Executive Podcast #245: An Intentional Leader’s Guide to Influence

Great leaders emphasize the importance of transparency and vulnerability in building connection and trust among team members, particularly in leadership roles. Chris and Perry discuss how leaders can demonstrate support for their team by fulfilling even small promises and commitments, which can create a positive and productive environment that empowers individuals. Moreover, this episode highlights the significance of consistency of character in leadership and the value of being the same person in every situation. The episode concludes with the message that valuing transparency and humility can lead to stronger relationships, foster growth, and learning, and increase a leader’s sphere of influence.

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Perry Holley:

Welcome to the Maximum Leadership Executive Podcast, where our goal is to help you increase your reputation as a leader, increase your ability to influence others, and increase your ability to fully engage your team to deliver remarkable results. I am Perry Holly, a maximal leadership facilitator and coach.

Chris Goede:

And I’m Chris Cody, executive vice president with Maxwell Leadership. Welcome and thank you for joining us once again. Hey, as we get started, I’d love for you to visit Maxwellleadership.com/podcast. There you can learn a little bit more about the five levels of leadership, which is really our core foundation of helping organizations not only develop their leaders, but enhance their culture and create a common language for what leadership looks like inside their organization. So we’d love for you to learn more about that or you can download the Learner guide. Or if you have a question for Perry and I would love for you to leave that there. Well, today’s topic is titled an Intentional Leader’s Guide to Influence. And if you want to become someone who can positively influence other people, you really need to develop qualities around that qualities of integrity and then live them out every day and make sure the way that you are leading, the way that you are talking is how you’re living that out. And the key here is those don’t happen by accident. You may have intrinsic, maybe some core to some of those competencies or qualities, but you really got to live them out and you got to develop them. And in order to do that, it takes intentionality. And so Perry, just talk to us a little bit about the title today and where we’re going on this content.

Perry Holley:

Yes, we have a piece of content based on a book that John wrote some years ago called Developing the Leader Within You. And of course, we believe leadership is influence, nothing more, nothing less. So you’re really developing the influence that you have with others. I was doing on a group call around this topic of Developing the Leader Within you and noticed that the idea of what is influence, how do you gain it, how do people see you as a person of influence, how does that happen? And it really is this word intentional. There are intentional things we need to do. We have a couple of other podcasts where we’ve talked about some practical ways to build influence. I really like this lesson on looking at some really the mindset. I love John, the Leader Within You, and said, how do you develop these attributes in you?

Chris Goede:

Love it. Well, when John teaches the intentionality of influence, he shares a handful of ideas that can make your intentional efforts pay off. And so Perry and I are just going to kind of bounce back and forth with a couple of these ideas and share them with you as we get started. The first one is model consistency of character. I think when you do this, it builds trust, which we talk about trust being the currency to all influence and leadership. I think you create a stable environment as a leader. You may say, well, how do I go about doing this? Which is a fair question. But I think as leaders, then if you have clear values and principles, reliable decision making, I can think back to some leaders that I’ve had where their decision making was not reliable. Not saying it’s here, but previously that has been the case. I think if you have emotional stability, we talk about EQ a lot as leaders. And just remember that as we talk about this, consistency of character. Consistency doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s just rigid. It’s really about having stability, reliability and trustworthiness that allows you to be able to do that.

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Perry Holley:

I love that. No keyword is consistency of character. We work with a lot of leaders, a lot of leaders. And I don’t know that I have one that I think is trying not to uphold the highest character. Right. We tend to if you’re in leadership, you’re not trying to deceive or hurt, you’re trying to uphold the highest of character. What I have noticed, though, when it comes to consistency, and this was true for me for a number of years, was, are you the same person? Are you the same character in every situation you’re in? At home, at work, on the golf course, at the gym, in the workplace, at the church, in the neighborhood. Are you the same person? And I know speaking for my pastor was, I come be two different people, three different people, depending on who I’m with. That is not consistency of character. And so one of the big learnings I had to make was determine who you are, what is the character you want to live to, and then be that and don’t apologize for it, don’t protect this group from it, and not that group. Are you consistent in how you walk things out? And is your talk consistent within every constituency that you’re hanging with?

Chris Goede:

We do this values card exercise, and you just made me think about eight out of ten times. They’re like, now, are we doing this for the values here at work or at home? And we’re like, it.

