Five MORE Reasons You Should Invest in Leadership Development NOW!

When times are critical, that's when leaders MUST be equipped with the skills to help their teams succeed! In a follow-up to Episode 37, Paul Simkins, The Values Coach, shares five MORE reasons why NOW IS THE BEST TIME to invest in developing your leadership.

Plus, Paul shares an excellent recipe for Sausage and Cornbread Bake. This is the easy to make in a Dutch Oven over coals or in your kitchen oven. You can find the recipe, and many more, on the Smoke and Ash Facebook group or by emailing TLToolbox@BoldlyLead.com.

You can get a copy of Paul's eBook 15 Innovative Ways to Show Employees You Care and Not Break the Bank by emailing him at paul@BoldlyLead.com.

Join the discussions at our Podcast Facebook group here.
Learn more about Paul Simkins on his website.

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Transcript

Producer: 0:00

The tech leaders toolbox podcast is brought to you by Paul Simkins and the Boldly LEAD program, focusing on helping tech leaders like you, and the frustration of low performing teams, and losing excellent employees, so they can increase productivity by 50%. Go home on time, and sleep better at nights.

Paul Simkins: 0:22

Hello, and welcome to the tech leaders toolbox. I'm Paul Simkins. And we're here because how you lead today determines how your team succeeds tomorrow. And I want to remind you don't doubt it for a second, that you are a leader, because leadership is all about influence. And as a good leader, we seek to increase our positive influence by growing each and every day. This is Episode 38 of the podcast. Now, in the last episode, we talked about undeniable reasons why you should be investing in leadership development for yourself, and for all of the leaders around you right now. But the list was incomplete. There's more. So let's look at even more compelling reasons to make that choice. Are you ready? Let's go. So in part one of this episode of this, again, last week, we gave five reasons why you should be investing in leadership development right now, despite all the turmoil going on, despite all the confusion, the work from home, all of the changes, you need to be investing in leadership development right now, not holding back, but surging forward, because we look for signs that there are problems. And they signs that we talked about these reasons why you should be investing in leadership development. These are signs that create stress within the management team and within your entire organization. And it's not just conflict, which conflict can actually be good, it creates stress. And stress has a way of flowing downward, Zig Ziglar used to call it call it the kicking the dog syndrome. And if you're a dog lover, you can prefer using kick the cat syndrome. But the basic idea is that things are not going well in the office creating a lot of stress. And you can't take it out on anybody in the workplace. And if you do, then that creates a lot of problems as well. But all that builds up during the day and you get home when there's nothing you could do about it at work, but you get home and you take it out on the dog. Psychologists call it displaced aggression. And the key is you don't want to look at the symptoms, you want to look at where the problem is, you have to get to the root source of the problem. And that's what you want to fix. So whatever you call it, displaced aggression, kicking the cat or kicking the dog syndrome, whatever, it means that things go bad. And often quickly, productivity suffers, you start to see some of the signs that there might be a leadership problem. Again, you're maybe your HR department becomes a revolving door, you're getting higher turnover, lower productivity, a lot more bad attitudes and morale in the workplace. And everything suffers as a result, you may find your sales are down, all kinds of things impacting that. And so those are all signs again, that you need to be investing in leadership development, because it all starts with leadership. As my mentor john Maxwell says that everything rises and falls on leadership. So last week, we talked about the first five signs which were high turnover, lower customer satisfaction, employees that don't seem to get it, poor communication within the organization, and a general air of discontent. Now let's look at the next five signs. So number six, if you want to call it is that trust doesn't exist. See, the presence of trust is a door opener for everything for better relationships with your customers better relate or clients, better relationships with each other better relationships with your employees, everywhere you go, the presence of trust, opens the doors. The late Stephen Covey said that trust is the glue of life. And he also said it's the foundational principle upon which all relationships are built. So when there's an absence of trust, it becomes a barrier to effective open communication. It keeps people away from working together well and from being productive. And in fact, there's actually evidence from research studies multiple research studies. That when trust exist, that productivity and profitability increase substantially. In fact, One study found that the most trustworthy companies outperformed the s&p 500 index companies. Did you get that? The most trustworthy companies outperformed the standard and poor 500 index companies. The lack of trust typically exists in two ways. Either you don't trust them, or they don't trust you. Usually it goes hand in hand, they're tied together. Yet, unlike the chicken in the egg question, and we talked about trust a few weeks ago, in a previous episode, unlike the chicken in the egg question, it's quite clear which of these comes first, it falls on the leader, it's like a landslide in erodes from the top and flows down. So when you as a leader, don't trust your people, they know it. And once they know it, they also know that they can't trust you. The erosion or nonexistence of trust is a major indicator that you need some leadership development. And here's Reason number seven, managers spend more time in their office then out of it. One of my favorite business books that I've ever read was The book In Search of Excellence, which was written by Tom Peters, er, he was one of the authors of it. And Tom Peters talks about a concept that he calls MB w a management by