How to Inspire Your People - Scott Edinger on Leadership

What is the one thing that impacts revenue growth, employee engagement, productivity, and even more in your organization? That's coming up. Plus, 3 ways to inspire your people, 3 activities that are likely consuming your organization's precious resources, and what really makes an innovative organization. Welcome to the Better Life, Better Business podcast, where we have conversations about how to live a better life and build a better business. I'm your host, Shawn Ellis, founder of The Speakers Group, and today I'm talking with Scott Ettinger, co-author of The Inspiring Leader and a new book titled The Hidden Leader, as well as the Harvard Business Review article Making Yourself Indispensable, which has been called a classic in the making. Scott is also a contributing author to the ASTD's Leadership Handbook alongside thought leaders like Jim Collins, Bill George, Marshall Goldsmith, Patrick Lencioni, and others. Companies like AT&T, Lenovo, the Los Angeles Times, and many more across 22 industries hire Scott to work with their senior leaders to achieve measurable business results. I really enjoyed this conversation with Scott, and I believe you will too. So I invite you to take a breath, set aside whatever's happened so far today and whatever may be coming up, Get out your notepad and be on the lookout for that one idea that could transform your life or business. Scott, welcome and thank you for being here today. I'm imagining that the, the leaders who are listening to our interview are looking for advice on a wide range of issues, from employee issues like how to improve morale or increase productivity, how to retain top talent, to also the more strategic or operational issues like how to speed up revenue growth, how to expand into new markets or address a declining margin. So all those issues, they don't necessarily seem to be related, but those are exactly the types of things that you help organizations with as a speaker, author, and consultant. So as we start out, how does all of that blend together? I'd love to hear your take on that.

Yeah, well, all of those things tend to blend together under a very large umbrella. That is referred to very frequently as leadership, right? So the achievement of all of those things that you just described tends to be led in organizations by those who are responsible for divisions or perhaps entire parts of the organization or even the entire organization itself. So when you think about those things, usually it is about the achievement of some kind of positive or intentional change that wouldn't ordinarily happen without the leader doing something different. Be that devising a new strategy, working with their team on how to implement that strategy, working on elements of the culture to create an environment where innovation thrives, any number of those things. So they're all under that very large umbrella of the job of leaders.

Well said. That makes perfect sense. And tying into leadership, one thing that's unique about you, or at least that I find unique about you, is you deal with both the strategic piece, helping leaders, helping their people know what they need to know, we might say, but then also helping them create the environment where their people can succeed, because obviously you've got to have both pieces of that. Can you talk more about the nature of your work and maybe how you work with leaders in these areas?

Yeah, there's essentially two very different kind of components of the work here. The first part of it is in formulating strategy. One of my mentors, a fellow named Neil Rackham, once said that if words could sue for defamation of character, strategy would be first in the courtroom. And that's because it has so many different meanings to different people. And I've seen people talk, leaders, very senior leaders talk about their strategy and pull out slide decks of 200 slides. And that's not a strategy. I like simple definitions to things. And strategy really is about what the organization is going to do and understanding a very clear objective, the scope of that objective, and the company's advantage in achieving those objectives and getting a very clear statement of that and understanding what that means so you can drive that throughout the organization is an important part of strategy. The ability to communicate that through vision and excitement and getting people on board with that is a really critical part of strategy that is too often left alone in favor of lots of financial statements. So that's one part of strategy. Then you got to implement that strategy, and certainly every senior executive team that I've worked with around a conference room table in a nice setting to create the strategy has always been perfect there. You know, it's never failed there. It's always the failure comes when it's out in the field. So having a very clear implementation plan to be able to very quickly articulate what are the critical issues we're going to address, what are our initiatives organization-wide that we are committed to funding with energy and effort and time, and what are those things, and be able to describe how we're going to implement them and get people behind that. So it's a matter of painting that very clear picture of where we're going and determining how we're going to do those things. That's a huge part of leadership effectiveness.

Great, and I know one of the things that we had talked about offline, you mentioned that a key question for leaders is asking the question, can I explain our strategy in 30 to 45 seconds, or in other words, succinctly.

