In Conversation - Steve Riddle Top Five Tips For Closing The Gap Between Leadership Intent and Impact

Welcome to the Top 5 Podcast with your hosts, Raoul Bricker and Lindsay Adams.

Welcome back. Our special guest today is Steve Riddle. Steve actually lives 20 minutes from where I do in Brisbane. So he's a very clever man and we're just chatting and turns out he used to live not far away from where I live right now.

How about that?

Small world. Let me tell you about Steve. He's the founder of Coach Station. Brisbane-based leadership coaching and advisory practice operating across Australia since 2010. He spent 16 years coaching leaders, working with more than 600 leaders across 90+ organizations on leadership capability, accountability, and decision quality. He is the author of Falling Into Leadership and the creator of the Effective Leader Framework. He is a QUT Queensland University of Technology Leadership Institute Fellow and a regular podcast guest and contributor. His clients range from emerging leaders to senior executives and business owners with engagements spanning one-to-one coaching, leadership workshops, and embedded organizational partnerships. And today he's here to talk to us about the top 5 tips for closing the gap between leadership intent and impact. Welcome, Steve. Great to have you.

Thanks, Lindsay and Raoul. Really appreciate the opportunity. I was just saying off the— before we were recording how good this program is. So, lovely to be a part of it.

Thank you, mate. We are delighted to have you with us. So, let's get going. Tip number 1 for closing the gap between leadership intent and impact. What have you got for us?

Most managers avoid telling people what is needed because they fear that it sounds or looks like micromanagement. It's an interesting one. I think there's many contributors, certainly in Australia. Our legislation and cultural norms have changed in the last 10 or 20 years since I've been leading teams and then coaching more recently. And part of that is fear-based. And the idea of setting expectations is how I define it. It's not rocket science, but a lot of people really fear the conversation and what they perceive to be telling and often feel that that's micromanagement and that I'm dictating or dominating a relationship or me as a manager or a leader. And A lot of the work that I do is giving people the comfort and the confidence to know that that's not only okay, but it's actually required. And what I often talk to my clients about is that leadership's owning the what and the how. So what we do and how we do it. And the what is mostly the leader's job and the how is the team's job. So it's really creating that environment where people are able to do their job to the best of their ability and allows them to own their job. I mean, that's the ownership piece and we'll talk about that in a moment, but and the accountability that comes with that is really where that gap sits, I think. So the difference between management and leadership, management's mostly about what we do. Leadership's helping people about how we do that, but it's really allowing people to do the task and the responsibilities of their role at a high standard.

So let me extend that. Leadership then is also about empowering team members to act on their own. And, you know, I always say to staff, new staff, And I give them a piece of rope and they either got to pull themselves out the water or hang themselves. I know that sounds a bit harsh, but, but I, you know, you've got to give them the rope to be able to do that in the first place.

That's absolutely true. It's interesting how often, and I see this in small businesses really predominantly, but it's true in large organizations as well, where the fear and the doubt of, uh, and the trust perhaps that comes into that to give people that scope and the rope, as you're saying there, Ray, is, you is something that we're really struggling with. I think we've got worse at this over the last 10 or 20 years rather than better. And there's many reasons for that. I touch on fear, but ego comes into it as well. I talk to my senior leaders about the fact that in remote management world and setting expectations is so important, but there's this sense of, if I can't see you, I don't trust you. I said, well, that's not an environmental thing, that's a trust thing. Where they're sitting is secondary to the fact that the trust isn't there. So you're exactly right. And that's probably, yeah, there are many reasons why it happens, but that's one of the key reasons, I think, the lack of trust in the first place. Okay.

So, so we've, we've told people the what, but we're not telling them how to really do it. Hit us up. Tip number 2 for your top 5 tips for closing the gap between leadership intent and impact. Yeah.

And it's an extension and the 5 that I've got really do sort of flow down. I'll talk to, I'll summarize that at the end. But the second point is that real accountability is not something you impose on people. It's a culture that they choose, but people are only going to choose something when they understand the context and the reason why they would bother. And we often talk about incentivization and most people automatically think about that as financial incentive or how much I get paid or my bonuses. And that's true for most people. We want to be paid fairly, but ultimately what we're really trying to tap into here is people's willingness to do it and the choice to participate in their role at a high level. And that's more about the psychological incentive rather than financial. So the questions that people ask themselves are more about why would I, why should I, why could I, why will I bother? And it's a leader's job to help connect to what we often talk about in terms of the personal values and then corporate values and so on that aren't just on a poster on a wall. They are important to create that connection about what we're doing and where it connects with what an individual's doing in their role. And that's less about the corporate culture and more about the individual's values in my experience. So, our aim's to create an opportunity for team members to be accountable, not waiting to be held accountable. And that's the big shift. I talk about these things on a scale and no accountability at all is bad. And then we often have environments or subcultures and team cultures where people are waiting to be held accountable. And that's better than no accountability at all. But I would argue that the best form of accountability is one where people are actually enabled and are able to be accountable rather than waiting to be held accountable.

