102: The Best Leaders Keep it Simple

Welcome everyone to another episode of the Reality Based Leadership Podcast. I'm the CEO of Reality Based Leadership, Alex Dorr, and I'm excited you're joining today for this episode because this one was a thought I had recently after a speaking engagement as I was flying home. And, and it was about the idea that our leadership should be, our approach at least should be pretty boring. I was thinking about how so many of us make leadership really fancy and clever, and we try to like optimize it before we find some standardized ways to approach the bulk of the challenging situations you face with your team. And we miss that there's patterns. And that's what we study at Reality-Based Leadership are the sources of drama that keep teams from success and happiness, or if you will, the interferences that keep teams from being their best. And there's not 100 of them, but there's these patterns. And with that being patterns that come up, although there's different elements to them, as a leader, if you have some solid ways to absorb that, process that with those you lead, and then be able to get into what I call next right action with clarity, you can handle about anything that comes your way. Although some of the context might be different and some of the business realities will be different. You'll have a proven anchor that you can trust when those times come. And so it got me thinking about this idea of the best leaders really are boring or really standardized in their approach. Now, it doesn't mean as you meet them, as you're interacting with them, as they are with their teams, that they're boring individuals. In fact, quite the opposite. They're some of the most fascinating individuals where you often see even in challenging moments or big-time disruption or where things definitely aren't going the way that we had hoped, they're still pretty light. They have a sense of humor. They're serious about the problem, but they're able to help us get through it and still find joy in those tough moments. And why that happens is because many times they've got experience. They've been through similar things like this, and they know that staying with it, trusting their principles, trusting their great team, they're going to get to the other side. But my hunch after doing this for about a decade is that they also have some proven principles based on universal truths and how humans respond to stress that they use to be able to handle these situations in a one-on-one setting or in a team setting. And so I want to share some of my thoughts I had on how to help you do this, to be able to be a more solid, steady leader, and to be able to hopefully handle those tough moments That would be, you know, opportunities for drama to really come in at a high level to be able to handle those. And, and so let's talk about how to make leadership easy. Maybe the word's boring. Maybe it is just so solid that your team is able to be soothed as they come to you with their stress. So let's look at number 1 here. I got 3 of them for you. So number 1 is really make sure you're using frameworks. Not instincts and not gut feelings. Now, sometimes if you're really grounded in frameworks and, you know, good leadership philosophies or some of the classics, and you have some of those tools ingrained in you, then you can trust your instincts. You, I would say, actually trust those instincts because you're probably onto something in those moments. But if you're not currently using some sort of framework to absorb drama, or what I call people facing unpreferred realities, you're then just kind of shooting from the hip and you might even react as your team reacts. When they come in what I call low self and they're stressed, you might meet them with the energy they come in. But as a leader, we got to be able, when people come in with what I call low self energy, we want to meet them at neutral. We want to be a safe place to land where they come and they know that as they bring a challenge to us, We're not just going to take care of it for them, fix it. So then they're the helpless ones. We're going to have them land in a safe space. We're going to do what I call love them up. And then at the appropriate time with discernment, we're going to call them up to greatness and say, you're capable. We can handle this. We can find next right action in the short term, the midterm, the long term to work through this. And so, but that's going to take frameworks and some discipline. So some of my favorites are You know, I start them off as mantras for those quick moments when you're interrupted and you're not, you know, expecting the drama to come and you're, you're caught off guard as a leader. I'm always living with my first framework and mantra is stop judging, start helping. I can't tell you how many times someone comes up to me with an internal challenge or an external problem with a client. And it has a A surrounding of judgment. It's laced with judgment, so to speak. You know, someone comes up and it's like, oh my gosh, you know, we didn't get this particular, you know, PowerPoint over to the client and they didn't say they needed it this early and their tech team needs it. And it's like really unorganized there and it's all chaos. And I can, as a leader, get involved with my team and go spinning into, you know, nobody ever tells us these aren't organized and we should take the lead on these and, and all of that. But instead, I love to sit with stop judging, start helping. And I love the person up that might be stressed. I go, I see that this is disappointing, that we're seemingly letting a client down on one of the steps here. And that you're frustrated because this is something that wasn't on your list. That's now, you know, on our list, validate the experience. And then I like to go into start helping. It's, I might even ask the question, what's like the most helpful thing we could do right now? And they might say, well, we could check and see if that PowerPoint is almost done, or if you'd started on it in our Drive where we hold our PowerPoints and have you finish it in 10 minutes. I go happy to rearrange because