How to Sustain Your Leadership Influence

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 thanks for joining us today. If you are not watching us on YouTube, I want to encourage you to do it. This is not a mirror effect. We decided to switch it up a little bit. We’re going to get crazy in the new year. And we said, well, that’s what sides of the table.

Perry Holley:
No, I feel your power position.

Chris Goede:
I’m taking over. I’m taking control from this side. Well, listen, we are ecstatic that you’re listening and we hope this adds value to you and to your team. And today we’re going to talk about how do you sustain leadership influence? We talk a lot about leadership as influence and what does that look like. And some of the things that are hard to do is to sustain that over time. And we say leadership’s hard because you got to do it differently with different people and you got to be able to sustain it. It’s like a one trick wonder.

Perry Holley:
We talk about all the things to do to gain it, but you think when you get heads down in the heat of the moment, in the work that you’re doing, setting the goals in the place you are in the year, with the annual challenges, all that you’re doing, you can really, you can kill your influence in a quick hurry based on some behavior. So that’s where this was coming from.

Chris Goede:
I love it. So before we get in, I want to encourage you to go to MaxwellLeadership.com/ExecutivePodcast. There you’ll see a button on the upper right. We’d love to hear from you. If you’ve got a question, you got a. A topic you’d like for us to unpack or maybe you need some leadership development training and coaching in the new year. If you’ll just click on that button and fill out the form, we would love to get back in touch with you. So let’s dive in.

Chris Goede:
Let’s talk about this and, and how do we get to a place where we’re super int. That’s a big word for us. John wrote a book called Intentional Living. If you ever want to read a book that can lay out a process of working you how to be intentional, I would highly recommend it. But we got to do this with our influence as well. So let’s Dive in.

Perry Holley:
Yeah. So the first place, as you say, as we’re saying, that you get in a hurry and get things gets intense. So what do you do? And number one, I would say starting with modeling your consistency of your character is the way I wrote that to say that, you know, trust and character is not really in the big moments. It’s revealed in everyday moments. So how do you show up with things? And are you consistent in that? We’ve talked many times here about people aren’t asking, are you perfect? Matter of fact, if you are, we have a podcast on that. I don’t mind you thinking I’m perfect. However, it’s not a winning strategy for influence. It is.

Perry Holley:
What they want to know is, are you consistent? Are you predictable? Are you a known quantity to me? So your emotions, are you consistent of emotions? Are you consistent of actions? Are you consistent in your words and how you show up so that people know that they can trust, that this inconsistency is where inconsistency in character, in how you do things, erodes trust and really takes people back on their heels a bit. I don’t know which one of you I’m getting when I come in your office to talk about the deal. We’re struggling to win and we may lose here in the end of the year type of a thing, and you’re going to blow up on me. I don’t think so. But John says that talent may get you to the top, but character is what keeps you there. And so how do you show up? So as I say that to you, doesn’t that sound completely, duh, that’s easy. I mean, isn’t that what we do? And I say, can you help me with why? Why do we have to even talk about why? Is this hard?

Chris Goede:
Isn’t it? Yes, it seems simple, right? But listening to you, I go, I’ve had some of those conversations about some leaders that I’ve had in the past four leaders that we’ve worked with. And you go, so where’s the miss? Right? Like what? What is causing this to happen? And I think there’s a lot of emotion around it. But we’re not asking you to change how you’re wired or your personality. It’s how we consistently show up and how do we do the little things? I’ll say this. As we get started, I see this happening, the lack of consistency. I see this happening a lot with leaders that don’t show up authentically. They try to be one person in a situation and. And then the bullets start Flying or the heat gets turned up and then they show up a little bit differently and then it gets turned up even more and it’s differently.