So, Steve, that's an interesting point you make. And it's kind of, it's almost like a balancing on a fulcrum, isn't it? You know, we lean one way, we go too far one way, we get too far the other. How do you, you know, as someone listening, as a manager, as a leader in an organization, how do they do this? You know, like I've worked in some organizations where micromanagement has just riddled, ruined any, you know, sense of free thinking or whatever. How do you get to that middle point and have that really nice balance?

That's a great question, Lindsay. I would say to you, as with all these things, there's dozens of factors. You can't simplify to one or two, but one of the key things I've seen is where we're creating that opportunity because we are understanding what an individual actually wants from their role as much as what we're going to give them and what the business wants. And it sounds a bit soft and, you know, some people dismiss that as being, oh, that's, you know, it's important they just do their job. And I'm like, well, I'm talking about the same thing. We are talking about them doing their job, but Aren't we talking about how well someone does their job, not just that they're doing their job? The metaphor I often use is, you know, 5 people can be playing tennis and they're all playing at different standards. Someone could be playing at Wimbledon, someone's playing D-grade in a local competition, but they all can say they're playing tennis. But obviously there's a big difference and that's fine if someone wants to play D-grade. I'm not judging the performance, but often we talk about things in very black and white terms such as, oh, well, we are all playing tennis. And I'm like, well, aren't we really playing at different standards? So, to answer your question, Lindsay, it's more about making sure people are capable and they understand what's required for their role. And that's where we do have to do a bit of telling. But then, as I said earlier, the how we do that is we really should be leaving that up to our team members to come up with the answers. It's not our job as leaders and managers and business owners to tell people how they're going to do it. And that seemed like a big leap for a lot of people that I work with, not because they've got malintent or they're bad people, but because they just don't understand in terms of their skillset, how to actually make that real. And that's why I talk a lot about accountability and expectation setting because it allows people to actually own their role. And we're giving them, as Rael said, we're giving them the rope to actually do that in a positive way, not from a threatening way or from a, you know, being accountable is not catching people out doing the wrong thing. It's making sure that people are able to be accountable and learning from the things that don't go so well, but also recognizing the 80 or 90% of the time when they're doing good work. Because most of the time people are doing the right work the right way. And we should recognize that too.

Yeah, I guess, I mean, mostly people go to work with the right intention, don't they? It's sometimes it's just how that pans out. All right, let's move on now. Tip number 3.

Yeah, so following on from our discussion, your intent and your impact are not the same thing. And interestingly, many leaders don't check the gap. And so if we think about intention and we're talking about accountability, it is interesting that Often, we have an agreement. It could be in a one-on-one or an environment where someone's committing to doing task X over the next week. And often, and I find this quite remarkable, to be honest, in terms of leadership, often we don't follow that up. But more importantly, we're not creating that opportunity again for people to be accountable, for them to follow up with us. We should allow people to be proud of the work they're doing. And that's why one-on-ones and these opportunities and formal discussions, as well as informal discussions, but the formal discussions allow people to update us with the work that they've committed to. And instead of us telling them what we've seen, I might've seen 10 minutes worth of work in that week, someone's lived and breathed it for 24 by 7 in the work that they're doing. Surely the best thing to do is ask the question about how you feel you went. Where are the challenges? Where are the successes? What worked well? What didn't? Have you learned something from it? Have you reinforced some strengths that you've already got? And so on. And these are the conversations that you should be having, but you can hear in the little examples I'm giving, it's much more about the questions we ask than it is about the statements we make. And almost universally, we fall into the trap of making statements and telling people how they've on rather than asking them how they've gone in their mind. Okay.

So what we're talking about there is some level of assessment of evaluation in a formal sense. I mean, do you think that the sway has also been, and I hate grouping people, but millennials and Gen Zs who live in Google time and Siri time and want instantaneous feedback, whereas the boomers probably were quite happy with their 6-monthly performance reviews. And has the world shifted to the, I call it the little puppy dog syndrome, where the puppy dog's going, how did I do? How did I do? How did I do? Every day, rather than waiting for a process to happen?

