the ripple effects for decades to come. What would happen on your team if 40% of your team members left? That’s what we’re facing right now as people are looking to change their roles, to change their level of investment, to get to new heights in their own personal lives. And what you do, as you focus on the possibilities ahead, if you do it well, if you do it intentionally, you can accomplish more in this period than in any other period of your life or your business. Great days are ahead. Be intentional. You got this.

Make sure you visit newgenerationleader.com/14 for Show Notes and a full transcript of today’s episode: The New Wave of the Pandemic.

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 at newgenerationleader.com.

Thanks for listening today and we look forward to seeing you next time on The New Generation Leader Podcast

The culture you build will leave a trail of artifacts, either positive or negative, which have an impact on performance and the bottom line.

So what kind of artifacts does your team leave in its tracks?

Leaders define culture, so the opportunity to increase team performance is in your hands. Let’s dive into our conversation today with Tim Perseo, a New Jersey-based consultant focused on building high-performing, flourishing teams focused on Purpose, Personal Growth and Positive Relationships.

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Shibumi Shade

The self-proclaimed (and Aaron-affirmed) “World’s Best Beach Shade.” Wind-powered, lightweight, easy to set up, and provides shade for everyone. Designed and sewn in America!

WorkLife With Adam Grant: The Science of Productive Conflict

Think Again by Adam Grant

Discover Your Voice

Everyone Speaks. Not Everyone is Heard.

You have a leadership voice. Discover it today.

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What are the artifacts of your culture?

Tim Perseo

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Support-Challenge Matrix

Leader Mirror

Full Episode 13 Transcript

The culture you build will leave a trail of artifacts, either positive or negative, which have an impact on performance and your bottom line. So what kind of artifacts does your team leave in its tracks? Leaders define culture. So the opportunity to increase team performance is in your hands. Let’s dive into today’s conversation with Tim Perseo. Welcome to The New Generation Leader, Episode 13: Leaders Define Culture.

Welcome to The New Generation Leader. We’re giving you the tools you need to lead in the digital world. Ready to reach your true potential? Let’s get started. Welcome to The New Generation Leader Podcast.

Aaron: Alright Tim, welcome to the show today. Glad to have you. Looking forward to our conversation. Tell us a little about yourself: where you are, what you do, who you serve.

Tim: I’m Tim Perseo. I am a GiANT consultant based in New Jersey. I serve mainly non-profits and healthcare companies. I have been with GiANT for about 2. 5 years now and have really enjoyed the transformation that it’s created in my life and hope to help people create high performing, flourishing teams.

Aaron: Awesome. And The 5 Voices is one of the tools that we use as a foundational tool. If you’re listening and you haven’t taken The 5 Voices, you can take that assessment. We’ll put the link in the show notes. Tim, what’s your voice order?

Tim: So my voice order is Connector / Creative / Nurturer. I used to wonder why people wouldn’t seem to get my ideas or understand what I’m trying to say. And then when I realized I was a Connector / Creative, I realized, you know, I can actually either 1. Sow my ideas more passionately or 2. When it comes back with criticism, when someone else comes back in with criticism or critique of my idea to know that it’s not about me, it’s actually about some things that are going to work in this idea. So I’ve learned to be a little more gracious in incorporating feedback. So there’s a little plug for The 5 Voices, it is really transformational and I would encourage you to take it.

Aaron: Yeah, it’s been really interesting in working with individual leaders like you said. It gives us something to continue that learning process, to develop some self-awareness about ourselves, but it’s also been transformational in relationships. Family relationships, my kids starting to understand their voice orders, my wife and I how we interact with our kids and also with the people we work with. Family members, in non profits, in serving the community. It’s a great, great tool that opens up lots of doors not only for the self-awareness but also the others’ awareness of how we collaborate more effectively.

Tim: Yeah. Know yourself to lead yourself and then know others to lead others.

Aaron: Yeah. Fantastic. All right Tim so one of the phrases we throw around a lot is “Leaders define culture.” When you hear “leaders define culture,” what comes to mind?

Tim: Well, the first thing that comes to mind is one of our foundational tools which is called the Support Challenge Matrix. So you can think about two lines dividing into four quadrants and the two lines are Support and Challenge. We want to be liberating leaders, we want to create a liberating culture. So we want to create high support and high challenge for everyone we’re leading, but that doesn’t come naturally to anybody. So, some people are really good with support but not really good at challenge. So they tend to be protectors and create a protector culture where there’s maybe mistrust or entitlement, maybe critique or resentment that will explode all at once at some some point. And that creates mistrust. Like can I really trust that the leader says it’s okay because you know, they just blew up last Thursday about this – this one thing that’s been going on for a while. That’s over in the protector quadrant, that’s where I fall a lot of the time. I’ll get to that maybe a little bit later in a later time. But then the other quadrant is high challenge and low support and that’s a dominating culture. That creates a lot of fear and manipulation. People don’t do things because they want to, they’re more afraid of what’s gonna happen if they don’t. And you know, that’s not really healthy either. It’s really, both protector cultures and dominator cultures are toxic cultures. And then you’ve got an Advocator who would provide neither support nor challenge. Usually this is when you have someone who’s burnt out and that’s you know, a culture of apathy and low expectation and nothing gets done. Obviously there’s no growth at all. So it’s about calibrating high support and high challenge. And when we look at our culture, do we find domination or people are afraid? Is there a lot of manipulation happening? Is their mistrust of the leader? Do people not say what they really mean? Or, do they feel entitled? Is there not much happening on that front? Or are people just burnt out and kind of just don’t care, you know? And then we can take that and look at the leader, whether that’s yourself or someone else, and use it as a self awareness tool. So that’s what I usually think of when I think of how leaders defined culture.

Aaron: Yeah, that’s really interesting to hear you talk about the Support Challenge Matrix because it’s always interesting hearing someone else described from their own perspective. And so you said, you would find yourself in the Protect Quadrant and we’ll drop a picture of this tool in the Show Notes. I naturally reside in the Dominate Quadrant as a Pioneer, that’s where I’m coming from. There’s always a level of expectation that it could be better. And so I’m naturally going to push and try to raise the bar. And so I love hearing about that from a different perspective. And what’s interesting is, as I look back through teams I’ve worked with, organizations I’ve worked with, teams I’ve worked in, I’ve been around all of these kinds of teams and organizations and cultures. And so what would you say is the leader’s first step to understanding how they can define a non-toxic culture?

Tim: First of all, you need to know your yourself and your own tendencies. So, again, something like The 5 Voices Assessment, is great. Or just looking at what you tend to do in terms of support and challenge. Are you more on the “ra-ra”, you know, get everybody excited, give them appreciation, encouragement? Or are you more of the setting expectations? You know, adhering to the rules, making sure people adhere to the rules? Those are just examples of different support-challenge behaviors. So, when when you can understand which you tend to do more of, you can figure out what the, you can almost plot yourself towards support and challenge and then you can figure out what we need to go. So, for myself as a Protector, I need to remind myself to constantly be giving more challenge in different scenarios. And, Aaron, you as a Dominator, I would imagine are going to need to give more and more support. And, you’re laughing. Did you want to do something about that? Since I called you on that on the carpet?

Aaron: Hey, that is absolutely the truth. We just celebrated our 13th wedding anniversary and my wife will call me on this on the spot that I’m not being very nurturing in certain moments, either with her or with the kids and that reminder from, from myself or from somebody else, like you said, plotting yourself and simply having that reminder: whether that’s somebody else giving it to you or an internal reminder of how we, as you’ve talked about, know yourself to lead yourself. If we know ourselves better, we can lead ourselves from a more healthy posture and to lead ourselves into that healthier place also allows us to lead others to a healthier place.

Tim: Yeah, absolutely. So, just figuring out which… almost like two levers: like which lever do you need to boost a little bit more in different situations? And then another great thing to tangibly do, is to ask people one-on-one or just in an appropriate environment, however, whatever your relationship is like with that person. Maybe your direct reports, and say, “Hey, what does support and challenge look like to you? What are the things that I do for you that look like support? What are some things that look like challenge to you? And what can I do better in those areas?” I might be encouraging someone in a specific way, but they don’t need encouragement, they just need more clear direction from me and that’s support to them. So support and challenge looks different for different people and you want to get really specific about the people on your team, or in your organization if you’re at the top of an organization, to figure out what it looks like to be a liberating culture for them. And this is gonna differ from person to person, team to team, organization to organization and really industry the industry too, because some industries are high challenge, so they need high support from their leaders.

