The Randal Osché Podcast: Business Bites | Episode 4
Join us on Business Bites as Chris and I explore the nuances of effective leadership. We discuss what leadership means to us personally and our own approaches, including servant leadership, collaborative leadership, and transparent leadership. We share our firsthand experiences with both good and poor leadership, offering insights into what practices foster success and which ones may falter, drawing on real-life examples.
What You'll Learn:
Different leadership styles such as servant, collaborative, and transparent leadership.
The impact of good and bad leadership practices, illustrated with real-life examples.
Actionable takeaways, including the "compliment sandwich" technique for giving feedback.
How to tailor leadership styles to meet the needs and personalities of team members.
The importance of empathy and active listening in building a positive workplace atmosphere.
Chris and I provide practical advice and real-world scenarios to help refine your leadership abilities. Learn how to balance various leadership styles to navigate different situations
Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Youtube, Podcast Index, Podcasts Addict, Amazon Music, or on your favorite podcast platform.
SHOW NOTES
Questions this conversation has Randall Pondering
What does leadership mean to you?
What was your favorite quote or lesson from this episode? Please let me know in the comments!
And that's it for today's conversation here on the Randall Osché podcast. Thank you so much for joining us and we hope that you've enjoyed listening as much as we've enjoyed recording it.
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Business Bites Episode 4
[00:00:00] Randall: Chris, today covering effective leadership to start out with.
[00:00:03] Randall: So effective leadership skills. What does leadership mean to you? Yeah.
[00:00:09] Chris: I've heard recently people say it's a bit of a cliche to talk about servant leadership. But I read about it a long, long time ago, and I certainly would describe it is leadership of a team is trying to get the best out of them.
[00:00:25] Chris: And I think it's a bargain between what you need from them and what they need from you. And you're trying to obviously drive high performing team, but you're also wanting to help elevate their career and their employability as well. So it's a sort of trade off. You're not asking people to do things you wouldn't do.
[00:00:46] Chris: And you're asking people to do things that are occasionally a stretch. The reward for them is that they will have a better answer in the next panel presentation they're at when they're going for a career change. So in a very simple way, if you treat everyone in your organization, if you're talking about leadership of a large organization of people that you know that it's a trade off between what they need and what you need and how you behave reflects that. You want to help people stretch. You want to help people grow but you also want them to perform. So you have to be very clear. I've got a long answer to that short question, but I'll let you, I'll let you jump in.
[00:01:24] Randall: Yeah, so I have I have a beef with servant leadership.
[00:01:28] Randall: My beef with servant leadership is, and I would love for you to challenge my thinking on this is that I think it's overused and I think it's generic and I've worked with a lot of quote unquote leaders that have said my leadership style is servant leadership and they've been shitty leaders.
[00:01:44] Randall: So when I first got into leadership, you know, the question would come up in interviews is like, what's your leadership style? And at first I was like servant leadership. I'm here to serve the people that are under my employ. And then I started to think about what my leadership style actually was.
[00:02:00] Randall: And my answer now would be, collaborative and transparent. So I think maybe my opinion is that all leaders, if they know what they're doing, are serving the people underneath them to help them go further faster. And if you help them go further faster, you're also driving the mission of the organization that you're a part of.
[00:02:22] Randall: Right. But, the way I'm thinking about it is the main bullet point is servant leadership. And then the sub bullet points is how you get there is being collaborative and transparent. I arrived at collaborative and transparent because those are the environments as an employee I like to work in, right? I want to work with people, not because I want to steal their ideas or I can't do the work myself, but I believe good things happen when you work together as a collective, right? And then transparent is, you know, we talked about it before in a previous episode, it's like everybody deserves to understand what the mission is and what the expectations is from their supervisor, of the employee or from, the team member of what they're, expected to do. Yeah. So collaborative and transparent.
[00:03:08] Chris: Once you've got that trans clarity and you combine that, so the clarity of what's expected of them in their role at that level. And then you then have to prove through a series of actions that you're giving them permission to be creative to give their own spin on those things to be able to try out things which is not prescriptive from you.
[00:03:30] Chris: So you've kind of given them the guide rails, you've given them the definition of what's expected, and then you trust them to get on with that. And the trust obviously builds up over time as you prove that you don't step in as soon as they try something new out. So, if you've got that in place, then you can truly do that you know, the pyramid, kind of the lead at the top, everyone below, and you flip it on its head.
[00:03:51] Chris: Those people who, in most of my world, have been in the customer sales areas, those people who every day are dealing with a customer from a support or professional services or sales or, you know, technical side of things they're all at the, forefront of it all. And then I see my role is to be supporting them to make sure that I take away some of the annoyances and I keep giving them the tools and the content and a few guiding principles to be effective as they can.
