Executive Podcast #283: Leader Change: From Position to Influence

Chris Goede:
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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. Hi, I’m Perry Holly, a Maxwell leadership facilitator and coach.

Chris Goede:
And I’m Chris Goede, executive vice president with Maxwell Leadership. Welcome and thank you for joining. I want to encourage you to go to maxwellleadership.com/podcast. If you’ll click on this episode. There you can fill out a form. If you have an idea for a future episode, which Perry would greatly appreciate, or a comment or a thought, we’d love to hear from you. If you want to download the learner guide, please feel free to do that as well. Well, today’s topic is leader change from position to influence.

Chris Goede:
And for me, as I think about this, and I know where we’re going, this is really a key step in building what we would call your leadership legacy. Like, this has to happen. This is foundational for you as you build your legacy of leadership. And so, as we conclude this series, which we’ve spent a lot of time talking about change, I want to make sure that you guys understand we’re going to start talking about today, personal change versus organizational change. And that’s why I’m talking about, man, this is your leadership journey. This is you. At the end of the day, we do a thing with some people will say, who’s the greatest leader you’ve ever had the privilege to work and serve for, play with or whatever? And at the end of the day, you want people in that room going, man, it was, you know, it was Chris, it was Jake. That because of that, and this is a key first step to doing that.

Perry Holley:
I probably could have been more clever with the title. Just thinking that if you want to lead change, you need to be changed. We often think about the reasons why change efforts fail or change efforts succeed. It has a lot to do. An enormous amount to do with the amount of buy in that your team, the team you’re leading has in you. And you mentioned this briefly on last week or the week before about are we leading from level one? Just telling people what to do. That’s probably not going to go very long. People will be intrigued for a bit, but they don’t want to be bossed.

Perry Holley:
And so you’re leaning heavily on your influence and generating buy in from the team into you. So the question is, have you done a good job of changing yourself from a positional leader? Congratulations. You were given a title. That’s a great thing. You do have a position, but can you lead from that and be successful from that? I think temporarily, maybe, but not long term. Especially when it comes to leading tough change efforts. It’s going to require a lot of.

Chris Goede:
Your people do not want to be bossed around.

Perry Holley:
No. Sorry to interrupt, but this really came up this week in a session, was back to the generational differences. Is that as a baby boomer myself, that it’s easy for me to want to tell and direct, but the Gen Z and Gen Y, they do not want to be. Nobody wants to be boss, but especially these younger generations, they definitely don’t want to be bossed. So you’re going to have to get more buy in.

Chris Goede:
You have to do that, right? And that’s at the essence of what level one is. And John Maxwell says proof of leadership is found in the followers. And so there’s this question that comes up often about why do some people emerge as leaders while others can’t influence, no matter how hard they try, right? They’re like, this is not for me. And by the way, it’s not geared just towards a certain personality. It’s different people. Sometimes they can’t lead, no matter or influence how hard they try. And so for us, I see this more than you would think in conversations. And again, that’s why I just threw in there.

Chris Goede:
It’s not just a certain personality type. We get people that ask us all the time when we do some assessment breakdowns, they’re like, hey, so of the different categories, what’s the best leader? Which category is the best leader? And we go, yeah, no, it’s your category. Right? Like, whatever you are, you can become a great leader with the talents that you have. And the personality that you have. And what we want to do is talk about how do we move from leadership position where you just want to be the boss at level one and you want to be the leader you want to have influence with. So we’re going to talk about how do you lead from the position to influence.

Perry Holley:
This is really a pure John message because he affected me so deeply when I was coming up because I was really taught. I think most of us, especially in the United States, were taught leadership is being the boss. Leadership is, you earned it. You can tell people what to do. You have the right because you have the position of leadership. But that’s John teaching. Leadership is influence. Nothing more, nothing less.

Perry Holley:
So how do I develop influence? I wish I’d have been taught that. But this lesson, when I reflected on it, was really critical for me, growing up as a leader, to think about influence. And it all starts with character and who you are. And you and I have talked many times on here about how often are people watching you?

Chris Goede:
All the time.

Perry Holley:
All the time. They’re watching you. And then we ask the follow up question is, what are they watching for? And why do I care that they’re watching is that I want them at that level one position, I have the right to tell you what to do. The control is with me. But at level two, the control switches to you, and you need to give me permission to lead. So you’re watching me and trying to decide, are you going to make this enormous leap from follow me because you have to, to follow me because you want to? And so what are they watching for? And we’ve talked about it before, so I’ll go quickly, but I just think they’re watching your actions for sure. Even more, they’re watching your reactions. How do you handle bad stuff? Can you manage your emotions? Do you display your emotions or delay your emotions? How are you handling that type of thing? So actions, reactions, they watch your interactions.

Perry Holley:
How do you talk to people above you, below you, beside you? How do you talk to servers and restaurants? And I’m trying to decide as I’m watching you, am I going to give you permission to lead me? And I think that, to me, is one of the character. How do you show up and are people going to buy into you?

