How Can Coaching Transform Your Leadership and Management Style?
It’s Nicole Greer here, your guide on the journey to creating a culture that buzzes with energy and innovation. I’ve just wrapped up a special episode of the “Build a Vibrant Culture” podcast, and let me tell you, it’s one you won’t want to miss. I took a seat on the other side of the mic this time to share some of the most powerful tools from my very own coaching toolbox.
🎩 The Four Essential Hats: In this episode, I dive into the four roles every leader must master: leadership, managing, mentoring, and coaching. Each hat is a game-changer in its own right, and I’m here to show you how to wear them with style and impact.
🤝 Coaching: The Heart of Leadership: Discover why coaching isn’t just a skill, but a partnership that can transform both personal and professional lives. I share my own experiences and the profound effects coaching has had on my journey, both in and out of the pool.
🔄 Embracing Change: Change is inevitable, but how we handle it can make all the difference. I talk about becoming a change agent and leading your team through the waves of transformation with confidence and grace.
🔥 Getting “LIT”: Lean forward, maintain integrity, and transform. This is the mantra I swear by to ignite passion and potential in everyone I work with. Get ready to light that fire within your team!
🚀 Future-Oriented Leadership: I stress the importance of looking ahead and crafting new paths in every aspect of business. Whether it’s customer service or manufacturing, I share insights on how to be the leader who not only envisions the future, but also invites others to join in shaping it.
⏱️ Time Management & Productivity: Learn how to keep your eye on the prize with key productivity indicators and time management strategies that ensure you’re always moving toward your goals.
🔍 Quality Control: “Inspect what you expect.” I delve into the necessity of quality control and share stories from icons like Steve Jobs to drive the point home.
🌱 Mentoring Matters: The value of mentorship can’t be overstated. I discuss how mentoring and being mentored can transfer invaluable skills and knowledge, fostering a thriving environment for all.
This episode is packed with real-life examples, personal stories, and actionable advice that will empower you to lead with vision and vibrancy. So, if you’re ready to elevate your leadership and build a culture that’s not just alive but vibrantly kicking, tune in to the latest episode of “Build a Vibrant Culture.”
Summary:
As the host of the “Build a Vibrant Culture” podcast, I’ve had the unique opportunity to delve into the intricacies of leadership and management. But in a recent twist, I took the guest seat to share my personal insights and the robust tools from my vibrant coaching toolbox. Today, I want to take you on a journey through the key lessons and strategies that can help any leader or manager foster a dynamic and thriving work environment.
The Four Cornerstones of Effective Leadership
Leadership is an art that requires wearing multiple hats and, in my experience, there are four essential roles every leader must embrace: leadership, managing, mentoring, and coaching. Each role is distinct, yet interconnected, forming the foundation of a vibrant culture.
Leadership: Guiding the Way Forward
As leaders, our primary task is to set the direction and inspire our teams to follow. It’s about being future-oriented and inventing new paths in every aspect of business, from customer service to manufacturing. Leaders must be visionaries, inviting others to join in shaping what lies ahead.
Managing: The Present is Your Playground
While leadership is future-focused, managing is all about the present. It involves overseeing current processes and ensuring that everything runs smoothly. Effective time management and tracking key productivity indicators are vital to achieving our future goals.
Mentoring: Passing the Torch
Mentoring is a powerful tool for developing leadership skills within your team. It’s about transferring knowledge, skills, and advice. As leaders, we should seek mentors and also be willing to mentor others, creating a continuous cycle of growth and learning.
Coaching: Unleashing Potential
Coaching is perhaps the most transformative hat a leader can wear. It’s about partnering with individuals to help them maximize their personal and professional potential. As a coach, I’ve seen firsthand how coaching can inspire employees to think differently, be innovative, and be creative.
Coaching: The Catalyst for Change and Performance
In my own journey, being coached in swimming taught me the value of having someone guide and inspire you to reach your goals. Coaching in the workplace is no different; it drives performance, inspires individuals, and influences others positively. It’s about helping employees envision their career paths and setting goals for the future.
Embracing Change as a Change Agent
Change is inevitable and, as leaders, we must be adept at managing and embracing it. Coaching plays a crucial role here as it helps teams navigate change effectively. We must become change agents, encouraging and guiding our teams through the evolving landscape of business.
The “LIT” Concept: Lean Forward, Integrity, Transform
I introduced the concept of getting “lit” in the workplace – leaning forward, integrity, and transforming. This approach is designed to motivate and inspire individuals to achieve their full potential. It’s about fostering an environment where everyone is encouraged to lean in, act with integrity, and embrace transformation.
