Episode 144 - 3 Leadership Challenges with Dr. Patrick Jinks

[00:00:06] Speaker A: Welcome to the Leadership window podcast with Dr. Patrick Jinks. Each week through a social sector lens, Patrick interviews leaders and experts and puts us in touch with trends and tips for leading effectively. Patrick is a board certified executive coach, a member of the Forbes Coaches Council, a best selling author, award winning photographer and a professional speaker. And now, here's Dr. Patrick Jinks. [00:00:31] Speaker B: Hello everyone. Welcome to episode 144 of the Leadership Window. We're gonna have a pretty quick episode today. I think I say that sometimes and then I ramble on longer than I thought I would. I do that with my workshops. I always think, you know, I don't have enough content and I develop more and then before I know it, I'm halfway through my content and the time is gone. So I'm bad about that. I can ramble. I'm going to ramble a little bit, but I'm going to try to make it quick. And I want to share with you, this is one of those solo episodes where when some things are on my mind and I'm experiencing some things with my coachees, I like to kind of bring them to the forefront and share them with you, get you to think about some things. That's really all this is. And that's kind of my job as a coach. Get you to think about things, elevate your thinking and challenge you a little bit. So I'm going to share with you three or four of some of the most common challenges I see in leadership as I coach executives. And these are really simple. I don't want to insult your intelligence. They're actually pretty elementary, but they are true and they are powerful and we forget about them. And so I just want to inspire you on some things and I'm going to get right to it. The first one I see a lot and some of these are going to relate and they're going to kind of overlap a little bit. I see leaders, particularly executive leaders, often have difficulty getting out of the weeds of the operation in their organization. I coach a number of leaders and executives at the highest level who are constantly struggling with this personnel issue or this software issue or this, you know, fundraising challenge or event logistics or just anything even, even grant language. And some of the things that, yes, they're important, but I see leaders oftentimes get stuck there so much that it distracts them from where their focus should be more often, which is at the higher level. The vision for where we're going, the purpose of why we're doing, what we do, the, the leading of others and the influencing of others. The strategic thinking and movement and daily vision, casting, the thinking way ahead. Those kinds of things are what leaders do. But you can't do those things when you are constantly putting out all the little dramas and fires and things like this. I mean, I see it all the time. It's who, when I'm coaching them, I mean, I'll hear a lot of the struggles. And I'm thinking, man, those are really down in the weeds. And so it's really one of the big challenges. Leaders have got to get out of the weeds. I know many organizations, I work a lot in the nonprofit sector, for example, and you know, I've worked with organizations that the CEO is the only full time employee or they have maybe five or six employees, or even those that have 20, 30, 40 employees or more, they get caught up in that drama. And I know sometimes you have to live there. Small organizations, leaders don't always have the luxury of just staying in CEO mode. You also have to have your own portfolio of work you've got. You do have to be the sort of utility player, as it were, in your organization. But to the level that you can, even if you can't spend all of your time at that CEO thinking level, spend as much time as you can. And the only way to do that is to calendarize it. You've got to pause and, and take time for thinking and researching and, and just connecting with, just connecting with where your organization is going in the future. There's a, there's an old matrix, it's called the Covey matrix. And really it developed, I think, from Dwight Eisenhower. It's called the Eisenhower matrix. Most of you have heard about it, the difference between what's urgent and what's important. And some things are neither. Some things are urgent, but they're not important. Some things are important, but they're not urgent. And some things are both urgent and important. And this is one of the things that a lot of people don't realize. You think, well, yeah, I guess I should spend my time in the quadrant of things that are both urgent and important. That's what a CEO should do, right? Spend your time on only the things that are both urgent and important. But Eisenhower and Stephen Covey, after him, would advise you, no, that's not where the highest level of leadership should live. More time than not, they should spend time in the important but not urgent. In other words, the things that are about the future, those are important things. What the next strategic lever you're going to pull is what the horizon looks like. Because if you're only dealing with the urgent things, those are the fires, those are the, I mean when your phone rings, that's urgent and it might also be important. But we've got to get out of just really thinking that if it's urgent, I've got to, that's where I've got to spend my time. And I'm not going to go deeply into