Podcast appearances and mentions of Michael G Rogers

Terry Earthwind Nichols is the Chairman of the Evolutionary Healer. He is a thought leader and author of the book Profiling For Profit What Crossed Arms Don't Tell You, he's also the grand master of Repetitive Behavior Cellular Regression® - In this episode you can learn from Terry: How a chance helping conversation developed into Repetitive Behavior Cellular Regression® How imposter syndrome and PTSD share similar traits and coping strategies How he turned people watching into profiling How to hook into the non verbal clues when meeting with others Plus lots more leadership hacks! Follow us and explore our social media tribe from our Website: https://leadership-hacker.com Music: " Upbeat Party " by Scott Holmes courtesy of the Free Music Archive FMA Transcript: Thanks to Jermaine Pinto at JRP Transcribing for being our Partner. Contact Jermaine via LinkedIn or via his site JRP Transcribing Services Find out more from Terry: Terry on LinkedIn Evolutionary Healer Website ----more---- Steve Rush: Some call me Steve, dad, husband or friend. Others might call me boss, coach or mentor. Today you can call me The Leadership Hacker.   Thanks for listening in. I really appreciate it. My job as the leadership hacker is to hack into the minds, experiences, habits and learning of great leaders, C-Suite executives, authors and development experts so that I can assist you developing your understanding and awareness of leadership. I am Steve Rush and I am your host today. I am the author of Leadership Cake. I am a transformation consultant and leadership coach. I cannot wait to start sharing all things leadership with you.   Steve Rush: Terry Earthwind Nichols is the guest on today's show. He is the founder and Chairman of the Evolutionary Healer. He is a top thought leader and the author of Profiling For Profit What Crossed Arms Don't Tell You, but before we get a chance to speak with Terry, it is The Leadership Hacker News.   The Leadership Hacker News   Steve Rush: There is so much bad press and so much terrible news happening across the world right now; I am pivoting today to tell you a story, and it was first told to me by my friend and guest on episode four, Michael G. Rogers. This is a story about unintended consequences of leadership communication. Once there was a group of frogs merrily hopping through the forest, they did not have a care in the world until two of the frogs fell into a deep pit. All of the other frogs gathered round quickly around this large pit pared down into its deep vastness. They began to scratch their heads, trying to come up with a way to help. After a long period of time, they couldn't think of any solution, so they all agreed it was hopeless and yell down to the other two folks to prepare for their fate, and it was unlikely that would ever get out.   Unwilling to believe this the other two frogs started to jump and jump and jump. The group of frogs above began to shout. It was time to give up. You are never going to win. It is time to quit. You are never going to get out of here. After a period of time, one of the two frogs in the deep pit gave heave to what was being said to him, he gave up and sadly died. The other frog, however, kept jumping even higher and higher. The shouts of discouragement continued and got louder and even though it was absolutely drained, every last bit of energy, this last remaining frog had continued to jump even higher. And in a miraculous last jump eventually jumped so high he spring out of the pit.  The frogs celebrated the frog's crazy victory, gathered around him in puzzlement. They said, didn't you hear us tell you to stay down there, that you would never get out. In response the frog said, Oh, that is what you were saying. I am hard of hearing, and I thought you were telling me to jump higher, and I thought you weren't discouraging me, but actually encouraging me. And I guess there are two leadership parallels to the story, many people in your life and work and your role as a leader, including yourself talk by the way, will tell you things are too hard. Give up, don't try harder. Make the choice not to listen to negative self-talk and negative talk from others.   And positivity breeds positivity. As a leader, you can unlock Mindsets that shape thinking and develop positive behaviours, and it is so much more fun being positive than being negative. Right? So take this as an opportunity to inspire people. Don't suppress even what you think might be impossible and let them unlock their greatness. That has been The Leadership Hacker News. If you have any stories, new or insights, please get in touch.   Start of Podcast   Steve Rush: Our special guest, on today show is Terry Earthwind Nichols. Terry is the Chairman of the Evolutionary Healer. He is a thought leader and author of the book Profiling For Profit What Crossed Arms Don't Tell You. Terry, welcome to The Leadership Hacker Podcast. Terry Earthwind Nichols: Thank you, Steve. I am glad to be here. Steve Rush: So before we get into some of the really interesting work that you are undertaking with your teams at the moment, just tell us a bit about the backstories to, you know, maybe your early career and how you arrived at leading the business that you do now? Terry Earthwind Nichols: It has been an interesting run, I will tell you. I graduated from high school. I was born and raised in the upper western area of the United States in the mountains over Rocky Mountains. You might say I am a mountain boy, so to speak, and when I graduated from high school, I did not quite make the financial grade to go straight into college. Vietnam War was still going back in 1971, and so my best bet was to join the Navy and see the world. That is exactly what I did for 20 years. I loved it. It was a great experience. Would not trade it for anything, and we can talk about that a little bit later but I had been a lifelong helper. My nickname in high school was Doc Nick. People come and talk to me and tell me their problems, so, you know my future life had started very early. I just never knew it, some 40 years later after high school going on 50, here next year.   