"Loving, Caring Empathy" The Path to Servant Leadership

So, yeah, and I think that's. Sorry, sorry. But that is, that has literally been the hardest thing for me as a leader to come to terms with, which is just making peace with that and loving the people around me. Even if they don't like, even if they don't have this deep seated passion or they think about other things during the day, loving, caring, empathy is still like. Yeah, it's a hard fought lesson for me as a leader.

Well, you mentioned it earlier, this concept of servant leader. What does that mean to you?

Yeah, I was only introduced to this a couple years ago actually through the pca, the Painting Contractors association, the nonprofit that I'm the board chair of. We started trying to figure out me and another contractor. We actually put the organization through traction and professionalized it the best we could with the help of a mountain of other people too. But when we started going through the core values and who we should be recruiting for board members, we're trying to oversimplify and try to just say, here's what we're looking for. And we wrote down all the best traits of the best members and board members and they were all leaders and they all just served and they all, they didn't come to the PCA and say, if you give me a free booth at the trade show, I'll gladly give my time to this thing. No, they all showed up and they said, I want to help. This is meaningful. There's not even really an immediate benefit to me, but this is what I do and I'm here to serve. And so we coined, we didn't coin the term internally, we recognize the term servant leadership and now it's like, oh yeah, it makes complete sense. Ask a painter live my 7 year social media show. I have this biological urge to share stuff with other people and it makes me super happy when other people interact with me about it because that's what I want from other people. And this whole organization is full of servant leadership and it gives me a ton of energy.

That's super cool. I think more of that is needed in our world. The best example that walked our planet 2,000 years ago.

Right.

And it's what we preach. We preach this idea of caring enough to willingly serve you and willingly being the key word, like willingly serve your people, they'll know that you won't. But that empathy thing, we sometimes take that too far. There's a big difference between empathy and sympathy. Like, yes, I put myself in shoes. I see what you're dealing with. I understand what you're dealing with. I Have some experience with what you're dealing with. But we're not going to allow that to be an excuse. So here's our action plan. I won't let you fall down on those excuses. I won't let you play victims because I believe you're a victor and we tend to not have that ability to press that extra button there. Have you had any experience with that? Like maybe being too kind?

Listen, man, you. It's like you are partially in my head right now. So I have. I got this poor high school intern, man. My beloved high school that I graduated from is down the road and I got involved with their business program and stuff and they sent me this intern and he's going to college in North Dakota here in a month or two. But they kind of gave him to me and said, do what you want with them. And today, this morning we worked on his previous project was doing a bunch of automation with artificial intelligence for goal setting and review meetings where we track data and compile it. And that's all the fun, like you know, crispy stuff that we do with the young fun people. But we completed that project and now I'm talking about recruiting, retention and inspiration. And this morning we had to deliver a stain sample to a client and we got in my car and I said we're having a mobile meeting today. And all we talked about was my arc of over sympathetic versus over harsh with all my people. And I wanted feedback from an 18 year old. I said here's examples of all these conversations I've had. Give me feedback of whether they were too empathetic, too harsh and things like that. And literally that's all we talked about this morning of that. And then how people reacted to it and the outcome and slowly realizing that, you know, when you get an 18 year old's perspective about that, it's like they do not enjoy the over empathetic either. That doesn't get best performance out of people. But they also don't like the old grumpy guy screaming at you. So it's always that interplay of. It's kind of like a no duh sort of thing. But it's great to hear it from somebody from the generation underneath you about that. So yeah, you're in my head, man. That's all, that's all we talk about. And this poor high school intern standing.

There like an 18 year old kid was open for that conversation.

Dude, yes. And so I got a gem. I got an absolute gem. So on the outset you'd be like, oh my God, this kid probably fell asleep into his face down in his cereal. He could not be more into this. Like, he is. He is a high performer, just like me and my leadership team. And he brought examples of exact. I would bring an employee example. He would bring an example from Boy Scouts or from a sports association in school. And our examples mirrored each other to a T. Exactly. So it's really fun to impart that later on in life stuff. It's also fun to get that experience from him, which is again, we all think we're snowflakes magically. People in the Boy Scouts experiences, people in painting businesses, roofing businesses. And it's universal and it's amazing. We don't actually get more intentional about it and think about it more.

