Camille: This kind of relates to our quick fix in the belief shifts, because I think training is a quick fix that organizations take in and it's not fixing anything.
Camille: We're just gonna train our people on this thing and it'll be fine. It's like, no, that's not the solution to whatever ails you.
Camille: Whether it's the way you're doing it. Yeah, exactly. If it's training that's not done by an actual expert trainer who knows that with training also comes coaching. And that practice is part of learning a skill that there's no way that people are gonna be transformed by just sitting in a class and learning some information.
Camille: Back to what we're gonna talk about today especially in leadership. There is no freaking way you learn how to be a good leader by sitting in a class.
Camille: No way. Yeah, no way. I
George: agree.
Camille: You wanna start talking about it for real. Yeah, I do. Okay. Cue music. Cue the music.
Camille: Welcome to The Belief Shift. The show that explores what you really need to know about building a successful small business.
Camille: I'm your host, Camille Rapacz: small business coach and consultant who spent too much of her career working in corporate business performance.
George: And I'm George Drapeau: your co-host and her brother. I'm a leader in the tech world bringing my corporate perspective, but mostly my curiosity.
Camille: Together, we're exploring beliefs about success and how to achieve it. But mostly we're bringing practical solutions so you and your business can thrive.
Camille: Hi George.
Camille: Hi Camille.
Camille: We're gonna talk about leadership. We're gonna answer all the questions everybody has ever had about leadership in just one episode.
Camille: That's it. Yeah, no problem. Yeah, no problem. 10 episode too, that's the thing. 10 minutes. Yeah, it'll be super fast. We overcomplicate leadership. It's no big deal.
Camille: I know I said that I loved planning. I might love leadership more. I don't know, it's a tie. They kind of go together.
Camille: So today we're gonna talk about leadership because everything in your business starts at. And you as a business owner are at the top and you're a leader and you gotta have good leadership.
Camille: If you haven't been in a position of leadership, it's hard to know what good leadership looks like. What am I supposed to do? What does that look like?
Camille: And if you're not literally leading people, so if you have a business and you don't have employees, you might think this doesn't apply to you, but it does. That's mainly the argument I'm gonna make today is it absolutely does apply to you. So everybody's ears hopefully are perking up thinking about, Hmm.
Camille: I do wanna know, what is this leadership you speak of that doesn't involve other people? Well, it always involves other people, but we will get into it.
Camille: So if you haven't been thinking of yourself as a leader, well there is no time, like the presence. You can start thinking about yourself as a leader right now.
Camille: So we're gonna start talking about leadership because it is the cornerstone of a successful business. Without it, everything will be harder and slower. And with good leadership, everything will get clearer, everything will be more aligned, it will get quicker.
Camille: And ultimately it will be more fulfilling. When you are a good leader, it is super fulfilling. Do you need a better reason? I don't think so. No. So today we're gonna cover everything, right, George?
Camille: Everything you need to know.
Camille: We're gonna cover a lot in less than an hour. Will not be the last time we talk about leadership for sure. But this will be our introduction into this topic.
Camille: So we will talk about what good leadership looks like. And I do wanna pull from our story, so maybe this will be a little foundational setting too, for future conversations to just talk about what your leadership style comes from and looks like and mine.
Camille: Because it really does frame the conversation around our perspectives on leadership.
Camille: But it's all in service to how important this is for you to have a high performing business. I'm gonna go about on limb here, George, and I'm gonna make a statement that I think you and I are exceptional leaders.
Camille: Absolutely.
George: That, I
Camille: mean, that's what I hear.
Camille: That's that's what people are saying?
Camille: I think we're both humble almost too humble, really. And well, that's why I'm going out on a limb saying that yes, trying to be humble, but also we should own it.
Camille: We have both received enough feedback in the course of our careers to know that we're fairly exceptional in our leadership skills. So let's just own that.
George: Even if we couldn't say that, what's absolutely true and distinguishes how much we care about it. Both of us really care about being good leaders and that is more than a lot of people take that
Camille: seriously.
Camille: That I think is such a good point. Yes. One of the differentiators is how much you care about how much curiosity you have about it.
Camille: Yeah.
Camille: I'm always fascinated how badly people do it sometimes. It's not actually that hard to do it better than what you just did, but you chose that and why did you choose that?
Camille: I'm always also just fascinated by the choices that people make as leaders. That curiosity and that desire to actually just understand it better helps us be more exceptional in that. Absolutely. Yes.
Camille: Since that is the case, I wanna start with your story, George, your leader story.
Camille: So you could either just tell the journey of you becoming a good leader, but I'm curious if you can remember the aha moment when you saw or experienced or delivered good leadership and you were like, Oh. There's this moment where you really understand what good leadership looks like.
George: Oh yeah. So in retrospect, as I reflect back on my life, I realize that we're. Aspects of leadership that I exhibited and were important to me from very young. The desire to help others grow, that's been with me since I started elementary school. I would always be talking in class a lot, but usually helping other kids who aren't able to get stuff done.