Chris Goede:
Yeah, that permission level is level two, Perry and I believe that, and John would as well, that that’s the foundation of you building your influence, as I mentioned in the opening. And so we talk about that being the permission level. And at this level, there’s all kinds of different ways for you to get their permission. We like to talk about it through connecting with them. And you may say, well, I’m not a people personnel, I’m not highly relational, but that’s okay. There’s all kinds of different ways that you can connect with them. As you, again, remember, we’re thinking about how do you go from position to influence? Questions connect, going through problems and adversity together. All those things connect, ideas connect.

Chris Goede:
There’s different ways that you can connect with them. Even if you go, hey, I’m an introvert and don’t like to really talk to people and build relationships, that’s okay. But you can still connect with them in a way that where, hey, they want to give you permission to lead them and that will increase your influence when we talk about relationships. And I’ll throw it to you, but I’m going to throw it to you with a question. We often say that people are asking you, they’re asking themselves three questions about you. And I started thinking about it when you started off with the word character and then even here, which is under relationships. And those three questions are, yeah, they.

Perry Holley:
Want to know, can you help me? Are you trying to help me or are you trying to help yourself? And they watch you for that. They want to know. The second question is, they want to know, do you care for me? Do you care for me personally, professionally? That’s a tough one. Do you think, how do you reveal you can care for people? And it’s different for everybody, so can you help me? Do you care for me? And the third one is the linchpin of all leadership. Can I trust you? And you start thinking about it. Like you said, if you answer those, yes, yes and yes, I feel you’re trying to help me. I feel like you care about me and I feel I can trust you.

Chris Goede:
They’re going to give you permission to lead them.

Perry Holley:
Pretty much, yeah.

Chris Goede:
So those are three simple questions. Hard to answer, but simple questions.

Perry Holley:
So we start with character. We look at relationships as you’re mentioning. A third one would be looking at knowledge. Do you know stuff? It’s different from competence. I think that’ll come up in a minute. But do you know what you’re doing? Do you know about the business? Do you understand the markets? Are you knowledgeable about how you fit into the market? Your customers, your clients? There’s so much that you show, have you done your homework? Are you knowledgeable about stuff? And people are not influenced by people that don’t seem to know what’s going on and don’t have that basic level of knowledge about how things work.

Chris Goede:
I’ll ask this question sometimes, would you prefer your leader be competent or be committed? Right. And we have this in one of our trainings. And it’s interesting to watch the dialogue of the room because immediately people go, I want somebody that’s committed. And we’ll have a very few that are part of saying, I want to be competent, have the knowledge of what we’re talking about, the competency, which you said, we’ll get to it in a little bit. But when I think about that, it’s not only of the current job, but it’s the historical knowledge that comes with that. And it’s fun to watch the room and the leaders in the room begin to go, well, maybe you’re right. I probably wouldn’t have influence, someone wouldn’t have influence with me if I didn’t feel like they had the credibility of the knowledge of what we’re trying to accomplish. Well, the fourth one that we’re going to talk about is intuition.

Chris Goede:
This is going to be an interesting, that’s an interesting conversation. So with this one, if you work for a leader who can read the tea leaves, as we say in the business, the customers, the market, the economy, and if you trust that, they may say they can read it, but if you trust that, then you’re probably positively influenced by them. I thought it was interesting that this woman was in here, though. So I want to unpack it a little bit with you. Do you feel like you can develop intuition? Is it something that maybe you’re born with? How do you increase your intuition if you feel like you can develop it?

Perry Holley:
I do think some people have an easier path on this one, but I do believe you can develop it and it has a lot to do. And I talk a lot about, do you have a growth plan? Are you pouring into you? I guarantee you, you and I have more intuition today about leadership’s gut feel about our teams and leadership than we had 20 years ago because we’ve been constantly pouring into ourselves, go back to that word. Knowledge is that we continue to read, we continue to listen, we continue to sit at John’s feet, Mark’s feet, we continue to ask questions, we continue to share mistakes and failures. We learn, we grow. And I just think I’m in a different place today, that when I, years ago, if somebody on my team had slammed their fist down and I would think, I would thought one thing, and now my gut says there’s a bigger something going on. There’s something going on in their personal life. It’s not about this. It’s not about what they’re saying.

Perry Holley:
I’m reading the leaves that something else is going on. All that comes from studying people, studying leadership, studying management, studying personalities, doing these right path things that we do.

Chris Goede:
And I agree with that.

Perry Holley:
I have developed over time to do that kind of leads into another one though is probably the fifth one I think here is about experience. How does experience play into your developing of influence and where you’ve been, what you’ve done? You hit into that just a minute ago and I hear John in my head saying it’s not just about your experience, it’s about evaluating experience. I wondered your thoughts on that. About is it taking time to reflect on experiences? Is it learning about that experience? People are influenced by leaders that have experience, but what’s the reflection piece of that?

