Explore every episode of the podcast Ready to Lead
| Title | Pub. Date | Duration | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Different Ways to Build Organizational Trust | 11 Apr 2022 | 00:31:09 | |
As leaders, it can be tempting to bypass team building exercises and just get down to business already. That is a very bad idea. In today’s episode, co-hosts Richard Lindner and Jeff Mask build a solid case for why leaders in today’s virtual environment can’t afford not to design trust-building experiences for their team. If you want to make an impact—and you want it to be enduring—you have to rally people to do their best work, or it won’t be sustainable. Your dreams and aspirations will crumble, and work will be a drag. When you align people, connect with them, and build deep strong relationships, the output is the best work of your career. You can accomplish way more, way faster, and more profitably when you have a strong foundation of trust. Listen in for some great practical advice on intentionally designing organizational trust as a leader. IN THIS EPISODE YOU’LL LEARN:
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| How Leaders Can Make Decisions.... Despite Burnout, Overwhelm, and Fatigue | 04 Apr 2022 | 00:29:25 | |
When is a decision yours to make as a leader and when do you entrust it to your team? On today’s episode, co-hosts Richard Lindner and Jeff Mask talk about the fine line leaders walk when it comes to making decisions. If you think that being a leader, being in charge, automatically means you make all the decisions, you need to take a step back. Sometimes the biggest decision a leader can make is deciding to delegate that decision-making to someone else. As leaders, we also need to take a deep dive into why we make the decisions we make. Are we being ruled by fear, or do we have the best interests of our team in mind? As leaders, our job is to multiply effective leadership—to lead others well so they may lead others well. Listen in for some actionable tips and helpful frameworks for making, delegating, and analyzing decisions. IN THIS EPISODE YOU’LL LEARN:
LINKS AND RESOURCES:
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DigitalMarketer Podcast with Mark de Grasse | |||
| Firing: The Best Way to Let Your Employees Go and How You Can Avoid the Same Situation in the Future | 24 Jan 2022 | 00:55:49 | |
The words “you’re fired” spark a lot of emotion, but in some unfortunate circumstances, they’re necessary to say or hear.
In today’s episode, co-hosts Richard Lindner and Jeff Mask talk about best practices when it comes to delivering termination news. Most leaders have faced—or will face—that moment of truth when they have to let someone go. There’s a right way and a wrong way to fire people, Richard and Jeff believe, and they want to give you the script.
Listen in for some super practical advice on firing someone the right way and tips for preventing it in the first place. The Script
They start off with the script right away, then work backward. Here’s what you say in 30 seconds or less. If you handle things right from the very beginning, this is how easy it can be to fire someone. If you’ve led with clarity, if everybody knew what was required/expected, there shouldn’t be surprises. Having a script memorized is key so you don’t freeze up under pressure.
The script: “Hey, Jeff. Thanks for joining me. Listen, the decision has been made that this will be your last day with the company. I’m sure this is not what you wanted to hear, but I’m also sure it’s not a total surprise. While I know this isn’t how you wanted it to end, I’m sure there is some relief as well. I have this HR person with me. They’re going to walk you through what’s next with benefits and any remaining pay and returning equipment and next steps. I’m sorry it turned out this way. It’s not what any of us hoped for. I wish you luck and let me know if there’s anything I can do for you.”
It may seem short, even cold, but when you hear the process leading up to it, you’ll see why this is all that’s needed. Avoid Surprises by Creating Clarity from the Beginning
Once upon a time, Richard sent Jeff a text saying, “I’ve let people go in the past, and I want to do it better.” He had a situation that raised his spidey-sense, and he wanted to address it before it got bad. He says he had a rare moment of intuition, of realization before reaction. He and Jeff chatted on the phone and it went great.
He says that was the day he chose to lead differently, to avoid surprises, to create crystal clarity from the beginning so people know where they stand at any given moment for any given goal in any given role. Jeff shared what he had done, and Richard tweaked it to fit his business. They co-created a collaborative version of how to walk people through a plan, the Performance Improvement Flowchart.
You’ve hired someone and things are going well, until something goes wrong, a triggering event. When you make the decision to fire someone, there has typically been a series of things that went wrong. Did you brush those under the rug, or did you address them as they came up? Something going wrong is an opportunity to have an alignment conversation. (You don’t need a flowchart for immediately-terminable offenses like assault or harassment.)
Let’s say something happened. Who’s responsible? Let’s say Jeff is responsible. Richard leads Jeff, so he has a conversation with him and leads with curiosity. “Hey, Jeff. Let’s grab some time to chat. I want to talk about this. Is this something you feel you’re responsible for?” The goal is to leave the conversation with clarity about responsibilities. Richard ends with: “Do you have any questions? Do you need anything?” What Happens After the Conversation
After the conversation, Richard sends Jeff a simple follow-up email so they have a document to refer to. The motive of the email is not bureaucracy... | |||
| Management Mess to Leadership Success with Scott Jeffrey Miller | 17 Jan 2022 | 00:48:46 | |
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| New Year, New Team: How to Set Goals with Your Team that Align with Your Organization | 10 Jan 2022 | 00:39:27 | |
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| Working with Family & Friends and Dealing with Nepotism in the Workplace with Clate Mask | 03 Jan 2022 | 00:42:26 | |
You want to hire people you know, love, and trust, and quite often those are friends and family members, but how do you avoid favoritism and nepotism?
On today’s episode, host Jeff Mask is joined by his brother, Clate Mask, CEO and co-founder of Keap (formerly known as Infusionsoft), a sales and marketing automation platform. Clate loves entrepreneurs and has great respect for the grit and tenacity and perseverance they show as they build their businesses. He built a company that helps entrepreneurs overcome the challenges and frustrations that go with the territory. Automation helped him and his business, and now he shares it with others.
Clate and Jeff have a lot of experience working together in multiple companies over the years. They’ve seen what works really well and what can be really painful, creating family strife.
So how do you work with family and friends? How do you lead through nepotism and favoritism? How do you avoid those horror stories we all hear about when family members work together and end up ruining their relationships outside of the office?
Listen in for some encouraging stories and practical tips—all born from years of experience, both good and bad.
What NOT to Do When Working with Family
Years ago, during the dotcom era, Clate was Jeff’s boss in a company he didn’t own. It was a lot of fun, and they learned a lot. Jeff is six years younger than Clate and idolized him. They had a good relationship, but as Jeff started tasting success, he got prideful, and Clate would try to keep him in his place. Clate had the mental game and knew how to push Jeff’s buttons. Both of their weaknesses came out.
Their company had a ping pong table where they’d play lunch tournaments. Clate won 95% of the time, because of his skill and mental edge. They always played best of three. One day, they had each won one game, and Jeff was one point away from winning game three. He smashed it and won. An employee had walked behind Clate at just that moment, and Clate slammed the paddle down and said, “If you want to win that way, sure.”
They replayed the point. Clate won and gloated, and 21 years of little brother exploded inside Jeff. He lost it, started swearing, and they were yelling at each other, totally embarrassing themselves. They went back to work and kept fighting over Instant Messenger.
Learning From Their Failures
They eventually got over it and healed. Fast forward. Clate started a new company with two of his brothers-in-law. Jeff could have joined but didn’t want to mess up their relationship. Jeff went out on his own and found success. After two kids and a cancer diagnosis, he wanted to find purpose and vision in business. At the same time, Clate was looking for a Jeff Mask in his company and thought, shoot, we just need Jeff Mask.
Jeff was hesitant at first, because he really didn’t want to risk ruining a family relationship he treasured. But he and Clate sat down for a ground rule-setting conversation at the very beginning. They knew they had to be intentional, and they were. They set ground rules for what they would be and not be. They decided together that they would avoid these three things at all costs:
And they would make sure they demonstrated:
There were certain standards Jeff had to meet, results he had to get, and if he didn’t measure up, they agreed Clate would fire... | |||
| Why Feedback Alone Is Not Enough | 27 Dec 2021 | 00:42:59 | |
Richard and Jeff want to hear from YOU. Was something in today’s episode a big aha moment for you? Anything you disagreed with? What did you learn that you’ve applied to your leadership? Email them here with your thoughts/questions: feedback@readytolead.com
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| Vacations, Holidays, and the Importance of Taking Time Off | 20 Dec 2021 | 00:41:15 | |
What does it mean to lead well through the holidays with all its distractions and deadlines, and people’s different beliefs and cultural backgrounds?
On today’s episode, co-hosts Richard Lindner and Jeff Mask talk about the holiday season and how it can be exhausting and loaded with dangers and pitfalls. But it can also be rewarding, even life-changing, with a few key mindset shifts.
Listen in for some heartfelt tips on turning the holiday season into an incredible opportunity for you and the people you lead.
Who Gets Your Time and Energy This Holiday Season?
In the past, Richard has taken on more responsibility as a leader during the holidays so he could give his team the gift of recharging and spending time with their loved ones. But his “selfless” act often turned into him feeling resentful. On the flip side, he’s thought, “I’m important, and I deserve this time off, so everyone else can take care of everything.” Neither one of these extremes is healthy.
So, how do we make sure the key initiatives are still accomplished, but the workload isn’t given to one side or the other? Not 100% or 0% delegation, but working together to complete the truly important tasks while also giving the gift of recharge to ourselves and our team? How do we focus on what’s important and avoid resentment?
Jeff often talks about work/life integration and making sure you know where you’re going to spend your time, making sure your loved ones know you prioritize them. But how do we do this and get the work done? Most leaders have individual roles, management roles, and a family life. That’s a lot of hats.
The next level after work/life integration is work/life harmony. When you create a chord in music, everyone knows the role they’re playing and we’re all on the same page. This harmony requires proactive communication. What are the critical tasks that still need to happen and who is owning them? What are our contingency plans?
At the root of a lot of our stress is workaholism and fear of failing. That fear drives us. Get a plan in place to make the holidays awesome and full of love and life instead of fearful and exhausting and being a martyr.
Ask Questions and Get Curious
Richard says he used to think leaders had to have all the answers, but he’s learned that asking questions and being curious as a leader is invaluable. He looks at the holidays as an opportunity to be curious and asks questions individually and to his team.
Seek to understand and build a calendar for when people are engaged outside of work. The team as a whole can start to understand each other better. It gives people a more diverse understanding of what this season can mean.
It’s very valuable and powerful when people step in to help others, but be mindful of people who always volunteer to do extra work. Look for opportunities to avoid resentment. Where does it build? Leaders need to ask, because people probably won’t volunteer those details.
Don’t Forget About Your Indirect Employees
The family and loved ones of your actual employees are what Jeff and Richard call indirect employees. If resentment builds up with a life partner or a child toward the company, you’re putting the employee in a difficult place.
Seek to understand what’s important to them and their family. You want someone at home who loves the company and the manager. If the employee even thinks about exploring other... | |||
| Leading Professionally in a Toxic Workplace with Karen Pierce | 13 Dec 2021 | 00:39:03 | |
It can be hard to know how to navigate a really tough environment as a leader. This is how one woman did it really well.
On today’s episode, host Jeff Mask sits down with Karen Pierce, CEO of KMP Consultants, to talk about best practices in leadership and how to deal with tough, even toxic, work environments. Karen and Jeff met at an event where Karen told him, “we speak a very similar language.” It’s true. They do. The bottom line? They both believe deeply that leadership is all about putting people first. It’s not as much about skills and getting things done. It’s about developing people, inspiring them, motivating them.
Karen heard someone say once: “You can’t be a leader if nobody’s following you. And if nobody’s following you, you’re just out on a nice walk.”
Listen in for some great examples of leading well when things aren’t going so great.
What Karen Does Now and How She Got Here
Karen helps leaders in organizations navigate change by developing an environment where people can thrive and have fun, feel valued, like they have a place, like they’re a part of the organization, not just someone who gets assigned a task.