wandering around. And the idea backed by what he observed and top performing companies is to get out of your office and be where the work is getting done. And if you're doing that, then you have opportunities to be one on one with the people who are making things happen. Now, that doesn't mean that you never ever enter your office, there is necessarily within your role in a managerial position, there is work that you and only you can do, and that has to get done. And so there are times where you do have to go into your office and do those things. What happens though, is that a lot of times we look at that simply as a crutch to keep away in doing from what we know we should be doing, which is out there talking to our people finding out what's going on, because that can sometimes be uncomfortable. And we tend to shy away from the uncomfortable. So we want to get out there, we want to wander around, we want to talk to people, we want to find out what's going on, we want to have our finger on the pulse of things. Because again, we can't make changes, we can establish any kind of communication or relationship with people when we're sitting behind a closed door in our office all day long. Now, don't let yourself go to the other extreme on this. Don't look at this as an excuse to look over everybody's shoulders and micromanage them. The idea isn't that you're wandering around shouting at them how they should be doing their jobs, you're wandering around and you are simply asking questions, and looking for answers. It's the chance to care about your people to show that you care about them. And to build that trust with them and know more about the people who make you a leader to begin with. leaders who don't have the time as they say to get away from their desk, send a message to all their employees, they send the message that they just don't care. Reason number eight, there is a carrot and or stick mindset. Now you've probably familiar with the old metaphor of using a carrot or a stick for MIP for motivation, and it works like this. To give you an example, you have a driver of a horse drawn cart, and he wants the cart to move forward. Right. So in order to do that, he has to somehow get the horse to move. And he figures he can do that in one of two ways. He can put a carrot on a stick, and he can dangle the carrot out in front of the horse's face, the horse will attempt to move towards the carrot in order to get it and the cart will consequently move forward. So he lowers the horse by holding a carrot in front of them as a motivator. Now the other one is the stick mindset is that he can beat the horse with a stick or with a whip. Hitting the horse on the rear with the stick or with a whip makes the horse want to move away from the reach of the stick. And since they're attached to the cart, everything else moves forward as well. So again, that's the carrot and the stick method either you you motivate them with something They want or something they don't want. And the problem with either approach is that it is effective only in the short term. You know, we've said before, you can lead by fear, but understand that when you lead by fear, it is always going to be short term. Because what happens is, let's say Okay, so let's take the carrot as an example. So if you use the carrot motivation technique, where you attracting them with something they want, well, what happens is, after a while, the horse gets frustrated, that they can't seem to reach the carrot, and they give up. And if you let the horse get the carrot as a reward, they eventually fill up and the carrot is no longer a motivator. And I'll give you a good example of this. company I worked for years ago, I managed all of the training centers for them. And we had multiple training centers, and I managed all the training centers for them. Now, my only job was to manage the training centers, manage the people working in the training centers. My job was not sales in that case. But the incentive that the owners of the company gave me to try to increase productivity is they said, if we sell if we increase sales of seats in the training center by a certain amount, we're going to give you a bonus. So they dangle this money in front of me, which, quite frankly, money's never been a big motivator for me anyway. But they dangle this money in front of me. But it was something that I had absolutely no impact on whatsoever. I could not affect that. And so it seems to be a motivator for me. Because I had no way to make sure I achieved it, I was entirely dependent upon somebody else who I did not manage to achieve that goal. So they utilize the carrot, but that carrot was not a motivator for me. Now, flipside of use the stick as a motivator, the stick or the whip, eventually the animal gets used to the pain and learns to live with it. Same with fear, use fear as a motivator. Eventually, your employees do one of two things. They either learn to live with the fear, and it's no longer a motivator. Or what it does is motivate them to go out the door and go somewhere else. So the stick is no longer a motivator, you either have to use a stronger negative motivator, or change tactics. The biggest problem with the entire approach of this carrot or the stick is that it assumes the subject is so dumb, that an intrinsic extrinsic motivator is all they need to be provoked, productive. In other words, there's something you can do extrinsically to motivate them, they're motivated by money. A lot of sales managers think this about their salespeople that all they're motivated is by money. So if you just offer them the opportunity for more money, if they will do whatever it takes to reach a higher goal, then that's all it's gonna take. And it's overall not consistently effective. And by the same token, using the fear to hit these numbers, or else you're all gone. Again, doesn't really become a motivator anyway, especially if it becomes quite clear, they're not going to hit the goal. Now it ceases to be any kind of a motivator to D motivator, they just give up. So forget the carrot and the stick mentality. It doesn't work. All right, number nine fear. Reason number nine, fear rules the roost. Again, related to this, it's a tricky one. And here's why. It's a tricky one to spot this. Because realistically, if you ask any leader, manager executive, they would not admit to using fear as a method of command