The One Question That Turns a Follower Into a Leader

Speaker A: Let me guess.

Speaker B: As a leader, you're too busy. You're too busy doing things for other people. Your team comes in with problems all the time, and you don't get to the strategic stuff. I get it. I hear this all the time. And what we're going to talk about today, what you're going to hear, is the number one thing you can do to reverse that trend, to empower your team and to get stuff off your plate. This is taken from a Friday leadership Live in the glc. But it was. It's such an important topic that we wanted to turn it into a podcast. So here it is for you.

Speaker C: Welcome to Leadership Mindset 2.0, Practical Neuroscience and psychology. To transform you from a tactical doer into a strategic leader. Here is your host, former social entrepreneur of the year and coach to some of the world's top executives are, uh, Michael Anderson.

Speaker A: Hello, leaders. Michael here. A lot of us know that have been studying and working with leadership for a while. There's a lot of these big topics about being more authentic, about having a purpose that are talked about a lot. And they're important. They're talked about a lot. What I enjoy getting into is the smaller, more specific, subtle issues and areas. And I think people like that because they run across them a lot more than you might think, but they're not talked about as much. And I'll give you an example. A VP that I'm coaching. Let me set the stage. This person is a bit newer. So my VP did a time audit, which was a really good idea. Basically looked at where he was spending his time and who he was spending his time the most with, which is a great idea for all of us to do. You can do it at quarterly, monthly, yearly, whatever it is, and just see where you're spending your time and who you're spending your time with, especially if you have a couple different direct reports. And he was spending, uh, much more time with this one leader that reported to him rather than the others. And granted he was in a new situation, he needed some help, and that's okay. So it's okay to do that. And he came to me and he said, okay, uh, but I want to do less of that with him. And I'm like, yeah, smart thinking. Because we needed some time. We needed extra time with certain things. At one point, we don't want to continue that. We always want to be reviewing our calendar. And he said, what should I do? Should I just tell him I'm going to spend less time with him? Like, probably not, because he could take that a bunch of different ways. And I'm getting to know this leader, the person who reports to him and quite honest he can be a bit sensitive. And so you may not want to say something like that. So a couple different things, there's a couple of different things came out of this and we, I uh, coached him, I gave him some, some mentoring around this. And the first thing I told him is a, it's great you're doing the time audit. Second thing I told him is that why don't you frame this as a phase? And you say, hey look, this last year I've worked directly with you to make sure you hit the ground running. And I think what happened is they had a really good last year. So what you can say is this was the integration phase. So we're done with me integrating with you. And uh, what that means is I'm going to spend a bit less time with you because you're on the ground running. I'm still here to support you, I'm still here to coach you. But maybe instead of spending five hours a week together, maybe we'll have two one hour meetings type of thing. So it is going to reduce and get his buy in and what do you think of that and hear what he has to say. Maybe he has some concerns. But you want to handle that, right? You want, you don't want to just be telling. You want to get the sense how's his body language when you deliver that, all those different types of things. And what also he talked about is when this guy comes to him and he often just talks and talks and he can also just really get stuck and not make decisions, which is really great information. And so what you have to realize is a couple things. One, some people on your team are uh, what I call external processors. You have internal processors and external processors. I'm an internal processor. So I won't go to anybody unless I've thought through things. And I have uh, a, uh, way forward. External people like to bounce things off of people. They like to talk through things. They like to talk out loud. Now me being an internal processor, when people do this, m. I'm really like, uh, why are you telling me all this? It doesn't make sense to me because I do this internally. But we do the same thing. It's just some of us do it internally and some of us externally. So if you have external uh, people that process externally, there's different levels of this. They may need somebody to do this processing with and so you may need to make yourself more available to them. Maybe you don't need what I talked about five hours a week, but maybe they're going to need two and a half hours a week when other people might need one, one and a half hours per week. Just be aware that this might be how this person processes and they need this type of person in their life. And if it's not you, maybe you set them up with somebody else who is, uh, an external processor. And what they can do is do some of this together to take some of that off of you as well. And you can coach them to do more internal processing. Because we should all have a balance, somewhat balance of external internal processing. And if you've been making yourself very available to them, they're going to come to you too much. And what he said, he would get sometimes frustrated because they feel like they were going around in circles and he wouldn't make a decision. Sometimes people need to be coached. In this case, it sounds like that person needs to be coached to make decisions without having all the information. So that is something you can work on with them in a coaching facility. So, for example, when they come to you with an issue, another thing I told them to put in, I know there's a lot of little things here, so bear with me, is don't have anybody ever come to you with a problem. They can come to you with a problem, but they should have at least one to three solutions. Between one and three solutions already suggested. When they call me, it's like, hey, Mike, I have a problem. My next question is, okay, what are your options? Oh, I don't know. I was like, uh, okay, I'm going to hang up now. You come up with some options and then come back to me. Maybe one out of a hundred times they're like, they would maybe have no idea, but even that you would challenge them. They just come up with something. Uh, you need to start coaching them to be more proactive. So you want them to come with you with solutions, and then you want to maybe talk through the solutions with them, the pluses and minuses. Maybe here's a solution they haven't thought of. This is really going to make them more of a leader and less of a follower. And then you might talk about, okay, what is. Start asking strategic questions to them. What does success look like for this issue?

