Jeff Standridge (Into):
Are you ready to change the trajectory of your business and see massive improvements? Each week, we’ll share strategies and practices to generate sustained results and long lasting success in your organization. Welcome to the Innovation Junkies Podcast.
Jeff Standridge:
Hey guys. Welcome to another episode of the Innovation Junkies Podcast. I’m Jeff Standridge.
Jeff Amerine:
Hey, and this is Jeff Amerine. It’s great to be back.
Jeff Standridge:
Hey, it’s good to have you back, man. You’ve been out gallivanting.
Jeff Amerine:
I have. And I’d heard that you upgraded with a guy that had much more promotable hair than what I got.
Jeff Standridge:
Oh, listen, listen, it was a great upgrade. Yeah. Although I did make a little bit of an error in judgment. I referenced him being in the twilight of his career, and I think he interpreted that as the twilight of his life. So I had to make good on that. Hey, we had some great conversations with Glenn Crockett talking about leadership, and we’re going to continue those conversations about leadership for the next few episodes. I know you’ve got a lot of value to add there.
And I thought we would start today by talking about… There was a period of time where in this organization that I worked in where we used to talk very positively about leadership, and we would talk almost as the antithesis of leadership and kind of talk negatively about management. Say, “Oh, you want to be a good leader, not a good manager.” And I really kind of believe that it requires both/and. Right? Leadership being about how you deal with people. And I actually kind of created this phrase that I use is that you lead people and you manage things, but you got to be able to do both well. How do you feel about that?
Jeff Amerine:
No, I agree. I agree. And there has been, over the course of the last 40 years of my career, this very strong bias towards almost denigrating management skills and saying it’s really important to be a leader. And I believe that that’s true. If you’re going to be out in front of an organization, you do have to be a good leader. But attention to detail and making sure that tasks are getting done and just good management practices are what keep the train on the tracks and keeps the organization out of the ditch a lot of times. And I think the two are not mutually exclusive. I think there are two sides of the same coin. Sometime you’ll have difficulty finding people that can lead well that are also decent managers. And if you know that about yourself as a leader, it’s good to recognize that and make sure that you’ve got task oriented, management oriented people in that next echelon of the organization.
Jeff Standridge:
You might be a good manager, but might lack the leadership skills to really be responsible for a large group of people. But I’m not sure that the converse is true. If you’re a great leader, then you almost have to have a modicum of quality management skills, even though if you’re a little weak in them, you got to have some. You’ve got to have a threshold. But if you’re weak in them, you surround yourself with people who can shore that up for you.
Jeff Amerine:
Well, and tell you the truth, we’ve seen lots of examples as you look at the life cycle of business to where a good entrepreneur, good leader, will get something to a certain point and they don’t really care a lot or don’t really engage a lot in good management practice. And that ends up being ripe for a turnaround because they haven’t paid attention to the details or they haven’t set the stage to have people that are good at details that work for them. So yeah, both are important. There’s no question about it.
Jeff Standridge:
When I was in my academic career, as you know, I continue to be a recovering academic, but when I was in my academic career, that really fascinated me that in the healthcare field, we would take the most technically astute practitioners and they would automatically get promoted into shift supervisor, department director, hospital administrator, whatever, getting promoted into leadership positions. And my experience was, many times the most technically competent or most technically proficient person on the team wasn’t necessarily the best leader of people. And so I actually studied that academically for a number of years. And we studied successful people in the healthcare world, and we looked at what was it that differentiated them. It wasn’t about their degree, it wasn’t about their technical proficiency, it wasn’t about their professional credentials.
There was this concept of threshold skills. You had to be able to have a basis of capability to even be in the profession. But just because you had those thresholds didn’t necessarily mean you were going to be highly successful. And so the way I boiled down, what I found in that research, is that real success, leadership success, and even individual success depends upon this balance of results and relationships. If I focus on results at the expense of relationships, I’m going to be wildly successful very, very quickly until I alienate everyone around me who’s responsible for helping me maintain those results. By the same token-
Jeff Amerine:
Short term, right? It’s very short term.
Jeff Standridge:
Exactly. If I focus on relationships at the expense of results, the opposite side of the spectrum, then people will love me. They will think very, very highly of me. That is until they lose respect for me, because I can’t do what I say I’m going to do when I say I’m going to do it. I can’t deliver the results. I can’t make good on my promises. And Stephen Covey Jr, I think it was Stephen M.R. Covey Jr, he’s the one that the senior Stephen Covey wrote about in the Seven Habits when he talked about teaching him about making the yard green and clean or clean and green, if you remember that. Well, he came along a few years later and wrote the speed of trust, and he talked about that same concept of results and relationships, but he called it character and competence, which I think is the same thing. You have to have this balance of character and competence in order to be a sustainable leader and a leader that generates sustained results.
Jeff Amerine:
Now, I think it’s very important, and you’ll see people tend to be somewhere on that scale naturally or innately, or by personality or by experience. And if they can be self-aware enough, maybe through a process that a group like us can take them through or others, if they can become self-aware that they need to pick up those other skills, that’s where they can really unlock the power of the organization and can really perform well as a leader.
There’s examples that have come up just recently where there are people that are well experienced who will say things like, “Oh, I think I was successful in that situation because I made two staff members cry and they finally understood what I was trying to get done” That’s not typically going to lead to good long term results. And so, there are instances like that where people have to be willing to be self-aware enough to understand that there is this balance between character and competence, between results and getting the task done and also managing the relationships.