Work doesn’t have to be a four-letter word, she says. It should be rewarding and affirming. We spend at least a third of our waking hours there. Rather than endure it to the weekend, we should feel like we’re contributing to something better than ourselves. As we look at this Great Resignation, employees are voting with their feet. If we don’t create an environment where they can thrive, they’re heading somewhere else.
Karen’s journey started when she was a young female aerospace engineer who faced a significant amount of resistance in spite of her ability. Women just weren’t respected in the field, in general, and being good at what she did turned out to be more negative than positive. She could work really hard and do a great job and still not be part of the team.
People felt threatened by her. Her work was sabotaged. When she got promotions, people talked about who she slept with to get there. Her life was even threatened. She came to a decision point. Pursue this or quit and find something else. “I have a purpose here,” she decided. “I can try to make a difference.” Maybe she could change people’s minds and make things better for the women who came after her.
Dealing with Toxic Work Environments
Over the course of her career, Karen has handled toxic work environments with grace. At one point, Karen’s boss sent a problem employee to her. This employee was frustrated with his job, was feeling very threatened, and had almost hit his manager. He was dealing with mental health issues that people didn’t know about at the time, putting Karen in a difficult situation. He threatened her life at one point, but no one believed her. It wasn’t until they were in court (he sued her) and had an outburst, that her lawyer realized her life was in danger.
Leading through mental health challenges is so tough, and is part of a leader’s reality more now than it’s ever been. Passing employees from one leader to the next isn’t the best idea. Help them be extraordinary first in their current role, before passing them on. If it’s happened more than twice, don’t be seduced as a leader, thinking you can be a hero. There’s a pattern there.
Not being believed is a frustrating, even terrifying, thing. It took a lot of guts for Karen to raise red flags, because she was young and female. She didn’t want to be a failure. She asked good questions and kept good records, and eventually the truth came to light.
Fast forward in her career to when she got a leadership position that several people she was leading wanted. They were in an open office environment with about 40 people. | |||
| How Rituals and Routines Can Help You Become a Better Leader | 06 Dec 2021 | 00:44:36 | |
Rituals and routines, done with intention, can help us prepare ourselves to show up emotionally and mentally and lead from a place of power.
The theme of routines and rituals is popping right now. People around the globe are finding that the routines that once worked so well are no longer serving them. Life has changed, and our routines need to change too, if we want to stay on top of our game.
In today’s episode, co-hosts Richard Lindner and Jeff Mask kick things off by telling a true (and painfully embarrassing) story about how this is actually their second time recording the episode. Why? Because the first attempt was a miserable failure. Why was that? Because, ironically, they went into it without putting in the work of mentally preparing with a routine. It was an hour of their lives that they will never get back, but what an amazing validation of today’s topic.
Listen in for some great tips on implementing routines and rituals into your day so you can be your best for the people you lead.
What Do You Need in a Ritual or Routine?
As leaders, we need to be present physically, mentally, and emotionally for our team. How do we get there? One way is by implementing rituals and routines that prepare us to perform and give our best. Some questions to ask yourself:
How do we upgrade, level up our routines and rituals to today’s standards? Things are evolving. Our routines/rituals need to evolve with them. We have to be willing and humble and self-aware to know when and how to update them.
Ask yourself: what are my most critical roles in life? What does performing at the highest level look like? What would need to be true in my thoughts, words, and actions to make sure I can perform at the level I need to so the people I lead can create and work and change?
Are Routines and Rituals Inherently Selfish?
One way of looking at a routine is: how do you take the time to be intentionally selfish so you can ultimately be selfless? You actually do need to be selfish in your routines so they fill you up, put you in the best possible place, so you’re not responding to yourself and your needs when you’re being called to lead someone else.
Jeff brings it back to the oxygen mask analogy once again. When we take care of ourselves by making sure we’re in a high-oxygen environment, what’s the motive? To be able to serve other people. Where this gets misconstrued is where we hear a lot of talk about me time and pampering. That’s okay but to what end?
When we intentionally invest in ourselves in order to bless the lives of others, that selfishness enables us to be sustainably selfless. When our tank is full and our foundation is solid, we bless people, and receive more oxygen, and it’s this awesome cycle.
You might need me time for a season for healing and regrouping, but then it’s time to take time for yourself in order to bless others.
Rituals and Routines at Work
Richard shares that early on in his executive leadership, he didn’t prepare for meetings in a powerful, meaningful way. One of his biggest breakthroughs was to put in a 15-minute buffer between meetings. He would take that time to review his numbers and ask: what story are they telling, what context needs to be added to tell the actual story, what does he need from the room, and what can he get from the room?
Showing up like that was more powerful. He started having more of an impact on... | |||
| How Investing In Relationships Results in Powerful Leadership with Kimberly Holmes, CEO of Marriage Helper | 29 Nov 2021 | 00:44:47 | |
When you invest in appropriate relationships with the people you lead and make them feel valuable, you become all the more effective as a leader.
In today’s episode, host Jeff Mask sits down with Kimberly Holmes, CEO of Marriage Helper to talk about some universal principles that work across all relationships, whether personal or professional. Kimberly is passionate about championing marriages and creating strong families. She and her team want to take over the world with hope for great relationships.
Listen in as she shares how you can implement these powerful relationship principles into your leadership.
How Kimberly Became CEO of a Successful Company
Kimberly’s story starts back in the mid-1980s. The founder of Marriage Helper was a very successful speaker whose schedule was booked five years out. He was married with two daughters when he fell in love with another woman, and left his family to be with her. He was divorced for three years, became a drug addict and an alcoholic, lost his friends, was living out of his car, and almost died. He told God he was going to turn his life around, called his ex-wife, and asked her to take him back, which she did, against the advice of her loved ones.
They remarried, even though they weren’t in love, and they had a third child in celebration of their remarriage. That child was Kimberly. She says, “I literally would not be on this earth if it weren’t for two people committed to trying to make it work, to put it back together.”
She entered the family business part-time and saw the amazing change that was happening in the 3-day workshops her parents hosted. The service worked, but they had no marketing whatsoever. Her dad was considering shutting it down, because it wasn’t profitable. She knew they had to get the message in front of people, because it was needed. They were an organization driven by mission and believed the stakes were high.
Kimberly became CEO with a staff of four. They started an email list, and experienced 100% growth for two consecutive years. There was really nowhere to go but up. In 6 years she had 5x’ed the company. She learned marketing, got clear on her why, and worked hard to scale. And now they have a staff of 75.
How to Invest In Relationships
You have to invest in people if you’re going to take your business from 4 people to 75. Kimberly has invested in relationships on her team, and the team helps people invest in their marriage relationships. What are some things she has learned about relationships over the years that can apply to us as leaders?
Kimberly says people want to leave a relationship for one of three reasons:
At the core, if someone feels liked, loved, and respected, they’ll feel more attachment to the relationship they’re in. So, ask yourself: what am I doing that is showing the other person that I like, love, and respect them? People are attracted to those who evoke emotions that they enjoy feeling. Am I helping people feel edified, uplifted, supported, liked?
If leaders can do this in an appropriate way in their relationships at work, it makes all the difference. It changes us and the people we’re leading. People need to feel valued, like they’re not just a number. You want them to like the way it feels to be a part of your team and a part of your company.
The Four Stages of a Relationship
There are four stages to any relationship, and understanding each one of them can help you make your relationships stronger, whether at home... | |||
| Having Corrective Conversations in a Timely and Constructive Way | 25 Nov 2021 | 00:54:45 | |
Corrective conversations are never fun, but as leaders, it’s our responsibility to help people become better versions of themselves.
Today’s episode with co-hosts Richard Lindner and Jeff Mask is all about having those difficult, but necessary, corrective conversations. How do you give correction? When do you give it? How do you do it well? It can be an easy thing to mess up, and Jeff and Richard want to help people avoid that pain.
Listen in as they talk about why correction matters and how to do it in a way that truly benefits everyone.
WHY Have Corrective Conversations?
Why is it so important for leaders to give timely correction when something gets off track? The biggest reason is this: we need to lead people for who they can become, not for who they are today. We want the people we lead to become their best selves, and a lot of everyday actions prohibit them (and us) from doing that.
Jeff says that, as leaders, we have the ability to change the trajectory of ourselves and those we lead. When we don’t give that feedback, we’re not helping people see the implications of their behavior so they can be better. It’s an obligation, an opportunity, a blessing, to help people elevate their thinking and behavior. When we don’t, we’re just thinking about ourselves.
Richard says that the hardest pivot for him was changing the way he thought about correction. It doesn’t have to mean confrontation. Correction isn’t necessarily coming from a place of judgment. It doesn’t mean the person is bad. There’s just an action that needs changing. It’s pain avoidance when we don’t have these corrective conversations. We like to lie to ourselves and think we’re protecting the other person from pain, but we’re protecting ourselves.
WHEN to Have Corrective Conversations
Jeff once had a team member whose behavior was not in line with their core values. It wasn’t off-the-charts horrible, but he knew he needed to talk to this person and kept putting it off. His delay resulted in a chain of events that occurred in a short period of time that was very destructive to the brand of their company and the overall vibe of their team. It got out of hand quickly because Jeff didn’t have the courage to address it at that moment.
If something strikes you as off on your core values, that’s your first and clearest red flag. Core values can be a guiding light for how to behave. Maybe you have that spidey sense that something is odd or a little uncomfortable—or you notice a reaction or body language from the person that person is talking to. In a virtual world, this can be more difficult. Don’t avoid it and let it grow into a larger problem down the road.
Richard always looks at attitude, effort, and effectiveness. Those are the categories he puts things in when evaluating each team member. If something is off in any of these categories, then a conversation is needed. Attitude and effort are more of a corrective conversation. Effectiveness is more of an exploratory conversation.
Jeff says that Richard married data and intuition. Data can be taught; intuition can’t be. Going down the intuitive path (spidey sense) isn’t helpful if there’s only an intangible aspect. You need intuition + data.
Definitely don’t wait until the time is right, because it never will be. Don’t wait until your next one on one. The more time that goes by without correction, the more it communicates that the behavior is acceptable. This is how a good work culture deteriorates.
Have the conversation that same day—with one caveat. If there’s a blow-up and someone loses their cool, that needs to be dealt with, but there needs to be a cooling off period. The deeper question is: how do we know if we are calm enough as a leader to offer the correction? If my motive to | |||
| How Leaders Can Get the Most Out of Their Time | A Productivity Strategy for Leaders | 28 Mar 2022 | 00:37:42 | |
What’s one of the single biggest frustrations/struggles for new leaders? Time management.
On today’s episode, co-hosts Richard Lindner and Jeff Mask take on the challenge of helping new leaders manage their time effectively as they transition from an individual contributor role to the role of manager. That shift is no joke, they say. And hopefully it helps to know that you’re not alone. No less than 100% of leaders find this difficult. And no two leaders approach time management the same way. Jeff and Richard don’t. Their suggestion is to learn as much as you can, then put a plan into action. Think of it as an experiment. If it doesn’t work, and you have to change it, that’s still a win. It’s a stepping stone on your way to success.
Listen in for some helpful guidelines and frameworks you can test out as you transition into leadership.