Practical Wisdom: Lessons from the Greats
Throughout the podcast episode, I shared practical examples and personal anecdotes to bring these concepts to life. I drew inspiration from influential figures like Steve Jobs and Ronald Reagan, who exemplified key management principles. Their legacies teach us the importance of quality control and the power of inspecting what you expect.
The Vibrant Culture Blueprint
To build a vibrant culture, leaders must intentionally use the tools and insights from their coaching toolbox. It’s about creating a work environment where people feel valued, supported, and empowered. Remember, a vibrant culture is not just about the bottom line; it’s about the people who contribute to it every day.
In conclusion, whether you’re leading a team in a call center, a credit union, or a retail space, the principles of leadership, management, mentoring, and coaching remain the same. I invite you to embrace these roles and use the insights from my vibrant coaching toolbox to create a culture that not only succeeds, but thrives. Let’s build vibrant cultures together where innovation, creativity, and passion are the norm and where every individual has the opportunity to shine.
Transcript
Voice Over: This is the Build a Vibrant Culture podcast, your source for the strategies, systems, and insights you need to turn your dreams into your destiny. Every week we dive into dynamic conversations as our host, Nicole Greer, interviews leadership and business experts. They’re here to shed light on practical solutions to the challenges of personal and professional development. Now, here’s your host, a professional speaker, coach, and consultant, Nicole Greer.
Nicole: Welcome everybody to the Build a Vibrant Culture podcast. My name is Nicole Greer and they call me The Vibrant Coach. And today I’m going to be my own guest on the podcast! Many of the people that listen to the podcast, and have listened to it for over a year, have requested that I just download some of what I know. I’ve been doing business for a very long time, and I’m one of those people who loves to work. I love to do well at work. I think that work is fun, and although it is a four letter word, it is something that we all have to do and we all have to experience, so why not have fun doing it? So let’s get started.
I’m going to share with you tools in my Build a Vibrant Culture toolbox. It’s my Vibrant Coaching Toolbox. When I started my career, back in 2007 as a coach, I went and took a program, and that program was instrumental in helping me think about how I can help other people learn to be better leaders and better managers. And here’s what we know. The linchpin truth about our work is that we either do well because of the people that are around us, especially the person that we’re reporting to, or we don’t do well because of the people around us. Right? So we can have a great product. We can have a great process. We can have all sorts of things that would do well in the marketplace. But none of those things do well in the marketplace unless they have human beings, human resources, that can deliver that product, that service to the marketplace. And so the number one thing we need to understand as leaders and managers is that we have to actually coach them.
So let’s talk a little bit about coaching. I also think some people might be a little confused about what coaching actually is. But coaching is a wonderful, wonderful thing and everybody needs to learn to do it. So what I’m going to do is I’m going to go down here and I’m going to share my screen and show you my vibrant coaching toolbox. All right. So here it is. And so inside of this little box here, this beautiful orange box, are going to be several tools I’m going to share over the next few weeks that are going to help you become a better leader, a better manager, a better mentor, and a better coach. And again, this is the linchpin thing that makes your organization have a vibrant culture. So what’s in my Vibrant Coaching Toolbox? Well, I’ll tell you, the first thing that we’re going to talk about in today’s episode of the Build a Vibrant Culture podcast is going to be about concepts of leadership, managing, mentoring, and coaching.
So right there in your office, if you are somebody who is trying to positively influence the organization, you need to have four hats on your hat rack, okay? And those four hats are my leadership hat, my managing hat, my mentoring hat, and my coaching hat. And so I have these four different hats and I learn I have enough awareness as a leader, as a human, to read the other people in the room, read the person in front of me, and figure out which of these hats should I put on right now? Now, in the midst of one or two conversations, you might have this hat, these hats, on and off several times. So you have to be agile, you have to be flexible, and you have to be a leader who’s open and aware of what’s going on. And we’ll cover these other concepts in future upcoming episodes of the Build a Vibrant Culture podcast. So I want to start out with this idea, which is what is coaching? This definition comes from the ICF, the International Coaching Federation. So go check them out.