That's a great question. I like to think of opportunities and possibilities, and to answer that succinctly, because it's complex, Surely we should be working in the environment that works best for the individual. So if you've got someone that's 55 and likes to work a certain way, then that's okay. If we meet with them once a month or once every 6 weeks for a one-on-one, I still think the opportunity is greater than that. But if someone needs to be meeting with you every week for a couple of months because they're newer or you want to create that environment of accountability we're talking about in that culture, then that's also okay. Now, I would argue that the better situation is for creating those opportunities for people to be able to tell you in that millennial case you're talking about. If we've got a weekly one-on-one, then again, it's not about us telling them how they've gone. It's more about asking how they feel they've gone. And your original question there was about measurement. We have KPIs, KRAs, different ways of measuring these in a formal objective sense, and they're deeply important. Everything I do is about outcomes and performance, but I just genuinely believe, and again, I'll talk about this in a moment, the way that we do the things or how we do the things is much more important. And so we're not just talking about, as I said before, playing tennis, we're talking about how we're playing tennis. But how can you possibly know that if you're not treating the person as an individual and finding out what they want? And I think, Raelle, to your point, I honestly think it's a little bit overstated, the generational differences, whilst acknowledging there is difference because we're all trying to do, let's say I've got 5 people again trying to do the same job, paid to do the same work at a similar level. The difference isn't about their KPIs and the performance in terms of the outputs. It's much more about how we're enabling them to do their job to meet those performance pieces. And that's an individual thing and that's not changed for hundreds of years. I just think we're more aware of how to do that nowadays.

Okay, fantastic. So let's move on. Hit us up, tip number 4 for your 5 tips for closing the gap between leadership intent and impact.

Love it. And reflection is just such a deep, deep, deep important piece. So reflection only has value if it changes what you do after your reflection or what you do next. And I often talk about the fact that we have, we are all exposed to different experiences and exposure. So our life is full of opportunities and experiences. but I've met hundreds, I've coached over 600 people now, and just because we get to a certain age doesn't mean that we have wisdom. And that wisdom is the things that we've reflected on over our journey, the hundreds, if not thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands of things that have happened, good, bad, and indifferent, and how we've learned from those opportunities. So my point is that not everyone who lives those experiences learns from them. And the difference in my mind, and one of the key differences between those that as we get older, we become wiser and our intuition improves and so on, are those that are strongly reflective. And that leads to other skills like judgment and discernment, but judgment and discernment that are based on something, not just based on gut feel and hope. You know, blind hope's not a strategy. So the idea of reflection then allows us to give ourselves credit, as I said earlier, to acknowledge those things that we're already doing well and to talk about those strengths. And when I presented to the executive team, here's the things that went well, and my 3 key points were received well and so on. But there was a bit of humor I used during the discussion and maybe that fell a bit flat. Okay, why was it? The type of humor, the timing of the humor, the audience. My delivery? These are the things that we learn from. But I see, as a sub-point here, I see a lot of people in reflection become very self-critical, hypercritical nowadays. Certainly in the last 20 years, that's changed. But they'll really labor the point about what didn't go well. And I'm like, no, you learn from that. That's fabulous. And you don't ignore it. And we're not in denial here, but that's just one of the aspects of that presentation. And let's acknowledge the times and the moments when it went well as well. So that's what, in simple terms, what reflection is. It enables us to be thinking about the things that we're about to do as we're doing things. And then afterwards, we're reflecting the whole time. And that's a deeply, deeply important skill and something I wasn't talking about 10 or 12 years ago, but I realized the power of that because I've seen the success of people who are reflective by nature and what that means for them as their career and lives outside of work grow as well.

So, would it be fair to say, Steve, if you've come up with a— if you've been reflecting and you've come up with a negative reflection that you should try and outweigh it with a positive reflection?

Yeah, it's interesting, Lizzy, and this, I'm going to say something that I know falls a bit flat for a lot of people, but I hope this resonates. I honestly don't define things as positive and negative really. I mean, obviously, if you've abused someone, you know, verbally abused someone in the workplace or whatever, that's deeply negative, right? But we're talking about the general behaviors and attributes and things that we do day to day, and mostly they are just things. And so, this is my point. We often talk about these tasks in very extreme ways. You know, I'm a bad person, or I feel shame because I made a mistake. Mistake in that presentation. It's like, yeah, you're not a bad person, you've just— it's an opportunity, surely. So I even— and again, it's not about thinking positively. I'm not into Tony Robbins and so on, you know, and people— if people are, that's fine. But it's not about positive thought for positive sake. It's about recognizing the reality of situations. And I think in the complex world of technology and legislation and leadership now, it's actually getting harder. And that's why these things are more important, not less important, because the complexity is increasing. So by really understanding who we are and the opportunities that we have rather than seeing them as really strong or really bad or really negative or really positive. It's more just seeing them for what they are. And I like to think of things more as opportunity and possibility rather than really, really good things or really bad things because I think they're a little bit over and understated. And unfortunately, it affects our self-esteem when we're overly critical of self and talk to ourselves that way too often as well.