this is priority for the client and do that. But that question sparks us out of judgment, whose fault it is, who, you know, has dropped the ball on this, and into we're all back on the same team. If we could suspend judgment, Settle into neutrality. What would be next right action? Now, I'd like to say I'm perfect at this. I'd like to say, although I'm supposed to be the best expert in the world at ditching the drama and stop judging, start helping, that I don't get into judgment. But I'll be honest with you, I teach this for a living. This is what I speak on and I screw it up, but only daily. But in my best moments, that framework is right there as an anchor for when those moments come. So I call it stop judging, start helping. Whenever there's judgment coming around, you're in a meeting and it's focused on why we can't, why we shouldn't have to, why things are all just, you know, going to heck in a handbasket. If I just raise my hand and genuinely say, you know, I see that we're in this situation. I see some of the challenges here, some of the circumstances, but one thing I think I could do to help is I'm going to spend some time here. And I just plant a different flag in the conversation. About helpfulness and how we could. If you have a team of 10, if you have a team of 20 on that call, if you have a team of 4, sometimes 2 people see what you're doing. It's almost like they have a twinkle in their eye that, that sounds more like possibilities and not drama. They come along with you and you're able to just steer that whole conversation into a better place. And so leaders, we got to remember, we're energy managers all day, every day. Whether you're a formal leader, whether you're an informal leader, we manage energy. We manage energy away from why we can't or why we shouldn't have to or why it won't work into what would great look like and how could we get there. So Stop Judging, Start Helping is the fastest mini framework to make sure you're doing that for the bulk of the day. And if you go to bed at the end of the week and you, for 94% of the time, were putting your input and your spirit into Stop Judging, Start Helping, I promise you'll be happy with how you contributed. So will your colleagues. So will your organization. And I, sometimes I get done with Stop Judging, Start Helping in a keynote and it's the first 10 minutes and, you know, we have another hour, we have another 6 hours if it's a training. And I'm like, you know, we could just stop the whole thing for now and just spend 2 weeks, all of us living Stop Judging, Start Helping. And we'll see how that works. Like that one technique. And obviously we go into the rest of the content for the day, but I really think that is a basic framework that even I get out of sometimes that can transform your life. So that's the first one. Another one I love that I've kind of already mentioned is, and it's in my new book coming out in September, is the Call to Greatness framework. And this really is about when someone brings me drama or an unpreferred reality, how do I absorb that? support them and help us both eventually end up at next right action. And the mantra behind that framework is love people up and then call people up to greatness. You have no right as a leader to call someone up to greatness if you haven't loved them up first. And I say this over and over, but it's always a constant reminder because some of us as reality-based leaders, if you've been loving our stuff for a while, if you've been You know, following it for 2 weeks, 2 years, or 10 years. We love our tools. We love a good call to greatness. We love a good coaching question that flips the conversation and toggles someone up into high self and gets them into how we could. We love when those work and they're fast and we want to get things done. But if you go with that call to greatness and you haven't on the macro built a relationship with this colleague, haven't, you know, got to know them a bit. What are their hopes and dreams? Um, you know, what do they have pets? What's their family? What are their kids into? Like, if we haven't built that relationship, that classic relationship building, it gets to be a little harsh if we go right into the call to greatness. Now, in the micro, loving people up is— this will go into the framework. The call to greatness framework is I first validate your experience that this is an unpreferred reality, that what you're bringing to me Is indeed frustrating. Like I can connect heart to heart that if I was in that situation, I'd be so frustrated too. And I'm here to support you. Now I don't jump in there and collude with them and get into sympathy and say, you, you know, you poor thing, there's nothing you can do. I want to make sure I'm holding that space with the framework of empathy, which is I love you up and say it's frustrating, but I now need to get into the call to greatness. Let's go into cleaning up your thinking. Around this problem. So if someone comes in and says, I'm surrounded by idiots and no one cares around here and no one knows what they're doing and no one ever follows process and I have to do everything around here. And that's why we don't have the information. We have to look at that honestly and say, before we get into action here, because we're super charged up, what do we know for sure? So you said you're surrounded by idiots. Okay. Let's look at this team you're working with. A couple of people got a master's degree, probably a couple of people got 15 years of experience doing this. A couple of them have a couple patents. We have a couple of people with PhDs. So you're surrounded by idiots. Is it true? If you really entertain that question, we're cleaning up our thinking. We have a couple of folks on our team that aren't understanding the requirement. See how different that is than the initial unpreferred reality? But see, I'm in a framework. I am having a conversation, but in my head, I'm anchored in the Call to Greatness framework. So I validated your experience, step 1. Step 2, I'm looking at, let's clean up our thinking, get down to the facts. Now, step 3 is a little dicier, but I call it, what's your part in it so