In this episode of the Reality-Based Leadership podcast, host Alex Storr explains the core principle that great leaders "lead first, manage second." He begins by contrasting the common pattern of managers who spend most of their time fixing problems before coaching their people, and introduces a new approach that puts coaching the person in front of you ahead of fixing circumstances. Alex shares a detailed anecdote about a high‑performing team member who uncovered a colleague falsifying time‑sheet entries. Instead of immediately launching a managerial investigation, Alex demonstrates how he shifted to a leadership stance: he asked the high performer probing, supportive questions, explored how the situation could be turned into a coaching moment, and considered how to help the tardy employee rather than simply punish them. The story illustrates the distinction between leadership (winning hearts and minds, coaching, building loyalty, recognizing and calling people to greatness) and management (delivering ROI, standardizing processes, enforcing non‑negotiables, automating grunt work). Alex outlines practical steps for managers to free up time for leadership, such as defining 7‑10 non‑negotiable processes, standardizing work through software and AI, and using simple coaching questions like “What did you do to help?” or “How could we support you?” He emphasizes that when non‑negotiables are clear and automated, managers can spend more time leading. The episode closes with a call to share the ideas, and an invitation to Reality‑Based Leadership’s workshops, keynotes, and tools that help teams ditch drama and call each other to greatness.
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Let me tell you about an experience I had that completely shifted the way I lead my team. In this week's episode, we're diving deep into one of my favorite leadership principles, which is lead first, manage second. And we're going to get into that, but many of us are managing, managing, managing, And then hopefully there's time for leading on top of it, or we're managing first, leading second. And today I want to shift and introduce a new approach that transformed the way I led the moment I accidentally realized I needed to start doing it. So welcome to this week's episode. I'm Alex Storr, CEO at Reality-Based Leadership. And if you're here, you know, this podcast is all about how do we lead without drama or lead beyond drama? Build alignment in our teams and call those we lead to greatness. So if you're into doing that as a leader and being your best self, and most importantly, inviting others to be their best selves, then you are in the right place. And this podcast today is going to help you do that because this lesson, I wish I would have learned so much earlier than I did, because the main idea here is really looking at the difference between leadership and management. And I might do a separate podcast that goes deeper dive into this, but I want to go at a little bit of that. And then the idea of where do we lead? Where do we manage? And I was once asked by someone, they're like, how often should I be managing or leading? Is it 50/50? You know, 50% of the time, 50% of the time, 70/30. And I came out when they, when they asked that and said, the idea is you have to do both, but the best leaders, they lead first and manage second. Said differently, always think about the person in front of you needs your leadership the most before you go out and fix circumstances or manage circumstances. It's calling that person to greatness in front of you first. So, so let me give you a quick story to show where I, where I learned this. And so I had a couple of team members in one of my first leadership roles that solid team, we're doing all right. And eventually I had a team member come up And it was one of my best team members, high performer, just your right hand gets everything done. Just think of your rock solid team member. And they had found out that someone else on the team had been showing up late and worse yet, they lied about it 3, I think it was maybe 4 times on their timesheet, about 15 minutes each time. So we got about an hour of time, you know, that, that has been lied about there. And so in comes one of my top team members and they are telling me like, this is bad and they are, you know, they found them out and this was like, took a little bit of investigative work. And it hit me typically in my leadership, and maybe you might approach this as well. We, we obviously have a problem there. Like, not only are we late, not only is it getting worse because we're lying about it. And now we have like that integrity is broken. And this is core, you know, principles of what we don't do on the team I was, I was leading. And so usually with that, I would run out and try and like go figure out what happened, investigate it and go, you know, figure out, is it true and all of that. And that's really managing the circumstances. It's managing the situation. And I had been thinking a lot about like, where do I jump in and do that instead of lead and grow the person in front of you? I had a mentor that had shared that with me is always coach the person in front of you. I had been asking over and over, like, how do I know I'm doing enough coaching? And I'm there with my team. They're like, keep it simple. Whoever's in front of you, it's probably a chance at a coaching moment. You can remove, know, a barrier that they might be stuck in, in their thinking. You can