IN THIS EPISODE YOU’LL LEARN:
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| Leading Without the Clutter with Kathi Lipp | 22 Nov 2021 | 00:45:01 | |
What does decluttering have to do with leadership? Way more than you think. In today’s episode, host Jeff Mask sits down with Kathi Lipp, world-renowned author of over 20 books and host of the Clutter-Free Academy podcast. Kathi has dedicated her life to serving people who are overwhelmed by clutter and people with a mission who want to communicate it. Why talk about decluttering on a leadership podcast? Because there are a lot of grounding principles here for leading ourselves and leading others. When we have cluttered minds, when we have cluttered systems and processes, when we don’t have clarity, it’s so much more anxiety-inducing to lead. Listen in as Jeff and Kathi talk about how decluttering leads to more peaceful, powerful, and effective leadership. The Damaging Effects of Clutter Years ago, Kathi was a young mom, heading into a dark place, overwhelmed by her house and life and stuff. Her dad was a hoarder. They didn’t call it that then, but that’s what he was. She tried all the programs and strategies, but nothing worked. Until she figured out that it was more than just having too much stuff. What is my relationship to stuff? she asked herself. Why do I have this need to keep bringing things into my home? She realized that it was more of a mental/spiritual issue than a stuff issue. “Once I dug into that and dealt with it,” she says, “I was able to find freedom. I’m not Martha Stewart, but I could invite you in for a cup of coffee at any time without having to apologize, and that’s a big leap for me.” Kathi says that, when you know that you’re different and you don’t understand why, it wreaks havoc with what you can potentially do. When you can’t have people over, when you can’t get out the door on time, when you only have one area of the house where you can aim your Zoom camera, it limits who you can become and who your partner/children can become. Clutter is just a physical manifestation of what’s going on inside of us emotionally or spiritually. If you’re not coping in an area, it will seep out somewhere else. Clutter can lead to depression for many people. If you are depressed, you have clutter. If you have clutter, you’re dealing with some level of depression. How Clutter Affects Us As Leaders Decluttering enables us to clear out the closets of our minds, to help us be more present as leaders. It helps us let go of the heavy, painful anchors that are holding us back from becoming the true person we could be. So we can lead our team to be their best selves too. What is one thing leaders can do to start down this path toward peace and clarity? Kathi says she’s a big believer in picking one thing and focusing on it for 15 minutes. If you have 20 things on your to-do list, and you haven’t prioritized them, you aren’t going to be able to tackle them without feeling frozen. She uses this 15-minute principle in her work, her environment, and her creativity. It ups her creativity and productivity—everything she needs to be a good leader. She recommends that leaders start by clearing a space on their desk. She sits down every day and writes ten 15-minute items. Things that will push her business forward. She also chooses one thing to do an hour-long deep dive on. She asks: What is one thing I need to spend some concentrated time on? Then she puts it on her schedule. “We overestimate what we can get done in a week, and we underestimate what we can get done in a moment,” she says. “Fifteen minutes is a moment, and we can actually get a lot accomplished.” Kathi suffers from bright shiny object syndrome. (Don’t we all?) Everything else in the world besides what she’s doing looks more fun, more awesome. But she keeps bringing her focus back to the task at hand. She reminds herself constantly: “I have to do the things I have to do so I can do the... | |||
| What to Do When Good People Leave Your Organization | 18 Nov 2021 | 00:44:32 | |
The Great Resignation has had a huge impact on teams and organizations. How do you respond as a leader when you lose a really good team member?
In this episode, co-hosts Richard Lindner and Jeff Mask talk about what happens when one of a leader’s biggest fears becomes reality: a key player on the team decides to leave. Instead of just speaking in generalities, Richard shares a very personal and recent story, and he and Jeff walk through these important questions:
Listen in for some great tips to help you think about—and become better from and through—these experiences.
Richard’s Team Loses a Key Player
Richard says their company was blessed not to lay anyone off during Covid, but they still experienced the Great Resignation to some degree this summer. He recently had the scary realization that his team was at the definition of a skeleton crew. Everyone was perfect for their job—right person, right seat, right attitude, right cultural fit. “If anyone here leaves,” he thought to himself, “we’re going to be in a bit of a bind.”
And then it happened. Someone who had been with the company for five years (in internet years, that’s forever, Richard says) put in her resignation. In the growth they had seen over five years, this person had been critical in figuring things out and ushering in that change. She was always smiling, had the best attitude, and owned her role. When Richard got the news, his mind went to “not her, not her.” This was going to hurt.
Richard said this is when you start to spiral mentally, no matter how long you’ve been leading. He went immediately to a bad place, because he always processes the worst case scenario first. This person embodied their core values. The company could have written its values by following her around. When she left, we asked, where did we fail in leadership and vision? Where did we fail in growth and opportunity? What are the rest of the team members going to think? Will others leave because she left?
If “bad people” (an underperformer, someone who’s not a cultural fit) leave, we get it. But when a good person leaves, the fear is that other people will think, “Wait a second, if she’s leaving, should I leave? What does she know that I don’t know?”
How Do We Process It Internally?
Important question #1: how do we internally process the impact of this person leaving? How can we work through it in a way so that it’s a growth opportunity instead of something that paralyzes us? If we don’t work through it in our own minds in a healthy way, it has a negative ripple effect on everyone around us. A negative spiral is not helpful.
Every failure is a failure of leadership. However. Good people leaving is not always a failure. It just means that, organizationally, their growth has outpaced your need. When done correctly, sometimes we grow people too good, too much. They outgrow the company. It’s a job well done. You’re called as a leader to grow people. You’re called as a leader to align that growth with the company. When they outpace it, you fulfilled your calling. If the company can’t support their growth, you let them go with your blessing.
Jeff summarizes Richard’s process. First, he went to a dark place, thinking “where did I fail? What will people think?” That’s totally normal, human, healthy. Where the unhealthiness comes in is when we stay there. We have to reframe. “Where’s the good in this? Where do we go from here?” It comes down to selflessness as a leader. Seeing the... | |||
| How to Become a Disruptive Leader with Rob Moore | 15 Nov 2021 | 00:45:41 | |
How to Become a Disruptive Entrepreneur with Rob Moore
The word “disruptive” can have a negative connotation, but it’s really all about stepping in, shaking things up, and making the world better.
Rob Moore is a powerhouse, and he’s super great at what he does. He loves entrepreneurship and property investing; he runs several businesses and two podcasts; and he lives up to his brand as an entrepreneur that disrupts. In today’s episode, he sits down with host Jeff Mask to share his incredible story.
Listen in to be inspired to do some disrupting of your own.
Rob’s Rock Bottom Story
Rob’s dad owned a pub in the UK where Rob worked from age six. In 2005, when Rob was 26, his dad had a massive nervous breakdown in his pub. The police were called, beat his dad up as they tried to restrain him, and his dad was ultimately diagnosed as bipolar. Rob was humiliated, and he determined right then and there to make something of himself, to “make up for lost time after a decade of acting like an idiot.”
Fifteen years later, he has written 18 books, runs several companies, became a millionaire at 31, a decamillionaire at 35, and has raised more than a million pounds through his charities. He says he owes it all to his dad. He’s been able to help his dad retire, buy a house, travel, drive a great car, and he’s going to send him on a 55th anniversary trip overseas. “That’s what being an entrepreneur has given me,” Rob says.
Jeff says that, “when we rattle off CVs that are stale/cardboard, it doesn’t get to the essence of being a human being.” Rob’s story is so relatable to so many. And it really begs the questions:
Rob answers these questions and more.
What Do You Do?
How often do we hear that question: “So, what do you do?” Jeff asks Rob what his answer is when people ask what he does for a living.
“I never answer what I do,” Rob says. “I don’t fricking know what I do. I spin a lot of plates. I like variety. I don’t want to be labeled or typecast. So I don’t answer what I do. I answer what my vision is, because I’m really crystal clear on that.”
Rob’s personal vision is to help as many people on this planet start and scale their business and get better financial knowledge. Full stop. He’s got billions of people he wants to help, and that is what he does. He answers that question in a vision statement.
Jeff has a vision statement as well. He helps CEOs confidently grow their business without losing their souls.
Knowing your vision statement is an awesome leadership lesson. Why do we do what we do? Why were we put on the planet? The clearer we are with our vision, the more naturally things will flow to us that accomplish and further that vision, and the easier it is to say no to things that aren’t relevant to the vision.
What Does It Mean to Be a Disruptive Entrepreneur?
A few years ago, Rob realized that, if he wanted to grow globally, which he did, he needed to extricate himself from his UK... | |||
| Designing Organizational Trust with Richard Lindner and Jeff Mask | 11 Nov 2021 | 00:36:32 | |
Trust among coworkers has never been more important than it is in today’s virtual environment, and leaders have to intentionally design experiences that help build that trust.
As leaders, it can be tempting to bypass team building exercises and just get down to business already. There’s work to be done, goals to be met. Who has time for “shared experiences” and “team bonding,” right?
In today’s episode, co-hosts Richard Lindner and Jeff Mask build a solid case for why leaders can’t afford not to design trust-building experiences for their team. If you want to make an impact—and you want it to be enduring—you have to rally people to do their best work, or it won’t be sustainable. Your dreams and aspirations will crumble, and work will be a drag.
When you align people, connect with people, build deep strong relationships with people, the output is the best work of your career. You can accomplish way more, way faster, and more profitably when you have a strong foundation of trust.
Listen in for some great practical advice on designing organizational trust as a leader.
The 3 Levels of Trust-Building Experiences To build trust with each other organically and consistently, you have to do it with a consistent cadence. You have to build these experiences into your company’s rhythm. But where do you start? How do you design these experiences? How do you develop the appropriate amount of intimacy based on the level of trust you have? You don’t want to do too much, too soon.
There are three types of experiences you can create as a leader, and they need to go in this order if you want to go at a good, healthy pace.
Start with Shared Experiences Shared experiences require no real relational equity. You could do a zipline together. Ride go-carts. Play a round of putt-putt golf. Tackle an obstacle course or an escape room. No one has to get vulnerable with anyone else. You just show up and play the game. Jeff recommends not going to a movie together. It’s better than nothing, but there’s not a lot of interaction. You’re just sitting there. Personalities don’t come out. There’s no struggle, no common goal.
A shared experience should incorporate a challenge of some kind. You’re architecting and engineering something in a non-work environment that mirrors what you’ll go through at work. You start together, struggle together, and emerge victorious at the end. You can have your trust at a level 0 out of 100 and get it up to 10 after this shared experience.
Richard’s leadership team does something called the Hot Wings challenge, which is Facebook-famous. The show interviews celebrities who have 10 hot wings in front of them, with sauces that build from “not that hot” to “oh my gosh why would anyone ever eat this?” Along the way, you’ll see the person’s mask coming off, bit by bit.
Richard’s team members take turns in the hot seat. When you want to talk about difficulty and shared experience and pleasure and pain, he says, this one’s loaded. You ask questions along the way like, “What would your wrestler name be?” It’s one thing to answer that question when you’re sitting around a table. It’s another to answer it when your eyes are watering, your lips are burning. It adds something to it.
He also suggests a board game like Apples to Apples. Jeff says jackbox.tv, Quiplash in particular, is great for when you can’t be together physically. These games provide time to get to know one another, share emotions, laugh, bond. It’s something you can anchor back to, reference time and... | |||
| Unlocking the Gifts in Those We Lead with Stacey Ferguson | 08 Nov 2021 | 00:38:37 | |
One of our roles as leaders is to identify and unlock people’s gifts. Today’s guest tells us how.
Unlocking people’s gifts presupposes that we believe everyone has gifts to unlock. Stacey Ferguson, Digital Director at Time’s Up, believes they do, and host Jeff Mask wholeheartedly agrees. In today’s energizing episode, the two of them sit down for a fun and enlightening chat about bringing out the very best in the people you’re leading.
Know What You Want and Go After It Stacey’s story begins with her thinking she knew what she wanted in life, getting it, then realizing it wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. She dreamed of being a big entertainment lawyer and landed an “amazing” job with a big firm that represented artists. Turns out, at the end of the day, it was just a lot of contracts/paperwork and long days and weekends.
One night she was working late; she was 8 months pregnant and hungry; and she took a brief to this guy in his office. He looked up at her, like he was seeing her for the first time, even though she’d been in and out of his office all day, busting her butt for 12 hours straight.
“Have you eaten today?” he asked, almost as an afterthought, and she thought to herself, “What am I doing here?”
She immediately started looking for another job. She says she could have been more courageous and quit on the spot, but started quietly applying at other places. She also asked the managing director of the firm if she could switch to a department with more reasonable hours. He said sure.
Then another employment opportunity came through with the Federal Trade Commission. Her director was actually happy for her, a reaction she wasn’t expecting. This experience taught her that it’s always best to go with your gut.