far? Now, this one's about accountability. And this one sometimes is tough for people to settle into, even myself, because accountability, the ego hates getting into accountability when it comes to a situation that's surrounded by drama. And it's what's your part in it? You didn't get the information, but I also say, did you follow up? Have you checked in? Was it the chicken or the egg where you had, you know, said, hey, I need this. And there was a conversation 2 weeks ago, but you hadn't brought it up again. Like just checking what's your part in where the ball has been dropped, if any. And now the next step in the Call to Greatness framework is what's our role in the solution? What's our role here? Like, is there a way to change the whole process of getting information? You know, are you a decision maker? Are they, are people asking us, because this is a problem that's happening widespread, are they asking us to put up a proposal of how to fix this process issue so we can have better communication? Or is this in this moment where we're just really what I call informed, a good person to be informed that we're in a problem here and we need us to tend to the need in the short term. I call it tend to the need in the short term, although it's not ideal, and just Get it back on track. Now, in this case, a lot of times it's just we're good to person to be informed. We're not enabling that, but it's our job to connect into next right action. And so from there, we know our role. We've taken some accountability. We're now more neutral in our thinking. And now when we go engage with that individual that we didn't get the information from, we're able to figure out what is the way to work forward differently in the future. And so again, the idea here is That's not instincts. That's not trying to manipulate, manipulate you and like have some magical dazzling coaching approach that just comes from all high. And I know how to solve it. This is a disciplined call to greatness approach to love someone up and then get them into next right action, call them up to greatness. And so more to come on that, but that's one of my favorite frameworks is validate your experience. Let's clean up our thinking, see the problem clearly. Let's find our part in it. Let's know our role in the solution and let's get into next right action. And that is so powerful. So as I'm talking to someone struggling, or if I'm struggling myself, I'm trying to fulfill those 5 steps because it always shoots me into next right action. Another framework I love, super simple. I almost have a curse I tell people with this framework is given that. I joke, if you're going to be a leader, for sure, you're going to want to get a tattoo I'm just kidding. You can start with a sticky note of given that... somewhere you can see it. Because when you're in leadership, most of the day will be unpreferred realities, disruption to your days, things you didn't expect. Someone dropped the ball and people come to you and say, look at this mess. Look at this disaster. Look at this unpreferred reality. And I often love to say, thank you so much for sharing. Dang, this is not ideal. That's an unpreferred reality. I hate when we're unable to get to the next step of the process because of behavior like this. Now, given that, here's where we're at in all of those constraints, those circumstances. What would great look like? What's our ideal future like? What if someone was being perfect right now? What would that look like if they were taking action on this problem? What would it look like? And I love asking that question because so many of us know what great looks like because it's the standard in which we judge others. Is you want to know what great looks like? It's what they're not doing. It's what marketing's not doing. It's what customer success isn't doing. We all know what great looks like. It's what we judge others as the standard to. I just like to use that question to put it outside of us to say, if someone was taking care of that, anybody, what would they be doing? And then I like to say, go follow those simple instructions. And so given that unpreferred reality, what would our goal be? What would great look like? And then what's the next thing we could do? What could you do? And then how could I support you? And I love that. So it's not feeling like I'm throwing it back on the person, but essentially as a leader, my job's to coach the person in front of me. Even if it's one of my top performers, the person in front of me usually needs my help the most. Even if they're tattling on someone who's not doing what you need, that's a separate conversation. But I gotta grow this person on how to handle that in the moment when I'm not there. To call that person up as a colleague. And so given that, what would great look like? What could you do to help? If something comes to you or that person in the conversation, you have your next right action. That framework, along with Stop Judging, Start Helping, Call to Greatness framework, pick one of those, is great to have a predictable way when people come to you with problems to be able to support them, but not collude and over-function and fix it. Really big for leadership. Now, second point is all around this is when you're doing this, what starts to happen is you're so predictable and almost so boring that your team knows exactly the questions or the tools you're going to use before they come to you. So you'll start to see, and I had a leader, I say this because I had a leader that was really consistent like this. One of my favorite leaders ever, by the way, not a harsh leader, not a boring leader. As you think about it, a really helpful leader, because what would happen is I'm like, oh my gosh, I'm going to go talk to You know, um, Molly, my leader, because I'm so frustrated that X, Y, and Z is happening. And as I'm walking to her office, I start to think, dang, given this unpreferred reality, yep, that's not ideal. What would great look like if I was being great? What would be next right action? And as I'm almost to her office, I'm like, well, I could do these 3 things. Why don't I just go be great and I'll skip the 