[00:04:20] Chris: So servant leadership for meis all about that kind of realizing that they're doing the job that needs to happen and you support them to make sure that they've got no annoying bureaucracies and processes that get in their way, that they grab something and it's there and available for them to use.
[00:04:38] Chris: But my natural style if I have that, when I first was in leadership was very delegating, you know, very much delegating, trusting, giving people responsibility for something. And it's only when I went on a training course that I realized that you need to have more than one style and it's situational.
[00:04:58] Chris: Ken Blanchard referenced there because you can ask someone to do something which they've never done before, haven't got any of the skill sets for. So you've delegated them something and they're set up for failure. Because it's far too big a jump for them. And you have to recognize that even though they may be a senior person or experienced person in their job, what you've just asked them to do, they are now no longer experienced at that.
[00:05:24] Chris: So it's the situation you put them in, not the person and any criticism of their kind of years of experience, but you've asked them to do something that's out of their control, that's out of their knowledge area. So therefore you have to have three more skill sets. One is really to be very directive.
[00:05:41] Chris: So it might be in the very earliest time you've just got to tell them to go do step A, B and C, and then come back when that's finished. And I'll tell you what D and E is. So very directive style and then you start to be very sort of coaching or maybe being able to sort of, watch you in action and then you start to support them and you step into the background and you're still watching them, but letting them do it and then finally you can delegate.
[00:06:07] Chris: SoI believe in that you don't look at the individual, you look at the situation you put them in and then you have to have at least four different gears to jump into depending on what they need for that situation.
[00:06:18] Randall: Yeah, I would agree with that. You have to know your people, understand the situation and adjust for the situation, certainly, but also, adjust for the personality, just thinking back to, you know, my first role in leadership is, I was responsible for individuals, those individuals responsible for driving revenue, and they all had different personalities and approaches.
[00:06:37] Randall: And in order to get what I needed, I have to understand how they wanted to approach their business, and then two, in order to move the needle, I needed to influence them to move the needle, right? I found the best approach to doing this was understanding what was most important to them, not what the organization wanted to accomplish, but what do you want to accomplish?
[00:06:59] Randall: Do you want to make more money? Do you want your workday to be like more effective and more efficient? What is it? Do you want to change the products that you're selling? Do you want to change the type of business that you're doing? What is it? So I found that in understanding what they wanted to accomplish say at like the beginning of the year What do you want to do this year?
[00:07:16] Randall: What's the business plan look like? Understanding what the challenges are that are preventing them or roadblocks that they have. Do they need some education? Do they need the resources at the organization that are available to them, but they don't know about? Do they need more assistance from the organization.
[00:07:34] Randall: And then my job as a leader is to remove those roadblocks, provide the resources to help them accomplish what they want to accomplish. And I found that at the end of the day, approaching it that way, they're bought in the doing it because it's about them, not about us. And that as a leader you know, removing those obstacles mitigating those challenges, to help them go further faster is how I look at it.
[00:07:59] Chris: There's a lady called Liz Wiseman is an author of a couple of books. One around Force Multiplier, but one also called Impact Players. And there's the idea of you know, not being in the way of them being creative and being able to make a big difference.
[00:08:12] Chris: But when she wrote the book on Impact Players, it made me also realize there is a two way thing here. You can be this leader you're talking about. But the people there who you are leading also have to look at what they do and how they support and how can they have an impact? And you know, you're in charge of your own career stuff as well.
[00:08:31] Chris: It has to be two way. A good leader obviously has to recruit some people as well, you know? Right. The right people and you get to know them fine. You get to understand their motivation's. Fine. But have you got the right people in place? Is is also a leadership trait.
[00:08:44] Randall: Yeah. I think the characteristics to me, when I think of a person who is in charge of other people you have to be able to lead. These are all different skill sets to me. Right. A person that's responsible for other people in the organization. You have to be able to lead, manage, coach, and influence the direction of the people underneath you.
[00:09:04] Randall: And I think depending on the situation you have to wear each one of those hats differently. Managing to me is not leading. Managing is checking time sheets, making sure people get paid, pushing the paperwork around you know, influencing is understanding how do I get the person to do the thing that they might not want to do the thing.
[00:09:22] Randall: Right.
[00:09:22] Chris: An understanding that they can't do it, won't do it, or just don't have permission. Didn't realize they had permission to do it. I think the areas changes slightly, and I found the really toughest was becoming a manager of managers. So then I was leader of a function and communication was really, you know, Really quite hard because if you want to get to know somebody and you understand what motivates them and what they want, it gets harder when there's 90 or 100 of them and so forth.
[00:09:49] Chris: So, obviously you've got to sort of rely on your leadership team to do some of those things. But yeah, that was the biggest learning curve I ever had was that next step up and realizing that what I said was not heard in the same way. And about 90 different interpretations across 90 different brains about what I meant by it.
