Empowering Your Team Part 5 of 5.mp4
Wed. Mar 13, 2024
0:12 - Speaker 1
Welcome to technically the first, but maybe not the first episode of the Right Now Leadership Podcast, formerly known as the Blue Shirt Leadership Podcast. And why am I changing the name? I'm changing the name because I wrote a book called Right Now Leadership, and I've also realized that right now, for you, for me, and for anyone else that's a leader, which is everyone, now is the time to take the lead. Now is the time to lead. Primarily to start with yourself. Lead yourself. And then to lead others after that.
0:47 - Speaker 1
We gotta lead ourselves first. In this episode, we're going to be talking about the fifth part of empowering your team. Now, of course, empowering your team is about leading others. And so in order to get there, you need to go through the four pillars of leadership to get to a place where you can do a really good job of empowering others. The first pillar is to be a self-aware leader. That's the B in Blue Shirt Coaching. The L in blue is to lead with accountability. If you lead with accountability and you have great self-awareness in your leadership and who you are, what you have and what you lack, then you're going to grow.
1:24 - Speaker 1
It's just inevitable that you're going to grow, which is the U in blue, use a growth mindset. And then finally, once you get to that place, you can empower others. And in this series, I'm walking you through the five steps, the five ways that you can empower others. So far, we've covered four of them. The first is all about expectations. Expecting your team, the people that you interact with, to be exceptional at what they do. Expecting that and setting that tone in the room, in the space, and in your mind that that's who they're going to be.
1:58 - Speaker 1
Because when you set that tone, you have that expectation. This is how they're going to start to show up to you and you're going to call them to that higher level. If that sounds a little out there or ridiculous, try it for two weeks. Come back to me and tell me I'm wrong because I guarantee I won't be. When you set that high expectation of someone else and stick with it, You'll be amazed at the progress that person makes and their ability to perform. The second is to study. If you are doing a good job of having high expectations for your team, that's gonna create this curiosity in yourself to study your team, to study those around you and get to know them in a way that helps you to empower them by asking step three powerful questions and listening deeply.
2:50 - Speaker 1
In part three, I talked about the wiser way to listen and how you can leverage that ability to Empower others to listen to them well, to study them, to be fascinated by them, and to watch them excel in what they're doing for you or doing in their own lives, which ultimately leads to step four, part four, which is automatic accountability. And if you've never heard of that term, which most people haven't, you got to listen to that episode because automatic accountability is something that will completely change your organization and completely change the way that you lead other people.
3:28 - Speaker 1
In short, it's people owning the things that they bring to you because they bring solutions with them through the power of great questions, knowing who they are and assuming and having fascination about what you can expect of them. Putting all three of those components together in the empowerment path leads to automatic accountability. Okay, great. So then if you've got all this in place, there's one more step. Step five or part five of this empowerment series is today's episode.
4:02 - Speaker 1
Hey there, if you don't know who I am, I'm Kyle Gillette, owner of Blue Shirt Coaching and also host of Right Now Leadership podcasts. I'm excited for you to be here, to be listening to the final part of this series. If you jumped in at this part, don't be confused. I've renamed the podcast to Right Now Leadership. And also don't be confused because all the other components of this empowerment are applicable to making this final piece make sense and work. So if you haven't listened to them, listen to them.
4:31 - Speaker 1
I think it might be a total of 40 minutes of listening. You can listen to it on two trips to work, really. I mean, not a huge deal. So grab a listen to those episodes and then hop onto this one. All right. Assuming you've listened to all the episodes, all the Empowerment of Your Team episodes, Here's the simple part five, and that is celebrate your team. Celebrate those you lead. That simple. Now, if you do this already, fantastic. Keep going. Teach others how to do that really well. But let me give you another little twist on this, and that is celebrate both the setbacks and the successes, right?
5:14 - Speaker 1
I think often we forget that it's really, really important to celebrate the setbacks. The perfect example, of course, is when you watch that kid try to walk. All of us have seen a child try to walk before and then they fall right on their butt or on their face sometimes. Or they trip over a rug. I'm in a small group with a bunch of other families and married couples, and they have kids that are around one years old, so they're all starting to walk, and there's this little lip of a rug next to these two chairs in the place that we meet every week.
5:48 - Speaker 1
And we all know that it's there and even the adults trip over it, but it's really funny when the kids trip over it because they're just happy running and they hit the rug and smack right down on the ground and then they cry. So we try to stop them, but sometimes we miss them. So we're not torturing the kids, but it is still funny. And it's also how it works because when it comes to celebrating the setbacks, this is a setback for that kid. And so what do we do? We push them down? We hold them down?