Oh, two of my favorite words. Intentional and thinking. Well, you're part of the problem. You're out there, you got all this social media stuff and it's distracting to me. It gets my attention and we all fall into the trap. I mean, there's very few people in the world out there that don't go, hey, there's Nick. Let me watch that reel that he's got going on. That was pretty interesting, pretty humorous, pretty funny, all that good stuff. And then the next one and the next one and an hour later, I've wasted an hour of my life that I could have actually been thinking and being intentional about what I do. Do you do anything to like, keep that out of your world?

Dude, listen, all right, we. You like me. I'm known for escaping our live off the cuff. There is no prep that goes into my show and that's an open secret. Like people know that they. When I fired up, we go. You mentioned the same thing, which is, you know me. You did a minimal amount of research and we have an organic conversation. This is all I do now. I intentionally so I'm a utilitarian. I cannot just do one thing at a time. Right. Most business owners are like that. Like, I, I know I have to do fitness to keep myself of a certain like physical shape so that I can do this for a very long time. I also cannot just exercise and not do something else while I exercise. So I, I found a form of exercise, but where I used to do stuff like weightlifting and running where it was too strenuous to have successively deep ideations. Right. My brain would get distracted by the physical pain in my body. So I go for hour and 15 minute walks now every morning on a country road by myself and my dog and I force myself. Usually I put one song on repeat. So it distract my brain long enough and then I tell myself, here's the one thing I want to ideate on this morning and it's going to trail but I'm going to go this. And if you give yourself even eight minutes of no distractions, you start having these successive thoughts that you never would have had built upon one another if you were staring at Instagram or you were near a boardroom or in an office. And it is the, it is something I look forward to every morning now, which is that successive thoughts. And so, and it's all, it's all personal stuff, right? It's all, well, not personal but like personnel stuff. It's all, it all deals with the people, right? And thinking about the different variables and parts of that soup and going through thought experiments with that and just trying to like first principle reasoning it and say well if I just start over, what would I do? Or you know, things like that where you try to get rid of all your sort of dispositions about it. So yeah, long winded way of saying yes.

Well, it's, it's another one of those truisms slow down to go fast. We, we tend to think how we got to get to the next thing, get to the next thing, get to the next thing and constantly moving forward, like how do I grow the business, scale it and do more work and get more leads and make more sales? We're always like that mode. Has there been anything on your walks this hour and 15 minute walk that you had a breakthrough on that you applied to what you do and it moved things ahead much faster than if you would have just kept bowling through?

I think, I think there's going to be an unsatisfying answer. But I, I take ultimate ownership of everything. I still, I tell myself that this is all my fault if something happens and I truly believe it is, I believe that we can affect it. So most of the breakthroughs I have are, are confirmation of the things that I may not be good at or may not want to do, but you have to do if you're a leader. And it's that the biggest breakthroughs I've had are not moonshots. They're more of like literally I'll be on a walk and be like that's it. It's one of those things that's like oh, dumb, dumb. You know what it is? You just refuse to do it. It has everything to do with micro accountability, which is somebody in our position. You know, I think about technician versus manager versus leader and technician does the work manager manages the technicians who do the work and then leaders inspire the managers who manage the people who do the work. In my like oversimplification and for me, that, that micro. See something, say something every single day for the rest of your life and you're never going to solve it. Is the. Is the thing never letting accountability go any longer than it has to. Saying it now, holding people to it, that is the way to success. And that's through the few business books I've ever read, you will find a version of that listed as the main arbiter of success in any business. You know, that's really good.

Wow. That was like. I like mic drop. Let's go. I was pretty strong.

Yeah. So unsat. I wish I would say, oh my God. I had this idea for an app and it completely revolutionized my business. It's secret, nobody knows about it. I'm making four times the profit as everybody else. But we know business success is not that Apple, they grind. They grind. Apple just started Apple's a bank. They launched a sort of like deposit thing where you can save money and they like, weirdly enough, they didn't come up with the next new iPhone. They came up with the most stupid, boring thing on the planet. A bank. And honestly, I think they are, by market cap, the largest bank in the world. Now that is the mundane, unsexy, boring thing that they did that makes them world class. They didn't completely change the iPhone again.

There's not much more you can do to. It doesn't seem like unless they just embed one in your head or something.

Hence you get into banking. Sam.