Why We Suppress Our Gifts Once Stacey had more free time, she was able to start a blog. That’s where she found her voice and developed an online community. She started creating. She started a blogging conference for women of color. Everything took off and exploded from there.
Jeff recognized in her story that she figured out what she wanted, had the courage to follow through, and going down that path herself has allowed her to authentically unlock the gifts of others. Those are the steps we need to take in order to let the gifts we have within us breathe. Fear and insecurity and self-doubt are what suppress the divine genius within us. It comes in all shapes and sizes. We all have something amazing inside, but those loud voices can suppress what we know we can create or do.
As Stacey built this community of bloggers, she realized that being a leader was about so much more than her. It’s about other people. The greatest leaders aren’t the ones who just do great things themselves; they’re the ones who inspire others to greatness.
Identifying and Unlocking Gifts in Others Everybody really does have a gift. But a lot of times they don’t see it. It’s buried. You have to help them comb through the junk to get to the gift. One way to figure out what your gift is: ask some of these questions. What do you enjoy doing? What do people come to you for? What feels organic and natural to you? What can you do as a no-brainer in your sleep?
Maybe you make the best cupcakes. Maybe your friends ask you to plan their trip. Maybe you don’t see the value in it; you don’t think it’s special. A thousand other people make cupcakes. Everyone has that thing, but they take it for granted. You’re unique; you’re different; you have to bring your full self to whatever it is you’re doing.
When you look into someone's soul, see the gift, highlight the gift, and speak to that person, it’s so fascinating to hear their response. “Oh, doesn’t everyone do this?” We’re wired to... | |||
| Managing Conflict in a Virtual Workplace with Richard Lindner and Jeff Mask | 04 Nov 2021 | 00:37:37 | |
Leading people was already difficult in a pre-Covid world, but learning how to engage in healthy conflict is extra challenging in a virtual environment. It’s a leader’s job to assess human dynamics and behavior and guide people in and through conflict in healthy, productive ways. But it’s so much harder to read people when you’re not face to face, rubbing shoulders with each other every day. Sometimes things might feel okay, but it’s often “artificial harmony” (credit to Patrick Lencioni). It’s difficult for many organizations to get people to speak their truth. In this episode, hosts Richard Lindner and Jeff Mask speak directly to those leaders who feel like “something’s off” and want to know how to get things back on track. Not by pretending everything’s fine, but by dealing with conflict in a healthy way. How We View Conflict Richard prides himself on his ability to “mine for conflict” (another Lencioni term). Years ago, he correctly identified conflict avoidance as one of his weaknesses, so he leaned all the way into it to get the muscle memories, the reps, and make it a strength. Soon he could smell it everywhere. He even started off all of their team meetings with “healthy conflict is good.” But he admits that he’s having more trouble with it right now than he used to when it was one of his weaknesses. He finds it a lot harder when he doesn’t have that frequent/close in-person connection. He often feels like he doesn’t have enough relational equity to take people to the mat, even for the right reasons. And he knows he’s not alone. When he has this conversation with other leaders, they have so much to say. They’re all feeling it. So, how do they fix it? Jeff says that, weirdly, one of the reasons he “loves” this pandemic is because anything that was a weakness before is exacerbated now. Why would he love something like that? Because it gives us insight into which aspects of our leadership need to be improved. When you look at it that way, it’s more of a fun quest, rather than a draining exercise. This mindset shift changes everything. Recognize Conflict and Name It The first thing you have to do is recognize that conflict exists and name it. Call it what it is. Think back to the 4 Zones of Leadership. The Friend Zone is one of the reasons we avoid the “danger zone” of conflict. We often avoid conflict because we want to be liked. If you continue to avoid going there, the cycle will continue, and your work environment will turn toxic. In the book, The Three Laws of Performance, authors Steve Zaffron and Dave Logan talk about how the way people perform correlates with how situations occur to them. How we see the world is how we show up. How we see things arises in our speech/language. We need the self-awareness to recognize that other people see things differently than we do. So, what are some of the signs that we have conflict in our virtual workplace? It’s hard to pick up on context clues from Zoom windows. Richard says they’ve hired team members that don’t live in the area. There are people who have never had consistent shoulder to shoulder time with the rest of the team. They’re not building that sense of trust just from being together. How do we diagnose conflict? How do we know what’s off and where? 3 Common Signs of Conflict Jeff shares three common signs that there is conflict you need to deal | |||
| Empowering Those You’re Charged to Lead with Mike Yates | 01 Nov 2021 | 00:42:35 | |
As leaders, we have privilege, and it’s up to us to empower the people we’ve been charged to lead.
Today’s guest, Mike Yates, empowers people on a daily basis. Mike is an educator, the host of the Schoolish podcast, TED talker, and runs the Reinvention Lab at Teach for America. In this episode, he sits down with host Richard Lindner to talk about recognizing privilege and power structures and how leaders everywhere can leverage that knowledge to gain a better understanding of their team.
Mike’s journey is fascinating and unconventional, and he’s doing some pretty awesome things with his life.
Jack Of All Trades: An Insult or a Compliment? Mike grew up hating school. His mom was a teacher, so that didn’t go over very well in his house. He remembers being raised to be a well-rounded person, so he had his hands in a lot of stuff. “No one ever told me to hyper-specialize,” he says, “and I developed an ability to multitask. I decided to use my varied interests as a strength.”
Ironically, he became a teacher, and not surprisingly, he hated it. So he found a side hustle which led him to build a teacherless school that utilizes technology in cool ways. He built his personal brand, started a podcast, and became a jack of all trades, a phrase he discovered is actually misquoted (or incompletely quoted) most of the time. The actual phrase is “A jack of all trades is a master of none but better than a master of one.”
Richard, who identifies as a “generalist,” was thrilled to hear him say that. It took Richard a long time to appreciate that quality in himself. It always seemed to him like the most successful people had an extremely narrow area of focus, while Richard was just generally good at a lot of different things. Now he realizes that, if you want to excel organizationally as a leader, you have to have a general understanding of how every area of the company works.
The Culture of Power Richard loved Mike’s TED talk on recognizing privilege and asked him to break down the culture of power for listeners. Mike says that the “culture of power” is a phrase coined by Lisa Delpit. It’s this idea that power structures exist all around us.
Mike used the example of his mostly Black and Latino students, who would say to him from a place of major deficit, “I could never go to college. I’ll never be Bill Gates or Elon Musk or Lebron James.” Mike would try to dig deep to find something to help empower them. “No, you’re probably not going to be Lebron James, but you can be JJ Redick, if you do the right things and can see yourself differently.” He wanted them to have an alternate way of viewing what they thought were deficiencies.
Each of us needs to understand power structures and accept where we have privilege. There’s white privilege (which people get all up in arms about), but there are other privileges too. “I speak English,” Mike says. “As long as I live in the U.S., that gives me an advantage. I have the use of all my limbs. I went to college. My mom went to college. There are things that give me privilege.”
Empowering Those You’re Charged With Leading Mike says that, as a leader, your words carry a lot of weight. When you recognize the qualities and skills of the people you lead, you can metaphorically lift their chin when you see greatness in them. He knows a guy who’s often the most powerful person in the room. He saw something in Mike back in the day, and told him so, and it made a huge difference in Mike’s life. Good leaders help their people see themselves as powerful, give them that chin-up moment.
Richard agrees. “You don’t need to flex your power for people to know you have it,” he says. “True leadership... | |||
| The 4 Zones of Leadership & How to Sustain World-Class Results | 28 Oct 2021 | 00:35:58 | |
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| Handling Underperformers: the Counterintuitive Reason Why Bottom Performers are Performing Poorly with Richard Lindner and Jeff Mask | 25 Oct 2021 | 00:26:06 | |
When we focus the bulk of our time on underperformers and fixing problems, we bring the rest of the team down.
Every time you fix something, does something else break? Are you constantly drained from plugging leaks and putting out fires? Does it feel like your workweek is just a giant real-life game of Whack-a-Mole?
If so, chances are, you’ve probably fallen into the trap of always focusing on the underperformer. We’re hardwired as humans—and especially as leaders—to fix what’s breaking. We bounce from one broken thing to the next. Some of us hang our identity on that. But what happens is that we unintentionally neglect and overlook what’s going well. And our reward for fixing one problem is being handed the next.
In this episode, co-hosts Richard Lindner and Jeff Mask talk about our tendency to focus on underperformers and how it’s not a sustainable way to run a business. There’s a much better way to get things done.
The Business Law of Thirds Jeff walks us through a framework where you envision a rectangle divided into thirds. It’s The Law of Thirds, but the business one, not the photography one. In the top third are your high performers. When you’re growing something, leading through change, they’re lifting everyone around them, championing the cause, on board, a joy to lead.
At the very opposite end of the rectangle, the bottom third, are the people who are frustrated and super cynical. They’re not just questioning the strategy (that can actually be helpful), but they’re always pessimistic, sowing seeds of doubt, a lot of toxicity.
In the middle third are the fence-sitters, not quite sure where they stand. They could really go either way—and they do.
So, where do we as leaders focus? Our tendency is to pay attention to the bottom third and invest time there, because they need TLC. They’re loud, squeaky, and we’re concerned they’re going to affect everyone else.
But, when we focus on the bottom third, two things happen. The fence-sitters realize where the attention is, and they start gravitating to the bottom. They do it subconsciously. We just go where the attention is, as human beings. Focusing on the bottom means you get more people doing the grumbling.
The second thing that happens is you alienate the top performers. Some of them will leave, frustrated with the situation. They get sick and tired of the hand-holding of all the mediocre people. They don’t thrive in that environment.
Be Careful Not to Perpetuate the Cycle When we focus on the underperformers, we’re modeling how to get attention: negativity. Negative actions get positive rewards. We’ve got to rewire that.
When you’re so focused on trying to get an underperformer to the bare minimum, what’s happening to the ignored high performer? You might be thinking about High Performer Jane, “If everyone could just be like Jane...” Well, are you talking to Jane, investing in her, challenging her? Or are you putting her on a pedestal, comparing people to her, but then not focusing on her, giving her any attention, helping her go from good to great to greater?
Jim Collins, in his incredible book, Good to Great, says, “People are not your most important assets; the right people are.” Are you focusing on the right people, or do you need to flip the rectangle? Richard and Jeff would challenge you to focus just 25% of your time on the underperformers and 75% on the people who want to go from good to great.
When you focus positive attention on the high performers, people who are excited, then the people in the middle will gravitate to the attention, the excitement, the energy. Some of the bottom third will jump out of the boat and leave. Fine. Leading them is one of the hardest things you have to do. We don’t want to lose | |||
| How to Hire the Right Person and Find an Ideal Team Player | 22 Oct 2021 | 00:09:43 | |
Once you know when you need to hire, the next question is who do you need to hire? In this micro-episode, host Jeff Mask walks through a simple, but effective, model you can use to determine whether or not a person is a good fit for your company. The bottom line? You can do all the research, all the due diligence, and still mis-hire. Then you’ve got someone who doesn’t fit your team or culture, and you have to fire them. Listen in as Jeff takes a dive deep down into some frameworks that he’s loved over the years that are super powerful and help you know exactly who to hire for the long term. Don’t Hire Too Quickly Once upon a time, Jeff was tasked with growing a brand new team from scratch. He had to go from zero to six people in 4-6 weeks. He let the urgency get to him. “I’ve got to hire people, get things going, meet this massive revenue target, and make sure we’re being wise stewards of resources,” he told himself. He quickly looked at resumes and skill sets and figured out job descriptions and did all the right things. Or so he thought. He realized later that he had let the urgency to hire by a certain time trump the necessity of hiring the right people for the long term. His short-term focus translated into a lot of turnover, wasted effort and time, and frustration for people. Ultimately, they ended up keeping only two of the six hires long term. He knew he could have done better. If you’ve hired too quickly or don’t have a hiring process, hopefully you can learn from his mistakes. Years later, he stumbled across an awesome book by Patrick Lencioni called The Ideal Team Player. It’s full of powerful systems and frameworks, and he wishes he’d had it sooner. How to Hire The Ideal Team Player Jeff loves the simplicity of Lencioni’s models and how, when you use them and apply them, they actually work. The first one is called The Ideal Team Player (link at the end), and you ask three basic questions about a potential hire.