Perry Holley:

Shouldn’t you have different values?

Chris Goede:

You have different values. And so it just made me think about that. And so getting into the place where you’re consistent no matter where you are, I think is key.

Perry Holley:

Number two is another one. You think, well, yeah, but I want to hear what you think about this, though. It says employ honest communication, employee honest communication. I thought, Well, I know a lot of people that are trying to be dishonest about their communication, but this is not what we’re talking about here. You think about a person of influence, has that consistency of character, they speak in a way that is very clear. That is, we talk about clear as kind. They don’t shield you from stuff. They don’t protect you. They don’t give you just what you need to know. They don’t hold back. They are very honest, open and consistent again in their communication. And you can generally tell that when somebody they’re talking, you’re getting the straight scoop. There’s nothing you have to read between the lines. You don’t have to figure out what do they mean, no innuendo, those types of things. It is developing an honesty of my.

Chris Goede:

Communication direct, I think, different levels of leadership at times. As leaders, you will have communication that you can’t share at the moment. However, if that’s the case, be honest about that, right to your point. They can sense that. You and I can sense it. Everybody that’s listening can sense it when someone’s communicating to them and they’re like, I don’t think I’m getting the whole story, like there’s something behind there. And so I love that as being the next one that you brought up. Well, the third one is value transparency. Speaking of communication, feeding right off what you just talked about, man. Be open and honest with your communication. Encourage feedback both ways. Be transparent with what you’re thinking. Allow your team and those that you influence to do the same thing. Address mistakes and failures. I put this one down there because everybody knows when you make a mistake and there’s failures, it’s okay to be transparent about it and encourage that in your team and lead by example by doing that in order for you to really kind of get to this. Valuing transparency, it is an ongoing effort that requires commitment to be able to do it. Because naturally, I think we as human beings in our flesh don’t necessarily want to do this, right? We want to look all buttoned up and thinking about maybe in the past, walking out of my house as a kid, my mom’s like, now everybody put your smiles on. We don’t talk about what just happened inside the house. Right? And we should value transparency.

Perry Holley:

Not necessarily that I love your direction on a bit about vulnerability is that don’t hide your mistakes and faults, that it leads to you looking perfect and nobody really likes perfect. You’re much more relatable if you’re real and you value that transparency. Often the example I give, I teach about this is that we tend to and social media does this a lot. You’re seeing the Perry front stage act and there’s a curtain drawn behind me, and all you can see is what I want you to see. The transparency of my life is I open the curtain and you see the backstage act, which can be a little bit disastrous, chaotic, out of control sometimes, but it begins to give you a realization of my whole story. Now, this doesn’t mean all my dirty laundry is out. No, there’s too much information. But I don’t mind sharing with my life to say, I don’t have it all together. I’m learning, and you can help me, and we can help each other. So the transparency, I think, adds to connection and trust. There’s really that for that. This one kind of leads into this next one. Exemplify humility. Are you an example of humility in your work? Do people see you as humble? And I love the in Tim Elmore’s book The Eight Paradoxes of Leadership, paradox number one fascinated me because it said, can you be confident and humble at the same time? I thought, Well, I really want to be a confident leader. We all want to be confident. But if I have that and no humility, I’m arrogant. Well, what if I’m all humble and no confidence? Then I’m kind of sheepishness or something. You don’t want that either. So can I balance confidence and humility? And how do you do that? And a lot of times it’s what you just said. It’s about being a little more transparent, using the three most unused words in leadership I don’t know, letting people know that you need them, admitting that you made a mistake, asking for help, asking for an opinion, asking for a point of view, all kinds of things that can open the door to humility leaders.

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Chris Goede:

I know we’ve talked about those three words before. I don’t know, I was thinking when you just said that, that completely went out of my mind. And I thought, I am sorry, that’s probably but even just thinking about where you’re at with humility, because if my wife is listening, she’d be like, that’s absolutely three words that Chris doesn’t say enough. Right? And so I didn’t think about that came to my mind because I think that shows humility. I was also thinking about, we work with leaders all the time on the five levels of leadership. And we talk about you build your way up the levels, you never leave the level behind, but the other person gets to determine what level of influence you have with them. And so sometimes when we’re talking about this with teams, to make an example, I’ll walk up and I’ll be like, you don’t go up to a new team member that you have level one influence with and go. Hi. My name is Chris Goede. Welcome to the team. I’m a level five leader. We’re going to kill it, right? Like they go, this dude’s an idiot and I’m out of here. And there’s no humility in that in regards to your influence, you really have.