Aaron: Yeah, that’s such a hard, challenging environment to be in… to have an established culture, that even like you just said is almost industry-wide and, depending on the industry can go either protect or dominate. But to have that be so commonly accepted, almost makes it more difficult to overcome and to change the narrative and to change the culture because we become just so accustomed to how it’s always been done.

Tim: Yes. Yeah. This is kind of cyclical in that way in that the culture around us or the industry around us, can sort of create different types of leaders as well. And then those leaders sort of reinforce that culture. So you know, just look at the look at the results. You know, you can see the culture by what it’s creating. It’s creating people who are burnt out, exhausted and, you know, afraid and feeling manipulated then okay, that’s a symptom of the culture. You can call it like artifacts – things that you can look at tangibly and you can dig a little deeper and figure out where they’re coming from. If you’re, you know, you’re not getting anywhere, people are, you know, protecting themselves all the time, you probably have a protector culture and you look at that and you dig underneath and figure out what sort of patterns or behaviors that are underneath that. And then, you know, it’s all about as a leader: What would a high performing and flourishing culture look like for your people? And what direction do you want to move from there?

Aaron: That’s great. I love that word, the artifacts. And I was just having a conversation this morning with a client that we’ve been working with and when we first talked to the the business leaders, 6-8 months ago, I quoted one of the Gallup Studies that we often talk about related to a turnover being detrimental. And so, when, as we’ve talked about today, the culture becomes toxic, those artifacts become part of our everyday system and environment. And so we end up having turnover which costs us money because we have to train more people and keep back-filling, we have lost productivity when those seats are empty, then eventually we get somebody new on board but we have to get them up to speed. So we threw that out 6-8 months ago to this team and said: So this is what could happen, but it’s not your reality. Well, just within the last few weeks, an entire division of their company resigned. Every team member in an entire division. And and I think it’s now one of those artifacts that they need to work through, they need to think about. And, sometimes it takes, just like we talked about with all of our tools, our tools are a mirror; let me show you this and what do you see about yourself in the mirror? But in saying that, there’s, very specifically, one tool that is actually a picture of a mirror. Can you talk a little bit about The Leader Mirror? That’s one of my all-time favorite tools to use and talk about.

Tim:Yeah, we like to say that ‘we all have broccoli in your teeth.’ And, you can imagine, just being at a dinner party with a big spear of broccoli in your teeth, and if someone, you know at the end of the night, finally points that out to you, you’re thinking like: Oh my gosh! How long has that been there? Well, the same thing with our tendencies. We all have them and we’ve been walking around our whole life with them. Or maybe just most of our life with them and we’ve developed them at some point in our life. But, The Leader Mirror is really choosing to look in the mirror, whether someone gives you some sort of feedback or, you’re looking at your organization and looking at the behaviors in your organization, and you’re choosing to look at the broccoli in your teeth and you have an opportunity to do something about that. So, you know, a few specific things is, whether you’re proactive or reactive. So whether you’re going to actually go ahead and and plan and be the person acting or you’re going to just be more passive and react to everything. Whether you’re going to be accidental or intentional. So, whether you’re gonna actually look at the reality that you have, that you’re in and you’re going to make plans and, you know, be aware of yourself and others. Or, you’re just going to show up and hope for the best all the time. And then the third one is consistency or being inconsistent. So it’s not enough to just be intentional with just your team and then you come home and then your accidental all the time or be intentional in your community outreach and all of that, but then you are really accidental with yourself and your your mental health, personal health, whatever. You have to be consistent across all of those areas. I’m choosing to look in the mirror and seeing where am I in terms of being intentional? Where am I in terms of being consistent? Where am I in terms of being intentional consistent? And the third one, what am I missing? Proactive? There you go. Thank you. Yeah, there you go. That’s what it’s like to look in The Leader Mirror.

Aaron: That’s awesome. That’s one tool that was, it was really the first tool that I learned in leadership from one of my first supervisors before GiANT was even GiANT or the tools were tools, he asked us that question of: What’s it like to be on the other side of you and answering those questions? And I think as leaders, when we have these conversations in the workplace, I hear from clients, from professionals, from participants and 5 Voices Workshops all the time: ‘Well, I’m this way at work and I’m this way at home, so which way truly am I?’ And, in some ways, we’re probably trying to be someone, we’re not in one of those environments. Because we are truly, our 5 Voices will help us understand ourselves, our wiring, our tendencies across the board, anywhere. Depending on industries, they may push us into activity that’s not in our wheelhouse or our comfort zone, but it’s important for us to really understand ourselves, our own tendencies, and to look in the mirror at work, at home, in the community, with family, with friends, no matter where we are, that we are always intentional, bringing our best, proactive. So that’s awesome. All right Tim, last, final question today: What’s the most impactful resource – book, podcast – what’s been on your mind lately that you’ve been telling everybody else about?

Tim: I’m a Connector so this is supposed to be easy for me.

Aaroon: All right. So, so while you’re thinking, let me give my two. We just got back from a week at the beach and my number one that I’ve been referring so many people to is the Shibumi Shade. It’s a compact tent that you unfold the polls and has a canopy that blows in the breeze. And so you tie off the pole, and the breeze does the work, which means we’ve lost a lot of tents on the beach – either to rust or the wind picks them up, blows them away and they come crashing down and you can’t use them again. But the Shibumi is seriously my happy place wherever I put that thing up. And so you just set that up and face the beach and I’m in my happy place when I’m under the Shibumi. I’ll put a picture in the Show Notes so you can see it. The other one is Malcolm Gladwell’s podcast. It’s so fascinating. Obviously Malcolm Gladwell is phenomenal. I love all of his work, but I’ll link to Revisionist History.

Tim: I love that podcast as well, and I listen to the one that you’re talking about Collecting Government and that’s a great podcast that does kind of touch on this idea of leaders and their tendencies and behaviors and how that defines the team and culture as well. So I will second that. So, since we’re doing, you know, recommendations about things that aren’t necessarily leadership, the one thing that has just like got me really excited this whole, you know, last seven months, my brother got me a pair of Air Pod Pros (which is what I’m wearing currently) for Christmas and it’s been like one of the best things that I’ve gotten. For one thing, I love taking walks because, you know, I love just being able to think and reflect and having these around while I’m doing that enables me to number one, listen to things that kind of feed my intellectual side but then also just like be able to like take notes and stuff just by talking to Siri and all that. So, just a good pair of wireless earbuds. And then, in terms of what to listen to, you mentioned Malcolm Gladwell but also another thinker that I really like is Adam Grant and he has a podcast called Work Life. He talks a lot about work culture – that’s part of it. He’s an Organizational Psychologist so he talks about the real brainy stuff behind what we talk about here. A particular podcast that he had recently on a recent season was about conflict and how to create a culture that resolves conflict. And, you know, he starts with interpersonal one on one and then he talks about how to scale that up to an entire organization. And that one was really eye opening for me as well as someone who likes to avoid conflict quite often.

Aaron: That’s awesome. I just read one of his books, I hadn’t read anything by him, but I just read Think Again and there was lots in there, like you said, the organizational psychology behind what we talk about and how we are leading teams to be more efficient, more effective to handle conflict, interesting. He had a whole section in there. I was just talking to somebody about how we approach rethinking – circling back around to the Support Challenge Matrix, our openness and willingness to recognize that maybe we are wrong or misguided or off point. Our openness, our willingness to approach something, to reconsider, re-think our posture and our perspective opens the door that is truly the psychological safety as Google found in Project Aristotle that creates an environment where people thrive. So lots of great stuff there, we’ll link to all those episodes and books in the show notes as well. Tim, thanks so much for your time. Thanks for spending some time on The New Generation Leader today and we’ll look forward to having you back soon.

Tim: Thanks Aaron. Glad to be here.

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 at newgenerationleader.com. Thanks for listening today, and we look forward to seeing you next time on The New Generation Leader Podcast.

Have you wondered why your rising leaders just don’t deliver the way you do?

What if they aren’t the problem? What if you’re too accidental?

Welcome to The New Generation Leader, Episode 12 – Your Leadership Is Not An Accident.

Download the Leadership Toolkit eBook

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Growing to Intentionality

1. Ranking Your Circles

Rank your circles of influence from the areas in which you believe you are most intentional to the ones in which you are least intentional (i.e. accidental).

2. Take Some Time to Reflect on What It’s Like to Be on the Other Side of You

Hold up a mirror to yourself and think about the following:

• What is it like to be led by you?
• What is it like to be loved by you? Do you love some people in your life differently than others? If true, how so?
• What tendencies do you have that build others up or bring them down? Are those tendencies increasing or decreasing your influence with them?

