Executive Podcast #252: Is Your Team Concerned About the (Their) Future?

Perry Holley:

Welcome to the Maxwell 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 Maxwell leadership facilitator and coach.

Chris Goede:

And I’m Chris Cody, executive. You vice President Maxwell leadership. Welcome and thank you for joining. As we get started, I just want to bring to your attention, I know we have a lot of leaders that listen to this podcast, and we’re grateful for that. One of the things that we do every November is that we host an event called Exchange, and it is where leaders get together. It’s a small environment, about 100 and 2130 leaders. John’s with us for three days. And man, we just exchange leadership principles with incredible speakers, leadership experiences, with things that we are able to bring to the table. We would love for you to be a part of that. If you’re interested in learning more about that, I want you to go to Exchange.Maxwellleadership.com, and there you can learn a little bit more about that event in November that we host. Well, as we get started today, I want to talk a little bit about this title, and this is interesting in just the time that we’re in today, and the title that Perry’s bringing to us is, is your team concerned about their future? Not the future of the organization, maybe that’s part of it, but their future. And a couple of weeks ago, we talked a little bit about how leaders can create and maintain urgency. And one of the things is we talked in that episode and I’d encourage you to go back and listen to it is we talked about how do you create that culture, what does that look like, how do you go about it the right way? Because if you don’t, what’s going to end up happening is you’re going to risk creating a culture of fear and anxiety about why is there so much urgency around what we’re doing. Add to that the market conditions and with people quiet quitting. And I saw an article the other day, I even share Chris with you now. It’s fast quitting. And all these different phrases are coming out. There are definitely concerns by our team members about their future, about their leader’s future, about the organization maybe. And so today we want to talk about some ways to avoid creating a culture of fear and anxiety inside the organization while still trying to create that urgency.

Perry Holley:

Yeah, I don’t think anybody would disagree. There’s a lot going on in the economy, in the world, in business. Is it a recession, is it not a recession? There’s lots of dynamics that are affecting people. I found in my coaching lately a lot of leaders, and I also coach some young people. Just part of the joy that I get out of coaching. But there’s a lot of anxiety and what you hear a little bit in the press about the Gen Z and the anxiety, stress and anxiety they feel. But I think some leaders are feeling this as well as they lead those younger generations. So I’m reminded, and I remind myself when I’m tempted to fear things, is that I control the controllables, control what you can control. And for the most part, anxiety is related to trying to control things we can’t control, like the things I just mentioned. So I think step one for any leader trying to increase urgency while reducing fear anxiety with people is to remind everyone to what it is we actually can control in the business. And so a lot of time that’s going to come down to our thoughts, our attitudes, our actions, things that are within our reach in doing that. But I think the degree of empowerment we talked about in the Urgency podcast that a member on your team feels, how empowered they feel, can directly affect how anxious and fearful they may feel. But what do you think about that?

Chris Goede:

Yeah, I think the more that you empower, the more to your point, they feel like they can control their own situation and the things that are around that situation. As you were talking, it reminded me of a saying from Coach Bill Belichick, the great New England Patriot coach, where you can hear him on different clips for leadership videos, where he talks about do your job, do your job. And then Nick Saban says it because he comes obviously from that coaching tree, and that’s in essence, what they’re saying is, hey, there are eleven of us on the field at one time, and we have a lot of urgency. There’s a lot of urgency in the game of football. We can get anxious about this. There can be fear about things not working. Don’t worry about what’s going on next to you, what’s going on in the backfield, like, do your job to your point. Control what you can control. Empower them to be able to do that. The team that you’re working with, they’re not just sitting and waiting around for you or other senior leaders to decide when you empower them, you allow them to have the autonomy to do their job. They can move quickly. Oftentimes they’ll be able to do it without baggage of fear that may be created because of you as your leader if you don’t empower them, or uncertainty and doubt. And so I love the fact that we’re talking about this again because it is something from a leadership standpoint that’s not talked about enough.

Perry Holley:

Last week, we talked a lot about communication. Do you think how a leader communicates effects positively or negatively?

Chris Goede:

100%.

Perry Holley:

How anxiety is felt on 100%?

Chris Goede:

Yeah, 100%. I think when your team knows that through transparency, how you are communicating, they can read that, they can feel that. And I think even if I remember during certain times that we’ve all been through in the last three years, I remember Andy Stanley saying something that really stuck with me where he said, your team doesn’t necessarily care what you’re saying, although they do. They just want to hear your voice in times like that. And so your voice, whether it’s calm, whether it is anxious, they’re going to feel that they’re going to read off of that and then they’re going to act, they’re going to follow because it’s contagious. You put here in the notes, I think it’s great just to talk about a lot of people have seen this movie where, hey, if you are able to communicate calmly when things are critical, there’s deadlines. If things are urgent and circumstances, it’s super important to be able to do that. And one of the things you put in my notes here was I think about Apollo 13 in the movie, right, where Tom Hanks is like, I mean, chaos is going on. And he’s like, Houston, we have a problem. I was like, man, that’s not how I would not be communicating that calm.