Chris Goede:
Yeah, I think you need to evaluate. Obviously we’ve grown up in John’s world and it’s a big part of what we do. I want to encourage you. It’s not just evaluating experiences that went wrong because most people do that. They go, oh, it didn’t work. Let’s figure out why it didn’t work. I want to encourage you to also evaluate experiences and what you can learn from your current successes or even just staying mediocre. Right.

Chris Goede:
Like what are you experiencing? Are you taking time to evaluate that and then learn from that? I think that is a huge part of this. Another one we want to talk about is as you move from a positional leader to one that has influence, is your past successes. Both you and I love sports and we talk often about, man, we want to be in the winning locker room, not the losing locker room. Right now you’re listening to this and it’s probably a couple of weeks after the Super bowl. And so we don’t know who the champion of the Super bowl is going to be, but somebody’s going to have a winning locker room and somebody’s going to have a losing locker room. I’d much rather be in that winning locker room. And oftentimes it comes from that leader, the management team, the players that have had past success that they can lean on and learn from. And if you’re asking me, hey, what team would you like to be a part of, right.

Chris Goede:
Right now I’m going to tell you I want to be a part of the Kansas City Chiefs or the San Francisco 49 ers, both playing at the ultimate game in football with the Super bowl. And so this is a level three skill set in the five levels. This is where you have produced results not only in and through what you’ve done as a leader, but I always like to say in and through the team as well, because it takes a team to do that. So no matter how much weight you put on someone’s past successes, when you think about the influence that they have with you, it has to come back to some type of production. You can’t just sit at the relationship level and sing Kumbaya. And so there’s no doubt that their past success has something to do with that.

Perry Holley:
Yeah, I wanted some financial advisor, so I went looking for somebody that had been bankrupt six times.

Chris Goede:
Yeah, that’s exactly right.

Perry Holley:
No, of course not.

Chris Goede:
No, that’s right.

Perry Holley:
Looking for people that have been successful financially. I heard John say, yeah, if you’re looking for marriage advice, you look for somebody who’s been divorced six times.

Chris Goede:
Right.

Perry Holley:
No, look for somebody.

Chris Goede:
That’s great.

Perry Holley:
Your past success tells me a lot about that. You know what you’re talking about. You’ve been there. You’ve done that. You want me to go there and do that. It’s very influential in doing that. The last one goes back. We just hinted at a minute ago, number seven, around ability or your competence in the role.

Perry Holley:
I cannot say enough about how many leaders I’ve talked to on coaching. I said, what’s your growth plan? How are you keeping up with. There’s a lot changing. I had. Somebody recently asked me, they text me on a Saturday afternoon, hey, what do I need to know about AI? I thought, okay, that’s not a text question, and that is not a Saturday afternoon text question, but here’s the answer. Everything. Well, what do you mean? How does it affect your industry? How does it affect what you do? How could it affect what you do? And so, are you competent? Are you staying current? Are you growing in the role? Do you know about leading? Do you know about your business? Do you know about the market? It goes. Past knowledge is that I’m staying up to date, but I’m also growing in competency.

Perry Holley:
And people look at you. I don’t know how you are, but I am not influenced by somebody that is not competent. They’re incompetent in their role. If I have to follow you, I will, but it’ll be limited for a short time because I’m out of here type of thing.

Chris Goede:
One of the things that I would encourage you as you think about moving from this person or leader of position and changing to influence is what Perry’s talking about. Not only continuing to learn, but then share what you’re learning periodically. Just say, hey, man, I was reading this book the other day, or I was reading an article on AI over the weekend. This is how it impacted this business. I just wanted to share it with the team. When you begin to do that, they’re going to see it’s contagious, and they’re going to begin to see your ability grow. Their ability is going to grow. They’re going to want to share things with you.

Chris Goede:
And that whole growth process is something that will help you if you continue to develop, that will help you increase your influence. Well, as we wrap up, this is a topic that’s near and dear to our heart. This is something that we believe will give you success as a leader, whether it’s in your family, whether it’s in the community, whether it’s in the organization. What we want to encourage you is what we gave you today were just a few nuggets that you can kind of lean into, but we want you to lean into them for the right motive. A lot of people will say, oh, well, I just want to move the needle for me personally, or I want to move the needle because of this organization. Just make sure that you have the right motive between why you want to go from position to influence. And we always talk about there’s a fine line between manipulation and influence, and it’s that motive. And so as you think about this, we want you to increase your motive and your influence for the right reason, and that is because of what your motive is.

Perry Holley:
Well, motive matters, and people can tell, are you trying to help you or help yourself? Are you caring about me or you care about yourself? Can I trust you or are you just trying to manipulate me to get something for you? Shows up very easily. Well, thank you. Great insights. And a reminder if you want that learner guide to learn more about our offerings, to learn about our other pod family offerings, if you want to leave us a comment or a question, you can do all that at maxwellleadership.com/podcast. We love hearing from you. We’re very grateful you’d spend this time with us. That’s all today from the Maxwell Leadership executive podcast.