3. Determine Your Action

Determine one thing you can do in each circle of influence to become more intentional with the people/work in your life over the next week. These can be one-time situations, such as apologizing to someone you have hurt, or they can constitute entirely new habits you can begin to implement for greater health, intentionality, and freedom in every area of your life.

Daily Examen

This is a preview of the Examen exercise in Session 4 of the Intensive:

Set aside 10-15 minutes at the day to do the following:

1. Shut everything else down in your world so there are no distractions.
2. Review your day and highlight the 2-4 really good, specific things that happened today.
3. Go back through your calendar and reflect on what you did today.
4. If you find anything that is a tendency or pattern, use a Tendency Log to track it.

The Intensive

Session 1: Story

Your Story is an account of your life and how it has shaped who you are today in terms of how you live, lead, and make decisions. This is the first step to Knowing Yourself to Lead Yourself more effectively.

Session 2: Voice

Everyone has a Voice – a unique style of thinking, leading, and communicating. But most don’t fully understand or utilize it effectively. We use a method called the 5 Voices to help you understand your foundational Voice and how to adapt to use different Voices to connect more effectively with different people.

Session 3: Choice

We will identify your core motivations and drivers (positive and negative) that most impact your decision-making.
Session 4: Rhythm

We will help you build a healthy, effective, and sustainable rhythm for your life and work so you can bring your best in every area of your life.
Session 5: Relationships

We will identify the relationships that are most important to your life and work and help you take them to the next level.

Session 6: Game Plan

Your action plan to bring this all together and put into practice your most important takeaways.

Support-Challenge Matrix

Full Episode 12 Transcript

Have you ever wondered why your rising leaders just don’t deliver the way you do? What if they aren’t the problem? What if you’re too accidental?Welcome to The New Generation Leader, Episode 12 “Your Leadership is Not an Accident.”

Welcome to The New Generation Leader. We’re giving you the tools you need to lead in the digital world. Ready to reach your true potential? Let’s get started. Welcome to The New Generation Leader Podcast.

This is a powerful question I have been pondering, thinking about reflecting on these past few weeks. What are those unique traits – that are so strong in our own minds and our own habits in our own rhythms – that we think “Doesn’t everybody think this way?” when the reality is only a small portion of the rest of the population sees things even remotely similar to the way we see the world.

Everything that we talk about here on The New Generation Leader Podcast is about giving you the tools you need to become a leader worth following. For you to unlock your potential. We talk about this in a few words and phrases: liberating leadership, fighting for the highest possible good of those you lead. We don’t want you to be a leader who has to be followed. We want you to be a leader worth following. And becoming a leader like this, really boils down to knowing when to bring an appropriate amount of support, encouragement, training resources to other people, but also when to call your people up to a higher level of work or conduct. Accountability, standards, deadlines – those sorts of things. The best leaders, the best leaders, those who create a culture of empowerment and healthy growth, these are the leaders who learn how to calibrate an appropriate degree of these two ingredients. Both support and challenge.

So in our Show Notes, you’re gonna see an image that we call the Support Challenge Matrix. We want to get you to the top right corner. We want to get you to become a liberating leader, fighting for the highest possible good, helping your team unlock their potential, reach the stars reach what they were born and made to do and become that leader worth following. But, in order to become a leader worth following, you have to go through some steps, you have to do some work yourself.

You have to be intentional. You have to be intentional about your own growth, your own path, your own development, and how you go about working on this lifelong pursuit of self awareness. This is, as we say, the one school that you will never graduate from. You cannot get a degree or a certificate in self awareness. Part of this comes in because our teams, the people around us, are constantly changing themselves. They are learning, they are growing, they are developing, they are adapting and we are responding to those changes every day. But we are also adding new people or taking team members away. And the relational dynamics shift and adjust on those lines at a moment’s notice. So we must constantly adapt and adjust throughout our lives.

But, despite all of the books, all of the resources, all of the classes and workshops that are out there about self awareness, how many people truly understand the importance of being accidental versus being intentional in developing a sense of self awareness and putting that learning into action so you can do something different with it?

I’ll give you a peek inside my own mind, inside my own world. This is one of my favorite new tools and it comes from our intensive process. We’re going to talk about the intensive later in the show, but in one of our sessions about our rhythm, we have this exercise called Examen and it’s about creating a rhythm, a milestone in your day to reflect back on what occurred. And there’s some great questions and it encourages us to spend, say 10-15 minutes at the end of each day and reflect on how your day went.

What specific milestones and markers offered support, offered challenge that you needed to reflect on. Maybe you needed to give thanks. Maybe you needed to offer an apology as we’ve talked about with the five gears. That’s an important, powerful component we can bring into our world and our relationships. Going back through your calendar and searching yourself, reflecting as I’ve talked about on the radio show and now on the Podcast. My favorite end of your activity is to go back through the calendar and see: What did I accomplish this year? But what if we did that each day? What if we look back on our day and reflected on what we had accomplished?

But here’s my favorite activity that’s part of this Examen exercise. The exercise is to create a no yourself to lead yourself tendency log. What are the things that you tend to do? What are the habits, the choices that you make that always tend to go in a certain direction and if you don’t like it, mark it down in the tendency log, work on it. If you do like it, mark it down, make a note of it and learn more about why you do things this way. The choices you can make and how you can adapt and adjust to build towards a brighter tomorrow. Your self awareness game, if you are truly being intentional, your self awareness, growth and journey is never going to end. So how can you maximize this? And this is what we do with this Examen exercise.

So, becoming a leader worth following is a journey that begins with being intentional. You have to be willing to look in the mirror even to let others hold up a mirror for you, which is part of our coaching process so that you can see: what is it like to be on the other side of me? People don’t want to follow accidental leaders because accidental leaders are leaders who have to be followed. Again, we want to develop, we want to build, we want to unlock your true potential so that you can be a leader worth following.

What’s it like to be led by you? What’s it like to be loved by you? What tendencies do you have that build others up or bring them down? And are these tendencies increasing or decreasing your influence right along with them? So, what is the path to liberating leadership? It’s a challenge to be this honest with yourself and the people around you. It requires being secure, secure enough in who you are.

But, also the humility to be able to commit to a process of uncovering your weaknesses, reinforcing your strengths and become the best person and leader you can be in all areas of your life. But, unfortunately, our tendencies don’t really change. They don’t go away. Our tendencies are our tendencies for a reason. If you think about yourself, you may have a persona you feel like you carry with you, you may have friends or family members and you think: “Ah, yes they are the ones at the party who are go get them, out there. They meet people all the time.” Or, “this one’s the flighty one or this one is the forgetful one or this one is the ambitious and driven one.”

All of us have these tendencies: some of them are good, some of them are challenging. But we all, with intentionality, humility and conscious repeated effort, we have an opportunity to make different choices and to change our default patterns to change how we normally respond to a situation. The best leaders out there are intentional about this process. They are devoted to this exercise of Examen or something similar. At the beginning of each day, at the end of each day where they can hold up themselves, look in the mirror and consider, where have I been?, where am I going?, and how can I be more intentional in getting there?

But here’s the reality: The reality is all of us have an opportunity to ask these questions in five different areas of our lives. And we’ve merged these two together. And so you’ll see in the Show Notes, The Five Circles of Influence actually show us each of the five circles and this decision: are we being intentional or are we being accidental? You have an opportunity with yourself, your family, your team, your organization, or your community. You have a choice in a decision to make whether your actions and intentionality, leave a positive or a challenging effect on all of those around you.

So how can we be intentional with ourselves? I play a pretty powerful mind game with myself. Sometimes, dominating myself (going back to the Support Challenge Matrix) and beating myself up. Questioning, doubting, raising questions about myself to myself. We have that ability in our mindset in our framework, in how we approach every day with ourselves. That’s not even getting into the relationships around us.

But then we get into family. And a lot of times, what happens in our family circle, influences how we show up in every other circle. It influences how we see ourselves and it can be a vicious cycle: if we are not treating our family well, we in turn can carry that into other work situations, team situations, and even into how we view ourselves.

Every one of these layers of our circle requires us to ask: Am I being intentional? Am I fighting for the highest possible good of those I lead, including myself, my family, my team, my organization, and out in the community? You can’t truly be a leader worth following in one area and not be in another. You want to set an example. You want to be a leader worth following in every level of influence. Plenty of executives and organizational leaders excel in their roles at work. They may even be revered and loved by the wider community. But sometimes when you dig deep, you find a great deal of trouble at home or an absentee parent who doesn’t know their kids simply because they chose to be intentional at work but accidental in their approach to family.

No matter how you look at it, intentional leadership isn’t for the faint of heart. You have to be intentional. This can’t be default mode. Accidental leadership is the same as default mode. We’ve got to make some customizations: we’ve got to work hard, we’ve got to put in the effort.