[00:10:07] Chris: Some people knew me and knew what I was getting at. Some people didn't and maybe have interpreted it totally wrong. So. But a bit of a challenge when they get bigger.
[00:10:16] Randall: Quick question for you. What's a quick story of one of the worst managers you've ever, worst manager slash leader, I guess, worst person you've ever worked for, however you want to define that, a quick story of a worst person you've ever worked for.
[00:10:30] Chris: Unfortunately, the first person who ever really was my manager was the worst one. I have been lucky ever since. I've always worked for some great people. I had a problem with one leader who was just maternity cover for my boss and we didn't get off well, but we eventually have become good friends.
[00:10:49] Chris: But the first person I was at a internship stroke placement, depending on which part of the world you're from. I was still at university, I had one year in work and then you come back to the final one. And my first job was with somebody there who had never managed anyone before and
[00:11:05] Chris: making me do a lot of tasks that were boring and unfulfilling. But always wanting me to follow them around. Somehow I'd learn from watching. And then every time I tried to do something independent, they stopped me doing it. They crushed creativity.They micromanaged the heck out of me. And, I felt that I was a reasonably intelligent person who was at, you know, university, college, whatever, that I would be outta my depth in some areas, but that you could use my intelligence. But they didn't use any of my talent.
[00:11:38] Randall: No. Yeah. So I've worked with some bad managers. I've worked with a few good ones, but I think more bad or neutral at best leaders. But when I was in college, I worked in a restaurant and I was a cook in a restaurant. I'm 20 some year old, you know, man, college student, just doing this job for some, you know, going out money or whatever.
[00:11:58] Randall: I guess I did take pride in what I was doing. But we weren't trained or anything and we were making a little bit above like minimum wage. Like how, important do you think this job is to me, right? And I remember one time we made some ribs to go.
[00:12:14] Randall: So they were, you know, I cooked them, they were already, smoked beforehand, I warmed them up on the grill, I put some barbecue sauce on them, and then the barbecue sauce got kind of charred, you know, I don't think that they were burnt, but, because of the high sugar content and the heat, they were kind of charred on the bottom side of the ribs, so the customer brought them back, which, that happens as a restaurant, right, and then, for whatever reason, maybe she was having a bad day, she threw the ribs down the line, not to hit us, but through them in our direction to be like, what the heck are you guys doing? Do a better job. It was like, yeah, I don't know. Maybe that could have been a conversation. Maybe you could use that as a teachable moment.
[00:12:54] Randall: Like look at Randall, this is what went out, would you want to eat this? Like, no, I'll do a better job, I'll check. But instead, you saw flying ribs go, down the line.
[00:13:04] Randall: So, not the most effective way, I think, to handle the situation.
[00:13:10] Chris: No, exactly. I suppose, some people have to put up with every day. We're lucky we don't have to do that. Probably lucky that we mainly had some great managers or leaders.
[00:13:19] Randall: Yeah, I think to put a, a ribbon onthis episode.
[00:13:23] Randall: Yeah. One of the things I'll leave people with, because I do like to have some, actionable, takeaways is, you know, maybe this is old news. This is a lot of folks, maybe it's new news to some people, but even regarding the ribs situation flying across the kitchen is an easy way to give feedback to people that you're responsible for is a compliment sandwich.
[00:13:46] Randall: I don't know why, this doesn't happen as often as it should. But giving, constructive feedback is uncomfortable for both, leaders sometimes and the people receiving it. But there's an effective way to do that compliment sandwich is to be like, Hey, Randall. I really appreciate your hard work, energy and effort and dedication to this job, to this project.
[00:14:06] Randall: However, you know, there's this one thing here that you've been doing, I don't think it's the most effective way to do it, or you messed up here so let's just approach this a different way. And then you finish it up with a compliment and you're like, oh. But you're really doing a good job. You have momentum.
[00:14:22] Randall: You're doing these other parts really well, but there's just this one part and then you know, you sandwich it in there in the middle and that's how you give the critical feedback is much better than coming in hot and just saying, Hey, You made the typo, you messed up in the presentation, do better.
[00:14:36] Chris: Yeah, yeah, exactly. Absolutely. Certainly you know, confession time really. I know that feedback is a gift, but I usually hate feedback. Yeah. So, you know, if they dress it up that way, maybe that's good, or maybe if I've actually asked for it, or said that I don't think it did so well there. What should I have done better and something and you invite it.
[00:14:54] Chris: I think the most important ribbon on it for me is it takes two to tango and it really, your attitude to leaders as much as being a leader. And there is ways that you can make the whole thing a lot better. And and it comes from both sides. And so, you know, plug a book or two, but there's, There is that kind of concept for me in Pat Player's book, because the first half is written for leaders and the second half is written for individuals who want to get on.
[00:15:19] Randall: I like that. Well, Chris, appreciate you joining me for another episode of Business Bites. Looking forward to doing our next take.
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