Yeah.

Talk about that, because I know you kind of alluded to it, but strategy, a lot of times we think about it as this multi-page document or plan or whatever it is, but then you say, explain that in 30 seconds. Wow, that's a whole different challenge. How do you go about refining your strategy so you can communicate it so clearly and succinctly?

Well, I think the important thing to remember is that if you cannot, if you can't do it as the leader, then the odds of your people being able to execute that strategy are slim to none. So it's critically important to be able to articulate that strategy. And whether it's 30 seconds or 45 seconds, that's somewhat of an arbitrary alternative. Sure. Is not much beyond 5 minutes. And I'm pretty sure it's not much more beyond a minute or 2. So having a clear ability to paint the picture of where the organization is headed and what you are going to do to get there, and describe some of the efforts involved in that, if that takes more than a couple of minutes, odds are you are going to lose people. So those things, your clear objective, the scope of that objective, and how you are going to get there. Along with getting people excited about where you're headed.

Great. Let's, let's talk about then the, the getting people excited part of it. I know you, you wrote a book, The Inspiring Leader, and I know that you wrote an article earlier this year for Forbes highlighting 7 top leadership traps, one of them being the leaders lacking positive energy. So talk about that inspirational or motivational piece. Once you've, you've communicated your strategy, now how do you get people on board with that?

Well, easier said than done. That ability to inspire and motivate sounds wonderful, particularly when you say it fast. But then people are wondering oftentimes, you know, well, how do I actually go about doing that? You know, you ask a leader if they're inspiring people and they're likely to say, I'm exhausted, I'm inspiring my tail off out here. But what specifically are the behaviors that allow you to decode how leaders inspire and motivate others? And a lot of the time, There's nothing particularly revealing about the behaviors that people find most inspiring. They're often little things done a lot, done frequently, multiple times a day in many interactions over time that really change the texture of how a leader leads and the way they inspire others. For instance, a leader who inspires people with strategic perspective is very good, or strategic perspective and vision, is very good at linking activities in the organization and initiatives to the bigger picture and helping people understand how their work is more than just doing an activity, fulfilling a task, that it is a part of the achievement of something greater. That's one way it might happen. Another way it might happen is a leader inspiring by taking a very clear interest in developing someone's talent. I know that loyalty and engagement are things that are huge for companies today. And one of the main things that people want in businesses, want from businesses, their employers, is to develop their talents and to develop their skill sets. So a leader who routinely carves out time to help someone to develop, to coach them, to advise them on what they can be doing differently that would contribute to their success. Has another tremendous impact. And then I would suggest that there is another element that in the writing of the book we discovered was really one of the critical components of inspiring others, and that is the ability to make an emotional connection. And when I say that, I have to be real careful there. I wrote an article for Harvard Business Review called "How Leaders Make Emotional Connections," and I had to be really clear. I'm not talking about wild displays of emotion or being emotional, you know, crying at a moment's notice. The old Dick Vermeil kind of leadership, the old coach of the St. Louis Rams and Philadelphia Eagles who's noted for crying all the time.

Sure.

The idea of making an emotional connection, I guess said simply, is connecting as a human, a fellow human, as a person, not treating people like tasks or jobs or outputs or things to be done or automatons to direct in the completion of something, but rather to relate to them as people. And if you talk to people who are really inspired Inspired by a leader, and I've interviewed thousands of people to ask them, "What is inspiring about the leaders you've worked with?" One of the things I will frequently hear is, "I know they really cared about me as a person." And that may seem very soft and fuzzy, and perhaps it really is soft and fuzzy, but there is an element here that produces hard results because when people are inspired and engaged, they produce for a business that's more profit. That's more revenue, greater innovations. So the ability to do those things becomes really important. So leaders can inspire in a lot of different ways. It's not just one way. I gave you a few examples there, but really understanding what it takes to inspire has a huge impact on how a person leads, and it's usually the small things. Hmm.

Something you said there early on that made me think— so an inspiring leader, it sounds like it's not that you as a leader or I as a leader have to fit into this box, there are these little things you have to do, but it's not— I guess each person can be inspiring in their own individual way, playing to their strengths, you might say. Is that accurate?