Default mode is easy. It’s reactionary. It doesn’t require us facing our weaknesses, digging up our our past or our tendencies or even growing and learning. It certainly doesn’t require inviting other people in to challenge us in that process. But the truth is, most leadership fails because the leader is inconsistent, accidental and succumbs too easily to the whims of self preservation and knee jerk reactions, the angry outbursts, the hiding or glossing over something that’s less than stellar. This is accidental leadership.

We want to be consistent, we want to be deliberate. We want to be intentional. Intentional, consistent leadership brings health both to you as a leader and as a person. And when you become healthy, your relational influence grows dramatically. Then guess what happens? You start winning. Your team starts winning, your family, starts winning your community starts winning. You actually start feeling at peace with yourself. And with that security, comes confidence and humility, which makes people begin to respect you even more. And that is what it means to become a leader worth following.

So, we’ve included some reflection questions in the Show Notes for you at newgenerationleader.com/12. But I want to introduce you to our intensive process. This incredible six-step journey can take you into a deliberate pathway of exploring and understanding yourself and your leadership. Really pressing in to the self awareness that you need to understand, that you need to grow through. And as I mentioned, this Examen exercise that I highlighted is part of this intensive.

So here’s the six parts. The six parts start with your story. What is it about who you are, where you grew up, all of the aughts and shoulds of nurture that you have picked up along the way, all of those factors influence who you are, how you lead, how you show up each and every day. And so we want to understand your story because your history and your past play a powerful influence every day and how you make decisions and how you lead.

And second, with that, is the power of your voice. Everyone has a voice a unique style of thinking, leading and communicating. But most of us don’t fully understand or utilize our voice effectively. And so we use this method called The Five Voices to help you understand your foundational voice, your natural born strengths. And how to adapt to use different voices to connect more effectively to build influence with the people around you.

So we kick off with those two powerful components and we round out the beginning with choice. We’ll identify your core motivators, your drivers, both positive and negative, that most impact your decision making. And so after those three sessions, we have a powerful picture of how your life has shaped your current experience, how your voice, your mindset, your thinking, leading and communicating influence you every day, and how the choices that you make are driving you each and every day to make certain decisions, to respond to situations in a certain way.

And then we look at three incredible areas: rhythm, relationships, and your game plan. And your rhythm, we want to now take what we’ve learned in the first three sessions and help you build a healthy, effective, sustainable rhythm for your life and work so that you can bring your best in every area of life.

Then, in relationships, we want to identify the relationships that are most important to your life and work and help you take them to the next level. In each of these circles of influence that we’ve talked about today, there are key people in your life and we want to help you take those relationships to the next level. We want you to improve, to grow, to fight for the highest possible good of those people around you. You have that opportunity through these relationships.

And then in our game plan, we want to put this all together. We want to bring it all into one place and put it into practice. Get your most important takeaways from this experience and make a game plan for your future growth so that you can put into practice and you can start working towards your personal goals as a leader worth following. Now this 12 hour experience. At times, we will do in 12 straight hours. Not literally 12 straight hours, but in a 24 hour period We’re going to spend 12 hours together and in 24 hours we’re gonna knock this out and change how you see yourself and the world around you.

I have other clients who we are working together on a game plan through coaching and each time we get together, we’re going to tackle another one of these sessions. Sometimes we start off with one or two maybe story and voice just to get a quick start right out of the gate and then we go once a month or each time we connect, we go through another module.

But the point is that we don’t want to waste the time that we have. We don’t want to waste the incredible capital that we have in the relationships around us. We want to be able to invest fully and completely in every circle of influence. We want to be intentional with ourselves, our family, our team, our organization, and our community. And one of the best ways that we have figured out to do this, is to better understand ourselves, which happens in an intensive. It sets you up to be able to bring your best each and every day so that you can help unlock the leader worth following in every person you lead.

In the Show Notes, we’ve got a link to more information about the intensive. Check that out: newgenerationleader.com/12. Download all the tools we’ve talked about today: The Support Challenge Matrix, The Intentional vs. Accidental View of the Five Circles of Influence and information about the intensive. Give some thought to that. If you’re interested in taking your leadership to the next level, there is no better way to do that than through an intensive and we will make it fit your schedule, your rhythm so that we can bring the best, unlock your potential and take you to your potential of being a leader worth following.

Well, thanks for listening to Episode 12 of The New Generation Leader Podcast, “Your Leadership is Not an Accident.” I hope you leave today knowing that your leadership is not an accident. You can be intentional and when you are intentional, each and every day, every minute of every day, in every circle of influence in your life, you will take that influence to a new height, to a new potential and unlock relationships and insights that you never knew were possible.

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 at newgenerationleader.com. Thanks for listening today and we look forward to seeing you next time on The New Generation Leader Podcast.

Your Relational Competitive Advantage

Have you ever considered that your best competitive advantage could be relational?

In an age where information is free and global connectivity puts the brilliance of far flung colleagues and gurus at everyone’s fingertips, how do you gain a competitive advantage?

“Most of us focus on how much we know, but the ability to connect and be present in the midst of tasks is what sets leaders apart.”

– Fast Company article featuring the 5 Gears book

The traditional career advancement model focuses heavily on IQ for “corporate ladder climbing” – that is, it prioritizes hard skills and measured intelligence benchmarks for promotion. However, in this new world where everyone has access to the same information and specialized skills are becoming less exclusive, your greatest asset lies in your ability to connect with people to form lasting, positive relationships. In that sense, the information economy has inadvertently given rise to the relational economy.

The ability to cultivate such relational influence is called “Relational Intelligence.”

Applying the 5 Gears

1. Understand Where You Get Stuck
2. Learn to Use Triggers to Help You Shift
3. Work With Intentionality

Links from Episode 11

• Your Brain is a Supercomputer, Here’s How to Reboot It (Entrepreneur Magazine)
• The U.S. Education System Isn’t Giving Students What Employers Need (Harvard Business Review)

Join the 5 Gears Masterclass

Are you constantly in the wrong gear at the wrong time?

Learn the sign language and the life change that is the 5 Gears in the 5 Gears Masterclass.

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Applying the Gears

Reflecting on The Gears

Rank Your Gear Order

First, rank them based on which gears you spend the most in to the least time.

Then rank your gears based on which ones you do best, versus which ones you tend to grind the most in transition, handle poorly in general, or just maybe never reach.

What can you learn by comparing these two lists? Are you spending a lot of time in gears that you do not do well in? Or maybe you are avoiding some gears all together?

Think about the frequency and quality of time you spend in each gear.

It’s important that you be completely honest with yourself and remove any sense of pride, aspiration, or shame from your analysis. This will become both your baseline for progress as well as your compass for personal development, gently guiding you to the areas that need the most attention.

Map Your Daily Schedule

For example, do you wake up and go straight into 5th gear – checking emails, making calls, and looking at spreadsheets – before you take time to eat breakfast, see your kids, or start your day in meditation?

Do you spend a little too much time in 3rd gear around the break room, or maybe you need to slip out of 5th gear every now and then for some collaboration 4th gear work time with colleagues to both gain new perspectives and build camaraderie?

5 Gears Reflection Questions

• Where do I grind gears or get stuck during my transitions into or out of this gear?

• What’s one thing I can do to make time in this gear more effective

Example: If you need to be better about making time for 5th gear, maybe you need to have a sign on your office door so others will know you are in 5th gear.

Example: If you need help transitioning from 4th gear work mode to 2nd gear with your family after work, find a building or gas station a few miles away from home, and when you pass it, commit to ending work phone calls and switching gears to think about your kids or spouse and what they have been up to for the day or might have coming up.

Full Episode 11 Transcript

In an age where information is free and global connectivity puts the brilliance of far flung colleagues and goobers at everyone’s fingertips, how do you gain a competitive advantage? Have you ever considered that your best competitive advantage could be relational? The traditional career advancement model focuses heavily on Nike for corporate ladder climbing. That is, it prioritizes hard skills and measured intelligence benchmarks for promotion. However, in this new world where everyone has access to the same information and specialized skills are becoming less exclusive, your greatest asset lies in your ability to connect with people to form lasting positive relationships. In that sense, the information economy has inadvertently given rise to the relational economy: the ability to cultivate such relational influences called relational intelligence.

Welcome to the New Generation Leader, Episode 11. Your Relational Competitive Advantage.

Welcome to the New Generation Leader. We’re giving you the tools you need to lead in the digital world. Ready to reach your true potential? Let’s get started.

Welcome to the New Generation Leader Podcast, Episode 11. We are excited to continue this conversation about the foundational components of leadership.