Chris Goede:
And so it’s like, hey, if, if you can just be authentic. That’s the first thing I want to say real quick about this is that I think the consistency of your character, if you show up like you do at home, that you do at work and do it on a consistent basis, I think it would go a long way. That’s from an authentic standpoint. So thinking about this, some small things that maybe are done over time because everything compounds with consistency, both positive or negative, will erode or completely begin to have people question your character. So I thought about this, not about Perry, I thought about a couple of other people, right? And this always comes to mind is when you’re in and around conversations where you hear leaders talking negatively about somebody else or questioning certain things or, you know, it’s like we, we say in our leadership team, hey, listen, we might not be all in agreement when we leave here, but we need to be in alignment, right? A lot of leaders leave those rooms and they’re talking about why they left and they, their, their idea didn’t win, their direction didn’t win. And so then you go as a follower, you go, what, what’s being said about me? And you begin thinking about that as leaders that are talking badly about others or other situations. Another one is the spin factor. I didn’t say spin selling.

Chris Goede:
We, we were all in the sales world familiar with that. Just kind of the dishonesty and the spin of, of what the real truth is. And so again, just, we want to encourage you to be transparent, be authentic, tell the truth. There’s no reason, especially if it’s a mistake by you as the leader or the organization, there’s no reason to spin it, there’s no reason to be dishonest about it, to try to protect the people. Because what you’re going to do is remember what we’re focused here is on the long term play, how do we continually sustain and increase our influence. And then the last one, this is something that, this is a pet peeve of mine is that when the team is doing all the work and the leader steps up and said, yeah, I did a great job, right? Like, or because the buck stops with the leader when it’s their fault in their certain situation, they go, well, that’s because, you know what? Perry decided to sit on the other side of the table today. Didn’t go well, it’s his fault. Right.

Chris Goede:
And we know that we’ve all know people like that in our life. And so those are just a few things. As you think about how a leader’s character can begin to diminish over time instead of increase.

Perry Holley:
I think it’s interesting you say about, but people kind of know. And if you don’t acknowledge your weaknesses, your faults, you don’t acknowledge that they did the work. They know, they know. And I remember John saying, telling a story about some guy coming up, I, I am not going to. Why would you tell me to confess all this to my team? He goes, they already know. They just want to know. If you know that’s right, you can give it away. Another one, let me give you a second one was honest, honest communication.

Perry Holley:
Now get ready because I’m going to tell you, doesn’t it, duh. But you know, John says about a good musical where the words match the music, your audio matches your video Leaders, if you say one thing and do another, if you, you know, people notice these things and especially the team, they’re always listening, they’re always watching what you do and does it line up and you know, honest communication, I think some people relate that to sharing every dirty detail. No, it doesn’t mean opening the curtain all the way to the edges of the stage to show all your dirty backstage act, but it does mean opening the curtain to say, I’m not, you know, your word. Authentic. This is just me. I’m just telling you the truth. This is just where it’s coming from. And being truthful, being clear, being aligned, a great word you used.

Perry Holley:
And just knowing that your communication is. There’s no confusion in that. It’s clear and it’s honest that people know if you said it. They can bank on that. So, duh. Why is this hard?

Chris Goede:
Yeah. Back to what you said. I know you say this often. Leaders don’t want to say the hardest three words, which is, I don’t know, I don’t know. Right. Like again, it’s just these are little simple principles that we just want to refresh where you’re at and thinking about this. But this is so hard. Even the communication, by the way, this is not just a leader thing.

Chris Goede:
This is an organization thing. Perry and I see this all the time. It’s in the top three all the time. No matter industry, size of company, even at Maxwell leadership. I had a early morning breakfast this morning with a team member and we were talking about how to improve the communication internally because there’s gaps there. And so this is something that Happens, but it will continue to erode and continue to get worse. Specifically, if you’re as a leader inconsistent in, in how you communicate about certain things. Now Perry mentioned something that I want to bring up.

Chris Goede:
There are, there’s a price to leadership and part of that is sometimes you have information that you need to be working on that the team doesn’t need to be aware of or other individuals don’t need to be aware of at that time. At certain points that information will come out. And so as Perry said, you don’t have to open the curtain all the way up personally or professionally, but you can do it in a way that’s consistent where the team understands that you’re not, you’re not keeping it from them, you’re not trying to spin it. As I was saying a minute ago, you’re not withholding it. And so that’s how I would encourage you to just think about this is that we need to be sharing this communication. Often that you’re allowed to do outside of your leadership responsibility. Another thing is promising something this individual leader and then never following up. Hey, I’m going to send you that report.