this, but the whole matrix, I recommend you look it up. Just look up the Eisenhower matrix, look up the Covey matrix, look up urgent versus important. You can find it chat GPT it if you need to, but what you'll find is what to do in those various quadrants. When do you defer something like I don't need to do this right now. I see that a lot too, by the way, people who think it's urgent. You don't have to do that. This moment, I see it so often. Yeah, I just, you know, people come into my office or my email thing. Okay, that doesn't mean you have to pause right now just because somebody sent you an email just because somebody came into your office and asked for something. It's funny how we, we don't know how to say, hey, I'm really on a project right now. Let's check in tomorrow at 8 o' clock or I'll see you around 4. Before I leave right now, I've got to get this done. So that's really it. Just get out of the urgent and get into the important. I find it sometimes is helpful to look at what we call a three day horizon. Today, tomorrow and the day after tomorrow. Executives have got to get beyond today. The today stuff is the what's going on right now that we've got to say grace over. We've got to deliver on, we've got to perform on. Let's get to tomorrow, right? What's the next year? What's the next three years? The five, that strategic planning window and then the day after tomorrow. Where's our organization going 10 years from now? What's going to change in our community? How do we forecast trends in the sector and in the industry and in what we're doing? How do we get ahead of that so that we're future fit? We all want to think like that as CEOs, but it's got to get intentional. We have to force ourselves to spend bandwidth on those things. That's going to lead to the second challenge. The second challenge is very related and that is around delegation. And this has multiple layers. Right. People again, people will say, yeah, I need to delegate better or I have trouble delegating because I just always feel like I can do it faster myself. Takes more time to teach somebody, and I'm going to have to go and look over it anyway when it's done because, you know, maybe I don't trust my people. I haven't hired competent enough people, or maybe I just like doing this. I enjoy this and I'm good at it, so I'm going to keep it. And that is a mistake for leaders, because what it fails to do is to develop your people. How did you get good at the things you're good at? Somebody gave you the opportunity to work on them. And that's what we have to do as leaders. We have to delegate significance, have to delegate opportunity. It's not task we want to delegate. That's just a work dump that's walking in and saying, hey, I don't have time for this. This shouldn't be on my plate. I need you to do it. That's not really delegation. That's assignment delegating is delegating. The autonomy, the trust, the opportunity, the leadership, the stretch that develops our people. And this is, I mean, this, this may be, this may be the thing I see the most, is the inability, the deficiency in this skill and the art of delegating. I've said many times, I've talked about delegation a lot. I always will try to spark the inspiration of leaders by saying, consider this. Anytime you delegate something to an employee, instead of saying, I need you to do this, come to them and say, hey, I'm wanting you to take leadership of this project. Would you be willing to take leadership of our staff meetings? Hey, would you be able to run point on such and such that is saying to them, hey, I trust you. You can do more than you're doing right now. And I don't mean you can be busier than you are right now. I mean, you can be more than you are right now. And I don't want to limit you. I don't want to stop you from growing and stretching and becoming great at things and overcoming challenges. So I'm going to delegate opportunity to you. It's a very different thing. I'll end this particular challenge with a story. I was coaching an executive up north who was telling me in our coaching engagement, man, my, my team just comes to me with everything. I mean, they just come to me with every little thing. I can't get my team leaders, the vice presidents, the directors, I can't get them to take initiative and just Lead, they come to me for everything, solve every problem. Hey, you know, the printer's out. Hey, you know, this, this donor sent us a letter and they're upset about such and such or hey, this, whatever happened. And he said, I just can't get my team to do that. And we had been talking a little bit about that and one day we were, we were working with his entire team, we were doing some strategic planning and we were on a lunch break and I'm sitting there with the CEO and while I'm sitting there at lunch, one of his direct reports comes up to him and shows him her phone and says, read this. And he sits there and reads it and you know, he's reading, you know, kind of a cry of distress from one of his fleet drivers that their truck had broke down and he's out on highway, whatever, whatever. And this is the operations director that comes to the CEO and says, what do I do? And the CEO looks at the phone and he shakes his head and he goes, I'll call the, you know, fleet garage and, and why don't you do this and I'll do that and we'll get it set, situated and let's reconnect. Two o', clock, let me know where things are. And