What do we need in our leadership toolbox to make sure we are bringing our best to our business, to our team, to those we lead each and every day? I want to start us off with two seemingly separate threads and then bring us back to relational intelligence based on these two different articles. One, my friend, Steve, posted this article from the Harvard Business Review on LinkedIn that the U. S. Education system isn’t giving students what employers need and here’s the crux of the article – You may or may not agree with the bottom line of this article – but what it comes down to is the difference between information and relationships and really that’s what our episode today is focused on and that’s what I want to focus on out of this article.

Where are you learning information and where are you building relationships? There’s so much in the educational system, it’s a complex system. And with my young kids, I’m thinking about this all of the time: what they’re learning, how they’re being tested and how this is developing them into the people and the future leaders that they will need to be in the world. What, at the crux, we look at what information they’re learning. And so much of the educational system is built on information, information download, information testing. And is that really what we need to be educating people on?

The primary question we can focus on is: is that all that we need to be educating people on? I believe, if we add the relational skills, the relational intelligence into our educational system, that alone, we yield significant results, helping individuals helping students recognize that information is not the end. All be all of their educational journey they are continuing to learn. So as you examine what you learned in your life, what you are continuing to learn, what degrees, certificates, programs, you’ve gone through. One of the recommendations in this article that I think is interesting is: what kinds of micro credentials, badges, programs and certificates are appropriate ways to communicate the information that you need to communicate?

This is part of why we have created the New Generation Leader Mastermind Experience and other short courses is because we want to give people the information, but we want to give it in a bite size, digestible and highly applicable format so that when you need it, you can learn it and you can apply it immediately. So we’ll link to that Harvard Business review article in the show notes and you can dive in.

As I look across our state here in Virginia, they are rebuilding the math curriculum based on some of these questions. It’s a significant question and a debate that’s not going anywhere, but if we focus on it and the solutions, if we build for a brighter tomorrow and make adjustments, not just because we’ve always done it that way, but what do we need now going forward into the future?

Well, here’s the second article comes from Jason Pfeiffer, an entrepreneur. In his interview with Jim Quick and Jim is an author, a coach and he is working with leaders, helping them figure out how to do better. And here’s what Jason’s article focuses on is Jim has identified that leaders, business leaders, entrepreneurs specifically in this case are digesting a lot of information, but how do we apply that?

How do we apply that information that we’re receiving? And there’s a tension here because Jim highlights in this story that if you read an expert piece on, let’s say black holes in another galaxy, but you don’t have the scientific background, are you going to retain the information without understanding the principles of this article? And what Jim is reminding us is that we have so much information coming our way. How are we processing it? How are we keeping it simple in our minds and doing something with it?

But here’s the most powerful part of Jim’s conversation. It’s a powerful tool that we’ll link to and include in the show notes. And it is this:

E x E x S3. P is for purpose. The passion, whatever it is that lights you up, that excites you and gets you out of bed. Passion x Energy x S3.

How you manage your energy, how you manage your time. We’re going to come back to this here in a little bit. simple Small Steps. Passion, energy, simple small steps. We’ve got to break things down into simple, repeatable processes that we can use over and over again.

So that brings us back around to relational competitive advantage. Because here’s this: you have a passion and you have energy. But what are you doing with that? Are you focused on a lot of information and a lot of tasks and a lot of process? Teams and leaders focus on this. They focus on the alignment of their organization. How things are structured, what they’re doing what their output is. When really, there’s one more layer to this. One more layer that we need to dig down to build a foundation and it’s the foundation of relational intelligence. We’ve got to understand the people dynamics of the people who are around us. This looks like soft skills and when we say soft skills, that’s often I feel a hard phrase to use. But these are skills that we can use to build long term, mutually beneficial relationships. And that’s one of these small, simple steps is: changing our mindset. Directing our passion and energy to understand I need people outside of myself to accomplish my goals. And if we can tap into the “who’s” around us, going back to Dan Sullivan and Ben Hardy’s book, “Who, Not How.” If we tap into the “who’s” around us, mutually beneficial relationship, we can build on those passion areas that other people have, perhaps we can collaborate and multiply into something even more significant.

That’s why I love the fact that Jim quick in this interview with Jason Pfeiffer talks about this equation and uses multiplication:

P x E x S3

Purpose x Energy x Small Simple Steps

It’s an exponential growth potential. And when we think about relationships before opportunity. When we think about the relation all framework and connectivity that we have, it requires us to make a mental shift. To take the small, simple steps of first paying attention to the needs and interests of others before ourselves. It means knowing how to be present with the right mindset in the right way depending on, and one of my friends who lived in Italy for a number of years, talks about this powerful distinction between a social environment and a work environment, and for many of us our greatest barrier to true connection with others, whether we are at home with our families, at work with our colleagues, or out and about with friends is an ability to shift into the right mental gear at the right time and so that’s what we want to share with you today is a powerful tool called: The 5 Gears.

Most of us focus on how much we know, but the ability to connect and be present in the midst of tasks is what sets leaders apart. So are you connecting? Are you present with the people around you in the midst of tasks? This is what sets leaders apart. So let’s go through The 5 Gears.

Fifth gear is fast paced – you’re on the interstate highway of productivity: focused, door closed, phone off, slack minimized, you’re not checking email, you’re not responding to anything else, but you are laser-focused on accomplishing something significant, You’re focused, you’re productive.

Then fourth gear is task mode. Task mode is: I am working hard but I’m multitasking. I’m answering phone calls. People are stopping by my office. I’m replying to emails, working through my task list of everything that I need to accomplish today. I might be interrupted, I might be collaborating, I might be in a meeting but I’m I’m getting things done but I’m not as laser-focused on one, major, significant project.

And then third gear, is that great pivot, that great pivot point between productivity and relationship and connection and this is what we call social mode. It’s the casual, social connection activities, events. Maybe it’s the first 10 minutes of your board meeting or team meeting around the boardroom table. Maybe it’s sitting down around the dinner table with your family or connecting with friends in a relational setting. This is the great pivot point because we can start here in third gear and then either shift into productivity and get up into fourth gear of meetings. Or we can shift down into second gear, which is an in depth connection.

This is connect mode. I’m going to connect on a deep level relationally. A sidebar conversation around the boardroom table, connecting with spouse or kids or family member or friend. In a deep connection: a substantial, uninterrupted period of time where you are focused, fully focused, on the person sitting across from you.

And then first gear is again a personal time. Just like 5th gear, it’s focused. Uninterrupted. The door closed are distractions are gone, but instead of being highly productive, first gear is about recharging. Reading, sleeping, meditation, exercise and time outdoors. Maybe it’s a hike, a home improvement project, even if that reinvigorates you working in the garden. How is it that you recharge your battery?

And then our great reverse mode that sometimes we all skip over and reverse is, responsive. Some of our strongest relational capital comes from our sincere apologies and personal accountability. We don’t have all the right answers. We aren’t perfect. How are we clearing the air? And just as with manually shifting car, there are rhythms and routines to our lives. A natural progression like we talked about from third gear, you can shift into productivity and task-focused mentality with those you work with. Or you can shift around the dinner table conversation. But our days also have these powerful gear shifts happening each and every day.

You, ideally, begin your day in first gear. Personal time. Maybe shift into second gear with those closest to you in the morning. But if you shift right out of bed straight into fourth gear, getting into productivity, checking your email and working on your tasks before you’ve even rolled out of bed, you may be setting yourself up for minimizing your competitive advantage. So we’ve got to build up to this, we’ve got to make sure we have the time and space to recharge, to start on the best foot.

And just like that progression happens throughout the day where naturally, when you return home from work or, in our case, over the past year, when you walk back downstairs from the home office or move from the dining room table into the kitchen and the family room, you are shifting gears. And when we mentally shift gears, we have those markers. Maybe it’s the rooms you’re shifting in and out of and moving to and from. Or maybe it’s the gas station you drive past or the coffee shop you visit on the way into work.

It helps you consciously shift your mindset, shift your frame of reference and when you walk into the office or you start a meeting, you look at those spaces and the people around you as markers and reminders that we need to shift into the right gear. We need to be relationally present. Let’s start here.

I had a conversation with the business owner who is driven, pioneering, vision oriented and he is always driving towards what’s next and what’s ahead and how do we build towards this. And his team are relationally oriented, they care deeply about each other. And so as I look at his team and I look at their relational dynamics, this conversation we had jumps out at me and it highlights a simple re-orienting of the gears that can drastically multiply his relational competitive advantage.