Yeah. You know, there's a lot of different approaches that one can take. And after we wrote The Inspiring Leader, I had a chance to contribute to the ASTD Leadership Handbook along with other authors like Jim Collins and Patrick Lencioni and a handful of others. One of the things that we highlighted in that book was that there are multiple ways to be inspiring as a leader. There's a lot of specific behaviors, but in terms of your approach to those behaviors, it doesn't matter if you're an introvert or an extrovert or a high D or an ENTJ, whatever kind of labels you provide for these sort of things, that regardless of personality and style, there are a lot of different ways that people are inspired, and you can take multiple approaches to accomplish the same thing. Typically, we think of the very rousing kind of halftime speech where the leader who gets up in front of the troops and addresses them and really gives that classic motivational speech. And that is undeniably powerful. But there's a lot of other things leaders do, and that's part of what I was describing.

Yeah, right. I think that's comforting to know and freeing, I think, to know as a leader that I don't have to try to be somebody else. I can be an inspiring leader in my own way, again, going back to some of those little things and key things that you mentioned.

Yeah, I think just at the end of the day, what's inspiring is when you allow yourself as a leader, when you allow your leadership style to be seen and you can be yourself with people, that's a very freeing kind of feeling when you're like, I don't have to be a certain way.

Right. Since you mentioned that an inspiring leader can bring about such great, great results improve performance in an organization. If a leader is seeing performance isn't up to par, isn't up to the level that they'd like to see, what are maybe some warning signs to be able to know the difference between maybe there's a— maybe I'm not inspiring my people in the right way versus, say, a skills gap? How can you maybe identify the difference there?

Yeah, I think there's a couple of things to look at. Usually it's hard to necessarily identify the two things that you just described, whether someone's inspiring enough or whether there's a skills gap. It usually shows up in some kind of result. So I may have customer satisfaction scores in decline, and I have to look at what was the causal factor here, because they were at one level and they started to slip. It might be the person, it might— to figure out what is the causal factor there. You might be noticing turnover in an area. You might have low engagement scores or a low felt sense of engagement just as you work with a particular group. So you're usually looking for those kind of signals that allow you to say, okay, I need to trace this back to find out the cause. Most of the time you can trace things back and find out the cause has something to do with leadership. Not always, but there's something involved with what leaders are doing that are impacting that. Because people look to leaders for how to behave. So they're the role models, they are the avatars. So a lot of that, those sort of warning signals, those end results that I talked about, give you real clues.

What are some of the practices that you go through when you're working with an organization or with a group of leaders to, you know, to help them identify some of those things or walk through it? You know, am I being a a good role model? You know, do I, do I have the right, the right energy here? Because obviously it's hard to look at yourself and identify some of those things. How do you, how would you work? Let's say I'm a leader listening to this. If we were to work together, how would you maybe help me through that process?

Well, I think the first thing that's most important is to understand, you know, what's the objective? What are you trying to accomplish? Because leadership in a lot of ways is simply a means to an end. It's the means to an end, as I mentioned earlier, is that kind of positive or intentional change towards something or to achieve something, and in some cases, as you described, to fix something. But it's usually about that kind of change for the better. So to understand what you're trying to accomplish makes it much more simple than saying, hey, we need to improve leadership here, whatever we're going to focus on, whether it be inspiring or creating strategy or whatever it may be. So understanding the objective first for the business and then drawing a line of sight right back to a leader's behavior for what they can do to model the kinds of things that they want others to do. And sometimes it's that simple, sometimes it's not. I will frequently spend a lot of time in companies talking with people, understanding perceptions of an individual, learning about the culture of the organization, getting perceptions of particular groups of leaders. And without listening to the schoolyard gossip, I always try to look for the specific evidence of behavior. You know, what's the noticed behavior? What's the evidence of it? And then you can make course corrections that way.