she walked away. And he looked at me and goes, you see what I mean? And I went, yeah, yeah, I saw that. He said, what'd you see? I said, I saw a CEO solve his team members problems for her. And he, it just, he just stopped dead in his track. He just froze. He didn't know what to say to that. His jaw hit the table. And I said, I saw what you're talking about, that your team comes to you for everything. But I also saw you solve it for her. You took it on. There's an old Harvard article, oh, years ago, back in the 60s, some of you may have read it. It's called who has the Monkey? And it's about how your team will come and they'll put the monkey on your back, they'll hand you the problem here. Would you deal with this? And they might even do it very deferentially and say, hey, what do you want me to do about this? You know, like I'm coming to you for permission. Well then the leader is the one who has the monkey on their back. And what we need to do more as leaders is hand the monkey right back and say, you can handle this. I trust you. What are your solutions? Right? What are your options? What do you, what do you think is the right course of action, Even just asking them that question in the moment, this leader could have looked at this woman and said, okay, so how are we going to handle it? Well, I don't know. What do you want me to do? Well, what, what's your best course of action? Do you see him swapping the monkey back and forth? And that's what a leader has to do. Develop the critical thinking skill, the responsibility, the accountability that comes with those kinds of decisions. Here is the next challenge I see often, and over the last few years, we have moved really heavily into this space with teams and organizations around culture building. And we do what we call culture mapping, where we map out the way we want our culture to be. And it's very detailed and it's very specific. Culture, as we've talked about on this show before, is the way we do things around here. It's the whole feel, it's the whole experience of the organization. That's the culture. We tend to hear the word organizational culture and we gloss over because it sounds like this big academic term. It's really not. It's just the way we do things around here. When you go home and you say, boy, you know, we don't pay our people anything, well, you're describing culture. Or when you're sitting at lunch with a friend and saying, man, we have so much fun. Where I work, everybody just has fun. We love it. It's just a, it's a, it's a fun environment. That's culture. Or if you are complaining to a colleague that, boy, decisions in our organization get made behind closed doors with three or four people. They haven't asked us our input first. They just tell us after the fact what the decision is. Sometimes they don't even do that. We just have to deal with the fallout. No, you're describing culture. So we do culture mapping and we help organizations think about that. Here's the challenge I see is that leaders are not thinking as much about their culture as they are their strategy and their operations. They're not thinking about it. It's like, well, culture just kind of happens. You know, we, we have a value statement and we, we, we, we tell people, you know, this is what we want. Yeah, but that's not really fostering and driving and nurturing the culture that you want. You've all heard Peter Drucker, the Drucker ism, the. Probably his most famous one. Culture eats strategy for breakfast. Or. Well, it is so true. You can have the most beautiful strategic plan, all this great stuff in it, and the board was Involved and it's visionary and it's innovative and maybe you've even got all the right levers of strategy that you're going to pull are well articulated. But if the organizational culture is toxic, dysfunctional, confusing, chaotic, turbulent, incompetent, the document's just a piece of paper. So what does that mean? Well, we take time and do strategic planning. Why don't we do culture planning? Why don't we think about the behaviors, the processes, the protocols, the environment. The way we do things around here is really what leaders need to spend time on. And that means culture coaching. Your team, your executive leadership team, for example, they're the ones that are going to model it or not. So you got to be intentional about culture. I'm going to move on. One more thing. Self limiting mindsets. Self limiting mindsets, especially in the nonprofit sector. And this goes to the organizational level, even the community level sometimes, but it's certainly goes to the organizational level and then it goes all the way down to the individual level. The self limiting mindsets and beliefs that so many leaders have. We do an assessment on our coaches called the emotional intelligence assessment. Many of you are familiar with that term. And I've always said, I think it's the most important competency in leadership. It's the most important asset that a leader can have. You can be a great strategist, you can be charismatic, you can have all the business acumen. But if you don't have emotional intelligence, you're not going anywhere because leadership is about people. So in the emotional intelligence assessment, one of the components is self appreciation. It links to self confidence in some of the other assessments that we do as well, I will tell you, it's probably one of the top three elements of the assessment