George: It was, I don't know why, but that seemed to be something I was interested in doing. And then I remember in high school class present a couple times that I didn't do a particularly good job at it, but where I did better was in getting groups of people together. And I realized later on they never did it amongst themselves.
George: It was always me gathering people together. And so one aspect of leadership being persuading others to do something right, to kind of multiply your value. That was one me young and I just didn't realize it wasn't a conscious value, but It's been core of who I am for the longest time.
George: When I started realizing what I wanted as a leadership style, it was what I would see different attributes of other leaders as I went along. Like in high school, our band director Mel Hansen, is a fantastic leader and I could see how what he did to transform his music program from this one style to another style and how he did it by getting small number of evangelists and having good organization skills much more than his musical skills actually, which were good.
George: So I started learning from him like, Wow, you really know how to build an organization. That stuck with me. And then later on when I was in a drum bugle corps, who's in the group called the Santa Clara Vanguard, the core director, I mean everything that I thought we had great in high school, times 10 with the Vanguard.
George: And I could see clearly how he organized and led this whole organization, had this highly motivated staff and kids doing stuff. And I learned from that guy, from Gail Lawyer, some of his principles about leadership, which all had to do with using organization to set up kids to do more than they thought they could do.
George: The focus was on how do I enable the performers to do their work, not, and how do I make it good for the staff and the organization. The organization was there to serve the kids. That was very clear.
George: And then my first couple of jobs outta college, I had influential leader in different ways, and I first manager is this guy named Steve Loving, and he was huge.
George: So we were at a university and we had these resources that all the staff wanted, all the coolest resources for ourself. And he used to fight against that and say, This is wrong. We should put the best resources out on the computer floor. And find a way to make the students have access to it and we should get the good stuff last.
George: And he made enemies within the organization for that. But his attitude, again about pushing power down to the edge as much as you can really stuck with me. That really sat with me and that started a journey toward me thinking about leadership is serving others first and myself last. And it kept going like this.
George: I've learned different leadership styles from the aspects from different managers. I had have been very lucky to have a series of excellent managers and some good ones and a couple of bad ones, but mostly excellent. My first manager of Sun, he was fantastic at telling a story. And you would ask him about some company policy or how something work, and he'd say, Oh yeah, so the way it works is blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
George: And I was like, That makes perfect sense. I get it. Thanks for telling me. But then I would ask one of my coworkers and they said, There's no such policy on the books. He's just making that up. It turns out he would make up a story about how he thought things should happen, and he would support that. And so he'd give you the story made sense, just been along with that.
George: And then he would just protect you. And again, this is a guy who's trying to help you understand how to navigate things yourself. And then he would provide scaffolding around that. So I think I had this built up, this common theme of like, you're really here to remove roadblocks for people and help them be more than they thought they could be.
George: Whatever you need to do to make that happen. There's all kinds of aspects to leadership to make that happen. But really it's all about, I guess, two things for me.
George: If I need something done and I'm a leader, how do I persuade others to do that? It's not about me doing, it's about what I can do to get others to follow this path.
George: And then how do I serve them as they're doing it so they can be the best they can be, they can begin to own that path on their own? Not just doing what I tell 'em, but they believe in that story and I support them. And that's where the, the servant model comes in for me. And I really strongly believe in that.
George: Really my path to leadership started a long time ago some of the core attributes that I believe in, like really helping others, you know, and getting people to work with each other. And then before professional career, I saw examples of leadership that really sat with me and I wanted to copy some of that.
George: You know, Mel, we both had him as a band director.
Camille: Yeah, it's was interesting how far back you went. I was like, wow. My first thought honestly was, Mom's gonna love this podcast because you went way back to your childhood. You're welcome, mom.
Camille: It was fascinating to hear how you could take it all the way back to those early influences and, and examples that were starting to wire your brain in a certain way.
Camille: But I also think that not everybody that worked with Mel took that away from what he was doing.
Camille: So there is something about how your brain is wired too, that leads to you taking that out of that experience and then the next experience adding to it and the next. There's this idea that, leaders aren't born, they're made.
Camille: And I think that's true. I think you choose leadership and you have to choose to become a good leader. But there's also something in your story about your natural curious brain and what tickled your brain happened to be that aspect and that carried with you, Right.
Camille: Which led you into the choosing leadership and choosing to be good with that.
Camille: Yeah.
Camille: Cause that's not what happened for me because I had the same band director and I don't remember having that experience at all. Cause back when I was starting out at that young age, I wouldn't call this leadership, but where my journey began, if I started back then was I always had everything well organized and had a plan for what was coming next.
Camille: Yeah. Always. That was always part of my deal. When I finally took that organizational, structural piece of what I loved and took it into this leadership space was really when I first, early in my career, started to do project management.
Camille: I didn't even know project management was a thing you could do. There was no, you know, PMPs not to age myself or anything, but there was no PMP certification. There was no class that you took in university, nobody taught you project management.