get them reflecting. You could show them that they're more capable than they can imagine. There's always those moments with the person in front of you. And so I realized there was my top performer in front of me, seemingly giving me important information for sure about what's happening on our team. And what I did this time was so interesting. I led first instead of managed second. I go, you know, um, we'll just say Mike, 'cause that's my dad's name. I'll go, Mike, Just curious. Thanks for sharing, but how did you know all of this? And they were so proud to go into a story. They're like, okay, first we had to see and figure out on the timesheet, like what they were actually putting. And so we got that information. And then what we did is I had found them and saw that they lied about it. I had, you know, hid and kind of saw them do it to see if they really showed up on when they said or not. And I realized they had put 10 minutes and it's actually 15 minutes they were late. So I got that information. And then I got a couple of others from the team to do a little stakeout with me to make sure that I had some other people that had seen this. And so I'm starting to hear all of the project this took to figure out this person that was lying. And I started to do the math a bit. And let's just say it was basically like $100, $150, let's say overall, this person being late, us figuring it out. If you just put a number on it, $150, that was the person being late. And I started to ask myself, well, whose crime is bigger in this situation? And I looked over at the other team here, my high performer, by the way, my top performer had been on this wild goose chase trying to prove this problem here. And, and I'm not enabling that. We'll come back to it. They had done their own individual stakeout. They had done a lot of investigative work. They got others involved. And next thing you know, as I add up those others, time, efforts, and how they put together a little proposal. And now they figured out when to tell me, we're looking at about $150 of lost cost here for the organization. And over here, we're at like $1,500 is the cost. And so the question becomes, whose crime is bigger? Not to mention the cost of righteousness. We got others that are judging instead of helping, all of the principles that we really try and move away from in our team. And so this was the classic case of whose crime is bigger leading into this principle of leading first, coaching the person in front of you and managing second. And so I asked again, I asked a few more questions. It's like, so when you notice this person is late, I'm just curious, Mike, what did you do to help? You know, I love stop judging, start helping. Like, did you try anything to help? You have a team member that's been late 3 straight days. They're not usually late. Have you talked to them about it? Well, no, I haven't asked if anything's going on. You know, I didn't do anything. I was like, what if? Did you try and set up their computer? Did you get them a coffee? Like, could you imagine the workplace you were in if whenever you were late and you're scrambling in after, you know, like for me dropping kids off and they're crying sometimes and you're trying to just get them into class, someone walks in and your coffee's there just how you like it. Your computer's set up. You got your notepad or whatever you need set up and you got a team member saying, We know you've been having, you know, a couple of days with that sleep regression that aren't so, so rough right now. You're, or they're rough right now that you've been talking about. So we're trying to help you get set up. We know sometimes the mornings can be tough. Can you imagine how beautiful that workplace would be instead of our top person judging and all the things I just talked about? And so what am I getting at here? Lead first, manage second. When you're thinking of management, it's really working on the business in the most general sense. And I'll come into that pillar here. Leadership's about the hearts and minds, coaching your people, inviting self-reflection, leaning into building loyalty on a team from less judgment and more helping, and being really responsive when there's something that a team member is doing that leads to drama or being responsive with recognition if they're doing some great things. We want to be able to give recognition. That's a big part of being a leader. And we also want to call out consistently when someone's falling short. That's, that's building, that's leadership. That's building loyalty on a team. And that's the lead-first side that I was doing when I was coaching the person here, my high performer. Now on the management side, that is really about, it can be really simple. It is about understanding that as a manager, we have one job with the resources we're given. And is that, that is to deliver a return on investment in an efficient way. That's really the management side of our role is taking our resources, whether it's access to equipment, staff, intellectual property, the brand, and using all of that in our area for a good return on investment. And how do you do that? Really simple. I like to start at the bottom with outcomes or our results that we're measuring. We've gotten really good in the last 15 years or so in most of our businesses of measuring what matters. And so delivering on outcomes that hopefully you're measuring in your business. And I always say that here, if you're not measuring something