I loved your Kind of throwaway line, things are just things. And I think, you know, boiling it down to the lowest common denominator, you're absolutely right. I think we do get wound up sometimes too much in, did I say that wrong? Did I offend that person? Did I, did I, did I? Will I, will I, won't I? Do I, don't I? You know, so interesting observation. All right, let's round it off now. Tip number 5, what have you got for us?

And it flows on from reflection. And just to add to or join the conduit between the two, reflection isn't about going down rabbit holes. So, you know, it's not about overthinking things and becoming so self-critical that it becomes a problem. And so if we think about that, then the 5th point is about self-awareness. And self-awareness is not simply a soft skill, it's the most important leadership and relationship skill or behavior or tool that we can find. And I talked about reflection being a learning for me. over the last 15, 16 years of coaching people and 20-odd years of leading teams, I would say that if I had a sense of self-awareness being so important 20 years ago, I cannot overemphasize or underemphasize how important that is nowadays. And it's because it underpins all that we've discussed today. It's that degree of self-awareness and that self-honesty and talking about the reality of situations and things like denial or avoidance or fear or ego. These are all barriers to those. And again, we all have ego and we all fear things. So I'm not saying just don't fear things or don't have an ego. It's not about, again, it's not binary, it's not black and white, it's how we manage these things. And that's really where that self-awareness becomes the critical aspect and how it relates to emotional intelligence and the elements within the EQ space. But that self-awareness is critical because if we're prepared to be honest with ourselves and see it in a way that is real based on what we know, our reality might be different than others, but if we can explain that and explore it and articulate it to others, at least then that gives context to others. And allows them to reflect on a situation and to own their world and be accountable and all the other aspects we've talked about. In the absence of that self-awareness, then we tend to lack all of those skills. We don't give context. We don't seek or give clarity. We're not curious by nature. Fear tends to overtake us. Our self-esteem lowers and so on and so on and so on. So it's such a critical cornerstone, not the only point, but a deep and important cornerstone of leadership and relationships, generally speaking.

And is that a self-awareness not only of self, but of how we go back to number one, your first point, telling people the what without owning the how? Is that self-awareness about actually being self-aware of our own leadership style?

Yeah, that's such a brilliant point. And if you think about that first point, to circle back, we're talking about the what is your job, the how is the team members. If we don't have that self-awareness, both as a leader and as a team member, then we're often gonna be talking about the what. But by definition, we're going to be talking about the tasks, the things that we do, not how we're going to be doing it. So that's a really interesting way of putting it and not something I've thought of so cleanly, and I'm going to steal that, Rael. So thank you. But that's a really important point. And emotional intelligence, which self-awareness is part of, there's 4 components. 2 are about you and 2 are about you and others. And the self-awareness component's critical, but how we relate to others and how we use that to our and others' advantage is deeply important as well. It's not just patting ourselves on the back and saying, I am self-aware. It's about how we utilize that, of course.

Yeah, I'm really, yeah, I like that. And I think it's, yeah, you're right on the money. I am looking at the clock, Steve. We are almost out of time. Should our listeners want to get in touch with you and find out more, or maybe consider being coached by you, what's the best way for them to get in touch?

Thanks, Lindsay. 2 ways that are pretty standard, I guess, but LinkedIn, if you look up Steve Riddle or Coach Station, Steve Riddle in Brisbane, you'll find me quite easily. If you Google Steve Riddle and/or Coach Station, I'm pretty prominent in the Google and the AI searches. The easiest way would be to go to my website, coachstation.com.au, and you can explore. I've got many resources and tools, many all free, and access to my book, Full-End Leadership, that I've written and many other things that are all designed to help people to become more effective in their relationships and ultimately leadership. And that's really why we do what we do.

Fantastic. Thank you very much, Steve Riddle from Brisbane, Australia, for joining us today. Thank you to my co-host, Lindsay Adams, also from Brisbane, Australia. And this is Raoul Bricka from Perth, Western Australia, signing off for another edition of the Top 5 Podcast.