Camille: And I started doing it cause I was a very organized person. But I realized as I'm doing it and having to lead a team, that there was this other aspect. It wasn't enough to just have an organized plan and give it to them. I also had to bring them along in that plan. I had to do everything you just talked about.
Camille: How do I persuade them to do this in the manner that I've laid out and not just go rogue and do their own thing? Cause that's gonna be a bad execution of the project. We can't all just go rogue and do our own things. The project plan is to bring everyone together. Executing on the work and nice, thoughtful, cohesive manner.
Camille: So this was back when I started working for the, a wind energy consulting firm and I had to go out and manage the projects that were had to, I got to, I should say, amazing that I got to do this. I got to go out and manage wind energy project where we were standing up meteorological towers to do wind measurements so that we could determine good sites for wind farms.
Camille: That's what we were doing. And so I was managing that project from beginning to end, like having to acquire the equipments and the team to do the installations. And so I was doing all this, but all of a sudden I was depended on other people who didn't work for me. Yeah, I might be contracting with them, but they also were experts in what they did.
Camille: I didn't know how to put up a MET tower. They did. But I was the one who was in charge of them doing it well. So I had to figure out leadership. Now I have to be a good leader to figure out how to make all of this work. So I remember that being the first time I started to get the sense of what it meant to actually lead people.
Camille: But I still wasn't like a conscious student of it. And looking back now, I realized, oh, that's when I really started to approach this differently. When I started to have my more aha moment of what good leadership looks like is when I started working for a woman named Olga Braylovskiy.
Camille: She was probably the best mentor I had in all of my career. This is when I started doing project management in the tech industry. So I was doing like software implementation stuff and business consulting in that space. And Olga was my boss and she just one just through watching her.
Camille: So kind of similar to your experience, I just watched how good she was at working with really smart top leaders. So we were working for giant corporations doing this work. And she'd work with these other CXOs and bring them along into her plan and her approach, talk through issues and challenges we were having in the projects, delays all of the stuff that she had to navigate and do while also manage a team of people who didn't work together in an office.
Camille: We all came from different parts of the country and came together to work as a team on this. So I just watched her from both of these perspectives and how she did it, but she also took me under her wing and was like, I'm gonna show you how to do this well. So she would set the bar high for me and yet would never make me feel bad if I missed it.
Camille: Wow. It would just encourage me and she would coach me up into it. What do you
George: mean missed it? You made mistakes.
Camille: I probably never missed the bar, so maybe that's not true.
Camille: She had a high bar, , which also meant the team was awesome because if you stayed on her team it was because you were with other people who were superstars at what they did.
Camille: And she would weed those other people out. So I saw that too. Oh, she also knows how to pick the right people for her team. These were massive, you know, millions of dollars projects that we were doing. So there was a lot of pressure to do it well. That was my first experience with really seeing what good leadership looked like.
Camille: Then my next level leadership happened when I transitioned out of the consulting world into working as an employee . I got to opportunity to build my own team from the ground up. So I got to build my own project office, and that was an amazing experience. I learned and, and made plenty of mistakes, I learned so many things about hiring and developing people and creating structures for them to flourish and grow. And I didn't have to do that type of leadership when I was running projects that was different. I was having to persuade teams of people to do work, but now all of a sudden these people were looking to me to develop them.
Camille: And help them grow. It's a whole other level of responsibility. Yeah.
Camille: So that's when I first really started to get more curious. I started to actively think about, Oh, I need to become a really good leader.
Camille: I need to pay attention to how to do this well. So I started to reach out to more people to get more help with this and started to study that more because it also, I realized it was really, really fulfilling. My department became a department that was known for people coming in and getting these good project manager jobs and just the nature of the work meant they got to go out and work in these projects in different parts of the company.
Camille: So other leaders got to know them and see their leadership skills and they'd wanna bring them into their teams. So it was a great way for people to grow into the company. And I loved it. I loved seeing them do that, and I loved being able to help them do that. So that was my next level of amping up my leadership skills.
Camille: But the ultimate level is when I got into owning the role of organizational transformation in trying to transform this company into so it's lean performance improvement. If you googled that, that's really the essence of what we were doing.
Camille: It's not just about process improvement as it might be thought of, it's really about culture change and transforming an organization into one that does push the decision making to the lowest levels of the organization as possible.
Camille: Lots of companies have such strong hierarchies that that's not happening. The decisions go up, they don't actually go down. Yeah. And it's slow that way, if all of the decisions are going up. So that was a very difficult cultural transformation that again, it starts with leadership.
Camille: And so we were trying to teach leaders how to lead differently in this new culture of work that we wanted. That was creating psychological safety in the workplace so that people felt confident bringing up problems instead of trying to hide them. And it meant teaching leaders how to be coaches so they were developing people in the organization.
Camille: There were so many things involved in that and it forced me to really study good leadership and leader behaviors and how to practice that. Before we started this, I mentioned the lean leader training that I developed and taught.