that consistently scores lower. We're talking out of probably 20 to 25 different components of emotional intelligence, self confidence or self appreciation is almost always in the, in the bottom 10th percentile. These are, these are executives who have achieved success of getting in that chair and being respected and trusted as a leader. They got hired for this leadership role, the top one, and yet they still have such self limiting mindsets. And it's, it's hard to watch because I watch leaders who I look at and go, man, you, you have so much talent, so much experience, you have so much authority and credibility. But you're the only one who doesn't see it. You know, why don't, why don't you see it? And one of the things. Now I'll come, well, I'll come back to the Organization last. Since I'm already on the self confidence piece, one of the things that, that we do in coaching is we have leaders sometimes build what we call a history of success. Man, I just don't know if I can get us there. I just don't. Maybe I'm not the right person or I, I don't, you know, I just don't know. And I'll ask them. I, I had an executive one time read her resume to me. I mean I asked her, do me a favor, read your resume to me. Can you put your, can you put your fingers on your resume? She goes, yeah, I got it right here. It's on my, it's on my computer. I'll pull it up. Man, you should have heard this resume. You'd want this person, I don't care who you are, you would want this person in your organization. I mean the academic credentials were there. The, the history, the, the experience and the high level positions, the tenure, the success. She had results listed on her resume of the things that she had led and accomplished and the schools that she went to. I said, are you hearing this as you're reading this out loud to me? Are you listening to it? She said, well, I haven't really thought about it like that. I said, read it every day, would you? It's just a list of, hey, this is, and, and even that's, that's just your resume. That's not at the core deeply who you are. Write that down too. We have self limiting mindsets. We have to believe. You know, we talked about strategy, how important it is. Yep. You got a plan? I do this for a living. We gotta have strategy. Right. But you also have to have culture because strategy without culture is just a document and you got to have belief. My good friend and adjunct coach here at the Leaders Perspective, Munro Free, you've heard him a couple of episodes on this show. He will just tell you like the preacher would say it in an evangelical church. You gotta believe. Do you believe? So you have to plan for it, you have to commit to it, but you gotta believe in it. So I just want to encourage you leaders out there, don't short yourself, build your, write down your history of success. Think about all the things you've accomplished, even against odds, even when it was difficult. You didn't know how to do it, but you figured it out, you learned it and you develop. You became the best at it. Something. You're the best at something. What is that? And how do we take that and apply it to the next challenge and Say, you know, if I could do this, I can do that. So to the organizational level, I would say leaders focus on the obstacles. You know, one of the first questions that gets asked at a lot of strategic planning meetings or what are the barriers and the challenges that we face? As an age old question, we often start there. I learned years ago that's, that's not the approach I like anyway. Because what that does is that fixates on the barrier, the challenge. That's not where I want my focus. I want my focus on the possibility. Instead of asking what are our barriers, I want to say what are our aspirations and intentions and what will it take to achieve them? I mean, think about that. If you can answer the what will it take to achieve them question, you're going to address the barriers because you know what it takes. So it's a big appreciative inquiry concept. We, we, we teach it in our coaching training, but we, we view things through a lens of scarcity. You know, I talk to non profits and say I just don't know if my board will go for this. My, we don't have much money. It's one of the things I hear all the time. You know, we're a small organization, we don't have much money. And I get it. I've led them, I know, so I get it. But if that's your mindset, the scarcity, the we're small, that we don't have enough, you're just, you're going to stay there as a leader. I can guarantee it. You're going to stay there as a leader. I've seen small organizations think big and be big with impact. I've seen small organizations make a greater impact in their community than some of the large organizations that have the big budgets and foundations and endowments and planned giving and all that, I've seen it over and over and over. The, I've, I've shared this many times. I'm a, I ride motorcycles and when I was learning to ride a motorcycle, you go to the class to get your license and everything, you spend eight hours and then you go back the next day and they do a road test and all that. And one of the things they teach you, those of you that ride, especially those of you that ride a large motorcycle, like a touring motorcycle, the big Harley or the Honda Gold Wing or something like that, those are 900 pound motorcycles. And you know, getting around in a parking