Chris Goede:
Hey, I would love to have lunch with you. Hey, I would love to. And then there’s lack of follow through in that communication of what you have told them.

Perry Holley:
That’s a big one.

Chris Goede:
And so, or you and I have this where we don’t want to say no to people.

Perry Holley:
Yes.

Chris Goede:
So we go see how’s it that right there. Yeah, that’s good. This is growth in the new year. This is, we go. Let me just get, let me think about that. Let me get back to you. And then because we knew that wasn’t a priority or we weren’t going to have time to do that, we said that because we don’t want to feel bad in the moment. But then we’re losing credibility as a leader because of our communication in a way that we need to make sure that our, it’s not impacting our influence to, to erode it.

Chris Goede:
The final thing is, is just you have it here as self serving leadership. What does that mean? That is defending your, your reputation based off of maybe bad decisions, maybe a reality thing that everybody knows what’s aware of, but you’re going the other way because you feel like that makes you look better as a leader. So back to Perry’s point, they, they already know and more than not, they already know what’s going on in the organization and at the right time you’ll have to share that with them. So the Honest communication is a great second step to making sure we sustain our influence.

Perry Holley:
And we, we were kind of laughing about it last week that you make a commitment on a call that I’m on with a guy, and I wrote it down to help you remember to make it.

Chris Goede:
That’s exactly right.

Perry Holley:
But you did the same for me, said, hey, you were going to get back. Don’t, don’t let that ball drop. But we’re trying to hold each other accountable to the fact that those little communication misses where we just flippantly say, I’ll get that for you. I’ll back to you on Thursday. I’ll get it for the end of the week, and then we don’t do it. Guess what?

Chris Goede:
That’s a great point.

Perry Holley:
Dishonest communication is that. And people are watching that. And it may not be a big deal to you, but to them, they’re tracking that. And it says, I don’t know, your influence is now taking a hit. And let’s remember that’s what we’re talking about here. So another idea that kind of feeds into this is about valuing transparency. And transparency, this usually makes leaders a little nervous, is about, does it require vulnerability? Is that I’m going, you know, what can I share? What can I not share? And if you’re one of the leaders that holds back sharing because of how it might affect you or how it feels to you, it’s not an organizational thing, it’s not an inappropriate thing. It’s just that you’re not comfortable with sharing it that way.

Perry Holley:
People are going to perceive this in a way that you’re holding back, that I don’t know what you’re talking about. And when you admit, as we were talking about, you admit your weaknesses, your mistakes, your need for help, your not knowing the answer, those types of things, just being transparent. Tell me more about that. I’m curious, how did you figure that out? Where did that come from? And then sharing information from the organization down to your team, they know there’s something going on. But are you open enough to share that? When I say this again, thinking, duh. So why is this hard? Why is transparency a struggle?

Chris Goede:
Yeah. When a leader pulls back and is not willing to be transparent, oftentimes.

Perry Holley:
What.

Chris Goede:
We’Ve seen is that leaders want to be right versus do right. And so they’re like, hey, right? Like, I want to make sure I don’t really say what I’m thinking because that might not be the right answer. Right. And so we, we, we want to be right. But are we Getting to the place, to where we’re leading, because we just want to do right. And when you do that, that takes a lot of transparency because you don’t have all the answers, right? We don’t. We don’t know. I think also leaders often avoid transparency because they equate the vulnerability, the honesty to that as maybe a loss of respect, a loss of authority, makes them look a little bit weak or incompetent, or maybe even the transparency in the past, they’re burned from it, which we all have been, by the way.

Chris Goede:
So I’m thinking right now of a couple of ideas. And then that led to misinterpretation, that led to maybe losing a good team member or an employee. And so there’s a lot of drama that can happen when people, you know, leak that and you just burn from it. But we can’t do that. We can’t continue to lead based off of how we think other people will act or react to what we’re sharing. We. We can’t control that. You know, I was thinking about this as we’re working our way through and.

Chris Goede:
And getting ready to go to the next one. This is layered in the five levels of leadership methodology. I originally was saying, man, these are great level two principles, but if you think about it, all the work’s done at levels 2, 3, and 4, right? The connection piece at level 2, this is all in that if we’re going to produce together and we’re going to win, we got to be able to do this to the team. And then if we’re going to truly develop people and reproduce ourselves as leaders, we got to do this as well. And so that’s why I love the title of how do we sustain our influence with. With our leadership? And it just lines up right with the 5 levels.