Are they humble? To borrow a quote from C.S. Lewis, humble isn’t thinking less of yourself; it’s thinking of yourself less. Is this person coachable? Can they listen? Are they looking out for others, not just for themselves? Are they hungry? Are they driven, self-motivated? Are they self-aware? Can they take that and know when to take the initiative? Are they growing? Are they devouring books and wanting to learn more? That’s a great indicator. Are they smart? Not intellectually smart—although that’s important—but people smart. Do they have emotional intelligence? Do they understand how to work well with others? Will they bring cohesion to your team? You Need All Three: Humble, Hungry, Smart Right smack dab in the center of humble, hungry, and smart is that ideal person you want to hire. This begs the question: what if someone has just one or two of the qualities and not all three? Is that good enough? In a word, no. If someone is just humble, but not hungry or smart, they’re a doormat, a pleaser. They don’t stand up for things. If someone is just hungry, ambitious, but not humble or people smart, they’re just a bulldozer. And, if they’re people smart, but not humble or hungry, they’re just a charmer. Lencioni has names for people who embody two of the characteristics but are missing the third. What if you’re humble and hungry? You’re an accidental mess maker. What if you’re humble and people smart? You’re a loveable slacker. What if you’re hungry and people smart? You’re a skillful politician. You need to be really careful of the counterfeits. You have to have all three. Two... | |||
| Why Many Leaders Don’t Get the Best from Their Team | 21 Mar 2022 | 00:31:42 | |
When was the last time you praised someone on your team with specific, authentic feedback?
On today’s episode, co-hosts Richard Lindner and Jeff Mask talk about the absolute importance of leaders expressing appreciation and acknowledgment for the work their team is doing—in a consistent way. If you do it randomly, whenever the urge strikes, it probably won’t happen. You need to build this mechanism into your weekly routine. They share some helpful stories (both good and bad) and some actionable ideas for appreciating your people and inspiring them to greatness. We often glaze over this issue, but it can be one of the easiest and most powerful things we do as leaders. “The ripple effect of this is literally incalculable,” Jeff says.
Listen in for some helpful and tangible tools and frameworks you can put into action today.
IN THIS EPISODE YOU’LL LEARN:
LINKS AND RESOURCES:
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| How to Know When It’s Time to Hire with Richard Lindner and Jeff Mask | 21 Oct 2021 | 00:30:53 | |
Hiring a new person is serious business, and there are some really important questions to ask yourself as a leader before you take that step.
In this episode, hosts Richard Lindner and Jeff Mask walk through some really vital steps we need to take before we bring someone else on our team. In Richard’s company, they have a saying that reflects an important value:
We take the social responsibility of hiring very seriously. What does that mean? It means that, when they make the decision to hire someone, it’s more than an exchange of time for money. It’s not a pair of jeans at Nordstrom’s. It’s a human. They have other humans relying on them. And hiring should only be done after much care and consideration.
Listen in for some great advice on making these key hiring decisions as a leader.
Taking the Social Responsibility of Hiring Very Seriously When Richard’s company is considering hiring someone new, they do what they call “work journaling” for a bit first. They ask questions like: What are we doing? How are we spending our time? Is the leader hoarding something that should be passed down? What percentage of my day is spent on things I should be doing? What percentage of my day is spent on things I should be delegating?
And they follow these three basic rules of thumb:
Each of these things leads to unnecessary hires. That’s bad for the leader, the company, and the person you hired. Why don’t they throw people at these things? Because they take the social responsibility of hiring very seriously. When we’re in the most pain we’re most likely to throw a warm body at a problem. Don’t hire people in your emotional state. Step back and assess first.
You Can Never Make Enough Lists If someone requests additional help doing their job, make some lists. What the leader is doing, what everyone on the team is doing, what the person requesting additional help is doing. Go back to that critical task list—Do, Defer, Delegate, Delete. For the person asking for another hire, ask: Do you have the time to do all of this? Are we following a documented process? Is it efficient? What can we automate?
When you ask those questions (about how you’re spending your time, etc.), you can figure out if you actually need to hire someone, or if you just need to make some other changes. What if you get really efficient with your time two weeks after you hire a new person? Don’t hire for seasonal work unless you’re advertising for a short-term, temporary, seasonal hire. If people don’t know they’re being hired temporarily, don’t hire them temporarily.
These are the processes you have to go through so you can be socially responsible when you hire. We as leaders can get frustrated and impatient. Once again, all problems are leadership problems. We have to take this responsibility very seriously.
Check Yourself Before You Wreck Yourself There are a few things Richard and Jeff encourage you to be aware of and think about as you’re considering hiring.
There are people who are empire builders who like to build a large team of people underneath them. You need to look in the mirror to know yourself. Are you an empire builder? Does success for you look like the number of employees you have? Do you have a ton of employees but your company isn’t profitable?
Vanity metrics are things that look and feel great but ultimately don’t drive to the end result we’re looking for. A million subscribers but no... | |||
| When and How to Have “Awkward” Conversations with Your Team with Richard Lindner and Jeff Mask | 20 Oct 2021 | 00:43:08 | |
As leaders, alignment, clarity, and trust among your team are great, but sometimes the bridge to get there is the dreaded awkward conversation.
Every leader can relate to the sense of dread that comes with knowing you need to have a difficult conversation you’ve been avoiding. How do we lead into this? How do we request an awkward conversation and then how do we handle it? In today’s episode, co-hosts Richard Lindner and Jeff Mask share some practical advice for dealing with awkward conversations and then hopefully eliminating the need for them.
Turn Awkward Conversations Into Fierce Conversations
Jeff says the most important thing you can do is practice a conversation before you have it—especially that opening sentence. The first five seconds are always the most difficult—it’s awkward, then onward. He starts conversations with “I want to talk with you about…” not “I need to talk to you about…” Replace need and to with want and with. Then fill in the space after about with a clear statement of the issue.
Rehearse that first sentence more than anything. Memorize the facial expression, tone, and pacing so you set the stage for a productive, constructive conversation.
Jeff highly recommends Susan Scott’s book, Fierce Conversations, where she gives six steps to an opening statement, then #7 is an invitation for them to respond.
Here’s an example. 1. Name the issue (how you respond to certain members of the team). 2. Give a specific example (when Stacy talks, you talk over her and don’t let her finish). 3. Describe your emotion (it’s frustrating but I don’t want to embarrass you). 4. Clarify what’s at stake (but I’m afraid if we don’t talk about it, we won’t gel as a team) 5. Own your part (I should have addressed this earlier) and 6. Indicate your wish to solve the problem (I really want to work this out.) 7. Invite them to respond.
Some Practical Advice for Before and During the Conversation
You want to start from a good place, which means getting the raw emotion out of the way and getting to logic. Share your thoughts and feelings with someone else. Write it all out in an email you’ll never send. Create a plan to move forward. Establish your desired outcome.
When we get to that step 7 and ask for their feedback, how do we invite honest feedback and not a defensive reply? Facial expressions and body language while listening are so important. Make them feel safe. Resist the temptation to build a stronger case. Don’t get defensive. Listen. The goal is to help them feel understood—seen, heard, and valued. Don’t be on your phone. Don’t check something. Don’t lose eye contact. Not intense staring, but don’t lose focus or get distracted. Listen with your ears, eyes, and heart.
What if you mess up that feedback invitation at any point? Own it immediately. Think of a brick wall between the two of you.... | |||
| The Relationship Between Burnout and Impostor Syndrome and How to Battle Both with Richard Lindner and Jeff Mask | 19 Oct 2021 | 00:43:00 | |
If you’re experiencing burnout and/or impostor syndrome, there are some practical things you can do to get your energy back so you can lead powerfully.
Burnout is a pattern that’s happening globally right now. People are stressed, tired, anxious, and it feels like the marathon has no end. In this episode, co-hosts Richard Lindner and Jeff Mask validate this burnout you’re experiencing, explain how it causes impostor syndrome to rear its ugly head, and share some exercises you can do to refresh and re-engage.
Three Levels of Burnout
Leaders have to deal with burnout. Period. First, there’s internal burnout. You’re feeling it as a leader. Richard says impostor syndrome always builds when he’s burned out. “I’m not capable, I don’t have the skills to handle this.” He’s been feeling some of that embarrassment, shame, and fear lately, and he thinks this is a great time to talk about it.
Then there’s burnout in the people you’re in charge of leading. How do you know when to push them to do their best and when/how to give them a break?
Then what about when your leader/manager is experiencing burnout? If the person at the top doesn’t deal with it effectively, they push it down on everyone else. It’s cascading.
At least one of those levels is relevant to every leader on the planet right now, especially in these times.
Two Things You Have to Do
We’re in a season of funkiness and ambiguity right now. The more we label it as weird/difficult, the more we’ll flounder. We have to accept it, learn to be cool with it. It’s not going back to “normal.” We have a choice of how we’ll respond to it. This isn’t about putting a happy face on it; it’s about changing your mindset.
What opportunities are available now that wouldn’t have been available before? New, unique, and trying times are where character is truly developed, where our best selves can show up.
Dig deeper into changing your mindset. Get a piece of paper, draw a line down the middle, and make two columns. On the left side, write down everything that’s frustrating you right now. There’s power getting it out of your head. Write down the crap, get it out, no filters. Let it sit, look at it, meditate on it, accept it. Then prioritize it. Weight it. Which things are affecting/frustrating you the most right now?
On the right side of the paper, flip it. Ask yourself these questions:
Then look at those two columns, and ask yourself, “How am I going to choose to respond?” We totally have a choice how we respond to any situation, regardless of how difficult it is.
Richard says this exercise works, that Jeff has walked him through it before. Getting it out of our head and onto paper is so powerful. “Embrace the suck,” he says. Acknowledge it. Feel your feelings. How you react to that emotion is where the positive/negative comes in. We get to choose. But it takes reps.
Go... | |||
| Compensation, Raises, Job Titles, & Career Development | 18 Oct 2021 | 00:55:01 | |
As a manager, how do you have those awkward and difficult conversations with your employees about salaries and raises and promotions? Richard and Jeff have some answers.
More people are leaving their companies right now than at any time in history. We entered the first relief period a few months ago. People left, companies made adjustments, now what are we left with? The people we absolutely need. You start making emotional decisions. How do I keep this person and make sure they don’t leave?
Because of Covid, a lot of these conversations have been postponed and avoided, and now they’ve ballooned. In today’s episode, co-hosts Richard Lindner and Jeff Mask walk listeners through some anecdotal stories and a process for having these conversations effectively to benefit both the employee and the company.
Listen in for some practical, actionable steps you can take to resolve these complicated issues.
What to Do When Someone Asks For an Inappropriate Raise
If a team member comes to you asking for a raise or promotion, and it’s inappropriate to their situation, how do you say no? Jeff says we all have horror stories as leaders, where we had good intentions but unintended consequences. People want a raise, just because they need the money, not because they’ve earned it. The company isn’t growing, or the person isn’t growing, or hasn’t delivered more value. So what do you do?
“I want to back up and say why I think this is a broken conversation,” Jeff says. He believes that, when it comes to career progression paths, we’ve let it creep in that the path lies on the shoulders of the company/manager. He believes leaders need to train their employees to see what progression can look like, and tell them it’s a choose your own adventure path.
Step #1: Flip the script. Help them see it’s theirs to declare. Step #2: Create different options with them, but let them own it.
In the past, there was a manual. This is what you did. This was the progression. Now people change careers multiple times and much later in their working life. What you as a leader have to figure out is what do they want? Where do they want to go?
