Episode 214: Gratitude-Driven Leadership: Closing the Chapter with Traci Austin

I'm Tracy Austin, your host of the People Strategy Podcast. This show provides interviews with organizational leaders and ongoing coaching experiences that highlight elevating people in organizations through a People Strategy Roadmap. Welcome to the People Strategy Podcast. My name is Tracy Austin, and I am your host.

We have been having conversations for the last four years around the latest trends and best practices in talent management and organizational development. We have talked with some of the most incredible talent leaders, coaches, consultants, business owners on their journey of looking at different people's strategies that work inside of their organization. And this is an incredibly special episode because we're talking about completions. And as we talk about completions, there's so much gratitude for what goes into something to name it as complete.

So with that, I'm very excited to do a final solo episode with you. So again, what we're talking about today is completions. And with each completion, it starts with having a goal in mind. And when we're working directly with clients and with teams, what we find is so often we haven't defined the goals that we've set out to meet.

So with the People Strategy podcast, which started as the Talent Optimization Podcast, what the goal was is and was to reach people leaders to really support them in understanding how do we optimize our people and how do we really execute people strategies in organizations that work with real world examples from clients and from individuals that we've been connected with through different means. So with that being said, the goal that we had was to be in front of these folks, really share and inspire individuals through our podcast.

And that we have done. One of the reasons we're talking about completions today is so often what we find is we actually don't complete a task before we move on to what the next thing is. And when we don't make a completion, meaning it's final, it's ending. So when something comes to completion, it's finished.

Like the door is not open to move forward or to come back into it. So we shut the door on doing that thing We could come back to it in a different version but then we going to go through a different process So that is a completion is that it done We've completed it. A lot of time completions come with things like a diploma, you know, so I have my youngest son is graduating from high school this Sunday, and that'll be a couple of weeks after this podcast airs. But when those things happen, a graduation is a completion.

There's a certificate. it. We've done all the work up to it. We accomplished the goals that were there.

And the thing that's really important about completions is that so often when I look at different work or different projects that folks are doing in organizations, we run projects all together and we don't actually celebrate the completion from one to the next. The issue with that is that it starts to create burnout and it starts to mesh the lines between what is actually important that we're currently working on. And that is what I call nexting, meaning you move from one item to the next item without actually completing it.

The best example that I have for this is there's times when my sink in my kitchen is full of dishes and it's full of these dirty dishes that have stuff that's now stuck on them, right? None of us love that. And what happened was somebody got really busy. They made the meal.

They ate the meal. There may still be half the meal on the counter. I don't know. But the process of eating and cleaning up and putting the dishes in the dishwasher was not completed.

And so it's still sitting there. It still needs to be done. And the issue then is those things add up. And all of a sudden you look in the kitchen sink and you're like, oh my gosh, this is going to take me an hour to do, which would have taken you 10 seconds to do if you would have done it bit by bit and actually had a completion with dinner being done or breakfast being done.

And so nexting is when we go from one thing to the next without actually completing it. A completion is when it's finished until something new is started. And the announcement that we have today is that we are completing the People Strategy Podcast. So after four years and 212 episodes, we are calling it complete.

And we are so excited about this completion because every door that closes means that there a new door that opens and new opportunities And as things change in your business you know there things that do need to be closed because they no longer serving the purpose of what you originally started it for or you completed it All of the things that you set out to do within that task are now complete And so whenever something ends, it creates space and it creates space for something new.

And those are opportunities. And yet we can't continue to add without pausing and saying what needs to come off of the plate, so to say. And so with that being said, we are very excited to announce something that's called the People Strategy Club. And as much as we absolutely love our People Strategy podcast and talking with experts and coaches, what we're seeing is a request for more mastermind type opportunities with our clients and with prospective clients and really around, hey, how do we truly solve some of these tough people issues?

How do we have these tough conversations? We have something called our tough talk audit. And that tough talk audit really looks at and says, how do we take a complaint and turn that complaint into a request? So we have a whole podcast on turning complaints into requests, which we will link here in the show notes so that you can have that.

But what this People Strategy Club will be doing is we will be talking different people's strategies with guests that are coming on. This is live. This is for anyone that wants to join us. And then we will also spend some time actually doing some coaching on how do we have some of those tough talks, whether that is at work, whether that's with our boss, whether that's with their employees, or quite honestly, whether that's with their teenagers, right?

Whatever that is for you. So as we complete the People Strategy Podcast, we are launching this season of the People Strategy Club, which will be held at 2 p.m. Central on Tuesdays.

And you can find a link to that inside of our show notes that will take you to our calendar where you can see all of our guests for that and sign up for those. So as we and I sign off on the People Strategy Podcast for the last time. There are so many gratitudes that I want to name and share. And gratitude in the workplace is one of those things that really starts to build a culture We talked a lot about culture on the People Strategy podcast and core values and what that means And every guest that has been on our show has taught me something very specific And whether that was Jonathan Reynolds with Titus Talent talking about how we take core values and do interview questions out of them and ask some of those questions to really get curious about the behaviors of individuals whether that was talking with Shelly Taylor, with CEC around psychological safety.

So we've had some really profound episodes talking about culture and impact inside of organizations. And one thing that I'm not sure if I give enough gratitude to is the team, the current team that I have and some of the team that I've had over the last several years that have really built themselves up with the work. You know, and one of the things that we absolutely love is making that huge commitment to our team members, whether that's coaching, whether that's supporting them in different training programs, getting SHRM certifications, because whether they stay here or go somewhere else, what is so important is that we are leaving better than what we found.

and how we do that is we do that through pouring into our people. And we're so grateful for that and grateful for Hayes and Hannah on our team that have just done a phenomenal job with the marketing and the podcast. So with that, I want to say thank you and I hope to see you live in person in one of our People Strategy Clubs. Again, you'll find that in the show notes.

And if the People Strategy Club is not the place, we of course have our Leadership Development programs. And we have those starting several times a year. So thank you so much for being on this journey with us for the last four years and 200 plus episodes. And we look forward to connecting with you in a different venue and format.

Thanks so much. Thank you so much for listening today. I'd love to connect with you. If you'd like to connect, you can find me on LinkedIn at Tracy, T-R-A-C-I Austin, and at our website at elevatedtalentconsulting.

com. If you'd love to learn more about our process, please reach out to us. And again, thank you so much for listening and sharing your feedback with us through a review. Have a fantastic day.