They are kind of the authority on everything coaching. I’m a member. And the coaching programs that I have gone through were formatted according to the ICF qualifications. And so all these great people around planet earth, ICF is global, they put together this definition of coaching. And so let’s go through it and think about it for a second, because I’m not sure people really understand what coaching is, okay? So coaching is partnering with an individual. And what that means is is that the coach is not smarter than the coachee. The coach is not older than the coachee, bthe coach is not a better performer than the coachee. The coach is somebody who simply comes alongside the person that needs help. And I think that’s so, so important. All we’re trying to do is help. Like if you think back in your lifetime, the coaches that you’ve had, you know, these were people who came alongside you and helped you become a better swimmer. I used to be on the swim team in high school, and so my coach was there to help me.
In fact, I’ll tell you a quick story. My coach, up in Wisconsin, when I went to high school up there, she needed somebody to do the butterfly, the 200 meter butterfly. And so nobody wanted to do this butterfly, right? And I don’t know if you’ve ever done the butterfly stroke, but it’s a challenge. And so she kind of looked across all the little swimmers she had out there in the pool and she, like, pointed at me and she said, Will you learn the butterfly? And so I was raised to say yes. And so of course I said yes. And that’s a good thing. I used to say yes to the right things, but to say yes to challenges, yes to growth, yes to moving forward, yes to challenging yourself. So I said yes. And then she partnered with me. She said, I’m gonna take care of you and I’m going to help you do this butterfly. So she taught me what the stroke looked like. She got in the water with me and she, you know, showed me what I needed to do in the water.
She, this probably was not a good idea legally, but, like, she tied my feet together with, like, a little strap so that my little feet would go like this. And she challenged me. She had a thought provoking creative process that taught me how to do the butterfly stroke. And to this day, I love doing the butterfly. So I think that this is a really important thing. Now, this is the same thing in your life with regards to, like, I don’t know, did any of you learn to ride a bicycle? Have any of you ever learned to use Excel? Have any of you ever learned to lead a team? It’s very helpful if somebody will come alongside you, not in front of you, not pushing you, but somebody who partners right alongside you in this thought provoking creative process, inspiring you. So please don’t miss this. This is a whole body experience. I’m using my brain, right? Thought provoking. And then I’m also inspired, which is really, like, gut soul stuff.
Like, you know, like I really wanted to be a hero for my team and learn the butterfly. You know, when I learned Excel, I didn’t want to learn Excel, but I learned it. And now I have this skill that helps me maximize my personal and professional life. And that is really what we want to do. And so I want you to think about somebody in your life that perhaps came alongside you and helped you do something that you have never done before, and how it maximized your personal and professional life. And here’s the thing I want to tell you is that, whoa, this is not happening out in the world like it could be. Many people, you know, the SHRM (Society of Human Resource Management), all the things that are out there, all the surveys they ever do, it says the number one reason why people quit their job is not because of the job, but because of their leader, their boss, their mentor, their lack of mentoring, their lack of coaching. And they don’t they don’t see any way forward where they can maximize their personal and professional life.
And so if you’re leading people or working alongside people or leading a team or however it looks, you need to be a coach because you want people to think differently. So let’s talk one second about your brain. So you could, you know, be on YouTube and look up a hundred thousand different videos about how the brain works. What I understand is that in my brain, I have neural passageways, and these neural passageways are locked and loaded, meaning that off the ends of my neurons are these little hairy things called ganglia and they connect together when that neural passageway is created. And so this is how we do habits. This is how you drive to work and you don’t even know how you got there, because you’re just turning left and putting your clicker on and looking at the lights. But it’s all like on autopilot, right? And a lot of people that work inside of our organizations, they’re on autopilot. They’re doing the same thing that they did yesterday, today, and they’ll do it tomorrow and next week unless we coach them in a thought provoking creative process, to move forward, to think creatively, to do things in a new way. And just to bottom line, this whole thing about coaching and how important it is, is the fact that, you know, companies have to innovate, they have to be creative, and they have to have thinking employees, they do not want to be placed on autopilot. So let’s help coach people. So that’s why we’re doing the Vibrant Coaching Toolbox, right? So, why coaching? So a lot of people are like, why do you need a coach? Well look at all these reasons right here. So number one is we need to manage change. You know here’s the thing. Change is inevitable. It’s at every turn. If I asked you to write down, name three changes that happened last year inside your organization, you’d be like only three? So there’s a bunch of changes going on. And then here’s the other thing.
If you want to be relevant, you want to be paid well, you want to get promoted, you want to be a high potential, you need to be changing and and literally change happens better and in a more robust, vibrant way. if you’ve got somebody coaching you along. Because remember, it is a thought provoking creative process to maximize your personal and your professional life, right? So, change. It helps with career growth. Here’s what I know. The better you are, the further you go. It helps interpersonal communication. The coach can give advice, right? Which is a little bit of mentoring. It can help you set goals. It can help you with your job satisfaction. It can provide support. It can help you be a strategic thinker, help you get through conflict and feedback. When you improve, the organization improves and your performance goes up. So coaching does a lot of great things. So if you lead people you need to be coaching. And like please don’t miss this.