Great advice. Let's shift gears a little bit here and talk about one of the things you've, you've obviously worked with a lot of great leaders, studied a lot of great leaders, and And I know you had mentioned again offline, talking about the importance of focusing your time, your effort, energy, money, everything on the right priorities and how it's easy to get distracted, we might say, and be investing those in the wrong areas, or at least not the most valuable areas. I'd love to hear some advice from you about maybe some of the things, how to know what the right things are to invest your time and your resources in.

Yeah, there's a few predictable squandering points in organizations that are resource black holes. One of them, and I bet you everybody listening will nod here, is meetings. We know that we spend an inordinate amount of time in meetings, and part of the reason that is the case is because we're not very clear on what the meeting needs to accomplish. And there are multiple agendas present from the different participants. So I think it's rare that you truly need a meeting with 6, 8, 10 people. Most of the time, if you can get real clear on what you're trying to accomplish and determine who really needs to be involved outside of political agendas and self-interest, you can save a lot of time in meetings. And that's one of the places you can be really judicious about time, resources, and of course that all equals money. Right. You had asked about a couple of other places where you might look, is that right?

Yes, yeah, I'd love to hear. Maybe your top 3, if meetings is one, maybe a couple of others.

Yeah, and meeting is kind of all-encompassing, I know, but if you're listening, if you look at your calendar, I think if you gave it an honest look, you know you didn't need the full hour, and sometimes people— or the full 2 hours or the half day or whatever, and sometimes people will stay just because it's on the schedule. Another one is the performance appraisal process in most companies. And this is not to say— before I get all the HR folks angry with me— this is not to say that focusing on the performance of individuals is not valuable and that improving the performance of people and appraising that is not valuable, but rather that the appraisal process in most companies is very administrative, too bureaucratic, and over-engineered in terms of process. So done properly, employees are frequently getting coached and developed and having their performance monitored on a frequent basis, because the performance appraisal process is usually once, twice a year if it's done a lot, and that's just not enough to make course corrections. So that's a major time sucker and, and, and money sucker for a lot of businesses. So that's one place you can look for efficiency. And then I guess the third place I'd look is that strategic planning process. And I know we talked about that a little bit earlier, but there's an inordinate amount of time and effort and money and energy that goes into the production of nice PowerPoint slides and binders full of spreadsheets that have little to do with the actual strategy. It's usually comforting to do some of those things, but they're traps that are very expensive and very time-consuming for business. So the strategy process for both formulating and implementing can be much leaner for everybody.

That's great. So those are 3 things—

That would be my top 3, yeah.

Yeah, I was just going to say those are 3 things that a lot of times we think are just, you know, standard operating procedures. You've got to, you know, you've got to have meetings, you've got to do the appraisals, But it's good, it's good to be, be alerted that maybe those things aren't, aren't the things that you need to be spending so much, so much time on.

Sure.

What then, to flip that around, maybe what are some of the initiatives, or let me say it this way, what would be a key question that you could ask to— if you're, you know, so okay, we're looking at meetings, we're looking at performance appraisals, but if we're looking at other things, you know, other things I'm spending my time on, what might be a good qualifier to help me determine, is this activity really, you know, really a good use of my time or my money, whatever it may be?

There's one, and I believe organizations would save hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars, if they ask this before everything. And they asked simply, what is the business issue we're trying to solve? What is the business issue we're trying to solve, or slash address, I suppose? And getting very clear on the problem or the issue and defining that before moving very fast into brainstorming lots of alternatives and options and choices that we can make. Because these— this prevents you from going in a lot of different directions and gets everybody clearly aligned on what's the issue we're trying to address here. And a lot of times that is not done, and that is a cause for lots of confusion in business.

That's a good— that's a great, great tip, great advice there.

Single question. I promise it'll save millions.

Yeah, I mean, I'm a big believer, obviously, the quality of the questions you ask, you know, the better questions, the better answers you get. So that's, that's a good one. What— before we go here, I want to talk a little bit. You've got a new book obviously coming a little bit down the, down the pike called The Hidden Leader. I don't want to go before we talk a little bit about that. And maybe if you could give us a preview of what's to come there.