And here it is, this was our conversation, he said, “…and then we get to the end of our meeting and I check in on them: how are they, how are they doing, what’s going on in their world, what’s exciting, what’s challenging, what’s happening in their personal lives outside of work?”

And I said, “Here is an insight for you: switch the order of that conversation. Because to scratch the proverbial itch for these team members to tap into their relational connectivity at the outset, helps them go into a meeting, a task oriented conversation with the realization, with the understanding, and the comfort that you are in this for them.”

When we get into these relational conversations and get into these spaces with the people around us, helping them understand and affirming not just the words that we say, but that by our actions, we are for them, we are on their side, we are fighting for their highest possible good. When we do this, we are increasing our relational capacity and when we increase our relational capacity, we increase our relational competitive advantage.

I would try to shift up to shift on to the interstate highway and I would miss 5th gear. And that happens relationally: you know the guy who always shows up to after hour, social gatherings, sometimes this has been me, and can’t seem to drop the shop talk – even when everyone else is clearly trying to relax to have a good time to enjoy their environment, their experience. But this guy keeps talking work.

Or what about the team member who comes flying into the office every morning, barking orders, asking questions before you’ve even had your nine a.m. coffee.

You can’t even get a hello out of either of these people before getting an earful about some task or meeting or project or initiative. These are prime examples of being in the wrong gear at the wrong time. They seem trivial. But when we build these up over time, time after time, when we developed the rhythm and the routine of having these experiences, what we see are missed opportunities to connect and we’re raising barriers against relationships. And if your team doesn’t have relationships, it won’t be aligned to it’s full potential, it won’t be able to build capacity. You won’t execute on what you want to do.

And, unfortunately, these grinding of gears aren’t restricted to the workplace. If you’ve ever come home from work, or you sit down on the couch and your spouse again, completely transparent, this is often me. Your spouse or loved one is on the phone, not talking on the phone, just on their smartphone scrolling social media or checking the latest tweets or headlines. This is a common frustration in so many families and the important opportunity that we have is for us to, as we’ve said, use this language of The 5 Gears as sign language.

So, two stories for you on the personal front. One, my friend Tom, tells this story that he and his adult son had struggled in their relationship. Frankly, Tom says they didn’t have a relationship. And they were constantly in physical space together, but they weren’t connecting relationally and Tom taught his son this tool and immediately they had a sign language. They could hold up the peace sign or two to each other and say “let’s put our phone down phones down, let’s connect, let’s be present.”

Well, I also taught this to my then seven year old, I taught these 5 Gears and she immediately applied them. That’s part of the beauty of this sign language and this understanding, is that we can apply it even at the young age of an elementary schooler.

And she said, “Uh Dad, can you put your phone down?”

I was pushing her on a swing on a Friday afternoon.

“Can you put your phone down? We’re having two time right now.”

And it was a simple gentle reminder. It wasn’t nagging, there was no bitterness. It was simply a reminder of this is our shared language and this is the time that we want to focus on our relationship.

You can do the same thing around the dinner table or the boardroom table and flash a three and remind people this is our three time. This is our time to connect.

This was how my seven year old applied the principle. She said, “So, if I give you 5 time right now to focus on your project…,” in my home office, “…if I close the door and let you focus on this fifth Gear project, then we can have 3 time family time sooner. Is that right?” I said, “Absolutely, spot on. You’ve nailed it.”

And so, immediately, I was able to close the door, flash the 5, say this is my closed door focused time to complete this project. And when I finish that, I can shift to third gear and be present and be relational with our family.

We don’t want to stiff arm anybody, we don’t want to put up walls or barriers. And this is why this is such an incredibly powerful, relational, competitive advantage.

So we’ve got a few questions reflections for you to look at in the show notes. But I’m gonna leave you with three things: understand where you get stuck. Which one of these gears is lowest on your comfort level, on your priority level? Which gear do you struggle to get in? Two, learn to use triggers to help you shift. Understand: when I’m shifting into gear, when I walk past this place, I go past this place or a certain hour comes in my day, I need to downshift;. I need to be present when I’m at home. I need to be productive when I’m at work. What are those triggers that will help you mentally shift into gear?

As I’ve said a few times on the podcast, I have teams and clients who have instituted fifth gear time. They don’t always call it fifth gear time, but they are blocking out those times. Block and tackle to make sure that your day has those triggers, has those reminders to help you shift into the right gear at the right time and then work with intentionality. Make sure each and every day, that you’re spending time recharging in first gear. That you are connecting deeply with those closest to you in second gear, that you are giving the time and the space with your family, with your friends, with your co workers, to connect relationally before you try to accomplish tasks, be present with each other. Get your tasks done, check off that list so it’s not nagging at you, and set aside time to accomplish something significant. Maybe it’s not every day, maybe it’s just sometime this week. But if you work with intentionality, it will help you be more respectful of both your time and your colleagues’ time when you make sure you are able to shift and be fully engaged with them. The people around you will wonder what happened.

And when there’s so much information flying around, we need to make sure that we are bringing our best, each and every day, to the people around us so that we can bring the best out of them when they need us most. Let’s not be all about ourselves. Let’s build that relational connectivity so that we can have a competitive advantage because the world is throwing information at us information overload. Let’s set an example on how to filter through the information and focus on the people around us.

Visit newgenerationleader.com/ll to download the show notes from this episode: Your Relational Competitive Advantage.

Go take on the world. You can do this, we believe in you.

Thanks for listening to The New Generation Leader. 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 at newgenerationleader.com.

Thanks for listening today and we look forward to seeing you next time on the New Generation Leader podcast.

The Leader in the Mirror

Do we want to copy-paste and become just like someone else? Or do we want to understand our unique perspective and bring our true potential to the table?

As soon as any of us think we’ve got it all together and all figured out, we’ve probably reached the end of our effectiveness in this season.

In Episode 9, we sit down with Jonathan Kennedy, founder and CEO of Endeavor Capital, LLC, and the Endeavor Companies on his show, Leadership for Your Journey. Take a seat and join our conversation on Episode 9, The Leader in the Mirror.

Download the show notes at newgenerationleader.com/9

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Episode 9 Full Transcript

When we are in a leadership position, when we’re looking at the 30,000 ft view, we need to have a personal advisory board, a board of directors. People we can go to and trust that are going to bring a different perspective about the situation that we’re in so that we can trust them. When they say, hey, I’m, I’m waving the red flag or another one. Might be waving a white flag paste and become just like someone else. Or do we want to understand our unique perspective and bring our true potential to the table?

As soon as any of us think we’ve got it all together and all figured out we’ve probably reached the end of our effectiveness in this season. An episode nine, we sit down with Jonathan, Kennedy founder and CEO of Endeavor Capital LLC and the endeavor companies on his show leadership for your journey. Take a seat and join our conversation on episode nine. The Leader in the Mirror, Welcome to the New Generation Leader. We’re giving you the tools you need to lead in the digital world, ready to reach your true potential.

Let’s get started. Welcome to the New Generation Leader podcast. Yeah. Yeah. You were there with Todd Moyer from TK permissions with us. And one of the things that he said that really kind of re triggered me to our conversation was he was talking about self awareness and in particular the mentality of do this for that reason and be this for that reason versus being to pull yourself out of that uh mentality and seeing things for what they really are. Part of being a CEO is to be able to have a 30,000 ft view but based on certain issues, be able to get granular and bring the right person in there.

You really can’t do both unless you’re very self aware of what your weaknesses are. So that you know, when to call a time out and bring in the three point shooter, extraordinary to win the game right? So can we talk a little bit about the software this process and maybe some tools and techniques that people could use to start implementing that? And I think obviously you mentioned last time it begins with looking in the mirror and being really honest with yourself about what you see and don’t see.

Yeah, there’s so many components to this that I do see. And I’ll start with this. That self awareness, I say is the one school that we never graduated from. You’re going to graduate with a college degree. You can get a license, a certification in a different industry. You can go to graduate school, a certificate program, you can continue your education and conferences, workshops, seminars, and all of them give you a degree of finality, a certificate diploma. But at the end of the day, you’re still learning more about yourself each and every day, day in and day out.

And so we use the symbol in our coaching business of the infinity loop. We are always learning based off the reality of what we see in front of us. We’re looking at that through the lens of, okay, what did I bring to this situation? What was the influence that my perspective had on what I did? Because all of those behaviors lead us down certain predictable paths. We do the same thing day in and day out unless we make a choice to do something different and all of those choices, all of those decisions have a consequence which can be positive or negative, that shapes our reality and leads us back into a reflection about that reality.