6:16 - Speaker 1
We don't let them get up? Of course not. That's terrible. Instead, we help them to not trip again by showing them that's where they're going to trip, by encouraging them when they make it over it, or by just simply celebrating when they get up. Right? So this is the same for you. As a leader, when you see someone hit a setback, they came to a solution of their own from some sort of a problem that they're dealing with. What I want you to do is to celebrate the person. Don't necessarily celebrate the result in this scenario, because that doesn't make any sense, right?
6:54 - Speaker 1
So you celebrate the person. What did they do to get to this point? What effort did they put in? Now, if it's their own solution, they're likely to have put in a really good effort into it. And since you assume that they are amazing, that they're fascinating, and you have high expectations of them, then it's probably true that they put really fantastic effort into this. So then you can celebrate that effort. You can celebrate the person for the effort they put into it. Now, let's say they make it part of the way, and they don't fully succeed in what they're trying to achieve.
7:32 - Speaker 1
Well, then, of course, we're going to celebrate the progress. When the kid falls down, and then gets back up, and takes five steps, and then falls down, takes seven steps, and falls down, then maybe starts to take more steps, we celebrate that progress. And I know the people that work for you or the people you lead aren't kids, but it fits because it's incremental most of the time. And when we're having really high expectations of people, we want to catch them doing something good. I had a mentor slash boss for many years and he had something that he called MWBA.
8:10 - Speaker 1
Let me see if I get that right. M management, MBWA. There we go. MBWA. So not an MBA, but an MBWA, which might be better than the MBAs that are out there. Management by walking around. M-B-W-A. Management by walking around. Now, I'm not talking about a kid walking around. I'm talking about you walking around and noticing how people are succeeding or failing at what they do. Now, if you are someone that doesn't work on site and you're remote in your work, then this is about management by watching people as they're doing their things, right?
8:50 - Speaker 1
So you're gonna be watching them on Zoom, you're gonna be watching their emails, and then you can celebrate those little incremental improvements that you're looking for, you're expecting, because you're studying them, and you have this kind of fascination with this person because you know they're amazing. And if you find that it's hard to discover those little incremental improvements, just keep at it. They're there. They're right in front of you. Just ask your mind, back to episode one of the series, ask your mind to find those items to find those opportunities for those little incremental improvements and you'll see them.
9:30 - Speaker 1
You'll just set your mind to it and your mind will bring you those obvious things that start to happen. It's kind of like when you buy a car and let's say you buy a blue car. All of a sudden, every freaking car on the road is blue. You may not have noticed before, or you get a certain new gadget or toy or article of clothing and now everybody's wearing that or using that. It's just your mind is alert to it. Tony Robbins talks about looking around your room and you look around for the color blue.
10:00 - Speaker 1
And so you look around and then you close your eyes and you open your eyes and you see all this blue all of a sudden. And then if you ask yourself to try to find the red, it's going to be really hard to find the red in the room because you're focused on the blue. So I just want you to set in your mind the things, the little things you're trying to find for this person and celebrate them. Okay. Now, of course, you celebrate the successes as well. Well, that's really obvious. But when we celebrate the successes and the setbacks, there's some nuances to it.
10:34 - Speaker 1
And what's important here is the personality of the person that you're celebrating. And you can just ask straight up. I would recommend just asking straight up because some people like public celebration and some people don't. And so sometimes celebrating someone publicly is really embarrassing for them and it takes away from the encouragement. So, I think it's smart, and you probably should do this as soon as possible, have the conversation with the people you lead about, you know, I really want to, I'm looking to catch you doing some amazing things, because you already have done amazing things, and this is something that I know you're going to continue to do, but I also want to celebrate you.
11:15 - Speaker 1
I don't think I've done that good of a job of celebrating the things that you've accomplished and the effort you put in. If I were to celebrate you in a public way, would that be uncomfortable for you or is that something that you'd be okay with? That's a way you can go about it. So I just want to encourage you to do part five or step five of the empowerment by celebrating the setbacks and the successes of those that you lead. The smaller, often the better, because this means they know you're paying attention to the nuances.
11:46 - Speaker 1
Which brings us back to the very first episode, which was all about know, like, and trust. They know that you like them and that you trust them because you're paying such close attention because you're studying them. Part two. You're asking them powerful questions, part three, giving them the opportunity to be accountable for it, part four, and then celebrating it when they succeed or when they make progress. All right, that's it for today's episode on the Right Now Leadership Podcast.
12:13 - Speaker 1
Thank you for listening to this episode. Again, if you haven't listened to the previous episodes in this series, make sure you go back and listen to all of them. If you like what you've heard, please do subscribe. I'm on Apple and Spotify and other channels. Subscribe to the Right Now Leadership Podcast, write a review, share these episodes. I really appreciate it and I look forward to launching another episode. Thanks.