I started helping some people again through an international ministry called The Stephen Ministries. It is a one on one crisis intervention ministry and I was helping a person from my apartment in Minneapolis, Minnesota in the upper Midwest of the United States. And she was out in Australia and one night, I was helping her, but we weren't getting very far as far as, you know really moving forward to what her issues were. And I got this hit to have her close her eyes and that's shutting off all the visual around her and just ask her what her smell, because I knew from my leadership classes in the Navy and stuff like that. First aid classes that smells is the number one trigger for a memory recall.   And so I asked her what she smelled? And she said, oh my God, gas and I go, okay, what kind? Diesel, gasoline, what do you got? She said no, natural gas. This is an all-electric building, so there must be a fire and I go, well, somehow the second before, you did not smell anything. The second before I asked you, how about just taking a few deep breaths, close your eyes again and see if you can smell that gas again and she was able to, and I say, go back and find a memory where you smell that gas and she did. And so what we now have trademarked as repetitive behaviour, cellular regression had begun. After about three to five hours a week over the course of about three months, the first CR Session, that is what we call it. CR Process Session was completed and we've now got that down to a couple of three hours, so it's a lot quicker and easier for us to work with our clients. As a matter of fact, we work in clients in 13 countries in five languages now. Steve Rush: Wow. Terry Earthwind Nichols: So that was 10 years. Steve Rush: So what started out with some helpful, somebody that you were talking too, has now turned into your life's work. Because the Evolutionary Healer you now run is basically set up to help people through that regression and making sure that people are in a good place for the future. Tell us a little bit. About what you do now?   Terry Earthwind Nichols: Well Evolutionary Healers started out as a mom and pop operation. My wife and I started it out with health and wellness people and taking them through the CR Process as the first part of coaching with them. Our coaches said, why aren't you teaching this? This isn't woo-woo or anything like that. Yeah but a solid question and answer sequence, and so we started teaching it and so the Earth Wind Academy was born and we still have the Earth Wind Academy going and then you know, it expanded out. My wife is an author, matter of fact she just finished her memoir, which is her 20th book, just this last month. And she started working with people to write a book and self-publish it in 30 days over Amazon and that's turned into quite a business.   So now, we have three divisions there and I started working with Imposter Syndrome. Imposter Syndrome is wild, crazy. Steve Rush: Sure is. Terry Earthwind Nichols: Out there in the executive world. They estimate 70% based on my conversations and my work with CEOs and Senior Executives. That is probably 85% if not higher out there, and so the consortium was born the fourth of our four divisions of Evolutionary Healer. Now in just eight years, we have gotten pretty wide with practitioners in eight countries, 45 of them and so the consortium division is working with the Executives in Global Fortune 1000 Companies. And we work with them with a vision strategy and a lot of other things, but The Imposter Syndrome was a big piece of that puzzle. Evolutionary Healer has really evolved. Evolutionary is eve of illumination or coming out or see in something new, and healer is a little more than what people ever think. Healer is to heal oneself, and to move forward and to evolve, so Evolutionary Healer was born based on that premise. Steve Rush: Great backstory and Imposter Syndrome is high, kind of 80% in organizations is really stark. In your experience Terry, what is it that causes that? Terry Earthwind Nichols: Well, the same thing that causes a PTSD, suicide ideation, lifelong self-sabotage. All those things, what we found was the answer to what Dr. Sigmund Freud was looking for back in the late 1890s. He was a German psychiatrist that was working with people to try and find a memory of high emotional value in early childhood. Well we found a way to help a person using their five senses to inventory, a single memory one at a time. We helped them find an amnesia memory in early childhood, usually pre-language that has a high emotional value to that child at that moment, and because they are, pre-language, they can't go to mom and dad and say, you know. I just saw this happen or this just happened and I don't understand it, so what happens is there's a natural protection device in our brains called amnesia and amnesia takes over to protect us from remembering that memory. And as we grow it starts watching and protecting us in various ways, so that later on in life, when more significant emotional events occur in whether we see them or are they actually occur to us, the protection system keeps us thinking about those things. And then the repetitive behaviour sets in, and it's like being on a merry-go-round without being able to shut it off.   