Camille: There was this week long training that was all of this, tactical, it was practice, it was leadership behaviors. And the foundation of the leadership component was servant leadership that we were essentially coaching people into and teaching them how to do that. And that was probably one of the funnest, most fulfilling things I ever got to do was doing that and taking leaders through that and teaching them what that was all about. Because they would just light up at the potential of what they could do and the impact they could have.
Camille: Yeah. So that was the ultimate level for me where I understood what good leadership looked like, but also understood why it's so hard for organizations to do. And I'm curious what you think about this because you know, we've all been in organizations where we see them struggle to either teach good leadership, demonstrate good leadership, that they talk the talk, but can't walk the walk.
Camille: Why is this so hard for us to do?
Camille: I
George: do have thoughts about that. Actually. First though, I want to make a comment slash question about your early career. You're talking about when you're working for The Wind Energy Company, and I remember you telling me very clearly about those experiences. You're talking about when it dawned on you what leadership was about when you had your aha moments.
George: I don't remember you really talking about your own leadership. I remember you talking about running projects, but I remember you having very clear ideas about what was being done right and wrong at that company.
George: And you had clear standards about what the person running the company did as a leader or not.
George: I guess what I'm saying is, it may have been before you personally realized what leadership was, but you clearly have standards already, clear standards. Do you remember
Camille: that? Yeah, I do. And I think you're right. I say that my aha moment when it became a very conscious front of brain, this is leadership, didn't happen till later.
Camille: I I didn't have a name for it, I think back then. I just could see like, this doesn't seem right, this doesn't fit right. It was a small little company. So I could see the ripple effects of choices that we would make and realize, do we really wanna go in that direction? Why are we making that choice?
Camille: So yeah, it's funny because my experience with it does really start in small business. So it's like I've come full circle back to: I wanna help small business. I went from small business mindset into big corporate, crazy consulting stuff.
Camille: And then I've now walked my way back down to the small business thing. But the same leadership challenges and decision making challenges for business exist at all levels.
George: So you're asking why do I think not teaching leaders how to lead very well?
Camille: Yeah. I'm just curious about why do we have to talk about leadership so much?
Camille: Why is this so hard? Why can't we just read a book and be good at it?
George: First of all, when we want leaders in a small business or a large company, we're not usually clear about what our goal is.
George: And people, when they become leaders are often not clear about what they want. Like I know plenty of people who become managers because they want power. They think that if they get people under them, they'll get more power. Sure that happens, but that's not the reason you lead and that's not what leadership is about. It's not even really what management is about.
George: You don't have to be a manager to be a leader. Can we just get that on the table? Leading is about leading others, getting others to follow a path. You don't have to be a manager to do that. So I think a lot of people don't have clear goals about that.
George: People don't think clearly about the training to do that. They think it's too soft to skill, to be able to train for that, which we both know is absolutely not true. You absolutely can and should train for it, but a lot of people don't really have a clear idea about that. I could go on, but those are two of my big things about why it's not done better.
George: I'll say one other thing, two other things. First of all, I think as individuals as just humans, some of us just don't think we can lead. We think it's a magical skill. You're either born to be a general or you're not.
George: People aren't really aware that they can get it and so they maybe don't seek coaching for it. Those are my thoughts.
Camille: I agree with all of that. I would want to emphasize the power problem.
Camille: If I had a dollar for every time I heard somebody say: if I was just in charge. As in: if I could just make all the decisions and had all the power, I would fix everything.
Camille: And every single time my comment back would be: that's not actually how it works. It will be more complicated than you think, not just because you should be serving the people below you, but because the higher up you get in the organization, the more political the job gets.
Camille: It's not power the way you think it is. It's not like, well now I'm in charge and I just do all of these things, because now you have to make the best decisions that work across the company.
Camille: So if I'm become a director, I'm part of this whole system of other directors trying to collaboratively achieve goals in a company. I can't just go rogue and decide to do my own thing.
Camille: So I think that, yes, the power thing, it's totally a myth. And I think people that do it for that reason are doing it for the wrong reason, and it does not make you a leader. No.
Camille: Leadership is not about power. It is about influence and persuasion and bringing people along and developing people. So you are trying to get things done through others, but not just by telling. That's not how leadership works.
Camille: And then when you said about the training and the learning.
Camille: I've run into so many people who just haven't even experienced good leadership. So they don't know what it can do for them.
Camille: Yeah. Ha. Yeah, absolutely.
Camille: So I had this little episode that happened, it's a small example, but I think it's a good example of just the way that our brains sort of see the world.
Camille: So it was this instance with working with podcast producer Katie. We had this whole mix up in the episode order. And realized, Oh no, we just duplicated an episode. Like we put out the same episode twice. And she was mortified, like, you know, Katie. And so I was like, Let's just, we got a quick emergency zoom call.
Camille: We gotta fix this because it just went live and it's wrong. So we get on the call and she was so apologetic and felt so bad and I prepared before I got in there, just the way I would normally prepare for, Oh, I have an employee, quote unquote. I have somebody who's working for me who's made a mistake. I've done this a million times, so I knew exactly how to go into it.