Where Does Your Employee Want to Go?
As a leader, before we get to “I want more money,” try to figure out what they really want. Most of them don’t know or can’t articulate it. Ideally, you’ll ask these questions from the very beginning.
Your job as a leader is to identify skill gaps between where they are and what they want. A conversation about raises is easier if you’ve already talked about skill gaps. It has to be “no and here’s why.” Or, better yet, “no, and here’s what it will take to get it to a yes.”
The no is so much easier if you’ve already built a foundation of clarity of what growth looks like. When it’s not discussed initially, the employee blames the company and feels stuck. Call out what you want, then figure out a plan. What skills do I need to develop? Then it becomes a really cool process. If you... | |||
| Leading Through External Forces with Richard Lindner and Jeff Mask | 15 Oct 2021 | 00:37:05 | |
What does it look like to lead your team through external forces and distractions in a powerful way?
This is another one of those universal things that everyone is feeling right now. In this episode, co-hosts Richard Lindner and Jeff Mask share some personal examples from their own lives and work.
Richard just got back from one of his first business trips in a long time. He gathered with 150 leaders/founders/executives for the War Room Mastermind, and all of them are feeling the strain of external forces wreaking havoc in their own lives and their employees’. Jeff says it’s a recurring theme with his coaching clients as well. Just as quickly as leaders feel like they’ve gotten a handle on it, a new distraction rears its head.
Listen in as they offer some grounding practices and habits that will enable you to be the leader of your life and the owner of your circumstances.
How Can You Lead Well In Spite of What’s Going On? There are a billion external forces, scenarios, you could be dealing with at any given time. Then each person who reports to you could be dealing with one of a billion of their own.
In the past 10 days, Richard had every refrigerator in his home go out, multiple A/C units broke, his back fence fell down, one of his kids had multiple Covid tests, his car broke down, his wife’s car broke down, and he had to cancel a trip. And that was just at home. He still had to show up at work every day, lead at work, lead at home, and lead and serve at War Room.
How does he show up and maintain his energy with all these external forces at play? He has to be very careful not to bring his money problems from home to work and inappropriately generate revenue for himself as quickly as humanly possible in ways that might not be in line with the company. Or push his people because he’s worried about money going out the door. Or complain about money going out the door to people who make less of it than he does.
So, what’s Richard’s solution? A change in mindset. Instead of “here’s what’s happening to me,” he challenges himself to flip those things into opportunities to succeed. “One of the ways I am my best self,” he says, “is when I’m up against a worthy adversary, a worthy competitor. So I have to be challenged.”
He acknowledges that he needs to be careful not to compete with anyone who works for him though, anyone he’s charged with growing or leading. He’s failed there in the past, and it was costly.
For him, he looks at external forces and challenges as his competition. He can use hard stuff to help him get to his optimal performance level by leveraging what he knows about himself and competition.
Know Yourself Inside and Out You have to know yourself really well. You have to know what it takes to be your best self and how you show up as your worst self (and what triggers it).
What do you need personally and professionally to be able to show up as your best self? And when that starts to go away, what happens? The more self-aware we can be, the better we can lead. The first thing you have to control is you, because you’ll never be able to control the external forces.
Recognize where you’re off, replace those thoughts, recite the words out loud. Own your own emotion, your thinking, your process. Remember, as Jack Sparrow says so eloquently, “The problem isn’t the problem. It’s our mindset around the problem.” The one problem that’s unsolvable is the... | |||
| Leading in a Pandemic-Affected Workplace with Richard Lindner and Jeff Mask | 14 Oct 2021 | 00:33:47 | |
You’re not alone if you’re facing anxiety, concerns, and difficult situations in your workplace 18 months into the pandemic—it’s a pattern across the globe. A lot of people thought (hoped) we’d be back to normal by this point, or at least adjusting really well to our “new” normal. But it turns out there are just a lot of new problems and questions, fears and insecurities. In today’s episode, co-hosts Jeff Mask and Richard Lindner want you to know you’re not alone. It’s not just a hot topic; it’s the anxiety everyone is feeling, whether or not they realize it. They want to help you understand what’s going on and give you actionable steps to make things better, to give more clarity, to help you realign and reunite your company. This is how the episode will go:
Your Experience/Feelings Are Valid We’ve all been through a lot in the past 18 months, and then we saw some signs that things were getting a little better. Then other things started to creep in. Things like:
Richard shares their company’s story. On Friday, April 13th, 2020, they sent everybody home from their headquarters for a couple weeks, which turned into a month, then a quarter. Then they made the decision to be a virtual first company. They knew they couldn’t go back. They still don’t know if today is a new normal or a temporary normal. They’re in limbo. A couple weeks ago, things seemed to start getting better-ish, but people started leaving. Everyone wanted to know, what are we doing now? People seemed way more disconnected, out of touch, accusatory in tone. It was harder to get people on the same page. Everything seemed forced. They’re not in a rhythm, not in alignment.
Then people start leaving.
Why Are People Leaving Your Company? Richard can’t help but think, “Uh oh. Did we make it this far, then we’re going to fall apart? The world is going to get better, and we’re going to crumble? That’s what it felt like.” “Our thoughts go to dark places,” Jeff says. “Maybe it’s me. Maybe I’m a horrible leader. Maybe the company isn’t as good as I thought it was. Now that things are more stable, people are going where they want to go. Before, they felt imprisoned in this company, but at least it was a place of security. And your ego goes all over the place.” Richard says yes to the ego. They stepped up and supported their people during the bulk of the last year. They cut other things before people. When the first few people put in their resignation, he had to fight his ego. “How dare you leave us when we didn’t leave you? Do you know how easy it would have been to just cut this, but we didn’t, but now you are? That’s my own brokenness and humanity popping up, but I felt it.” Why are people leaving now? For a lot of reasons. First of all, it felt like a lot, because no one left for 18 months. People were exploring new... | |||
| 3 Keys to Leading a Winning Team with Jeff Mask | 13 Oct 2021 | 00:09:22 | |
When you have clarity in the role, clarity as a whole, and clarity of goals, the team you’re leading will absolutely be winning.
Today’s episode is a micro-session around three simple, but powerful, principles to help your team win. Too often, as leaders, we overlook fundamentals. We get distracted. We get going too quickly. People get hired and they’re excited, but when days and weeks go by, and they’re not quite sure what winning looks like in their role, they start questioning: Am I adding value? Am I succeeding? I don’t know.
If there’s ever a question in your team member’s mind about whether or not they’re succeeding, that’s the beginning of a difficult path. So let’s change that.
Think about this for a minute: What’s a role you once held in a company where you just didn’t know if you were doing a good job or not? You didn’t know what success looked like. You didn’t know exactly what was expected of you. Sometimes we’ll get a job description at the beginning, but we never revisit it, and we don’t really know if that’s still what our job is.
The 3 Keys to Winning
When those are all clear, our chances of winning are significantly greater. Let’s break it down.
#1: Clarity in the Role Why does the role exist? What did the job description say again? And are you actually doing that? What are the three key metrics, the big things you’re measured on? What are the reasons why the company is investing money in you to get that job done? Are you clear on what that job looks like? Are you clear for the person you’re hiring of what their job looks like?
Second, what does success look like? Can you define success as a leader? And can your team members define the same success? Too often, we have different definitions. The employee may feel like they’re doing great, but you are frustrated with their work, because you haven’t articulated what success looks like.
And don’t forget this important third point: the timeframe of that success.
Jeff was leading a director one time. They sat down and got clear on his role and the key metrics, what success would look like, and he was good to go. A couple months went by, and Jeff had this feeling something was wrong, but the guy seemed to think things were great. Jeff pulled him aside and asked about the role. The director was on fire. He loved it.
“You know,” Jeff said, “I’m just concerned that we’ve only got a little less than a month to go to nail these milestones.”
“What do you mean?” the director said, puzzled. “I thought we had until the end of the year.”
It was a palm-to-forehead moment when Jeff realized he had never told him the time frame. Jeff was thinking a quarter. The director was thinking a year. It was totally Jeff’s fault.
#2: Clarity As a Whole How do the players work together? Who does what and when and why? If everybody does everything, it’s hard to know who owns it. Balls get dropped, batons get dropped.
Think of a 4x4 relay team. Each runner knows what their particular role is. They know what to do. They know what it needs to look like when they pass off the baton. They know what time they want to beat. And they know they want that gold medal. That’s... | |||
| Leadership Mindset, Positive Focus, and Your First 90 Days Leading a New Team with Richard Lindner and Jeff Mask | 12 Oct 2021 | 00:45:00 | |
The absolute foundation of leadership is a powerful positive mindset, and it needs to start on day one.
What comes to mind when you hear the word “mindset?” If you feel like mindset isn’t important, and you’re impatient to get to the tactics, the “good stuff,” then this episode is for you.
Co-hosts Richard Lindner and Jeff Mask reflect back on the days when they first started working together. Jeff introduced an exercise called “positive focus” and Richard wanted to skip it and move right to the solution to his problem. He quickly learned that, if you don’t start by fixing the problem of mindset, then every solution is a temporary band-aid.
In this episode, we’ll walk through mindset and positive focus, then move into some tactical suggestions for your first day, week, and months leading a new team.
Why Mindset and Positive Focus Are So Important At the start of Richard’s first coaching session with Jeff, Jeff said, “Let’s start out with your positive focus.” Richard remembers thinking, “Better yet, why don’t you help me?” He really wanted to skip all the woowoo juju stuff and didn’t understand why Jeff was making him do it.
Richard said, “I don’t know, man. I got nothing.” And Jeff said, “Well, I guess we’re just going to sit here then. There’s something good, and we’re going to find it.”
Fast forward to today when they start off every weekly leadership meeting with positive focus, and Richard believes in it wholeheartedly. Jeff knows a lot of people can relate to Richard’s initial skepticism. Mindset can seem touchy-feely and unnecessary when there are difficult business problems to solve.
Jeff takes people back to the second Back to the Future movie when Doc Brown creates the time space continuum on the chalkboard and says “this is where we’ve been, and this is where we are.” He tells Marty that, when he went back in time, he changed something, and now there’s a new time space continuum, another 1985.
When we don’t start our meetings, our thoughts, from a place of positivity, we’re on a time space continuum that isn’t healthy because we’re thinking what we’re fearful and frustrated about. The highest part of our brain isn’t functioning. We’re in the bad 1985. When you reframe and refocus your brain on the positive, you start to exercise the higher-level functioning of your brain, the aspects that enable you to problem solve, learn, and create.
We’re wired as humans to be thinking more in the survival state, which is owned by the brain stem, the oldest part of our brain. When we try to solve problems from that part of our brain, we don’t get great outcomes.
Contrast that with the prefrontal lobes, the part that’s responsible for learning, adapting, creating, problem-solving, leadership. When we use that part of our brain, we hack ourselves to a higher level to get to a much deeper, better outcome. Jeff says at the beginning of every meeting, “Let’s hack our brains.”
A Simple Exercise to Realign Your Team’s Mindset Leadership is not about protecting yourself. It’s about growing others, aligning others, and building a cohesive team. If you put yourself first, none of that works. If we understand the science behind it, understand the need for mindset, what is a simple exercise we can go through to realign our mindset?
Jeff recommends starting with a level one exercise. The question is simple: What are you grateful for in your life today? At the beginning of a meeting, you just go around the room and give everyone a chance to answer that question.
The level two question is this: What is something in your business that you’re excited about or grateful for? Encourage people to get super specific, add detail, paint a visual image. This starts to... | |||
| How to Hold Your Team Accountable with Richard Lindner and Jeff Mask | 11 Oct 2021 | 00:27:32 | |
Leading from a place of empathy and accountability isn’t easy, but it’s the only way to get the results you want. How the heck do I hold my team accountable? It’s literally the number one question leaders ask. And it often comes with a tone of frustration and annoyance with the team. When leaders ask that question, they’re pointing fingers, but they need to shift the mirror a little bit and take a deeper look. In today’s episode of the Ready to Lead Podcast, co-hosts Richard Lindner and Jeff Mask turn the mirror on themselves as leaders and ask: Have I created an environment where clear accountability is the norm? Or are there ambiguities, inconsistencies, and miscommunications between me and my team? In Jeff’s experience, 90% of accountability issues go away when we apply the following model.