Steve Rush: Got It. Terry Earthwind Nichols: That is how that works. Steve Rush: And therefore, what manifests itself in our more mature years in our adult life. In your experience has been created much, much, much earlier. Terry Earthwind Nichols: Correct, and it's driven by that, so when they find it, when we help them go back using an alternate neuropathway because that the protection device, the active block, this amnesia has cut off the neural pathway back to that memory and it's protecting it. So we literally, by using the five sense, we go back to the back and bottom of the brain, near the stem, where the five senses are and move forward. So we literally come in the back door with a client, into a memory that they have not been to since it happened and the memory itself is crystal clear as if it happened two minutes ago. It is unbelievable how a memory back so far in early childhood can be remembered with such clarity, it is quite amazing. Now here is the key to this, Steve, when that is found, and we neutralize the emotion of that memory, all of the other stuff they can't stop thinking about, they stop thinking about. PTSD has shut off. Suicide ideation is shut off. The Imposter Syndrome thoughts are all shut off and they don't come back because we teach our clients how to recognize new problems coming in and neutralize it before they take hold. Does that make sense? Steve Rush: Right, yeah. Terry Earthwind Nichols: Okay, so yeah, that is how it works. Steve Rush: Given the vast amount of experiences that you have had. Maybe could share with our listeners, one of the, perhaps the most vivid experiences that you have shared with one of your clients? Terry Earthwind Nichols: Yeah, we go through The CR Process Session using Zoom or Skype or some audio visual, and we have used and used video on Facebook before. We watch them because; this is where the book came from because I have been a lifelong people watcher. And when we first started out in the business, our clients were alive in the room with us when we took them through the process and we would observe different things that would happen physically, as we were getting close to this memory and the person responsible for the memory. And one that was just utterly amazing. If you have ever tried to take a pinkie toe, and fold it over like you're crossing your fingers. Folded over your fourth toe, it is impossible, but I have had three different clients in different times be able to take that pinkie toe and cross it over the fourth toe when they were talking about or describing a person of high emotional value that we found out later was a perpetrator of various of different means.   That was an amazing thing to observe. Another time I was in the room person to person with a lady who did not move for an hour and a half, not a muscle. She did not move her face. Did not twinkle her eyes, not anything. She was like a hunk of stone. All of a sudden, we were talking about her grandfather and she was explaining her senses in a memory. She had dangling earrings and for anybody that knows dangling earrings, if the left one moves the right one moves too, they both go at the same time. All right, this one, this time, the left earring started to moving without moving the right earring. It was amazing, so there was just, you know, the different things that we observed going through these processes. Just mind blowing, you know, and they are indicators of where we are going to be when we get to the end of that third memory is pretty amazing. Steve Rush: And your fascination with people watching is what caused you to have the inspiration behind the book, which is all about. How you have learned through observation to how you profile people's behaviours. Right? Tell us a little bit about how the book came about? Terry Earthwind Nichols: The book came about because my practitioners and my business partner, my wife. Bugged me for almost two years to write the book, because I know so much, you know, I've been a people watcher all my life and when I was overseas in Europe and I would get off my Navy Ship and I would go and find me a sidewalk cafe whenever possible. And I'd sit there and have my cappuccinos. I love cappuccinos, and I would just watch people not from a scientific or behavioural standpoint, I just watch them and how they, you know, react to certain stresses. You know, that were obvious when I would be observing them, and then, you know, these oddities in muscle movements associated with our CR Process. I personally taken 147 people through this process in the last 10 years and so you learn that, there are certain things that the body does at a time that is completely subconscious movement, and so the book came from all of those observations. Steve Rush: Right? In old language, you might have heard the term body language or nonverbal communication, which you substitute for the word profiling. Right? So tell us a little bit about the whole kind of principle. What Crossed Arms Don't Tell You, because ultimately the old thinking behind body language was if you had your arms crossed, you are either hiding something or you are negative, but you debunk that theory, don't you? Terry Earthwind Nichols: Yes, I did. And there's nothing wrong with body language. There is over a thousand books, imprint in English Language alone on body language and how to read it. For almost all of it that I have observed. It is pretty accurate. The thing that they don't go into in any of the books that I've read and I've read, I don't know, over 50. They don't talk about variables to the way a person moves, crosses their legs or their arms or whatever. With the situation that they are in. Case in point, a woman was talking to me at a networking event. One time she crossed her arms, and you know, continued to conversation, which is basically a no buy for salespeople. Cross your arms, you are done but she was cold. Okay, so it was not that she was not buying or receiving the message that I giving her, it was just cold in the room. There are circumstances, environmental, and otherwise that we subconsciously do. For instance crossing your arms can be a security thing. You know, it is not that I am no longer in a no buy situation. It is just you are, touching on stuff that I am uncomfortable with. So crossing my arms as I was taught, when I was a kid, when mom and dad got mad at me, they crossed her arms. So when this person's talking to me and I'm hitting a couple of buttons, emotional buttons, they'll cross their arms for protection, not per se, no buy. So, you know, the way people tilt their head left or right. Means different things as well, and the way people talk on the phone and in the book, I talk about online how to look at different things in emails and phone