Camille: But she was like, I thought you were gonna fire me.
Camille: Really?
Camille: Why would I fire you? Yeah. Because her brain is wired to: that's the response of people when you do a bad job, they just let you go. Yeah. Which is really crappy leadership. That's what that is.
Camille: Instead I knew exactly what had happened and I knew like we both were part of that problem. It wasn't just her. So I just went into it in problem solving mode.
Camille: But I say that example because I think it's more common than we realized that people haven't had a good experience of leadership and so they don't really lean into it as a valuable skill to develop because they don't understand all that it can do for them.
Camille: They have never had that experience before. It's the same thing business owners are resistant to really sitting down and laying out strategies and plans for their business. If they've never experienced the good of that, it's hard for them to trust that it's good.
Camille: We very much need experience to help us believe that something is a good thing to do. That's my thought about that.
Camille: Totally agree.
Camille: This is the trouble that we are up against, which I think is also why we're doing this podcast. So you and I've both had lots of experience with good leadership and good strategy, like all of these things.
Camille: The premise of this conversation for me is I wanna make the argument that good leadership, well, maybe I say it the other way around.
Camille: When you are doing strategic planning in your business, that is you demonstrating good leadership in your business. These go together.
Camille: Strategy isn't just a thing you'd have to do, like pay your taxes. It's leadership task in your business so that's why, one of the reasons that I think this is an important topic to talk about. And also for all these other reasons, which is helping people do a better job of being able to hire the right people, whether they're employees or contractors or whoever they are.
Camille: Hire those people and be able to work with them optimally instead of struggling because, you know, they're not getting the right performance out of them, or they're just not doing the work right. I hear a lots of challenges with that for people. It's an issue of leadership and having the right approach to that.
Camille: There's lots and lots of things we can tie leadership to, but just gonna hone in sort of on a couple of ideas. I think the next stage of this conversation is really what does good leadership look like? So we've given our stories and our examples of kind of how we got there and a few examples.
Camille: But there are three main topics, and granted, there's a lot more that we could talk about in here, but I'm gonna hit on three key areas that I'll talk through and I want you to add into all of this conversation, George. Okay.
Camille: The first main topic and what good leadership looks like, I would say is good leaders are consistent and their actions are congruent with their words.
Camille: Consistency though, should not be confused with just, they only have one style of leadership. Because there are many styles of leadership, which maybe is another podcast to talk about all the styles and when do you use them. And like we've talked about, servant leadership is being really important.
Camille: But you can't be a servant leader 100% of the time. Yeah, no way. If there's a fire, you have to take control. There's no servant leadership, just gotta tell people what to do. We can talk more about that, but that's not what I mean when I say consistent is my point. I don't mean just be one type of leader.
Camille: A good leader they know when to adjust that style for the situation, but they're also aligning their actions to their words. And not just keeping your word, but actually acting in a way that's congruent with the things that you talk about, that you say.
Camille: Backing it up with actions is really important. So being congruent with the expectations that you've set for your team and for yourself. So not expecting your team to do something different than you. So team, you're supposed to do A, B, and C and I'll do it some of the time. That's not cool either.
Camille: Be consistent across the board with that.
Camille: And ultimately the worst thing you can do is go rogue and play the boss card. I'm the boss, so exception for me, I can kind of go over here and do this other thing, but I expect the team to do something different.
Camille: I have different rules. So having different rules that you play by, that's a poor demonstration of leadership. You are gonna have different responsibilities than your team. That's different. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the behaviors and the expectations that you've set as a team or group.
Camille: And that just because you're the boss doesn't mean you get to break those rules and do something else.
Camille: So that's my first category.
George: I've thought about this a lot in the past couple years. I'm an older parent. I got started late, was 52 when we got Avi into our lives. And I wonder if I'm a better parent because I've spent time leading people or if I would've been a better leader earlier on if I become a parent, because a lot of these same things apply parenting.
George: One of the great things that really helps you when you're raising at least a small child, ask again in 10 years is consistency. When we set out a consistent plan where Avi knows what's happening pretty much every hour, it's actually not constraining. It's helpful. He knows how the day is gonna go.
George: You communicate plans in advance. Tell him what's going. You give him structure, consistent structure. That's easy.
George: One of the hard times that we've talked with you about this, we went on vacation earlier in the summer and when you were asking, How long could we stay? I said, Five days. Because after that, even as regular as we make those days, it's outside of his normal plan.
George: He starts to get off. He needs his consistency and structure. I sometimes wonder if I become a parent in my early thirties that that would've accelerated my leadership abilities or like I said, reversed because I'm consistent in my leadership, I think that's helped me be a better parent. I really don't know.
George: But I guess what I would say to you parents there who don't think of yourselves as leaders, you definitely are. And if you feel good about how you are as a parent, you have a clear vision then steal from that. A lot of that applies to leadership, especially servant leadership.
Camille: Such a great example.