Perry Holley:
Totally agree. Another way to sustain influence and kind of gets into. Can get in the way and hurt your influences about how do you show humility? How do you exemplify humility in your work? And this one’s critical because sometimes as leaders, we can be driven by ego or jealousy or belief that we are the smarter because we’re the one in charge, that we have all the answers. Everybody listen to me. You know what? Funny, I know I’ve done that, but I would never say it. I would never say I’m driven by ego. It’s kind of one of these that sneaks up on you, is that you’re used to being in charge. You’re used to having the answers.

Perry Holley:
You’re used to being the One everyone comes to you start believing those press clippings and you kind of get into that mode. This is about others, about elevating others is what humility is. Not really. I love the definition. I think it was Rick Warren that said not thinking less of yourself but thinking of yourself less is the great definition there. And that’s what it’s about, elevating others. Pride isolates and humility connects. And this is all about connecting and building my influence.

Perry Holley:
So again, again, duh. This sounds like pretty obvious. Shouldn’t you don’t lead by ego and pride lead by with humility and others focused. Why is that hard?

Chris Goede:
So I think a leader in this situation, their desire to show humility erodes faster. When the organization as a whole and I as you’re listening, you’re thinking about this, you go, hey, what gets rewarded inside my organization? What, what is the culture of how we act, think and interact with each other? And if there’s a lot of ego driven rewards, if there’s a lot of image profile, you know, rewards that are there, no doubt about it that we’re going to as a, as a leader go I don’t know. Right. And we’re going to begin questioning that and we’re going to lose our influence with people because we’re going to want to jump in and do the same thing that the organization’s doing. Meanwhile, everybody on our team knows well that team member’s got a massive ego. That’s the only reason they got that notice, they got that shout out, they got that award. When we do that, we’re losing, we’re losing our influence with people because they are aware of it. If the culture also equates humility with weakness, as we talked about just a minute ago, the leader’s not going to lean into that.

Chris Goede:
They’re not going to want to show up and be seen as we. When leaders fake humility to manipulate or impress, it can also damage influence that they may have established. So there is a lot to this. It comes with your culture that you want to make sure you’re not trying to align with the culture. If it doesn’t necessarily align with your leadership style, if it’s really driven around what I call kind of those surface levels things in producing.

Perry Holley:
Yeah. Add to this one about really humility about others only. But are you demonstrating support for others? Is another way to think about your, how to sustain your influence over time that are you clearly putting the team first? Are you putting other people ahead of you and that’s going to show up with how do you, do you invest in others? Do you advocate for others? Do you mentor, do you develop, do you train, do you teach, do you coach? Are you doing these things and putting others out there or as is it kind of focused on you? And does that seem hard? That’s another one that I should be investing in my team. But why do we, Is it the speed of business? Why are we not? What are we putting our influence at risk when it comes to demonstrating support for other people?

Chris Goede:
When’s the last time you asked me, hey, I’m getting ready to move. Would you mind coming and helping lift boxes and move stuff? Right, right. Like, yeah. Nope. I mean there was a day that we’d move the trucks around and do all that. And so it’s hard in different seasons of your leaders, I think the more responsibility we have, it does get hard, it does take a little bit of time. But remember we’re talking about being intentional and doing that extra step to increase and or sustain our influence. So when leaders stop doing this, not only is it hard, but also maybe you don’t get this is kind of self serving in a way, but you get ignored for the effort that you put into it.

Chris Goede:
Or maybe you even get exploited for the fact that you, you’re doing it and people think you’re doing it for an alternative reason than actually just just to help them. And so I’ve also heard people say, well, you know what, I just want them to develop. I just, I want them to make sure that they’re not creating dependency on me as a leader, that they can get it done themselves. And so I’m going to go ahead and let them do that. I’m going to watch right here in case an emergency happens and jump in. But they need to grow, they need to grow through that, that it roll up your sleeves a little bit periodically and jump in and demonstrate that support for others on projects or events, whatever it might be.