clearly that, you know, is your outcomes, or you have a dashboard of that, try and find that for your team. So we have our outcomes. Now, if you want outcomes that are repeatable, sustainable, knowledge transferable, meaning if you bring someone else into the team, they can quickly get those. They're low risk, low cost. Like if you want in-the-bag outcomes, that is best done through processes. Standardization. I say you want to standardize everything you can get your hands on. So many people I talk to right now are like, oh my gosh, I don't want the robots to replace a lot of my work. My response is, please robots replace a lot of the grunt work that I don't like doing. That's really soul-sucking in my day-to-day. I would love so much of that to be standardized with software, You know, AI. So then it frees me up to do higher-level work, like connecting with my clients and customers in a more personal way. So outcomes are best achieved by standardized processes, and the best standardized processes are designed by teams. It could be your own team if they have found a breakthrough process, or I'm not picky. I often recommend groups to just grab a best practice off the shelf. The example I give often is like, instead of creating your own You know, software CRM, it's like, go with something like Salesforce that is used by many. Maybe it's not the best one, but it's solid. As everybody follows that process, then, and they comply with it, they go all in on it. Then we get better outcomes in our sales than if we had something that wasn't that. And so a manager's, management's only job, your only job as a manager is to pick 7 to 10 I call them non-negotiables around process that, you know, lead to efficiency and good outcomes. And don't negotiate those non-negotiables. That's it. And as teams sign up to those, and they're not about your preferences, again, these are about the potential for your organization to get most of the work done efficiently. Boom. All you're doing is managing to following those non-negotiables. Oh, it's like, I'm not saying no to this. That's one of our non-negotiables. Everything needs to be on the system. And so separating these 2 out helps you see as a leader where, if I have my non-negotiable set, can I manage really easily? And I'm not over-managing. And that is driving towards our non-negotiables. So then I'm actually freed up to have time to lead. Because that's the other thing I hear from a lot of managers out there is I'm so busy counting beans and making sure people are complying. And I'm, I'm fighting people that are negotiating non-negotiables. And I got people that say, Hey, you know, I know that's the process that they want for the company, but we're kind of special over here on the 4th floor, or we're kind of special over here in the Southwest territory. Do we need to follow that process? And if you get yourself into that cycle of constantly negotiating non-negotiables with others, then you have no time to lead. And so this is where to be able to lead first and coach as I did, where I usually made the mistake. And then manage the problem second. To be able to do this, it is figuring out what are those non-negotiables, clarifying those, hopefully having them tied to a lot more automated things like software checklists, um, best practices. And then that'll free you up as a leader to be able to do more coaching, do more leadership. And so again, we'll talk more about this powerful shift. Because too many of us get stuck over in the management side because we don't have our non-negotiables. So we can't do the leading that we just talked about there. We'll talk more about this, but find a place in your day-to-day after this, where you're jumping in to fix or where you're going off to firefight and fix instead of coaching the person in front of you. And just maybe make that turn, but metaphorically resist that urge and come back right to the person in front of you. See where they need to grow next. Usually it's just a coaching question or 2. I like, what did you do to help given that unpreferred reality? What could you do to add value? How could we support here? And then it doesn't mean we enable this. That was my next step was going out and figure out, figuring out with that individual one-on-one, what's going on? Why are we late? Is there a way I can help? And we got that figured out. And so lead first, manage second, because many of us out there are managing first and leading sometimes. If this episode got you thinking of some of the ways you might be overmanaging and maybe missing these opportunities, be sure to share it with your colleagues that are on this learning journey with you. Because if you can find a couple of other reality-based leaders that have that twinkle in their eye, as I say, that know that work can be a bit more effortless, you can grow together, share these episodes, discuss them, and that's a way to start to spread this in your organization. And so if you're looking for additional ways to do so, we have amazing workshops. If you're planning events, if your team is doing an event. I do keynotes. We got Laura on our team that does workshops as well. We'd love to help you out, design an awesome experience where you get to learn these principles and also apply them in tools that you can use the very next day to ditch the drama and call your teams to greatness. So thank you so much. Keep loving people up, but we got to call them up to greatness, and I'll see you on the next episode.