Camille: And I love this idea too, that leadership isn't just in business. We tend to think of it that way, but you choose to lead at any point in time, in any scenario. Certainly as a parent, you're demonstrating leadership skills, but so many other places where there's an opportunity for you to just step up and it's not a I'm gonna take control of the situation even, it's just, am I gonna be the leader?
Camille: I think the other thing about leaders is that leaders are the ones who will tend to do what others are unwilling to. Which is that step up and either say the thing that everybody's thinking, but nobody else is willing to say- make that move that other people aren't willing to do.
Camille: Get to that other, that next level of consistency that others are not ready to go into. All of these things are really what make you a leader is you are willing to just go that extra step, give that extra bit of help to those other people. I think that's the kind of the essence too, of just being a good leader in life.
Camille: Yeah.
Camille: So this really leads into my next category of what good leadership looks like, which is around good leaders serve others. And no, not coffee, although that's helpful. But what I really mean about good leaders serving other people is that you're serving them in a way that is helping them grow and helping them with a scenario.
Camille: I see leaders mess this up in a couple of ways. One is just piling on the work with no end in sight. And so that person doesn't really know if they're doing good job or not because they're just constantly cranking out random work. They don't ever really get to finish.
Camille: So there's no done and then celebration of I accomplish something. Yeah, that's one way this goes badly. That's not serving other people.
Camille: The other way I see it go badly is when people don't give work to other people because they don't want to burden. They're like, Oh, they're already so busy and I'll just do it for them.
Camille: Well now you're just taking away an opportunity for them to help you and people like helping other people. Especially if there are people that work in your company. But just in general, people do like to help other people and if you don't ask or offer this opportunity for help, then you're not creating a space where you can help serve them by them serving you or this greater good.
Camille: So there has to be a conversation about that. So you need to have enough respect for these other people that you're going to challenge them with some work so that they can grow and develop and help others and get to their next level of performance.
Camille: And if you don't do that and you only ever give them stuff that's actually either in their wheelhouse or that you feel is not over burning or straining them, they're never gonna get to another level of performance. You have to have a little bit of struggle intention in order to improve.
Camille: Yeah. Being able to give good feedback is another part of serving others. Can I give good feedback in a way that helps them improve while also building their confidence? Sometimes that's negative feedback, but you can give feedback about where somebody messed up and build their confidence at the same time.
Camille: And yes, that is something you can learn how to do back to your whole point about people think they can't. But you can be like, I can show you how you do that. I can coach you into how to be that kind of leader. Yeah.
Camille: And then learning how to, as a leader, be a good coach and show, how do I help this individual tap into their own potential? Which it helps if you're actually looking for that.
Camille: What do I think this person's potential is? What do they think their potential is? And then how do I help coach them into tapping into that? That's part of the, I'm serving them by helping them develop the skills that maybe they haven't tapped into yet. So if you don't challenge and you don't coach people in this way, they're gonna struggle to rise to your level of expectations.
Camille: So if you have people working for you that aren't meeting your expectations most of the time, not all the time. But most of the time when I hear people complain about this and I dig into it, they have not given those people the type of feedback that they need in order to even get close to that expectation.
Camille: You have a completely wrong expectation of what this person should be able to do for you, because you've not even expressed it much less coached them in it. Yeah. That's what serving others actually means. And this is also where in a previous episode I brought up the idea of humble leadership.
Camille: And I do wanna have a whole conversation about that later, so I won't get into it too much now. But this is where this humble leadership idea comes in. And humble leadership is a component of being a servant leader. They're not equal, but you've gotta be humbled to be a servant leader. But it is this idea of how do I have enough humility in this scenario in order to really help this person develop and grow into this space and feel again, that psychological safety feel enough of a comfort level to go in.
Camille: The only way people are gonna grow is if you let them make mistakes. If you want them to deliver a perfect product, then you want to hire robots. If you want people to come and grow and develop, you have to leave space for mistakes and problems to show up and then give them a chance to improve through that and make the space for that as well.
Camille: That is ultimately what I think serving others looks like.
Camille: Back to you, George.
George: Yeah, I completely agree with all of that. I guess at this point I wanna make a comment about if people who don't think they can be leaders, and I'll give a couple of simple examples, I can prove to you that you either already are a leader in some way, or you can be.
George: Let's say you have a job, or you've had a job where you're a wait staff. If you're a decent one, part of your job is to help people make your decisions about what to eat. It was very simple. I mean, you're not just taking the orders, but they'll ask you, What do you think?
George: And if at any point that's ever happened to you, and you confident about it, you're helping people figure out how to have a good time at their meal. You're coming and you have ideas about what's gonna make their experience better. And you go and you lead them to that. You don't just wait for them to come to you.
George: You come and check on 'em. Everything okay? You know how the experience needs to go and you're walking your customer through it. That's a form of leadership. You can take that form and you're serving others and you could take that and apply to leadership.