lot at slow speeds with a 900 pound bike is now it's not, it's it now it's easy, but it's not. When you first get started, a lot of people drop their bikes constantly because they haven't learned how to ride at slow speeds. And what the. One of the first things they teach you is that when you're doing a U turn on a motorcycle, which is a slow speed, sharp turn, you cannot look at your front wheel or what's right in front of you. You have to turn your head all the way behind you and look at where you want the bike to end up. That's where your eyes have to go. I'll never get it. Took me a while to get it. And my instructor would yell at me, you know, I'd go and I'd do the U turn around the cone and he would say, turn your head, turn your head. Because I just, it was every. It went against every instinct to look behind me as I was about to U turn. But the, the concept of it is the bike goes where your eyes are looking. Then you learn that this is true at high speeds as well, that you got to kind of see through a curve. You can't just look at the curve right in front of you. You can't look at a sharp curve and see on the, on the right hand side that there's a drop off down to a cliff. You can't look at that drop off and go, ooh, don't hit the drop off. Don't hit the drop off. If that's where your eyes are looking, that's where you'll go. Look it up on YouTube. There's tons of videos, evidence of this stuff. You see a rock in there, A big rock, or a pothole? Oh, no, no, a pothole. A pothole. Don't hit the pothole. That's the first thing you're going to hit when that's your target. It's called target fixation. Where are your eyes looking in your organization? Are you looking at. Oh, no, our campaign software isn't good enough. Oh, no, our. We just lost a donor. Oh, no, our budget is short. Oh, no, we have this. We had a big company in our community leave town. What are we going to do? Everything is based on the barriers and the problems, and we stay fixated on those targets. So I just want to encourage you to not limit your own mindsets in leadership. Hey, I mean, that's really it. Those are the, those are three things. Staying in the weeds and related to that, the development of your team. And number two, is not focusing on strategy as much as you do are not focusing on culture as Much as you do strategy and operations. And number three, limiting your mindset to scarcity and lack of self confidence. If you can get your head around those three things and set intention around strengthening those three things, you will see, you will feel it, you will notice it, your people will notice it. It'll be a big deal for you. So I just want to encourage you with that. I'm going to wrap this show up with something I don't promote a lot. I do want to let you know if you go to theleadersperspective.com there's a couple things I want to point your attention to. One is on our menu you will see that we have a YouTube channel. So we do this podcast every two or three weeks and then during the off weeks we do just a YouTube video. It's like they're usually like a four to five minute. A four or five minute video. Just a coaching video to give you something to think about. And we are thousands of subscribers. Our podcast now is getting over 20,000 listens per episode. So it continues to grow. Thank you for that. Thank you for being a part of that. But our YouTube channel is there as well and you can get all of it right on the. On the menus of the leaders. Perspective.com the other thing I want to share with you is if you're a leader trying to develop other leaders, one of the best ways that you can do it is to develop a coaching competency and a coaching mindset. A discipline of coaching rather than managing and directing. And so we have a. An online course that is, that qualifies for required training through the center of Credentialing and Education for those that are pursuing a board certification in coaching. So it's sort of accredited in that way. And it's a 30 hour online on demand course in leadership coaching. And it's for people who are professional coaches who are coaching from the outside and it is for internal leaders who want to be better coaches to their people. I hear it all the time. I want to coach my people better. But they've never really gone through what coaching actually is. They've just heard the word and they know it sounds like there's something to it that's, you know, not just directing and telling, but they don't really know the discipline and the frameworks behind it. So it's called Organizational Leadership Coaching Training or O L C T. And you'll find it on our website. So just for those of you that are interested or if you want to develop your senior leaders to be better coaches. Go and check that out and let us know if you have any questions about it. We have a nonprofit rate that's about. I think it's a 20% discount from the corporate rate. But even the corporate rate is, is. Is not unreachable, trust me. So, anyway, wanted to promote those things to you. Hey, I'm just trying to hold up things that sometimes are the simple things we miss. The common sense thing, the leadership kinds of things we think of, the manager things, the operational things we got to say grace over and take care of. Think like a leader, be a leader. It's different. It's influence. It's future thinking. It's developing your people. It's emotional intelligence. You got this lead on it.