and control. Usually because they don't realize that they're doing it. But you see the signs everywhere. You see, for example, the the manager seemed to have a Jekyll and Hyde personality. One minute, they're kind and the next minute they're a raging bull and you never know what to expect. And that is utilizing by those personality changes utilizing fear as a motivator. People are constantly walking on eggshells. Afraid of what's coming next. Manage you like to measure everything ever facet of work has to have a metric of some sort. measurement is the only meaning to anything. One of my favorite sayings, I like to, I like to repeat and like to share with a lot of executives and managers is not everything that counts can be counted. And not everything that can be counted counts. In other words, measurements are good for some things not so good for others. There's numbers you need to know, but you don't need to know numbers about everything. Another reason employees are constantly walking on eggshells again, if they're tiptoeing around, if they're being timid, if they're keeping their opinions to themselves, if they're keeping their heads down, that's a sign that fear is ruling the roost here. If blame is assigned, finding fault is more important than fixing the problem. That's a problem in itself. And if truth is a casualty, no one wants to tell the truth to the manager, because the leader or the messenger often gets killed for the message. Those are signs that fear is ruling the roost. fear based leaders have two consistent characteristics that you got to watch for. One is they thrive in dysfunction. And in fact, will manufacture it constantly to keep it going. They they thrive in an atmosphere that is chaos. Because in chaos, they're pretty much free to do whatever they have to do. If you're busy playing everybody off of everybody else, nobody's paying attention to what you're doing. And you're able to keep people on edge and individually manipulated. The other sign of fear based leaders, the other characteristic of a fear based leader is that they are typically short term leaders. Again, fear is a short term motivation at best. And you will find that typically fear based leaders are either going to lose everyone, in which case they no longer have anybody to lead. Or they're going to be removed because of the damage they've done. Because eventually productivity and everything falls down. And they're gone. So finally now Reason number 10. Why you should be investing in leadership development right now is that you don't think any of this applies to you. It's a strange phenomenon. But leaders who need who most need to work on developing their leadership skills, will look at this list and not see a single situation that applies to them. Everything is just fine. They'll go down the items like a checklist and cross them off. Oh, yeah, our turnover is at 25%. But that's just the nature of our industry, one of the biggest lies that leaders tell themselves. Or they'll say, yeah, we just need to market our product better and customer satisfaction will improve. Or if we hire some people who are smart and work hard, that'll fix it. Or just employees just need to listen better. Or if these people I'm stuck with they're just a bunch of whiners where they don't deserve my trust, I can't trust any of them, well, who hired him, and who's keeping them there? Or, you know, I really need to be in my office so that I'm always accessible to people. Or to say, you know, you got to motivate them somehow. That's a big lie, too. We'd actually don't motivate people, we provide circumstances for them to motivate themselves. That's another story for another day. Or they'll say sometimes putting the fear of God into them as a good thing. Or they'll say simply, this list is a waste of my time. with poor leaders, it's never their fault. Smart leaders recognize the signs and know that their path is one of constant growth. we, all of us, me, you, all of us can become a better leader than we are today. When we commit to that, when we commit to constant growth as a leader, and invest in leadership development for ourselves. And if you really want to be a leader, you have to grow leaders around you. So you have to invest in the leaders around you as well. Then you're going to find you're making a big, sustainable difference within your organization and when the end within your team. So here's a little tip for the day, and the next step to developing the leaders in your care. In the previous episode, I talked about doing personality profiles, identifying the personality profiles, and looking for practical applications of that. So here's the next one. And this includes yourself, identify leadership, character traits for yourself, and for all of your other leaders. Because by identifying those leadership, character traits, and rating them, then you're able to see where things need to be strengthened. I often do this. And if you're interested in a character characters survey, you can contact me at Paul@boldly lead.com, and I'll be glad to coach you through one. But I do this a lot with organizations when I work with a group is the first thing we do is we go through and we have everybody self assess on leadership characteristics, giving themselves a rating on each one, one through 10. And then also extending that, they'll then ask about five or six people whose opinions they trust, to rate them as well. Average all that together, come up with an overall average. And that basically identifies a leadership level. But it also what it does, is it identifies where your strong, which characteristics you're strong in as a leader, and which ones you're weakened. So again, what that does is that now gives you identifies areas where you need to work, and where do you work, you work on the characteristics, where you're strong, and learn how to make them stronger. And you look at where you're weak. And you'll learn how to compensate for where you're weak, with other people who have those strengths. So again, that's your tip of the day, next tip of the day, take this action. And again, I encourage you to look at taking this action within the next week or two. I did identifying leadership character traits for yourself and all of the other leaders within your team or your organization. And that'll get you started on that road. All right, we'll be back in a moment.