George: Or if you've ever helped a child learn something, you helped them. You've been a tutor, you helped them teach something. Or you're a teacher yourself, you're definitely a leader . You're taking something maybe, you know, or you can see that they don't, and you're helping them close that gap. Any time somebody's asked you for help doing something and you can recommend, Well, here's how we do that process.
George: That's a small form of leadership. It's in all of us.
Camille: I love those examples.
Camille: I do think it shows up in all these interesting little ways in our, it does lives that we don't think about and that's where the argument that it's not just about being in business. That's not the only place where leadership shows up. It shows up in all these other little ways in your life.
George: Yeah. I think, I'm gonna guess here. A lot of people equate the word leadership with command. It's not the only formal leadership. We're talking about stewardship, about helping.
George: Coaching, Enabling. Yes. Guiding. Those kinds of words. And you do that more often than you think in your own life.
George: Yes.
Camille: 100%. I think, you know, as a, as a parent, you're probably doing a lot of command and control leadership. Do this, do that. Your best leadership as a parent is when you get to also do servant leadership.
Camille: Which is what you were talking about. I'm gonna provide the structure and the space for my kid to have the best day. Because that's how he works best, is I have this consistency of this plan and this structure for him. That's a beautiful way of serving him because now he can be his best little self. Because you gave him the foundation for doing it.
Camille: And there's nothing better than when Avi is his best little self.
Camille: Best
George: little self is
Camille: amazing.
Camille: Category three of what I think good leadership looks like: good leaders work on the business. That's their job. This has come up many times and many companies that I've worked with and in but I have a current client where this is a challenge where the leaders in the company are working in the business as in they're doing the work of the company and they're really struggling to work on the business, which is developing as leaders, working on developing strategy, focusing on better approaches and systems to achieving their goals.
Camille: They're not doing the on the business work. They're just doing the actual work of delivering to customers. And it's a challenge because then, well, who's doing that work then? There's like one guy who can do the work and that's not how it should be.
Camille: So as a good leader in your small business, and even if you're little micro business, when you are working on your business, when you're creating that long term vision, you are establishing a strategy to get there. You are ensuring that that direction is really clear and you're making the hard decisions along the way as you go. We're gonna go this way, not that way. And that you're in a mode of continually assessing it, evaluating your strategy, and adjusting it for optimal performance, that's working on the business.
Camille: Part of that too is the performance improvement within that business. Are we improving our basic processes of the business and structures and all of that kind of stuff? This is all the working on how the business operates as a whole, as opposed to delivering the services that my business provides.
Camille: That I think is a form of leadership that is highly overlooked. But I would call that leadership.
Camille: Yeah,
George: me too. There's a podcast I listen to called Respectful Parenting by a woman named Janet Landsbury. And she gave me this model about parenting as a very simple rule that I think about all the time.
George: She said, Look, imagine you're a patient with a stroke and you're in the hospital bed and you can't speak, but your senses are there. And imagine the nurses coming into the room, and You can't take talk to the nurse and the nurse doesn't bother talking to you.
George: They just start doing stuff. They move your body in, check your bed pan and wash you, and bathe you, but they're not talking to you, it's kinda irritating. You don't know when they're done. You don't know how they're gonna embarrass you next.
George: It's just a really frustrating experience. Contrast that with the same nurse coming in and even though you can't responding saying, Mr. Drapeau, Hi, I'm here to do your bathing. Here's what I'm gonna do. And if you want it warm or something, you know, blink or something.
George: Just that difference of me knowing what's gonna happen makes the whole thing much less irritating because I have my expectations set.
George: My wife and I do this all the time. Can we just talk for a couple minutes about how the evening is gonna go?
George: Not big plans, but just like, do I have some expectation of what's next so I don't have to worry about coordinating with her in the moment?
George: Anytime you have direction, head release pressure, it makes you relax. And so as a leader, you telling your team more often than you think, what's the direction, What you're thinking. Even if it's not solid, you give them some idea. Believe me, they're so much more relieved and in tune and on board than you think they are.
Camille: And I just think it applies in life. We aren't talking enough about what's our expectation here for what's going to happen.
Camille: And it's not just about you saying these are the steps. That's helpful, but these steps matter because we want this other thing at the end of the day.
Camille: So all these concepts apply in everything that you want to go well in the world. So absolutely it applies in your business. And again, I wanna speak to micro business or solopreneurs out there who are thinking, but I don't have people, it's just me. Me and my virtual assistant . This still matters.
Camille: And it matters because you have to set direction for your business. Your business is just this entity, and it doesn't really know how it should operate without you telling it. And that means you have to decide and then also tell yourself.
Camille: So one, we're not really good at, following our own directions half the time.
Camille: Being really deliberate about laying out your own plan for you to follow is very important. Much more important than we think it is.
Camille: How many times have you made a little plan in your head and then it didn't happen? If you write that plan down and you set yourself up with a system for following that plan, then you're gonna have a much better chance of making that all happen.
Camille: Even if it's just one or two people that are gonna be impacted, huge, huge impacts from that.