So when we constantly think about this loop and working through this reflection, we get to a place where we have a better sense, a better understanding of who we are, who’s around us, all of the influences that have played into who we are, how we see the world, how we respond and interact to the world and we continue to learn and grow. But as soon as any of us think that we’ve got it all together that we’ve got it all figured out, we’ve probably reached the end of our effectiveness at this season.

Yeah, that’s a good point. I’ve noticed my himself over the years whenever I’m feeling overly confident about something I stopped and I retool what I’m doing in order to not be confident because if if I’m, you know, I’m not completely, but to the point where you’re dependent on the people around you, your teammates, um, you know, the interactions that you need, whether it’s the coach that I’m working with or maybe depending on the situation if it’s in business or at home, but making sure that we create a moment that is not allowing us to become complacent, so to speak because that’s part of this journey, is making sure that we stay on task, um, and understand all the pieces that go in.

So what is a good, uh, what is a good tool to use for identifying? Kind of, hey, I need to take a step back because sometimes we may override that, that kind of feeling, that urging, whether it’s in our heart or head or gut that’s telling us, hey, you need to slow down a little bit. I think one of those, it, this, this issue of self awareness and knowing our pace and what’s going on around us. We’ve got to see that in ourselves, but we also have to have the people we can trust to tell us that.

And so both of those come back to the tool that we use called the Five Voices helps us understand what we are innately gifted at, but also helps us understand what we are not innately gifted at not so that we can default to uh fall into a trap of, well, this is me and this is all I do. So let me just do that. But understanding the collaborative nature of working together and so in that advisory board, a board of directors, people we can go to and trust that are going to bring a different perspective about the situation that we’re in so that we can trust them when they say, hey, I’m I’m waving the red flag or another one might be waving a white flag and we’ve got to recognize that they have a voice that’s valuable, that we need to hear and understand, and that we need to be attuned to that perspective that they bring to the table that they bring to our lives to our work, that they ground us out and they make us complete none of us, the more we learn, the more we think we know, but we don’t know everything, We’re not going to know everything.

And so we’ve got to get to the place where we can hear from other people and no where my unique skill set and my superpower stopped and somebody else’s start so that we can collaborate and I can get a better, more, well rounded picture of truly what’s going on. Because as soon as I start having that conversation in my mind and reflecting myself, I’m I’m missing the big picture, right? Well, and that’s that’s important, right? Because um and I like this advisory board. I did that. When I first got into business in the financial planning world, I went to a bunch of older men who I respected and I asked him to be my advisory board As one off.

And that was something that was really eye opening to me because it really helped shape get me into not just who I wanted to be, but who I was and where I was lacking in order to get to where I wanted to be.

Um and that that was important. I really, I wanted to emulate a lot of these men. They were not in my business, right? But I respect them in the community. I grew up with their kids, they had had different successes and that really made me desire to have their input. Um and I think that’s important is choosing who that advisory board is. You’re going to get advice from somebody right? Um I will go back to the Five Voices. Um you if you’re using that with your team, it’s also good to use at home because then when it comes to those interactions, you have a common starting place and that person really understands you even better than maybe they did before, regardless of how long you’ve been married. I know that’s helped me and my wife when I asked her questions about our business and what to do with it.

Um so I think that makes a lot of sense. I also think, you know, being shooting your thoughts. It would be good also to have some type of coaching, one on one to right to ask the right questions of the ceo to make sure that they’re even seeing the right answers, that they need to get the desired outcome that they’re looking for. Yeah, you look at different coaches and their process, their methodology. And on the one hand you have what’s called pure coaching that you possess the answer.

I’m gonna ask you questions to draw that out of you. On the other end of the spectrum is the coach has all the answers and a lot of times business coaches will work to copy and paste their approach in another setting and our process is a hybrid that’s a bit unique. We’re not giving you the answers of how to do this in your business, but we’re going to give you a tool a mirror to hold up and reflect how does this apply in your situation? Because we want to jump start the conversation.

If I just wait for you in a sense of self discovery to come up with the answers, we’re gonna have a slower process, right? We don’t have time here in the 21st century to wait for the answers. So I’m going to ask you a very direct pointed question, how does this apply to your situation? And we worked through that and I think what you just described, we have a personal board of advisors, we have family, close friends who speak into us. Sometimes we have mentors, we have a coach when you put all that together, that is your full and complete personal advisory board, they’re not necessarily all gonna be friends. All gonna be coaches. All gonna be peers or mentors in the business world, but you’re going to put these people together and have what I call your inner circle.

Thanks for joining Jonathan and I here in Episode 9. For links, show notes and a whole lot more visit newgenerationleader.com/9. We’ll see you next time on the New Generation Leader Podcast. 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 at newgenerationleader.com. Thanks for listening today and we look forward to seeing you next time on the New Generation Leader podcast.

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Finding the Peace You Need to Lead

In a chaotic world, finding peace is a crucial tool in the leader’s toolbox. And when it comes to the perils and trials of leadership, every leader needs a toolkit.

After a year of living in a global pandemic, finding peace is all the more important for leaders to take on 2021.

Quantifying your peace provides a lens for analyzing, identifying, and categorizing pain points in our lives. It seems simple at face value, but if you dig deeper into your responses and use them as benchmarks over time, you’ll find there’s a lot more to this tool than meets the eye.

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Gain traction in your leadership growth in The New Generation Leader Network.

Find the resources you need to unlock your true potential alongside likeminded leaders in the community.

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How is your Peace Index?

Answer the Questions for Yourself

1. How purposeful do you feel?
2. How well are you enjoying your connection to people around you at work and in your personal life?
3. How well does the place you are living suit you?
4. How well are you providing for yourself and your family?
5. How is your personal health impacting your daily activities?

Find your Peace Percentage

It may sound silly or arbitrary, but once you’ve mined out a few sticking points for each of the areas of peace, you’ll be able to gauge where you fall in the 0-100% range for each category of People, Place, Purpose, Provision and Personal Health.

It’s important that you be completely honest with yourself and remove any sense of pride, aspiration, or shame from your analysis. This will become both your baseline for progress as well as your compass for personal development, gently guiding you to the areas that need the most attention.

Cultivate Peace

For each of the five areas – People, Place, Purpose, Provision, Personal Health – determine 2 or 3 steps you can take over the course of the next week or month to raise your level of peace in that area.

Do you need to make more of an effort to connect with friends and family rather than allow work and social disconnection to characterize your daily routine? Or maybe you need to look for a new apartment or some professional training to help you find the area of town or subject matter expertise you need to live out your dreams for living and working.

Full Episode 10 Transcript

In a chaotic world. Finding peace is a crucial tool in the leaders toolbox and when it comes to the perils and trials of leadership, every leader needs a toolkit. After a year of living in a global pandemic, finding peace is all the more important for leaders to take on 2021. Quantifying your peace provides a lens for analyzing, identifying, and categorizing pain points in our lives. It seems simple at face value, but if you dig deeper into your responses and use them as benchmarks over time, you’ll find there’s a lot more to this tool than meets the eye. Welcome to “Finding the Peace You Need to Lead,” Episode 10, on The New Generation Leader Podcast.

Welcome to The New Generation Leader. We’re giving you the tools you need to lead in the digital world. Ready to reach your true potential? Let’s get started. Welcome to The New Generation Leader Podcast.

Welcome back. We are taking a look at the foundational tools over the next few episodes that leaders need to build a strong, vibrant foundation of leadership. If we get these things right as leaders, if we build that foundation, get base camp all set and in order we can reach new heights and build a skyscraper on this foundation of our leadership. But we have to make sure the foundation is set.

You know, I heard this illustration a few years ago in a previous role, we had a consultant come in and they said you can’t put up the wallpaper before you build the foundation. So what are those systems? What are those processes? What are those details that you need to have in order in order to lead effectively? And we can’t give what we don’t possess. We cannot lead others to great potential. If we haven’t gotten a strong foundation ourselves to be able to bring our best, we’ve got a cultivate an awareness about the things in our lives that make us tick.

What motivates us positively? What corrupts us negatively? What elevates us each and every day? It’s about what brings out the best in who we are and the relationships that we need to create a healthy atmosphere to thrive. This tool that we’re going to talk about today gives us an avenue to be more effective, more empathetic as a manager, as a leader, as a leader of people, it helps us to bring our best and not just one time, not just a one time assessment, but this becomes a rhythmic process that we can benchmark. Here’s where I am today and we can check back in next week, where has this improved? Where has the pressure come off?

As I look back with my clients with myself over the past year, the 14 or so months of the pandemic that we have experienced throughout our world. This is not a local, a local effect. This is truly a global effect in this pandemic. And as I look back at the client’s I’ve worked with and I look back in my own life over these 14 months, there are various people, there are various times and places and markers where I see that this tool, these five things we’re going to talk about today had a significant impact on our outlooks, on our motivation, on our ability to think and dream and problem solve effectively. So we’re going to dive into these because I want to help you unlock your potential, but to unlock your potential, we’ve got to start with a strong foundation.