Jeff Standridge:
Yeah, no, I agree with you, and it’s real interesting. A little bit of vulnerability goes a long way as a leader. Having the strength as a leader to bring in a third party, for instance, to assess what’s the perspective that people have about me as the CEO or as the senior leader of the organization? I know we do a verbal 360 a lot where we’ll line up a half a dozen to 10 colleagues that can be direct reports. It should be a balance. If you’re a CEO, it should be a balance of people who report to you, people who are colleagues to you. And if you’re the CEO, then that may be a little bit difficult. So what do you do? You go get some board members? But if you’re looking at a C level executive, say a CFO, CIO, CSO, or what have you, you want the people to whom you report, you want the people that are on the team with you, your peers and colleagues, and you want a few people that report to you.
It’s kind of this 360 level review and opening yourself up to that and being willing to receive that feedback and to create an environment where people can feel comfortable giving you that feedback, that’s a real hallmark of someone who’s reached that degree of leadership maturity. They say that if you think you’re leading, and you look behind you and no one is following, then perhaps you’re just out taking a walk. And so you got to be willing to ask the question, “Are people following me and are they following me willingly or are they following me because of the perceived repercussions if they don’t?” And if it’s the latter, you got a sustainability issue with our leadership. Right?
Jeff Amerine:
Yeah. No doubt, no doubt. I mean these are kind of fundamental points in terms of… We’ve talked about it before, but building a winning culture starts with leadership. And if you’re going to build a winning culture, just knowing yourself, and being able to manage this balance between results and relationships, I think is a key starting point.
Jeff Standridge:
Yeah. Being able to balance it. So that doesn’t mean that it’s always in balance. You think about a guy walking a tight rope. He or she kind of loses their balance occasionally, and they have to self correct in order to keep from falling off that rope. And so, having that self-awareness that you mentioned, to be able to say, you know what? And having people who will give you feedback to say, “Hey, I think you broke a little glass on this deal and you might want to circle the wagons with a few people.” I had a leader that I’m so thankful for her because she would just stick the mirror up in front of me, kind of figuratively speaking and say, “Take a look in the mirror. Do you like what you see?” And what she would do that is after a situation, maybe that happened in the boardroom or in a senior team meeting or something, I might have acted out a little bit. I’m not going to say that I did, but I may or may not have acted out a little bit.
And she would say, “Hey, let’s talk about what happened in the meeting. How did you feel about that?” She wouldn’t accuse me, she wouldn’t beat me up about the brows about it. She’d say, “How did you feel about that? Do you feel like that you could have handled that any differently than you did? So what do you think the outcome of that was? How do you think Sally felt about what you said here? Well, is there anything you think you probably need to do to clean that up?” And you go through that three or four or a dozen times early in your career with a senior leader who’s really good at mentoring and what have you, it’ll change your perspective about being vulnerable. And so, to be able to prevent those kinds of conversations with my leader, that really made me say, why don’t I be a little more careful? And why don’t I watch and try to maintain that balance better? And why don’t I proactively seek feedback from people that work for me, that work with me or what have you to help keep me honed, so to speak.
Jeff Amerine:
Yeah. And it does require… I think a lot of people that are Type A personalities that are successful, they may tend to bias initially early in their career towards a degree of being self-absorbed, a little bit self absorbed. I mean, they assume… They’re smart, they’ve been successful, they’ve got the right ideas, and they’re going to try to drive those sometimes into every situation. And you realize over time, you got to really be aware that you can’t accomplish a whole lot by yourself. And so, if you can figure out how to be a little better, a little more diplomatic doesn’t mean that you’re not direct. The results that you’re going to get are going to be better. So much of it is about building the right kind of relationships that allow the organization to be successful while never losing sight of the task or the results that you’re trying to achieve. And the two things are not mutually exclusive.
Jeff Standridge:
That’s right. And we’re in no way suggesting that you’re not going to have to have difficult conversations with people. Leaders will have those difficult conversations. They will do them respectfully. They may do them very directly, but they will do them respectfully and do them in a way that… I always say my rule of thumb, and I think Glenn and I maybe even talked about this a couple of episodes ago, my rule of thumb is when I have to have one of those difficult conversations, I want to leave them thinking more about their behavior than my behavior. And if I can do that, then I’ve probably been much closer to having a successful outcome for that conversation.
Jeff Amerine:
You have to recap for us, what are the high points that people need to remember?
Jeff Standridge:
Yeah, so we’re talking about results and relationships here. We’re talking about this balance of getting things done and making sure that things get done, the right things get done in the right way. But balancing that with the people aspect of leading people and maintaining relationships and creating a culture where people feel valued, invested into, and treated respectfully and what have you. So it’s this concept of results and relationships that we like to talk about and the balance that all of us as leaders need to have. It’s this concept of competence and character or character and competence that Stephen M.R. Covey talked about. It’s this concept of leadership versus management that over the last 30 or 40 years, theorists would guide us toward the leadership and denigrate management. But we’re saying here that all of those, both of those, results, relationships, character, competence, leadership, management, that both of those are required in equitable quantities and qualities in order for someone to be an effective, sustainable leader. That fair?
Jeff Amerine:
Yeah. Good stuff, Jeff. Very good. All right.
Jeff Standridge:
Well, this has been another episode of the Innovation Junkies Podcast. Thank you for joining. We’ll see you soon.
Jeff Amerine:
See you next time.
Jeff Amerine (Outro):
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