Yeah, The Hidden Leader, the main idea of that book is respect to the fact that a great deal of leadership and a great deal of competitive advantage in a business is not existing in the formal leadership structure. When we think of leaders, we tend to look at the formal leadership structure higher rather than lower too. Even, you know, toward the mid-levels of an organization. And there is a tremendous opportunity to have leadership that drives great business results in the front lines and individual contributors. And in my work with hundreds of companies over the last decade, I have seen tremendous leadership ability in frontline employees and maybe even at the supervisory level right above them, which you don't necessarily think of. As leaders of a business, but they act as leaders. They have a vision for why their job is important and the work that is important. They're very clear about the purpose of what the company is doing for its customers. They're excellent at communicating with colleagues and peers, and they're the people in organizations who, you know, you know who they are. As an aside, I said that to somebody. I said, "You know who the hidden leaders are?" And they said, "Well, how's that possible if they're hidden?" And I said, "Well, yeah, they're hidden, but they're not invisible. I mean, they're people, right?" But they're hidden because we don't necessarily look to them for leadership. But they are the people in the business that when a new hire comes aboard, supervisor or manager says, "Do what Sally does." Or they're the people in the organization who in meetings when they talk, it has a massive amount of sway. Over the group. They're the people that customers write in about. So you get a sense for who they are, and most of the time I hear, "Boy, if I had 100 Michaels, my company would be great." Well, this is how to get those 100 Michaels. I love that.

The hidden leader. That's perfect.

Yeah.

Well, thank you, Scott. This has been really great and insightful. Before I share your website and some other ways people can get in touch with you, out of everything we've covered today, is there anything else that I missed? Maybe one thing that a leader could do today to help their people do their best work, or any one tip that you would want to share that we didn't address today?

You know, I think this falls under the heading of creating a culture where innovation thrives. You know, I end up doing a lot of work in the area of innovation too.. And one of the things that I've realized in studying that and doing a lot of quantitative and qualitative work in that area is that innovation really isn't about necessarily one person who comes up with the great ideas. It's about creating the kind of culture where good ideas thrive everywhere. And I think if you want to start to create that kind of culture of innovation, then you need to start asking people, "How else could we do this? What is your opinion?" on how we could make this more efficient. And I would ask those questions of the people closest to your end users, whether that be a distributor or a customer, client, whatever it is. Ask those kinds of questions and you will improve your leadership ability and it will have a very fast impact on the kind of culture that you are creating. Just asking that opinion. And it doesn't guarantee that you got to take action on it, but you will get great ideas.

Great. So again, going back to the theme of asking, asking good questions.

Great. Yeah, a lot comes down to that.

Well, great. Scott, thank you again so much for everything you've shared here. And for those of you who are listening, if you'd like to learn more about Scott, you can, you can learn more on our website here at thespeakersgroup.com. You can also check out Scott's own site at edingergroup.com. That's E-D-I-N-G-E-R group.com. And Scott, I know you've got some great free resources there. You want to give people maybe a preview of what they can find there?

Yeah, there's a, there's a couple dozen videos on there. They're short videos, 2 to 4 minutes, some of them that I produced with Harvard Business Publishing, some that I produced on my own and with a production company, but they're all on different elements of leadership. So I've got some that are focused on specific competency areas like inspiring and motivating or are creating strategy. I've got some that are focused on leading the sales organization, which, you know, is its own different animal. And I've got a lot of different topic areas that you can look at, all just very quick videos. There's probably 100 articles on the website from different business journals, from my Harvard Business Review blog or my Forbes blog, and they're all available indexed by topic and source. And then there's a free newsletter It's never commercial, always just pure value, tips, techniques, things that you can do as a leader to make yourself more effective. And you can sign up for that free on the website.

Perfect.

That's it.

Great, great. Thank you, Scott. And I know you're also on Twitter @ScottKEdinger and on LinkedIn. And of course, you can find Scott's books on Amazon.com. So thank you again, Scott. And thank you, thank you to those of you who are listening to the Better Life Better Business Podcast. We'll see you next time. Thanks for listening to the Better Life Better Business Podcast. Make sure you get all of our episodes by subscribing on iTunes at betterlifebetterbusiness.com/episodes.