You have better people. Your life is better. Better is better. That’s what I know. So help your people be better. Nowc here’s what we’re going to talk about. We’re going to talk about four different hats that need to be on your hat rack in your office.
Voice Over: Are you ready to build your vibrant culture? Bring Nicole Greer to speak to your leadership team, conference, or organization to help them with their strategies, systems, and smarts to increase clarity, accountability, energy, and results. Your organization will “get lit” from within. Email her at nicole@vibrantculture.com and be sure to check out Nicole’s TEDx talk at vibrantculture.com.
Nicole: So the first one is your leadership hat. And so this leadership hat is all about moving people forward. So, you know, if I could reach for the screen and grab your hand and say, come on, that’s what leadership is. Leadership is pulling people in a direction in a way that we want to go into the future, right? So it is very future oriented. So here’s what I want you to do. While you’re listening, I want you to take a piece of paper, get your whiteboard, stand up next to your whiteboard. I want you to draw a horizontal line. And on the left hand side, I want you to put an X at the end of the line. And on the right hand side, I want you to put an X on the end of the line. And here’s the truth about an organization, and the truth about the humans inside your organization, is that that organization and everybody in that organization is traveling this thing, and I call it the lifeline. And that lifeline we spend like almost a third of our lives working, right? If you’re lucky and you’re going to retire at sixty-five. But here’s the thing. You’re traveling the lifeline. And people who have a vision, excitement about the future, are change agents. The quality of that lifeline is better. Like quality of life goes up if we’re paying attention to our future.
Now, I’m not saying live in the future, but I am saying live with an intention to have a better future. So if I’m sitting down to work with a colleague or an employee and I’m talking to them about their future, I’m helping them see what might be possible for them, for their team, for the organization. Maybe this would even impact the world, right? So we want to talk to people about their future, and we want to set goals with them, and we want to encourage them to change. So here’s the thing about change. Change means that I’m going to grow. I’m going to become something I haven’t become. So when we’re leading people, we’re saying, like, here’s what we want to do now, here’s a very important thing is that these people need to have a vision for their own careers, a career path, and and that vision needs to be connected by the leader to where the company is going. Right? So it’s very future oriented. So I work with a company in Denver, North Carolina. Their North American office is there, but their international office is in Austria, and the company is called Blum. It’s an amazing, amazing company, and they are talking to people all the time about their path, about their way forward. And every single leader is required in the organization to sit down with every employee and say, what do you want to do with your career? And, you know, you get all sorts of responses. And the cool thing is that people are actually getting the opportunity to be clear about where they want to go. Now, some people say, I’m good, I’m right here. I don’t want to go anywhere. I’m happy. I’m steady, I’m steady Eddie. But the leader is at least opening the door or asking people, where do you want to go. Now, there are other people in life who say, I want your job. The leaders over there and leaders everywhere don’t need to be concerned. They need to be so happy when somebody says, you know, I want your job. Because what that means is that you now have somebody to teach, train, lead, manage, coach, and mentor to do the things you know how to do.
Now, here’s the thing. The minute you do that with somebody else, guess what happened to you? You become promotable and you become a high potential. So the development, the coaching, using this tool box is going to help make a stronger human. And when you have a bunch of strong humans who have a very strong organization, and that is what I call building a vibrant culture, right? So we’re going to get people turned on to their future. They’re going to get lit from within. So I have a little acronym. Let me throw it in here real quick. It’s called LIT. And here’s what LIT stands for. Maybe we want to write this down. So the “L” stands for leaning forward. Next thing is “I.” The “I” stands for integrity. Right? Integrity. And the last thing is “T” for transformation. So here’s what we want to do. We want to get people things. We want them to lean towards the future. We want them to declare a future and get on with it.
Turn what is possible into the probable. Don’t miss that. And we want people to live in integrity. Do this with a whole heart, their whole being, all their willingness. And then we want them to transform what’s ordinary today into something that is extraordinary. So that is getting LIT. That is building a vibrant culture. So it is future oriented. Now, I talked about change just a minute ago, but what we want to do is we want to look at what could be possible for this individual, for this team, and for this organization. So change is super, super important. And, you know, the world is changing, I already established that. But we can actually be the change agents. So that is a different thing to think about is that we could be changed agents. So moving forward in a beautiful way and transforming things is what we want to do. So I just want you to think about the last time you were frustrated at work and you thought, this is frustrating. There’s the moment where you could change something, right?