15-minute conversation. The framework starts to live inside my head. I call it the shadow of a leader, is the frameworks in my head and I'm using how they would have coached me. I can just skip that part and go be great. Now, it doesn't mean I never go to my leader, but it means I take care of the 80% of things I used to go to them for. And now when I bring something, it actually needs to be flagged to that level and they can help at their level of influence and access to decision-making and meetings that I'm not in. And so this next thing is, as you're predictable, With your approach, your team learns to trust that. They learn to trust coming to you that they'll, you know, land in a place that's safe where you'll love them up. And then we'll eventually get to, here's what we can do about it together. And you'll support alongside with their accountability. This becomes a really healthy dynamic. Without that dynamic of what I call shared accountability, you get into this codependency cycle where whenever someone's stuck, they bring the problem to the leader. The leader feels good because they've used to be able to solve that. So they go down and fix it, or they tell them what to do. And it becomes this vicious cycle, like a slot machine where I get less and less capable. You get doing more and more of my work. And then eventually as a leader, I resent you. And then I get scared because I'm not capable. So this is why these frameworks in boring leadership is so important on both sides, leadership and individual contributor. Now, lastly, I want to finish with all of this comes together because I've been fascinated by this study that came out and it is old and it's, it's a study they did to try and have better parks in cities. But how it works is they had a group of young children and they went with a caregiver to 2 different parks that were very similar, but one had a fence around it. And it's a fence you could see through. It wasn't too high. It wasn't like a cement fence. But it was a chain-link fence. You could see through the city and it was a park. Now the other park did not have that fence. And so they thought that when they take these kids to the park that's open, it's going to be a disaster. These kids are going to see the opening and the whole city and the streets and the cars and the dogs, and they're just going to run away because they're just going to go play and explore the city. Well, to their surprise, when they took the caregiver there and there was a playground, but no fence, They looked at all that, but they just cowered around the caregiver. They were kind of scared. They just really didn't explore the playground and the area. They just stayed around the caregiver. There was too, almost too much freedom, too much play opportunities without the fence. And then what was so fascinating is they took the same group over to a park, very similar looking with equipment, but it had that fence. And what was so amazing is those kids immediately went and explored all around the area. They were picking flowers and rocks and they were all over the equipment and they went to all corners of the fence and they were just playing, exploring. And it was this idea that if you put a little bit of structure, people know where to play. And I think a lot of leaders, for whatever reason, think that their teams want just do it as you want. You're free to, you know, kind of handle that how you want. We don't really have a lot of processes. We like people to be free spirits and we like people to use their expertise and figure it out and do manual workarounds. And that works for a while, but eventually that just creates chaos. Too much play is chaos. Too much structure is overmanaging, controlling, micromanager. And so this idea of having frameworks and a little bit of structure is perfect for teams to say, here's how we interact in a healthy way. When we have drama, here's how we work through problems intentionally. Here's our structure. This is evidence-based. It's based on the psychology, and it helps us move from our low self to high self and bring the best outta you. Top of your licensure, top of your training. I make sure you're in your highest self. That's what these structures do. So when you come to me, I'll be asking questions. I'll be walking us through some decision-making. And then from there, the rest is your play. You can innovate within that structure. That's where, when I'm not there, as long as you're using a bit of this structure, make your own decisions, trust yourself. You don't need to ask me for permission on everything. And this is where point one of having some structures, as it transfers to your teams, you can scale your leadership. You can be in many places at once, and you can be ditching the drama all over without you having to be there. And this is where reality-based leadership really goes to the next level. And so these are some thoughts, uh, and I'd love to know what you think about this. If as a leader, you've gotten a little guilty of getting too fancy and clever and looking for the next fancy leadership philosophy. I find where reality-based leadership is working great. And then someone's like, what else you got? I'm like, well, are you using the tools? Are you going through, you know, these frameworks consistently? Oh, we did for 3 months and now people want something else. Like, don't get fancy and clever. Keep it simple. Find your go-to structured, intentional ways to think through problems and call people to it with a lot of love. You'll really enjoy how your teams become more equipped, more capable, and they start to solve so many problems before it comes to you. And so thank you for listening. I hope you're loving the podcast. As always, subscribe if you can, these will be coming out more consistently. I'd love for you to rate and share with your teams and start a discussion. That's the best way is listen to this, use it as learning, and then start a discussion. And please let me know what topics you'd like to hear at our website, www.realitybasedleadership.com. Keep loving people up, but as always, make sure you're calling them up to greatness. I'll see you on the next one.