3 Keys to Winning The three keys to winning are easy to remember because they all start with the same word, and they all rhyme.
Let’s start with clarity of role. Is each person’s role super clear? Do they know their responsibilities? Do they know what success looks like and by when? It seems elementary, but so often we hire someone and never have that foundational conversation about their responsibilities, what success looks like, and the timeframe. Then we move on to clarity as a whole. As a team, how do we work together? How do we pass the baton back and forth, both intra- and inter-departmentally? When people know who’s doing what, it’s much more clear how we operate together, in our own department and cross-functionally. When we don’t define things clearly—who owns what and when—then there are a lot of gray areas and finger-pointing. The final key to winning is clarity of goals. This is all about clear milestones, rewards if necessary, and ultimately what success looks like. When we have all that clarity, then accountability conversations are easy to have. They get difficult when we haven’t done the groundwork to create clarity, and we’re all on different pages with different interpretations of what things mean. Think of a 4x4 relay team. Each runner knows what their particular role is. They know what to do. They know what it needs to look like when they pass off the baton. They know what time they want to beat. And they know they want that gold medal. That’s clarity.
Each Team Member Has to Understand the Why When Richard starts a new company as an entrepreneur, it’s just one or two people, then a handful more, and it’s easy to be on the same page. You’re literally in the same room doing everything together. But then, as the team grows, it’s easy to assume everyone knows the why as your team widens, deepens, grows. But that’s a logical lie. People need to understand what you do, who you serve, the business model, and value creation as a whole. If they don’t understand that, they can’t possibly understand how they contribute to that value, individually or as a team. If they know what they’re supposed to do, but they don’t know why, you might as well hire robots. A robot will continue to do that one thing even after it stops working. So will the employee who doesn’t understand why in the hell they’re doing what you asked them to do. If they understand the why, they can come to you and say, “This isn’t working, and I researched it, and I think we should try this instead.”
Understanding the Kindness Counterfeit What commonly happens is that leaders try too hard to be nice and slack off on accountability. What they’re really trying to do is maintain likeability. But ambiguity isn’t kindness; clarity is. Dancing around the truth,... | |||
| 4 Foundational Principles of Leadership with Richard Lindner and Jeff Mask | 11 Oct 2021 | 00:14:25 | |
There’s no perfect way to lead, but there’s a good way, and these four foundational principles lay the groundwork for long-term success as a leader. The Ready to Lead Podcast is the show that gives you—the leader—the tools, tips, and insights you need to grow your team, your company, and yourself. In this second episode, hosts Richard Lindner and Jeff Mask dive into their philosophy of leadership. “As we start on this journey together,” Richard says, “we can’t move forward until we break down what leadership means to us. What is the lens through which we’ll view every conversation we have?” Leaders have different leadership styles; Jeff and Richard are classic examples of that. There’s no one right way to lead. But no matter your personality, there are foundational principles that should undergird your leadership if you want to lead well and sustain results.
Four Foundational Principles of Leadership These are the foundational principles every leader needs to be aware of and cultivate—and in this particular order.
Mindset is how we think, how we process the world, how we look in the mirror, how we talk to ourselves, our motives. Culture is there whether you like it or not, whether it’s toxic culture or accidental culture or an intentional culture. Communication that’s consistent and clear is how we help our team see the vision of the company the way we see it. And trust is the foundation that holds everything together. If there’s no trust between a leader and the team members, everything falls apart. On top of that foundation, we build leadership pillars: creating clarity, growing people, managing constraints, and driving results. These things don’t get done if we don’t lay that foundational framework from the beginning.
Why Mindset Has to Go First It all starts with mindset. Peter Drucker, one of the greatest leadership and business minds of all time, has a book called Managing Oneself. You have to know what your strengths and weaknesses are and have the EQ to acknowledge those, make peace with those, and build teams around those. You may be thinking, if it starts with mindset, how do I know if my mindset is strong? Jeff likes to focus on the motive. When it comes to leadership, what’s your motive for leading? He has a lot of people coming to him saying they want to lead. He asks them, “Are you sure? Why? Before you answer, I want you to think about it, process it for a couple days. Get really clear. Why do you want to lead?” Very often people want to lead because they want more power, more money. They want to move up, climb the ladder, feel the progress and achievement. Those can be fine, but if your deepest motive isn’t developing, growing, and serving people, leadership will be very draining and difficult for you. When our motives are more about others and less about ourselves, then our mindset can be way more powerful and sustain us through the growth that inevitably comes when we lead. Be clear on your motive for leading, and your mindset will be in a solid place.
From Mindset to Culture to Communication to Trust Mindset—and your awareness of it—creates culture, then enables communication and trust. If we miss mindset, we’re in trouble, because it controls everything else. We can’t skip over it. Oftentimes we create toxic cultures because of our... | |||
| The Keys to Leading a Virtual Team and the Difference Between Leading and Managing with Ralph Burns | 14 Mar 2022 | 00:39:17 | |
The transition to leading virtually hasn’t been easy. It helps to learn from people who have been doing it for a really long time.
On today’s episode, host Jeff Mask sits down with Ralph Burns, CEO and founder of Tier 11 and co-host of the Perpetual Traffic podcast, to talk about his new book, Virtual Boss. Jeff planned to just skim the book in preparation for their interview, but he couldn’t stop reading. He loves that it’s written from the actual trenches of virtual leadership, not some theory. Ralph has put in the work and has applicable, useful info for today’s leaders in virtual spaces. The guys geek out over human psychology together, talk about building trust and getting the most out of your team, and dig deep into what truly makes a leader great.
Listen in for some encouragement and advice from a long-time (and well-respected) virtual leader.
IN THIS EPISODE YOU’LL LEARN:
LINKS AND RESOURCES:
OTHER SHOWS YOU MIGHT ENJOY:
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| Does the World Really Need Another Leadership Podcast? With Richard Lindner and Jeff Mask | 11 Oct 2021 | 00:19:35 | |
Eighteen months ago, the world didn’t need another leadership podcast, but the world has completely changed. In this introductory episode of the Ready to Lead Podcast, get to know hosts Richard Lindner and Jeff Mask as they share who they are, why they’re here, and what you can expect in the weeks and months to come. Hint: it will be different from other leadership podcasts. More raw, more real, more personal. It will also be helpful, applicable, relevant—and fun.
What Leadership Looks Like Today When 2020 rolled around, leadership was already changing. Then came the pandemic. Leading through and after Covid is one of the toughest challenges leaders have ever had to face. The old ways of leading just aren’t going to cut it any longer. Leaders need to pivot if they want to lead powerfully. There will be entire batches of leaders who have never led in an office environment, who will never have the connection that comes with leading someone face-to-face. People will learn how to lead (and be led) virtually. This won’t be easy. Richard and Jeff recognize their obligation and responsibility to have raw and honest conversations, to share anecdotal stories not just about people who got it right, but people who messed up. There’s less to be learned from success than failure.
Who Is Jeff Mask? “Who the heck are you?” Richard asks Jeff. “And why should I listen to you?” “Some white dude who has no clue about life,” Jeff says. “I’m a husband of 21 years, father of 4 kids, and figuring it out as I go.” Jeff has learned from being in multiple industries, having led thousands of people—and hired (and fired) a lot of people too—that leadership is hard. There’s no simple template. There’s no “this is exactly what you do.” There are a lot of books and frameworks and models that can help to some extent, but how real do they get? Jeff has dedicated his life to help people answer the question: “But what can I really do?” He and Richard are in a position to give back, help, and serve because of the countless well-intended mistakes they’ve made. They hope to save listeners tons of time, pain, and problems by sharing their journey.
Who Is Richard Lindner? Richard says that Jeff is a very modest guy with an extensive and impressive background. Richard is the polar opposite of that. Jeff has done leadership trainings and developed programs, while Richard is a serial entrepreneur. “I don’t have a strong love for the traditional education system,” Richard says. “I would be a horrible employee. I stumbled into leadership accidentally. I’ve led hundreds and screwed up.” When he first met Jeff, he immediately thought, “there’s something about that guy.” The way that he makes other people feel, the way he runs his org, and who he is. Richard knew he wanted to be more like Jeff. They worked together as business peers, and when Jeff left the company, Richard took the opportunity to tell him how much he had impacted his life. “I had no idea,” Jeff said. “I was so touched.” Not long after, Jeff called Richard to tell him that he was offering leadership coaching, and he wanted Richard to be his first client. It was an easy yes for Richard, who was excited to be formally mentored by this guy he respected so much. These days, Jeff and Richard are peers/brothers/close friends. They’re both charged with leading teams and families. For all of Richard’s humble talk, he is currently the President and Cofounder of the Scalable Company. Each and every day he leads people who are leading people who are leading people. And he does it pretty dang well. Jeff and Richard will be talking about their wins and losses from two very different perspectives. They’ll agree on some things, disagree on others, and listeners will get to hear it all. ... | |||
| [Trailer] Ready to Lead | 23 Sep 2021 | 00:02:27 | |
'Ready to Lead' is a show that gives leaders the tools, tips, and insights they need to grow their team, their company, and themselves personally. Hosted by Richard Lindner and Jeff Mask, 'Ready to Lead' shares the real-world, real-life insights that leaders need to do to be great. | |||
| How Leaders Can Retain Their Best Talent and Different Ways to Connect with Your Team | 28 Feb 2022 | 00:07:24 | |
“How in the heck do we keep people?” is the question on every leader’s mind right now in the midst of The Big Quit happening all around us.
In today’s episode, co-hosts Richard Lindner and Jeff Mask sit down to talk about the tension of employee retention. Specifically, retaining the most talented people who are the best fit for your company. Of course you don’t want them to leave. And as difficult and scary as that thought might be, there are some really simple (not easy) ways to make sure it doesn’t happen.
Listen in as they share some dos and some don’ts of keeping the right people on your team. Retention Starts with the Leader’s Mindset
As Jeff and Richard talk to other people at different levels of leadership organizationally, they’re hearing a lot of stressful talk about retention. How do we keep people from leaving? Why are they leaving? Is this my fault? Tell me what to do!
Jeff says one aspect of leadership that can happen is that you finally find the right team, a great fit, and you develop a scarcity mindset of “I hope nobody leaves.” He had a manager once with this underlying attitude of “I’m paying you well. You should be grateful. Your only way to grow is in this company and nowhere else.” The employees felt like they were under his thumb, like they were owned.
He believes this is why much of the workforce is saying, “I’m done with this. I don’t have to keep enduring what I’ve endured. I don’t have to put up with this fear-based tactic.” Covid has opened our eyes to what matters, to what we’re willing to put up with.
Jeff thinks that the lack of care and love for individuals is what has led to the Great Resignation. It’s not the only thing, but it’s a big part of it. It’s time to rethink and not repeat the habits and behaviors of that manager. Have you had that leader? Have you been that leader? Are you that leader right now?
We need to talk about how to retain people in a more healthy, holistic, long-term way of thinking, instead of a short-term, scarce, fear-based way of thinking. Some things are obvious. Don’t make your team members feel owned. Don’t posture as if they’re lucky to have this job. Don’t ask for inappropriate chunks of their personal time as the norm. Other things are less obvious and will take some thought and maybe even some trial and error. Building a Sense of Belonging
A sense of belonging is so important in a workplace, but how do you build that? Richard has tried some things in the past that just didn’t work. They did team lunches once a week one time. The budget ballooned, and people would get their food and sit in the corner with their cliques. It had little to no effect on anyone’s sense of belonging.