So maybe it’s a policy. It’s a procedure. It is a person’s attitude on the team that could help change that. All sorts of different things. So typically an obstacle or frustration is an indicator of where we can make a change. And here’s the thing. In your career, to be a change agent and fix the frustrations of those around you, you’re going to have a beautiful career. All right. Next thing is we could drive performance. Right? So again, my teacher, my coach who taught me how to do the butterfly I mean I can do backstroke freestyle. But then she comes in and she’s like, oh, who needs to help me fill in this blank. Right? So we’re going to this swim meet and then we can do the butterfly. And so not only did my performance improve, but then the performance of my entire team because we got to put a name in there. All right? And so we actually participated which was the first step in performance. Did I win? No, I did not win. But, eventually I got much, much better.
The other thing about leading is when you talk about how life can be better, people become inspired. And earlier I said that this is a full body thing that we do. You know, we’re changing the way we think, but we’re also changing what’s going on, like, in our guts. And I’m going to call it soul. So I hope that’s cool for everybody. But like, you know, it’s soul work to lead, right? It’s like, what we could do knowing it is possible for us. You know, it’s like something turns on the inside, you know, like, you could call it purpose. You could call it mission, you could call it calling. But something on the inside of this goes, whoa, I think I can do that. And so it’s almost like when that happens, there’s a lifting inside of us that gets us up out of our chair and gets us moving. So let’s talk about influence for a hot second. So influencing,, you know, there’s two ways you can do it.
One is that you can influence in a positive way. And if you’re a fan of John Maxwell, like me, you know that his definition of leadership – if you go look up John Maxwell, watch a video, one of his books, put that on your to-do list – his definition of leadership is influence. But, I would just add the word positive on the front end of that word, because we all know somebody who is a negative influence on the organization. So leaders need to influence in a positive way. And if you want to write anything down next to the word influencing, what I would write down is this: leave people better than you found them. Okay? Don’t leave people worse off. Even if you’re giving feedback that’s corrective or you have to have a serious conversation with somebody. You can leave them in a state where they feel cared for, and that they know your intention behind whatever you’ve said is good and pure and in integrity with what is right to the best of your ability. And then finally, the thing about leading you need to understand it is all about inventing a new way.
And so we need to invent new ways. So, you know, my favorite story around inventing a new way is, you know, when I was growing up, not only did I swim, but I roller skated a lot. We know roller skating on the roller skates with the four wheels they built. I used to roller skate around the neighborhood when I was a youngster. And at first, the first thing I ever got to roller skate around the neighborhood with was a cassette player. Anybody know what that is? And so it was the Sony Walkman. And so I would have my little Sony Walkman, and I put my Elton John tape in, and I would cruise around the neighborhood. Well, next thing I did is I got a Sony CD Walkman. Right? And so I put my CD in there. It wasn’t as good as the cassette player because it would skip all the time, but that was the next iteration. And then the next thing that came along, which my kids got, was the iPod Nano. Does anybody remember? I have one in the drawer right there.
It’s like an antique. But then the iPod nano was awesome. And so I would challenge you on YouTube, go look up Steve Jobs talking about the iPod nano. He’s standing up there. He’s in his black turtleneck. He has glasses on, he’s got his blue jeans on. And he pats his pocket and he talks about how he has a ton of songs. So, you know, he invented a new way. And whether we’re doing customer service, or running a call center, we’re running a credit union, we’re running retail, we’re running, you know, blue manufacturing that I mentioned earlier, there are ways that we can invent a new way forward. And so you’ve got to, first of all, be future oriented yourself. Where are we going? Remember follow the leader? Where are we going? You got to tell people, this is where I think we should go, and you’ve got to invite people to help you do that along the way. So while you’re doing that, you’re being a true leader yourself, inventing a way forward, future oriented, influencing, inspiring, driving performance and change.
You’re bringing everybody else along with you, right? So that is the first hat in your toolbox. The second hat in your toolbox is the managing hat. And you can see right here the list of words. A lot of people get in the managing mode and they forget about the leading mode. In fact, a lot of companies that I work with, you know, the only future oriented document they’ve got written down that they looked at consistently, don’t miss that, the only document they have written down that they look at consistently is the budget. But, in this case, we want to do is we want to have documents that talk about the future and then we manage the process in the present, okay? So lead into the future by managing what’s going on in the present, right? So managing is present oriented. So remember the little line I had to draw on the piece of paper. There was a line across and X on the left and an X on the right. So you’re traveling along this life line and there’s today, okay?