Perry Holley:

Grown in that too.

Chris Goede:

Well, thank you. I appreciate that. It’s taken 27 years. Well, the next one that I want to bring to your attention here is demonstrate your support for others. I think when you do this as a leader, you foster a positive, a productive environment in the team and in that individual. It helps empower the how do you go about doing this, man? You’ve got to be an active listener. We hear this a lot as well. I think communication is always a competency. We hear about when we’re working with teams, but we also hear that man, he or she just doesn’t listen. And I think if we can really become good active listeners, I think we’ll have support for other people. I think the other thing around this is I try to view my leadership or my influence as removing obstacles and barriers for people in order to support what they’re there to do, what they are called to do, what they’re gifted to do. And I think when you do that, then it demonstrates that you’re supporting others on that team and it’ll help your influence with them.

Perry Holley:

A key word for me, there is others. And you just gave a great example, and you are good at this, removing obstacles, barriers, clearing the way for the team to be effective. And that is an others oriented mindset. And this demonstrating support for others, not trying to get others to demonstrate their support for you. And so I want to move away from a self centered mindset to an others orientation. And when leaders have an others orientation, people know it the we talk about. Do you, the people on your team know you’re for them or are you looking for something from them? And I thought if I’m demonstrating support for you, I have my antennae up looking to say what do you need? What’s in the way? What are the barriers? This is what you’re so great at saying. Who do I need? I think you helped me yesterday. I had a question when trying to give you an assignment, but you said I can get that real quick. I said, no, I got it. This should be an obstacle, this should be out of the way for everybody, so let me do that. That’s an others oriented mentality and it really demonstrated your support for me and you do that really well. Another one is about SIM, seems simple. What fulfill your promises? I’m going to tell you what I’ve learned about this recently. Was it’s generally not the big hairy audacious promise that you say I’m going to like you just did yesterday. Let me get that out of your way for you, it would have been easy for you to I’ll do that later. It’s so simple, so easy. But you didn’t. You took care of it right in the moment and you fulfilled your promise. What I’ve learned about me is that one way I can break trust with others and lose influence is I’m on a call, somebody says, man, I love that chart. Could you send me that chart? Of course it’s a no brainer. I just say no brainer. Yeah, glad to. And then a call ends. And then what I do, I go to the next call or move on to the next thing and I don’t do it. And while to me, it’s a tiny little chart, it’s a chart. To them, it was a promise made that they are tracking viciously to say, Perry never sent me that. I have to ask three times. Every time I want something from I said, you know what? I’m changing. Got a little multicolored pin I see you’re using was if I make a commitment, make a promise in a call, in a face to face in a conference room, I change colors of my pin and I write in my notes in red, I just made a commitment, so I write that in. So at the end of the day or the end of the lunch break or whatever I do, I look at.

Chris Goede:

Anything in red that’s really good.

Perry Holley:

I need to fulfill that because that is looking like a promise to other people. And it seems so small to me, I just overlooked it. But it’s not small to them. And if you want to continue to have influence and trust, do the small things really well.

Chris Goede:

Yeah. I love that you developed a system and a process to help yourself with that, because we all get busy and we do make promises and then just accidentally it just falls through the crack and we forget about it. So I love that you have a system that you have set up to be able to do that. The other thing I was thinking about when you were talking about this is making sure that we don’t say yes to everything because I have a bad habit to do that. We talk about being a recovering people. Pleaser be careful what you promise. Yeah. And so if it’s something that maybe you’re not going to have time for in the moment, I’d rather you say, I’m not sure I’m going to be able to do that or no, I can’t do that, versus saying yes and then not doing it. To your point. Not saying you would say no to somebody that asked for a chart. But I know that I sometimes am like, yeah, and that gets me in trouble because then I don’t fulfill those promises. Well, number seven, embrace an attitude of service. This what jumps out to me here is you’re just really focusing on others. Again, going to another content piece that you’ve helped developed with us, which is ascend to servant leadership. And that’s really what it’s all about. It’s not subservient right, it’s about having the focus on others. Talk just a little bit about just that course and the impact that it’s had on you and some of the key points developed out of that because I think that’s another great day of training for teams that really helps them with servant leadership.