If you’re not prioritizing knowing your team, there’s no way you’ll know what to do or if it’s working. You need a cadence of communication. Jeff and Richard believe weekly one-on-ones are the key. They’re one of the best retention builders. And you need to posture the one-on-one as their time, not yours. Your “agenda” is getting to know them first and giving them clarity second. Building relationships is key. It’s easy for an employee to leave when there’s no relationship.
Jeff plays devil’s advocate for a minute. “Weekly one-on-ones? You don’t realize how busy I am or how many people I’m leading. We work together daily. We don’t need one-on-ones.”
Yeah, you do. Doing meaningful work together is great. Get stuff done and that builds bonding. But if you only do that, and you don’t dedicate time to finding out their hopes, dreams, and aspirations, it won’t be enough. This is not a secondary... | |||
| A Simple Framework to Eliminate Bottlenecks and Help Your Organization Make Better Decisions | 21 Feb 2022 | 00:07:24 | |
If delegation is challenging for you right now as a leader, this simple, proven exercise will help.
Today’s episode is a micro-session with host Jeff Mask, and it’s for any leader who has big goals for the year but way too much on their plate to get it all done. It’s okay to admit it: to accomplish what you need to accomplish going forward, you’re going to need help. You’re going to need to delegate.
Listen in as Jeff walks us through a simple delegation exercise that can make a huge difference for any leader. The Decision Tree
Without meaning to, leaders tend to be bottlenecks. A lot of things have to run through you for approval. Or you have your team coming to you for questions that seem really elementary and self-explanatory. You know you don’t actually need to be part of every decision or meeting, but no one is clear on who has ownership of what. People feel disempowered and disenfranchised, because they’re constantly coming to you for permission.
Jeff came across a very helpful delegation framework while reading Susan Scott’s book, Fierce Conversations. One of her employees shared it with her. It’s called The Decision Tree. Think of your organization as a tree. Trees have trunks, branches, leaves, and roots.
Each decision fits into a category. It’s either a leaf decision, a branch decision, a trunk decision, or a root decision. To visualize this framework, imagine 3 columns going left to right and 4 rows going top to bottom.
When you get clear on what type each decision is, and get clear on each person’s role, then it’s amazing how you can eliminate bottlenecks, confusion, and frustration. Leaf, Branch, Trunk, or Root?
If you pluck a leaf off a tree, does it make much of an impact on the tree? No. A leaf decision is something that doesn’t require your approval. Something like setting up a team meeting. You don’t need to sign off on it.
A branch decision is something a little bigger, like handling a high profile client. The team member can decide it, do it, and just let you know.
A trunk decision is a little bigger. Maybe this is something like changing a strategy. The team member can decide what they think, connect with you, get approval from you, then go do it on their own.
A root decision is something major, something very impactful to the company. Maybe a core value needs to be changed. A team member can make a recommendation, but you make the ultimate decision as the leader.
Implementing this simple exercise is powerful, magical. There are no more bottlenecks. Everything works more quickly. People have autonomy. The leader is relieved. And it’s onward and upward to those big goals.
Google “decision tree template” to find the one that works for you.
Richard and Jeff want to hear from YOU. Did something in today’s episode resonate with you? What insights or actionable items are you going to run with today? They’d love to hear your feedback on this episode. Email them here with your thoughts/questions: feedback@readytolead.com
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| Delegating: 4 Simple Steps Leaders Can Take to Free Up Time While Getting More Done | 14 Feb 2022 | 00:30:07 | |
If you hope to grow your revenue, your teams, and your company, you have to find a way to delegate. There’s simply no way around it.
In today’s episode, co-hosts Richard Lindner and Jeff Mask take on the evergreen, but ever-challenging, topic of delegation. Delegation is something all leaders need to take a look at annually (okay, and monthly, weekly, daily), but it’s especially timely right now. As we kick off a new year and aspire to achieve new goals, we realize we can’t continue to own everything we owned last year if we hope to grow this year. We’ve got to find a way to hand off tasks.
So how do we do it? Who do we delegate to? How do we let go of control? How do we set the person up for success?
Listen in as Richard and Jeff answer all of these important questions and more. The Delegation Doom Loop
If you’re paralyzed by fear at the very thought of delegation, you’re not alone. Maybe you’ve delegated in the past and gotten burned. Maybe you tried to delegate and ended up wasting a bunch of time and doing everything yourself anyway.
Jeff says that leaders often find themselves in a difficult doom loop when they try to delegate:
But what if a simple mindset shift could make you sprint toward delegation instead of running away? What if you could delegate confidently and give up control easily? What if you could help your team truly own what you’re delegating, and then grow it beyond anything you could have done yourself? What if you really invested the time to train people well? What could happen in your future?
Most of us leaders have the human tendency to want to control things. This makes delegation challenging. But the more you delegate, the easier it gets. Your company can’t grow if you’re always holding on to the most important things. And it’s always the most important thing for where you’re at. It’s not the most important thing for where you want to go. If you don’t delegate, you’re always going to be treading water. You won’t get anywhere.
It all starts with your mindset. Think of the top of that doom loop. You’re so busy. You’re so overwhelmed. Replace: “I’m so busy” with “I have all the time in the world.” And look at what happens to your energy and your thinking. When we think that way, rather than using busyness as a badge of honor, we have all the time in the world to go create and innovate. It enables our mind to delegate in a truer form, a way that’s more enduring and sustainable instead of coming from a place of scarcity and fear and franticness. The E.D.G.E. Framework for Delegation
Jeff learned a methodology 20 years ago as a Scout Master teaching 13-year-old boys. It’s called E.D.G.E.
Explain the why behind the task you’re delegating. Help them understand why it matters to them, the purpose behind it. Give visual aids/examples to solidify the idea/end product.
Demonstrate the actual skill when done well. Show them what success looks like, all the while keeping in mind that they might do it a little differently than you do.
Guide them, coach them through the process. This is where you let them try and experiment, so it sinks deep into them, instead of just watching you, then being left on their own. This step takes time and patience. This is the key step we... | |||
| Handling “The Great Resignation” and Should Leaders Be Overpaying for Talent? | 07 Feb 2022 | 00:49:22 | |
Millions of people left their jobs last year, and the elephant in every office right now is: how do we talk about money?
In today’s episode, co-hosts Richard Lindner and Jeff Mask tackle the difficult topic of salaries and raises head-on. 2021 was the Big Quit, the Great Resignation, the Year the Employee Leaves. Everyone has felt it. When 38+ million employees in the U.S. quit their jobs in a single calendar year, everyone feels it. That’s a lot of people walking out. That’s a lot of investment in training and onboarding and growth. That’s a really big hit. So, what are we going to do about it?
If you’re a leader freaking out a little (or a lot) about this right now, know that you’re not alone. Listen in as Jeff and Richard calmly and wisely walk us through next steps. Let’s Be Honest: No One Really Knows
What Richard is hearing from people he leads and in his communities, masterminds, and from other CEOs, executives, and mid-level managers is this: My employees are asking for raises, and I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how much to pay them. I don’t know if I should pay over market. I don’t even know what the hell market is right now.
Richard doesn’t know either. He says it feels like we’re sitting here bidding on a house in the hottest real estate market out there. How much over market do we have to go? There are times when the answer is whatever it takes. Sometimes it’s none. How do you know?
The next big question is: How do you have these conversations with team members? If they haven’t asked, they’re thinking about it, building up the courage to ask. The longer they’ve waited, the bigger issue it’s become in their minds.
When they do ask, how do we have that conversation from power, not fear? From humility and vulnerability? How do we model leadership practices and principles within that conversation? How do we stop waiting for them to ask and just initiate, so it’s not this big elephant in the room? Avoid Panic and Emotionally-Driven Decisions
Richard passes the puck to Jeff who doesn’t have solid answers either, but he does have some really good ideas. His first tip is to avoid extremes. Don’t panic. Don’t rush into decisions that are driven by emotion. This time may seem unprecedented, but he and Richard have seen a lot of ebbs and flows over the past 20+ years. They’ve been through up markets and down markets. There are some tried and true principles that can give you peace, clarity, confidence, and unity as a leadership team.
You need to be unemotional. This doesn’t mean you don’t care about your people. It means your decisions aren’t rash and made in the moment based on feelings. (Like panicking and thinking, “I can’t lose this person!”) You need to be united as a leadership team. You need responsibility and alignment. You have to do what’s best for both the person and the company as a whole.
Looking at a situation unemotionally means that the question isn’t “What are we going to pay Jeff?” But: “How do we pay here?” You need an agreed-upon compensation strategy upfront from the beginning. When this is missing, there will be friction and tension. You need to know what your principal stance on compensation is at your company. What’s your compensation methodology? If you’re not in charge of this at your company, ask your leader that question. Clarify and Communicate Your Compensation Strategy
Conversations around money are much easier when everyone understands the company’s compensation methodology. And when that methodology has been clearly communicated to all employees. The whole team needs to be aligned. You’re overtaxing everyone when | |||
| Finding Your Personal Purpose and Its Importance for Leaders | 31 Jan 2022 | 00:43:02 | |
When you know your purpose, your why, as a leader, you’re able to set harmonious and powerful goals for yourself and your team.
In a previous episode, co-hosts Richard Lindner and Jeff Mask talked about setting relevant goals that align with their overarching purpose as a company. In today’s episode, they want to continue that conversation and connect some dots. How do you go deeper into your own personal why, your personal purpose? This is a topic that is absolutely invigorating for Jeff and, frankly, pretty intimidating for Richard.
As they chat, Jeff plays the teacher/coach/guru/spiritual guide and Richard is the critic/cynic. Listen in for two very different and valuable perspectives on discovering your life’s purpose. Richard’s Reluctant Perspective
What if you don’t know what your personal why is? What if you’re not even sure you care to know? Then you’re on Team Richard. Richard says, “I don’t clearly know my personal why. I don’t have a personal mission statement. I can’t tell you my personal purpose.”
What Richard does know is that, at the Scalable Company, their purpose is to help entrepreneurs scale themselves so they can scale their companies. It’s something he’s really passionate about. He’s also passionate about the Ready to Lead podcast because he believes he and Jeff can help other leaders learn from their failures and mistakes.
Richard is envious of those who have personal mission statements. It’s hard for him. Blue ocean thinking and dialing that in are not his strengths. He just wants to get to work on his goals. But, because of his deep respect and admiration for Jeff, he’s willing to listen and is open to changing his mind. Jeff’s Passionate Perspective
Jeff believes this episode will be so valuable to people on both sides of the issue. Those who don’t know their purpose and those who do. He’s going to share a few exercises and frameworks he uses to help the CEOs and leaders he coaches uncover their why, the gift they bring to the world.
“The clearer we are on our why,” he says, “and the more effectively we can set goals that are relevant and in harmony with our why, the more we’ll be in the flow, excited and energized.” So many people are already exhausted and burnt out, and the year has barely begun. He believes it’s because we’re not anchoring to our bigger purpose and the reason we exist. We’re missing out on a deeper, richer meaning we could attach to our goals that could fuel us and keep us going.
Jeff and Richard are both leading people in all walks of life. It’s important to understand people’s mindsets and backgrounds to lead them from where they’re at. Maybe you know your true why, but you’re leading people who don’t. Or maybe you don’t know yours, but you’re leading people who do. It’s important that we understand each other. Some Necessary Prep Work in 3 Steps
Jeff has a valuable framework to share that includes four questions to ask yourself when trying to figure out your purpose. But, like most things, we need to do a little prep work first. We need to set a foundation for discovering our purpose and living into it. Here are 3 important first steps: Step #1: Avoid perfectionism. What happens very often when people try to discover why they exist is that they get stuck on making sure it’s perfect and exactly right before they go anywhere else. You kind of have to try it out. I think it’s this, or it might be this. Be okay to flex with it, tweak it, change it. If you’re a perfectionist, it’s all or nothing—and most often, it’s nothing. Step #2: Ask yourself how at peace you are | |||