And put a line where today is. And so think about this. What am I doing today to make that future thing happen? What do I need to do with the present? And so what we need to do is we need to sit down. We need to manage these next eight hours, right? So, time management. Maybe we’ll do a little time management series in the future. But we need to manage the eight hours that we have right now. And so we’re going to maintain the process. We’re going to maintain the procedures. We are going to look at the expectations that were set when we’re leading, and we’re going to look at what should we measure to see if we’re going to get where we said we wanted to go when we had our leadership hat on, when we had our vision hat on, right? So the KPIs, or key productivity indicators, we have to start measuring some things. And that’s the managing, right? So I measure it today, I measure it next week, or I measure this month, next month, I measure it this year, I measure next year.
You know, there’ll be different time frames that we measure things, but we’re going to look at things and say, how are we doing? How quickly are we getting to our future state that we said we wanted. Now, after we look at our KPIs, our key productivity indicators, then we’re stepping back and we’re looking at how did we do, right? So let’s say it’s seven or more tick marks on that lifeline, right? It’s a week from now. And we look at our KPIs and you say this number is not moving like we wanted it to move. So we’re going to go in there and start controlling that. So we’re going to look at the process. And let’s say we don’t have as much revenue coming in as we want. You need to look at the sales process, and we will control the sales process in a script that you may be training. Maybe we need to do a ride along with the salespeople. Maybe we need to look and see if they’re using the CRM, right? The customer relationship manager, so we start to control, right? Now as we’re controlling the process and we’re looking at it now or we’re not “micromanaging” here although let me tell you something about micromanaging. Everybody says they don’t want it, but sometimes I need it. I need somebody to look inside my process, tell me whether or not I’m doing it right. Like, have you ever gotten a tip from somebody what I like to call a strategy, system, or smart? And you’re like, oh my God, that’s money. That will really help me. And it’s because you allow that person to come into your process and look at it. They’re at a microscopic level, right? And they’re helping you control your process. This is wonderful, okay? It’s not wonderful all the time, but it’s wonderful sometimes. So sometimes we need to get in there and micromanage control of the process, right? See what we’re missing. Be something very simple. But if we don’t get a close up look at it we can’t figure it out.. All right, the next thing is exerting power and authority.
So here’s what I know about managing processes and here’s what I know about managing people, is that sometimes people don’t go carry out the process completely, or they skip a step, or they forget a step, and you have to go in there and you have to say you have to do A then B then C, please don’t do A, then C and see that takes a grown up, that takes a real manager. Okay? Somebody of courage to come in and say this is what we get to do. So a couple weeks ago I was working with the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and had the best time. I was working with their engineering staff over there. They were a great, fun group of people. There was this guy who was the safety guy and his name was Chris, and we were talking and you know, this guy has to exert power and authority all the time, and thank God he does. Because if he doesn’t, the students at UNC Charlotte are not going to be safe. You know, put your goggles on, get your suit on, put up the proper, you know, stuff to do this experiment that you’re engineering right now. And it’s not because people necessarily slack. It’s just that, you know, we have to have somebody who keeps the guardrails on, right? So sometimes we have to exert our power and authority. And in this series I’m going to talk about giving feedback. And I think that that would be super helpful. So giving feedback is also exerting your power authority. So that’s coming. And then the last thing is quality control. So there this president we had, Ronnie Reagan, go look him up, and he had a sense of humor, which was fantastic. When I was a very informative, you know, late teens, early 20s, he was in office and I was being challenged to, you know, figure out what I wanted to do, you know, with regard to what I believe about politics and this kind of thing. And so that was our president. So you watch him. And one of the things about Reagan that I love is he has a bunch of great quotes.
But one of his things that he said that I think is so true, one of the best managing mantras you can have is inspect what you expect, right? So you have to go out and you have to look around at what’s going on inside your organization. Last thing I’ll say about quality control is that there’s this little teeny tiny book, and it is like the classic. It is called The One Minute Manager. Would you please write that down? And would you please go out and get The One Minute Manager? Okay. SoThe One Minute Manager is so fantastic because it’s all these really simple, like, when you read it you’re like, duh. But like, are you doing it? You know, so we want to have these habits of managing in place. So the one that I think is so important is manage by walking around. So we’re challenged in the 21st century, you know, workplace because we are remote. We are traveling. Back to traveling, some of the people I know that are traveling are making up for lost ground based on what happened during the pandemic.