Camille: By the
George: way. Even if you have zero people, you usually have vendors. I mean, there's people you're buying from or supplying you, and you'd be amazed at how often, like if you just tell your vendors, Hey, yeah, I was thinking opening a new product lately, or I'm gonna do this event opening.
George: Your vendors, if they're on board with, and you built a relationship with you, a couple things will happen. One of them, they'll want contribute ideas. Or they might know another their customers that says, you know, I have another customer who did something like this and they chose this instead of that.
George: You'll get help, good ideas, wonderful things will happen.
Camille: Yes. Yes. I mean, as you said that I just realized, Yeah. It's a huge benefit to you then when you're out networking or just talking to anybody about your business. So like, Oh, so tell me about your business.
Camille: If you can lay out a vision and a path for what you're working on, like you said, you don't know what kind of conversation is gonna come up.
Camille: If you're just like, Well, I just have this, whatever, and I'm kind of, whatever. It's hard for people to get excited about the whatever, right?
Camille: I've had this happen where I'm talking to somebody, tell me what are you hoping to do with your business? Oh, like it's best question ever. And I start describing , ultimately I wanna be able to do this and and that for people.
Camille: And they're , I'm excited just listening to you talk about it. Yeah. Cause I was so clear about the vision of what I wanted to do and then they want to help. They're like, Well, tell me if I can hope in any way, I want to. So it hel, it matters in so many ways that you get really clear about that direction and that approach that you wanna take.
Camille: And then talking about it and using it. Don't just create a vision board and think like I'm done. You have to have this vision that you're constantly also working and massaging and improving on. because it'll change as you go over time and. I also think that's the joyful part of getting to own your own business is you get to do that.
Camille: You don't really get to do that when you work for someone else. You might get to contribute if you're lucky, but when you own your own business, I could decide if I shut this thing down right now and open up a cupcake shop! Which kind of sounds awesome, by the way, but I'm not gonna do that. Sound awesome.
Camille: I know, actually, they'd probably be Pupcakes I already have the mascot, Zoey the mascot.
Camille: So those are my three big, What does good leadership look like? Being consistent, serving others and working on the business. Those are my three big buckets.
Camille: There's a whole bunch of other stuff we could get into there. Yeah.
Camille: And wanted to make sure we emphasize that why this matters for a small or a micro business. because my whole you know, thinking around this is what big business needs for the most part, it's the same for small business.
Camille: So this is one of those examples of no matter how big your business is, it needs all of these things. It needs good leadership, it needs clear direction, and it needs you lean into that.
Camille: So if you are early in your experience with this and you're not really sure where to like just start, by obviously listening to us.
Camille: But just start by learning and studying and reading up on these things and trying to understand a little bit better of how you can just do a little bit more of an approach to leadership and how you're running your business.
George: These are the big ones.
George: Those really satisfied for me. One other thing I'll say, when I'm a team, I make a basic assumption that most people want to do a good job.
George: I don't assume people are lazy. I mean, people try to game a system that's getting out, but that's not what they're about. Most people, they want to have a, have work that they feel good about that uses their skills and gifts. I start out with that basic assumption that people are basically on the good side.
George: And if I start out with that way, there's a whole bunch of leadership behaviors that become easier to do and there's a whole bunch of leadership behaviors that are just not important to do.
George: If I assume, look, hey, you just wanna do a good job, then my question is, how can I help you be happy doing a good job?
George: Not like how I make sure you're doing what I tell you what to do, unimportant! I don't like using the phrase as assume positive intent because it's overused. But basically I assume people are good and they, they want a good job. They wanna do good work.
Camille: I think that's such a great point. I think the words get overused. The thinking gets underused. The thinking that yeah, there is positive intent on the other side, whoever it is that I'm engaging with. And that goes for, even if you're hesitating to ask someone for help. Because you're like, Oh, I don't wanna burden them or they're gonna think it's silly or whatever.
Camille: No. Most people do want to help. So if you're struggling to step up into that space of leadership where you're like, I need to reach out, need to be humble enough to ask for help in this space, that's a place to really lean into that leadership.
Camille: That is a form of servant leadership. I am giving them an opportunity to do something they already want to do. They're just waiting for somebody to ask.
Camille: Yeah, absolutely.
Camille: My closing thoughts on this topic, I'm gonna hone in on this idea of setting the direction.
Camille: Setting the direction and the how that's essential for your business. Because strategy work is leader work and setting that direction and working that plan is leader work. And assessing the plan and adjusting it to improve the performance of the business is leader work. So these are all the things that will help your business performance get elevated if you lean into that as my job is the leader of this company.
Camille: If you feel like you're constantly just trying to push your business forward, it might be time to think about this a little differently, get out in front and lead your business forward. And it starts with doing that strategic planning work and how you're gonna execute that in your business.
Camille: That's all I have for today. Any last thoughts before we drop off here, George?
George: Nope. I've said everything I wanted to say for now.
Camille: For today, this is enough. All right, thanks and we'll save everybody next week.
George: Bye everybody.