Perry Holley:

I love that scene because they’re screaming at each other, screaming and screaming and screaming, and they turn on the radio. Hello? Euston. Yeah, Chris, calm is very calm all of a sudden that they do that. Well, calm is contagious. And I love that when people are watched, the team is watching you all the time. Your level of anxiety may so you should avoid allowing your level of anxiety and stress to communicate that to the team. But I think about Coach John Wooden had a statement. He actually has a book title this as well, but how he could have easily have been the screaming, demanding Coach. We’ve all worked for that. You and I have played ball and always ran across that screaming, yelling, stress and building coach that was always on top of you. But Wooden was not that way. He was calm and his demeanor was always level. And he said, I need you to be quick, but don’t hurry. Be quick, but don’t hurry. And I love that about can we there’s a difference between rushing and hurry, and that stress and anxiety that people may be feeling in today’s environment. And we need to have urgency, but it’s not a false urgency. It’s not a stress inducing urgency. It’s just we need to be quick, don’t hurry. And I think that’s something we could use.

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Perry Holley:

Going back to communication, I’ve worked with leaders who just want to speed up and do things more quickly, but we really didn’t know what that meant or why. And so I think leaders need to focus on communications to be clear about the why. We mentioned that on the Urgency podcast as well. But if you’re not communicating clearly and calmly concisely about what it is we’re doing, why we’re doing it, where we are, how we’re doing that, people begin to let that anxiety I’m watching you and you look calm and we’re okay, we’re okay. And even those trying times and some clients are holding back budgets because they’re waiting to see, waiting to see, waiting to see. I got news for you, next year is an election year. It’s probably going to get worse because there’s going to be all kind of dynamics entering into that.

Chris Goede:

Yeah, I think as our team, if they can stay focused, they know what needs to be done and they have that confidence. I love that they can be quick without hurry. We haven’t talked about the role of accountability in a while on some of our conversations when it comes to leadership in general, but specifically today, let’s talk a little bit about it. When it comes to increasing or decreasing fear or anxiety. What are your thoughts about that? And how does this tie into what we’re talking about today?

Perry Holley:

Yeah, great question, and I was raised probably you might have been as well, that accountability was who do we blame when something goes wrong? Who’s accountable for this? I want to know right now. Who’s accountable?

Chris Goede:

Who’s choked? Who do I need to get a hold of?

Perry Holley:

And I find that that does nothing but raise anxiety and pushes people away. So I became enamored with an idea of making accountability about ownership. And I had a little saying, and I picked it up from some authors. The guys that wrote the Oz Principle had this little they didn’t write it this way, but the way I loved it, I took away from that, was that it’s a personal choice that you make to rise above the circumstances. And there’s always circumstances, and that’s what we’re talking about. There’s circumstances going on. But can you just make a choice to rise above the circumstances, to take ownership, to demonstrate they use word demonstrate ownership to drive the outcome that we want. And when I had those four things in my head about I’m going to make a personal choice, are the people on my team making a personal choice? I need them to rise above the circumstances. I don’t need excuses. There’s always circumstances. There’s always reasons why it won’t work. Rise above it. And then know that you own it. Whatever we’re talking about, you’re the owner, and we’re going to drive that outcome. I’m here to help you. We can do all the coaching and we can do all that, but I need to know that you own it. That’s accountability to me now when I teach it with my teams, is they know. And can I look at them saying, wow, they’re demonstrating ownership. I think you look at me sometimes and you have a deadline. We have a course, we have something. And you look and you say, is Perry demonstrating ownership of that process? And then you know that that’s accountability. Perry’s holding himself accountable, you’re holding me accountable, and we can move forward with that. But I think it’s so huge to letting go of a lot of the anxiety was if we’re taking ownership, I.

Chris Goede:

Love that word of ownership on our leadership team at Maxwell Leadership, we model something very similar to that, which is, okay, great, let’s talk about what the issues are, what the opportunities are, what the projects are. But before we’re done with that conversation, there’s one question, which is who’s owning this? And in essence, that’s what you’re saying. That’s the accountability. At the end of the day, we could have four or five of us on a project, but Perry is the owner when it comes to the accountability. We’re looking at Perry even though everybody else is involved in kind of helping that leader focus on removing obstacles, whatever it might be to get to that outcome. But ultimately, Perry’s the owner.

Perry Holley:

And then we report every Monday morning to the team on how we’re doing, on how you’re doing help, so you’re accountable, even that.

Chris Goede:

And that creates that great team, peer to peer accountability as well. And so if the people on your team know that they own an outcome, if they know why that outcome is important, if they are empowered to drive that outcome, if they can control what they can control, then stress, anxiety and fear should not have a place in that environment. Will there be urgency? Will there be tension at I know Patrick Lencio talks about tension and the power of that in meetings and in conversation, that’s going to happen. But we think that we can reduce the stress, the anxiety and the fear by going about it how we’re talking about today.