Perry Holley:
That’s really good. Let’s just come to this last one. And this was really, I thought meaningful based on some work I’ve done recently about maintaining my influence route, embracing an attitude of service. And this was kind of the servant leader mentality of again goes back to everything. We’ve kind of putting people first, but not about you, the leader being served, but about serving the team. And I think this is, I’m going to ask you why is this hard? But I think this one is actually hard to put yourself in that mindset that it’s really transformational about you giving your time, your Energy, your attention, and it communicates value to others. And so this integrity that you’re giving, you’re not taking from folks. And I just want to.

Perry Holley:
Is there something we can help each other? Just in this last thought around having an attitude of service.

Chris Goede:
So let me ask you this, because you were instrumental in creating our content around Ascend to servant leadership. We were a little bit iffy if we felt like we were going to roll this out, but we have some organizations that are like, no, this is absolutely part of what our culture is. As you were doing your research and working through that and talking to teams and coaching through it, what were you hearing on the other side of servant leadership? Why. Why would we need content around that? Like, that’s. Why would I serve right in the corporate. Is it. Am I going to be exploited? Like, what does this make me? Does it make me look lower than what I really should be? Because I’m a leader and I shouldn’t do this. Like, all of that probably goes through people’s heads, right? What specifically were you hearing and thinking about in the work that you did to ascend a certain nation?

Perry Holley:
We kind of laughed about it, but they say, yeah, I really like that idea, but could you call it something else? And they didn’t want that. And I said, well, we could call it leading with love. And then their head exploded.

Chris Goede:
No, we’re not doing that exploded.

Perry Holley:
But it’s really. People don’t disagree that this is a great way to lead because go back to your point about the five levels, that if you feel like your leader has got that kind of relationship with you, they’re the boss. Level one, but they have that kind of connection with you. Level two, wouldn’t you go to battle with that person and say, yes, I want to be in the fight with that leader, because that I do feel loved, I do feel valued. I do feel like they’re serving me. They’re in it for the bigger picture, not for themselves. And so when everybody heard that that’s what servant leadership is, they said, oh yeah, we love that. Can you call it something else? And I thought, no.

Chris Goede:
Well, I love that. Let me wrap this up for us with a couple thoughts and then I’ll throw it back to you. I want to go back to how we started. We talked about authenticity first. And that is an area that, as your influence continues to grow and you sustain, it will build trust over time. And that trust meter keeps ticking, the more that that you are authentic people in good times and in bad, and people are going to follow that type of consistency of a leader versus the rah rah, charismatic, come in or like you said, you just never know what you’re going to get every single day. So I want to encourage you that as a leader, your, your title, whatever it is, when they, they go, hey, Perry’s coming in. Perry, executive coach, executive facilitator, content producer, right? They have an expectation of how Perry’s going to show up in the room, especially if they work with Perry on a day to day basis.

Chris Goede:
So how they’ve experienced Perry is how they’re going to expect Perry to show up. And that’s Perry’s leadership style or his brand. So are we living by these principles.

Perry Holley:
That we shared today?

Chris Goede:
Because if we are, and this is part of what they expect to get from you, I promise your influence is going to continue to go up. But if it’s not, then I just want you to take some time to reflect over the ones that we reviewed and say, man, where could I do a better job of this going forward? Because my leadership brand, I want it to be about this, I want it to be around this. I want my influence to continue to go up and to the right and do it on a consistent basis.

Perry Holley:
And I’ll just encourage you also that as I reviewed them for myself personally, these can be blind spots.

Chris Goede:
Oh yes.

Perry Holley:
These are not something you say. I don’t have a problem with that. I think you need to ask someone, how am I doing when it comes to this or that? Because I found for me, I didn’t think and then I asked and I found out I had a couple blind spots. So great stuff. As Chris told you at the top. If you’d like to learn more about our offerings, learn about our other in our podcast family, you can do all that at MaxwellLeadership.com/ExecutivePodcast. You can also leave us a comment or a question there. We love hearing from you and very grateful you spend this time with us today.

Perry Holley:
That’s all from the Maxwell Leadership Executive Podcast.

Transcript created by Castmagic.