Speaker B: What do we have to work within

Speaker A: a timeframe, a budget frame, et cetera.

Speaker B: Who else is involved?

Speaker A: Walk them through all of that and then tell them to make a decision. Oh, I don't Know, I don't know. It's your job to know. And so sometimes they need the coaching and the push to make a decision. And we, uh, talk about phases early on in this conversation. So this phase may be their proactive phase, having them step in the leadership phase. So you want to give these phases some inspirational, goal oriented, focused phases and you remind them of them. So every time that maybe you talk to them once or twice a week in your one on one catch ups, you're like, okay, how are you doing in your proactive leadership phase? You know, like, oh yeah, I gotta be proactive in things. And then when you can work with people on things for three months, you really start to do some rewiring with them. So it's not just a one off thing, it's really a rewiring type thing. And so that is how you can take somebody who's an external processor and still put them in a position to win. But just remember to recap, you want to make sure that you always want to look for different phases in your relationship with them. The phases should really link with their growth or objectives that you want to reach. If somebody's an external processor, know that's part of their process and they can be coached to optimize that. They may need somebody in their life to be that external processor and to really work with them through the whole thing.

Speaker B: Your challenge today, dear leader, is simple. It's to put this into action. Now this normally comes in two steps. First is tell your team you're going to start doing this, because if you haven't been doing this and start doing

Speaker A: it, they're going to be caught off guard.

Speaker B: So the next time you have a team meeting, spend a couple minutes, tell them what they need to do when they come to you to start coming to you with these options. And then you need to simply enforce it. When people come in, If they don't know where to start, walk them through the thought process. This is going to create an army of leaders. You have less people coming to you for things, they are more empowered and everybody wins.

Speaker A: And remember, no matter what comes at you, you got this. I believe in you.

Speaker B: You got this. See you soon. M. If fear and self doubt are keeping you stuck as a leader, if you still experience imposter syndrome, if you sometimes don't raise your hand and speak up in meetings, if you're not, quote, unquote, playing offense with your career, putting yourself out there, developing strategic relationships and taking the necessary steps to continue getting ahead, whether it's your career or scaling your business, then I have exactly what you need. Myself and Shannon Sedlacek are hosting a, ah, two day leadership intensive in Montreal, Canada on October 2nd and 3rd. In this powerful two days you're going to be led through a series of exercises where you are going to learn how to develop your relationship with fear. Fear is natural. Fear in a way is good. But what you need as a leader is tools and skills to work with that. Because if you want to keep moving up and moving forward in life, you're still going to experience fear. We just got to give you the tool set to work with it. If you want more information, go to rmichaelanderson Intensive. We're hosting a reception the day before. If you get there on the Thursday, the day before October 1st, you get a chance to hang out with me and Shannon for a little while before the real work starts on the Friday and the Saturday. This is ideal for leaders who are uh, really want to invest in their growth and uh, love the in person format. This is not virtual, this is us sitting in a really powerful room. In fact we're calling it the bravest room in Montreal. So if you're interested at all, go to the link. If you have any questions, if it's right for you, if you're right for it, drop me a note. We'll figure it out. This is limited to 10 spots and we already have five accounted for. So if you're interested, make a move now because it is going to be a powerful event that you're going to want to make sure you're there for. I'll uh, see you in Montreal.