Producer: 22:20

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Paul Simkins: 22:50

All right now we're in a hidden come into the recipe part of the show again, those of you who have listened to episodes before, know that I am a big fan of outdoor cooking and I have a smoker at home I've got a grill. I've got several Dutch ovens, I do a lot of cooking over open fire when I go camping and all and learn always learning ways to use those Dutch ovens are so versatile, that I love my smoker. And any chance I can crank that baby up, throw some logs in and throw a bunch of food in there and cook everything up. I'm a happy camper. And I love outdoor cooking so much I created a Facebook group called smoke and ash. And on the smoke and ash Facebook group me and all of my friends are out there. They're all big fans of it too. And we share recipes with one another share ideas. We talk about different kinds of outdoor cooking, we show off our equipment and the food that we cook this last weekend and all and you're welcome to join us. Again, it's called smoke and ash. And it's a great Facebook group. And we'd love for you to come join us out on that. And so I like to share a recipe and outdoor cooking recipe each week on the show. And I post these recipes by the way out there on that smoking dash Facebook group and what I've got for you this week, a lot of times out when I share these recipes, if they can be done indoors as well. I'll tell you that and this is one of those. What this is, this is a great breakfast dish, especially when you need to fill everybody up because you got a lot to do that day. This is a sausage and corn bread bake, sausage and corn bread bake. You can do this in a Dutch oven cooking over coals or an open fire when you're outdoors. Or you can do it inside your oven if it's indoors. So what you're going to do is you're going to get a pound of breakfast sausage usually what they call the bulk sausage that comes in the little plastic container. And that whole you're going to crumble that up. You need a white onion that you're going to dice up you need about two medium size red potatoes that you're going to cut into half inch cubes. You want about six large eggs, two cups of milk, about a cup of shredded cheese, Colby jack or sharp cheddar would be perfect for this. And you want to make cornbread, either cornbread mix, or pancake mix or biscuit mix. I prefer the cornbread mix for this. You want about a half a cup of maple syrup. And then of course salt and pepper or any other seasonings you like to use along that little dash dash or to a cayenne pepper goes in here great too. So the first thing you have to do, of course is cook up the sausage. Now, if you're using a Dutch oven, you can line the Dutch oven with aluminum foil, which means less clean up later. But if you've really seasoned your Dutch oven, well, you may not need to because what you can do is you can we're going to cook the sausage up and of course the sausage is going to have some grease in it. cook up the sausage and then once the sauce in cook it in the Dutch oven. Once the sausage is done, remove the sausage with a slotted spoon and drain it on a paper towel. And then take that remaining oil grease from the sausage. Make sure you wipe it all around the inside of the Dutch oven. And then you're going to cook up your onions and your diced onions and your diced potatoes inside there. While that's cooking, you're going to beat up your eggs and milk, beat them together and then add your cornbread mix to it. And then go ahead and set that aside. Now once the onions and the potatoes are done, you're going to add the sausage back into the Dutch oven. You're going to season that with the salt and pepper. And like I said I like to do a few dashes of cayenne pepper in there as well. And then also pour in the maple syrup and mix all that up to code it. Then you're finally you have two options here, one thing you can do is you can take a couple of pieces of old bread, tear them into pieces and throw it in there if you really want to make it filling, although that's a lot of carbs. Or just take your just take your cheese and sprinkle that over top of all that. Pour your egg mixture over top of that with the cornbread. Pour that cornbread mix all over top of that. And then you're going to cover it and you're going to bake it for about 45 to 60 minutes at 350 degrees. Now how do you get 350 degrees in a Dutch oven, you're going to put about 10 coals underneath and about 14 coals on top on the lid of the Dutch oven. And that'll cook at 350 degrees. If you're outdoors, otherwise, of course, you know you just put it into a baking dish. And 13 by nine baking dish should do it and stick that in the evidence 350 degrees for about 45 minutes or so. And that's it. It's a sausage and cornbread bake. It is delicious. It is very filling. And you may even get inventive with it. Find other things you can do like smoked bacon, put it in there, add some other things, look at adding bell peppers and get inventive with it and have a lot of fun with it. So that's it the sausage and cornbread bake. Again, if you want the recipe, you can go on out to the smoke and ash Facebook group and get it there. Or just email me at tl toolbox@boldlylead.com. Alright, so this week, we talked about five more rule reasons why you should be investing in leadership development right now, despite all the turmoil that's going on, or perhaps because of all the turmoil that's going on. If you're listening to us on a podcast app of some sort like Apple podcast or something like that, be sure to subscribe so that you always know when the new episodes come out, which is every week and give us a review. Give us a five star rating and review so that other people can find this as well. And if you want to extend the conversation, come on out to the tech leaders toolbox Facebook group and we extend the conversation out there as well. Well, that's it for this week. Until the next time, go out and be the leader. You were meant to be