Perry Holley:

Yeah, people say, I like the idea of servant leadership, but could you call it something else because it seems weak. And I just tell them it is the hardest thing you’ve ever done. It is becoming a warrior for your people. It is having this, as it says here, an attitude of service that when I look at my team, as a matter of fact, influence we didn’t mention this a lot, but influence is 360. It’s up, down and across. So it’s not just down to your team, it’s across to your peers, it’s up to your leader, to your supervisor. So how are you having an attitude of service and putting yourself in a servant leader mindset to really serve the needs? How do I lighten the load of my leader? How do I assist and grow the people next to me? How do I remove barriers and serve the people on my team so that they have success? It really is a 360 degree attitude of service that does that and it’s the hardest thing you’ve ever done. Hard people say it seems kind of weak. It’s not weak, it’s complete struggle.

Chris Goede:

Simple but hard.

Perry Holley:

The last one we’ll put on the table was encouraging two way communication with the people you hope to influence. I love adding this one because the higher you go in leadership, the more it seems to be my voice only. And so I love this idea of share a voice and inviting people to have a point of view, inviting my team to speak John, using phrases like all of us are smarter than one of us and we’re not going to be successful unless everybody wants me to be. I need to have people speaking in and am I tapping into, well, first of all, the diversity. We talk about that am I being inclusive of this diverse team I’ve put together so that we have the best chance of getting the best ideas? Not just my ideas. I see one way and I don’t need you thinking like me, I need you thinking like you. So inviting that voice into what we.

Chris Goede:

Do, I love that. I think that all of these things that we just talked about today, you’re probably going, that’s not earth shattering. Well, we know that. I think the real question is kind of bringing this to light and just asking yourself, are we doing them? Are we living this out? And I think Perry and I shared as we went through a couple of these that, man, it’s even hard for us to do that at times, and we let things go. And so just bringing them to kind of the forefront of your mind again, saying, hey, this is how you grow your influence. If you’re intentional about these things, that it will happen. The key word there is intentional because we’ve talked about our calendars and we’ve talked about our to dos and all those things and teaching classes and yes, making promises and then not delivering. But, man, how are we intentional about that? What is the system and the process that we’ve set up as leaders to be able to increase and grow our influence through doing that?

Perry Holley:

And I did that little exercise you just suggested. Take those eight, look at them, be honest with yourself. And I already mentioned the filled promises I had to do a realignment on. Am I keeping the small promises I’m making? Of course, the big ones, too, but especially I struggle with the small ones I wrote down, demonstrating my support for others. Sometimes I get a little bit too into myself and into what I’m doing, into what my to do list is. I’m not looking around about how I can help the team. And that led to embracing an attitude of service. Am I actually actively, intentionally looking for ways to serve my leader, my peers, and my team to do that? So it’s a great little exercise. You got to be honest. It could be a little hurtful, but you can grow from it.

Chris Goede:

Yeah, great self awareness to go through these and ask yourself those questions. Well, as we wrap up, I just want to remind everybody we are all in the people business. Doesn’t matter the industry that you’re in. Yes, Perry and I have the privilege of working at Maxwell Leadership, and we are in the people business. But by the way, so are you. Doesn’t matter what your role is, what your title is, doesn’t matter the industry that you’re in. We’re in the people business, and leadership is influence. And the reason that we gave you these items to really think about is we really want you to have self awareness. We really want you to examine, not necessarily to grow your influence. That’ll be a byproduct of it, have the right motive behind it. And there is and we’ve said this before, that there is a difference. There’s a fine line between influence and manipulation, and that’s the motive of why you’re doing it. So as you go through these, remember, one of them is about humility. It’s not to boast your chest up and become, oh, I am a better leader, but it’s really to increase your influence, to be able to help and serve other people. And that’s the right motive behind it.

Perry Holley:

Terrific. Well, thank you, Chris. And just a reminder, if you go to Maxwellleadership.com/podcast, you can download the Learner guide for this episode. Which has these eight items listed there, as well as some other information we’d love for you to have. You can also learn about our offerings, and you can also learn about our family of podcasts that are available there. There’s other ones besides this, and we love to serve you in any way we can. We always love to hear from you. Leave a comment or a question, and we’re always grateful that you would spend this time with us. That’s all today from the Maxwell Leadership Up executive podcast.