And, you know, we’re out there looking around and taking a look at what’s happening. And so you might be either completely remote or out there traveling a bunch, but you gotta get out with the people, or you’ve got to get on the Zoom and you got to check in with them. You got to see how people are doing. You got to have conversations about the quality of their work. And if it’s not up to snuff, you’re gonna have to give feedback. And so that’s a little bit on feedback for future sessions. All right. Last two are mentoring and coaching. So again what are we talking about here? We’re talking about four hats that are on your hat rack in your office and four kinds of modalities that you need to learn to tilt to while you’re leading people. And we’re talking about things inside of The Vibrant Coaching toolbox. So the third one is mentoring. And here’s the thing about mentors, they’re very hard to find. You know, most people are not walking around looking for a project.
So if you don’t have a mentor, you have to find one and you have to ask for their help. So I’m going to tell you a good story. So I have a client, her name is Amy. I love her dearly and we’ve been coaching for a very, very long time. So at one point in Amy’s career, she was in banking. She, you know, really needed somebody to help her, like, how to navigate the career path. Well, she’s female and, you know, I challenged her. I said, we probably need to find another gal who has kind of done that right, who’s navigated through the system and can share with you kind of how she went about it. And she said, well, gosh, you know, who’s going to want to do that for me? And I’m like, well, I don’t know, we don’t know until we ask. So if you write anything down about mentoring is one if you don’t have one, you need to have one. You need to ask someone to do it for you. Right?
Now, before you ask them you need to understand measuring. Okay, so here’s the deal. Mentoring is you’re asking that person, would you share your expertise with me? Could you tell me the things, the little things you’ve done along the way, that have made a huge difference? And don’t miss that. The littler things make a huge difference. It’s like the 80/ 20 rule. Look that up. They can impart skills. They can tell you how to have a conversation. They can show you how to use a lathe. They can, you know, all sorts of different things depending on where you work. But they can show you how to use the equipment, how to use the system, how to use the environment, how to work the culture. Right? And they can help you transfer technologies. So when I say technology, it could be as complicated as learning how to use a software program. And it could be as simple as learning how to shake hands. So there’s no technique to shaking hands, and there’s a technique and a strategy and a whole bunch of learning that goes into a new software system.
But a mentor can help you learn the thing you need to learn. So let’s say you get a job and you need to know how to make pivot tables and make things happen in Excel and you’re like, oh my God, it’s the basics. Yes. Find yourself a mentor who will sit there and who will actually help. Here’s the thing about asking for a mentor is that people, I find, are typically helpful. If you can express what you want your mentor to do for you, and you put it into a time frame, you put it into some format and ask them if they could do that for you. Most people are willing to help. Now, if you get a no, I’m too busy. I got too much on my plate. You go find somebody else. In my own mind, I have mentors. I have several, actually, and they help me with all sorts of different things. Everything from my spiritual life to my business life. You know, I’ve got people that I’ve asked, will you help me? And they say, like, of course I’ll be glad to.
Right now I am getting certified in yoga, so hopefully that will be done here in just the next month or so. And the lady that is in charge of the program, her name’s Diane, and she has said, if not one time, she has said a hundred times, just call me if you need me. Does that sound familiar to you? So there’s these mentors out there. We just need to take advantage, not take advantage, but take the advantage of having a mentor. Right? So they can help transfer technologies. They can give you advice like you’re stuck. Like, I’m trying to teach this yoga class, and she’s like, oh, here’s what you do. Do this. Okay? All sorts of things people can tell you because they have experience, right?. Which gives them the expertise and they can train you on things. And don’t miss this at the very bottom of the screen if you’re watching on YouTube. It says mentors help you connect the dots when connections are not made.
And so really important mentoring is, like, I don’t get it. Why are we doing that, I don’t get it, I don’t understand. And the mentor helps you. So I’ve been talking about the mentors and you need to go get one. But let’s talk about you being a mentor. Now, here’s the truth of the matter. If you’ve been in your career for a little while, it could be three months. It could be thirty years. You probably have some expertise. You may have been doing a function or something over and over and over again, and you know how to do it. And don’t miss this, around you, around there are other people who don’t know how to do it. So instead of getting frustrated that they don’t know how to do it, you go to them and you say, I’d like to mentor you on doing this. I think I can help you. And again, again, again, again. When we have people around us who are doing good work. It makes our work easier.