So this tool is about finding our peace. And this might sound like an odd question to some, but: how much peace do you have in your life right now? The question we typically ask each other, our friends, people passing on the streets. We start a call, we ask one question, how’s it going or something like how are you? And our response is usually something along the lines of doing fine. Doing great. I’m okay. But what does that really mean? How much are we truly understanding what’s going on under the surface and on the surface?

There is an issue of peace, of contentment, where your heart and mind are aligned in bringing your passionate energy each and every day, the various components of our life and our routine are pushing and prodding and pulling us in different directions. And sometimes those factors have significant impact on our outlook. If we are drained, our energy cannot respond in the midst of this pandemic as we’ve been. What we’ve seen is continued research and reporting about how we are struggling to bring our best, how our energy is waning. We’re having a hard time thinking and seeing and processing information clearly. What if there was a way to do a quick self assessment to find out what was going on today?

This isn’t a quick fix. This isn’t, like I said, a one time assessment tool, but this is a tool to help us understand some of the hidden anxieties, some of the things that covertly sabotage our contentment, something that you can identify, that you can find a target to shoot at and begin taking back a measure of peace in your day to day routine.

So let’s talk about these five factors of peace and what they mean and why they can bring us down. So number one: purpose. How purposeful do you feel? Are you satisfied in the work that you’re doing every day? Do you feel like you have a sense of direction, A sense of calling or mission in your life? Do you know what you’re going after? Do you have a personal vision, mission values, goals for yourself that you are driving after? And do you feel like you’re aligned with those and, put simply, are you energized or passionate about what you do?

Here’s what we’re doing with these five factors, Is we’re going to give each one of these five factors a score 1-100. So for your sense of purpose, give yourself a score 1-100, where would you rank yourself today?

Now second is: people. How well are you enjoying your connection to the people around you at work? In your personal life? The people you spend the most time with? Do you have close meaningful friends that you spend time with? Are the people in your life – from friends, family, work colleagues -bringing you down or calling you up to the best version of yourself? Do you feel like you can depend on your friends and family? Are you connecting with them often? Are you connecting with them deeply? Are you able to have those connections with the people closest around you that you feel you need to have a sense of peace in your life? So think about the people in your life And give that a score 1 to 100.

And the third factor is: place. And you can download a graphic of this tool in the show notes at newgenerationleader.com/10. Download this and keep it as a quick handy reference for you. So the third one is place. How well does the place you’re living suit you? Does where you live suit your lifestyle preferences? Are there places to hike or walk places to go eat close by? Places to enjoy the kinds of recreational activities that you enjoy? Whether it’s walking, biking, hiking. Are you close enough to the beach or close enough to the mountains? Are you close enough to the city? For what fits your personal temperament and personality, what drives you? And then think about the actual place where you live, whether it’s a house or an apartment. Does it suit the needs of you or your family, your roommate, whoever you are living with, whatever your preference of life is. You can also think about traffic and the commute. How does that have an impact on your sense of peace? So all of that. There are lots of factors to place. But give a score to your sense of peace in your place right now 1-100. Yeah.

And then provision. How is your sense of provisions? Are you earning enough money to take care of yourself? Those closest around you who rely on you? Are you making what you need to take care of your basic necessities and some of your wants and needs here? How is your provisions caring for you? Do you have what you need to put a roof over your head, food on the table, enjoy the kinds of recreational activities, shopping, travel, vacation, everything else that you enjoy doing? Do you have what you need to take care of those basic needs? So 1-100 on that one.

We’ve been through four and now our last one is personal health and there are lots of components to our personal health from diet, exercise, activity and our sleep habits. One of my favorite quotes is from Kerry New Hoff, who reminds us that we spend ideally a third of our lives, a third of our lives sleeping, so we should make sure that we are getting the best sleep we possibly can. And he is constantly preaching this to the leaders he is coaching, investing in speaking to on his podcast and and wherever he goes, reminding leaders to focus on getting good sleep. All of these factors and components of personal health are so impactful. And the one other component that I have found comes up in conversation with people I’m coaching is substance use alcohol, tobacco. How are those impacting your life right now? Are you able to bring your best in every facet of life or is some factor of your personal health weighing on you?

So 1-100 on each of those five and then we average them. And the beauty of this exercise is that it helps you categorize these five, foundational, influential elements of life and how they might be impacting for better or for worse. The degree of peace and contentment you’re experiencing in your life right now. So take a moment to write down each of these five numbers, 1 to 100, then average them together. And that’s your overall peace number. It’s not perfect. It’s also not rocket science. But spending a few minutes going through this exercise provides a helpful ballpark snapshot of where you believe you are at the moment.

We often find that this simple, personal reflection serves as a wake up call when one of these numbers is low or if something is high, we can give thanks and be grateful, express our gratitude and contentment or it can alert us to an underlying discontentment, especially when the significance of that discontentment has flown under the radar. For now, we can identify things that have otherwise gone missing. And once you understand what this overall number means for you, then you can look at each component separately and ask what’s the specific driver that’s dictating these numbers for you? What do you need to work on? What areas do you need to focus on?

So here are a few examples that I’ve seen over the past year or two. One client talked about the physical place where he and his family were living. They were in transition having moved from one region of the country to another region of the country and they were in a temporary housing situation. Their large family was in an apartment. And not only was the space not ideal for the family to have their own space to spread out, to regroup, to recharge individually, but the geographic location wasn’t ideal for the commute of this client or anyone else in his family. It wasn’t close to the community that they wanted to be part of. So every factor of that impacted his overall sense of peace and probably the overall sense of peace in the entire family. And so the stress increases and and he may have felt as well that the people part was an issue, but the root cause was the place and I talked to him months later, after they had found a new home to move to, they had settled in. It was an ideal location in between his work and his spouse’s workplace. They were able to set down their roots to find comfort and peace at home. The commute wasn’t weighing on them. The small confines of the overall space for their large family that was not weighing on them. Place was now a place of peace for him.

Provision is one factor that has been significant throughout the pandemic. As you look at business owners, employees who have experienced losses or decreased revenue and income. Maybe a job loss maybe a loss of clients, maybe a slowing down of pace and business and work. And that affects provisions. If we are worried about putting a roof over our heads, feeding our families, taking care of our basic necessities, we are going to bring that stress and that challenge to every phase of our lives and then personal health, substance abuse, a nagging health challenge. Maybe it’s a an episodic illness. Maybe it’s lingering recovery from COVID. All of these factors pile in for us and can affect our personal health if we’re not eating well, we’re not sleeping well. We’re not energized by what we’re eating. We’re not energized coming out of our sleep. We’re not getting the exercise that we need to keep our bodies moving. All of those factors pull us down and when these factors pull us down and our peace decreases, we act then out of our stress and we can feel we can sense that we are not in a place of peace, but what we need to do is identify where that lack of peace is coming from, so that we can make a conscious change.

So I ask you this closing question: which one of these five areas needs the most work from you right now? Which one do you identify with? And what’s one activity that you can change? One pattern you can shift? One adjustment you can make? What can you put into practice to change your rhythm to make a difference here? And then set a timeline on this. Set a timeline to come back to this activity in a week, two weeks a month and then tell somebody else, here’s where my sense of peace is today. You can even teach them this tool and share this with them. Allow them the privilege of walking through this exercise themselves and out of their sense of peace and their number. The two of you together can look to that next assessment in a few weeks. Come back to this, have another checkpoint and see how is my peace today compared to where it was a few weeks ago and have these changes that I’ve made increased my sense of peace?

One last closing thought. If any of your numbers are really high, don’t push passed that. Don’t let that go by without a sense of gratitude. Give thanks for that sense of peace for that overwhelming peace that you are finding in one of these areas. Express your gratitude for that, share that with someone else as well. And if your peace index is really low, I mean below 50 and there’s something just weighing heavy on you, please please please don’t hesitate to reach out for support. Someone in your circles of influence is standing by ready to help and don’t hesitate to reach out.

This has been Episode 1: Finding the Peace You Need to Lead on The New Generation Leader Podcast. Download the show notes, get all the resources you need at newgenerationleader.com/10 and join us on the next episode, Episode 11, as we continue laying this foundation of The Tools You Need to Lead in the Digital World. Thanks for listening and we’ll see you next time.

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 at newgenerationleader.com. Thanks for listening today, and we look forward to seeing you next time on The New Generation Leader Podcast.