Perry Holley:

Well said. I never met a leader, not one who wanted to cause fear and uncertainty. I may have met a couple that wanted to raise the level of urgency and tension a bit and using that positively, but most of us don’t want to make things worse for our team. So just because you feel like you’re okay doesn’t mean everyone’s okay. So I think paying attention, being intentional, communicating transparency, a lot of the things that we talked about here today can help people feel like their future is not so much in jeopardy. And we can control the controllables. There are going to be things that happen, but we can control what we can control and focus on that and reduce that anxiety level.

Chris Goede:

Whether your organization or your team is thriving or whether you’re working through the Valley right now, there needs to be urgency inside that organization and inside the team. What we want you to hear us say is that urgency doesn’t equal anxiety. And you need to really, truly understand that and the difference between that because your team, if it comes across as anxiety and fear versus going after deadlines and urgency, then they are going to be concerned about their future. And man, as soon as almost kind of like you teach in team member engagement, where we have the five people in the middle of the boat, if those five people, they can go either way, right? They can even kind to fall into the urgency side of the things and man, my future is bright and we’re going to get after it. Or they could go the other way and they could be having conversations with people that are in the back of the boat and all of a sudden there’s fear and there is anxiety and they’re concerned about their future. And what ends up happening is not only do you get decreased engagement from your team member if you don’t handle this properly, but you also begin to lose people out the back door. And if you haven’t done research lately on what it cost organizations to lose people out the back door and then replace them, just Google that and then you’ll understand how important this is.

Perry Holley:

I had a question thinking about is my future secure? How are we doing? Do I have a future here? How are we doing? I know we do a lot about where are we. You do a lot of our business review meetings, talk about compared to our goal, compared to last year, what’s your feeling about anxiety increasing or anxiety reducing? There’s no right or wrong answer here. I watch our team and I know that a lot of things that causes anxiety is I don’t know how we’re doing. And I think in our team there’s no mistake on how we’re doing. And you’re Perry Direct and you put the numbers up for everybody to see every Monday morning. We know what the progress is. We know where we should be. We know where we were this time last year. Does that help or hurt?

Chris Goede:

I can’t answer that question. I’m just kidding. On this live podcast, here’s what I’m going to tell you. What I was thinking about when you said that was I think it helps some people. I think it causes anxiety in other people.

Perry Holley:

Good. I think that too.

Chris Goede:

So let me tell you how I handle that. I’m very aware, very aware of the individuals on our team that it causes anxiety. It’s okay that it does because of how they’re naturally wired. It’s not okay if I, as a leader, allow that to continue to happen without talking about it. So I’ll give you this is a great question and a great example. We had a meeting yesterday where I brought my sales team in and we started talking about Q Three and Q Four and what’s in the pipeline and what’s on the books and what can we anticipate in Q Four. And we’re having these conversations and one of the team members, who is a phenomenal leader on our team that causes some anxiety. And so what I did was started the meeting by saying, hey, I thought about having this meeting one on one and individually, but I decided that I felt like it would be better for us all to have a conversation so that we can all learn from each other on how we approach our book of business and the numbers and where we’re at and what do we need to do as a team going forward. Now, I didn’t have to have this conversation with the individual that on my team that doesn’t get anxious about reporting numbers on set, but I’m very aware of. So I guess what I’m saying is that as leaders, you’re going to have all kinds of people, right? And everybody we talk about, everybody deserves to be led well. And if that’s the case, the only way to be able to do that is to truly know and understand the wiring and the heartbeat of your people and to communicate that, to talk about it, to be like, hey, I know this may make you feel uncomfortable, but this is not personal. I want you to learn from this. We’re going to grow together and then maybe pipe down the other side, balance that care and candor, but also everyone’s not going to receive it the same way. But it’s our job as a leader to make sure that we understand that and walk them through that.

Perry Holley:

So as we wrap up, I’ll wrap it up.

Chris Goede:

Yeah, do it.

Perry Holley:

I think that that’s strong, what you just said. And I just learned something new as well, that being transparent as a leader is part of your job, to let people know where we are, how we stand. Absolutely. Do we have a future? Are we safe? They need to know. But we always talk. You have to lead everybody individually. Where do they need so you identified as a leader. You know your team well enough to know that certain people are going to struggle with that. Certain people are going to take it and study it. And certain people don’t care. They’re just going to go about their business. They’re going to control their controllables, not the bigger picture. So I think what I took away from that is that know your team, be transparent, be open and honest. Get as much data as run with people as possible, then realize who you need to go work on the side with to help ease their fear, anxiety, uncertainties that this is what the market’s doing, this is where we are, this is how we’re doing. But here’s how you’re going to help that. And I go back to what their role in it is, how relevant they are, what they need to do, why they need to keep moving quickly. I think those all play into that at the same time. Great ad. Well, thank you for joining. And as a reminder, if you want that leader guide, leave us a comment or a question. We love hearing from you. If you want to learn more about our offerings, you can do all that at maxwellleadership.com/podcast. We love hearing from you and very grateful you’d spend this time with us. That’s all today from the Maxwell Leadership executive podcast.