That is just how it works, right? You can impart your skills again. You have skillful people around you. Life is easier if you give people the transfer technology, if you teach them how to teach them the way forward, give them advice, train them, help them connect the dots, your life will be easier. So, question. Have you ever been asked to be a mentor? It doesn’t have to be so formal. It could just be like my door is open, you know? Email me, I’ll get you an answer. That’s what we’re talking about. So, we’ll talk a little bit about leadership philosophy in this series, but I’m telling you what’s really, really important, in this whole thing to understand is that, like, if you’re going to be a leader, you’re going to take people places, you want to run an organization, you want to run your family or run yourself. Well, you know, you’re going to have to have, like, kind of a philosophy.
And my philosophy is super simple. My philosophy is help all you can and learn all. That’s it. So when people ask me, I try to help them and I am constantly learning. So you can have the same philosophy as me. I invite you to have that for us. All right. Last thing we’re going to talk about on this episode of Build a Viral Culture podcast is the fourth hat on your leadership hat rack, and that is coaching. And as you can tell from the beginning of this podcast, I mean, like, I am jammed up excited about coaching and have been since 2007 because I have seen the powerful things that coaching can do. And here are the skills inside of coaching. And I’m going to share these with you as we go through this series. But the first one is like asking powerful questions. People need to be challenged with questions. Now, during the leading, during the managing, during the mentoring we are doing a little bit of telling. Here’s what you should do.
Little bit of advice. But when we get to coaching, we are trying to do that thought provoking, creative process that we talked about at the definition of coaching at the beginning, where people are connecting their own dots. So let’s go to the bottom of the page. If you’re on YouTube, it says facilitating the development of the ability to connect the dots. Thinking for yourself. Coaching helps you start thinking for yourself. And so the coach has to ask powerful questions, inquire about things, be curious about things, they need to probe around on things. Back right before I started recording this episode earlier this morning, I had a coaching client and she was talking about something, and then she said, I need to survive where I am. And here we are talking about our future. And then this thing just popped out of her mouth and she says, I need to survive where I am. And I was like, whoa, where’d that come from? See, she has a narrow passageway that says, we need to survive.
You need to survive. She’s trying to survive this place she works at and it takes survival skills. But, you know, when that thing popped out of her mouth, that didn’t make sense, because here we are talking about the future. She just says, I got to survive. Which, you know, having a bigger future or surviving, which one should we do? Let’s have the bigger future. And so I had to challenge her, like, you know what you just said? This thing just popped out of your mouth. And we saw that mirroring in coaching that you said you need to just survive. How do we reframe that? And so coaching is about helping people think in a different way. I got to get that thought out of her brain. You know that neural passageway that says survive, survive, survive to let’s thrive, thrive, thrive. That’s what we’re trying to do with folks is get in there and create that future vision. So, you know, leadership is actually telling people, showing people the way forward and coaching is inviting the employee, the associate, your partner, your kids to think about a better future.
And we facilitate the development and the ability to connect the dots. So here’s my challenge to you in the next space of time before our next episode comes out, I want you to think about how could you intentionally use these four hats to lead better, manage better, mentor better, and coach better in service to building this thing called the vibrant culture? Because here’s what a vibrant culture is. It is a group of happy people doing work they enjoy, and people who are happy are usually people who feel like their work matters. Somebody’s paying attention to them, and they’re getting resources, what they need to find the way forward. Right? That’s what makes me happy. And, you know, most of us have our heads, you know, on correctly. We understand, like, I gotta work and that’s a reality, right? So why couldn’t work somewhere where somebody is building me up and if I’m built up, you know, I get lit from within, right? I am leaning towards the future.
I am integrating integrity and I am transforming the ordinary and, ultimately, that goes into the organization. Or the partnership or in the marriage. Right? So we build a vibrant culture. So this has been another episode of Build a Vibrant Culture podcast. If you want to know more, you’d like to work with me personally, I’d be delighted. Go to www.vibrantculture.com and check it out. My phone number is right on the website. Give me a buzz. Let’s figure out how we can help your leaders build a vibrant culture. Thank you so much. Great to be with you!Voice Over: Thank you for joining us on this episode of the Build a Vibrant Culture podcast. If you found value in today’s episode, please take a moment to leave us a review on your favorite podcast platform. Your feedback helps us improve and reach more like minded listeners. Remember, the journey to building a vibrant culture never stops. Stay inspired. Keep nurturing your vibrant culture and we can’t wait to reconnect with you on the next exciting episode of Build a Vibrant Culture podcast.