conversations and that type of things. Steve Rush: So all of these, just providing you with little clues and hints to give you some insight as to how somebody is reacting, right? Terry Earthwind Nichols: Absolutely. Steve Rush: Got it. Terry Earthwind Nichols: You know, how they talk to me with their arms crossed the whole thing. I have a cute story in there. I was selling custom clothes shortly after getting out of the Navy and there was a man in front of me in my custom clothing store that I have worked at. You know, and we had already talked and looked at some fabrics and things like that, and so we were both standing facing each other and he had his arms crossed. And so, you know, I'm in the process of telling and how we're going to make the suit, and how it's done and all that. His arms are crossed, he dropped his head down to the left and I stopped talking for about a half a second, and I said, so how do you want to pay for this? And said, visa is good. I said, okay, let's sit down and let's get a deposit and start designing your suit. Okay, so a couple of minutes later, all of a sudden he sits back in his chair and he says, wait a minute, I go, you have a question? And he says, yeah. I am a professional salesman, I make $2 million dollar deals all over the United States every month. Okay, I am standing in front of you, given you a no buy sign, cross my arms, and you closed me. How did you know I was ready to buy this suit? And I go, well, both of your feet were parallel and you were facing me full on, that means neutral. Your arms are crossed, don't mean anything to me, because as soon as you dropped your head down and to the left, that told me you were trusting me, and you were confident in what I was saying, and it was time to close the deal. And he looks at me for another second or two, and he kind of shakes his head left and right, and he says, well, I'll be darned. Okay, so what do we do next? And he bought my first $2,000 dollar suits sale.   Steve Rush: Great, excellent. And if I'm a leader listening to this, Terry, there must be a bunch of things that present themselves regularly with my team and maybe with my customers and clients, what would be the kind of top things that you notice that present themselves as clues that we can be looking out for? Terry Earthwind Nichols: Well the biggest thing is if you were to dissect a person vertically. Right down the middle of their body, anything that is movement wise on the left side or the heart side of the body is confidence, love, trust, all of those things. Now, if you have ever picked up a baby who is crying or whatever, where do you put it? On the left side of your body, over your heart, so that you're heart to heart, that's the love nurture side, okay. Now, if they start to move and movements are tilt their head to the right that is defence or distrust or confusion. Okay, so in body language, for instance, if a person is lying to you, they have a tendency to look down into the right, right side, okay. Where did we get left and right? Well, left side is the nurturer inside. Another thing to think about is back in the Roman times. They taught everybody to carry a sword or a weapon in the right hand and a defence device, a shield or something in the left hand, so that all of the soldiers were exactly, the same. That way they did not cut each other when they were standing beside each other. And so the natural deflection of since, you know, the last 20 or more, thousand years out there. Has to been fight, flight or freeze is to the right, to run away and those kinds of things, if possible. So knowing the left side of the body and the right side of the body is a very important to remember when you are doing that. How fast are they talking to you on the phone? How fast, or slow? Cadence of, how they speak is very important. Somebody is talking very fast, could be an ethnic thing or they could be just nervous, or they are trying to figure out how to get out of this conversation. There is a lot of cultures where their cadence is quicker, so you just tune yourself, your ears to those cadence. In an email, for instance, are they long casual sentences? Or are they short and to the point? And is it a short email? Somebody trying to get this email off their inbox, or are they really trying to communicate with you? So all of that's in the book as well. Steve Rush: Excellent, so there is lots of hints and tips. That folks can get into, if they get a copy of the book. Right? Terry Earthwind Nichols: Oh yeah. COVID, kind of messed us up a little bit. I have had some fun on webinars. I did a webinar for a sales and marketing executive international. We had about 1,121 people on that one. That was a lot of fun, but you know, when I am live, I have little things that we do it with the audience that is kind of fun, you know, makes it interesting. That is for sure.   Steve Rush: So this part of the show, Terry, we are going to turn the leadership lens back on you. So you have led teams for many, many years in different guises in different shapes, so we want to hack into that leadership thinking that sits with you and therefore, Terry, could you just share with us. What would be your top three-leadership hack? Terry Earthwind Nichols: Listen attentively. Okay, the person in front of you is communicating with you, and I teach this in my coaching. That message is everything, okay. If the person is not receiving you, a good way to understand that they are or not receiving you. Is to ask a simple question. Those of you, who are listening, write this down. The question is. Does that make sense? Does that make sense; solicit 97% of the time the person's going to respond audibly with the word yes. The other 3% they have questions or they are going to say no, and if they say no, normally more than three quarters of the time, they're going to say no, but I have a question, okay. Does that make sense? Is huge. Now here is what, does that make sense do for you as a person who is maybe selling something to somebody. You give them permission to hear themselves say yes, out loud, two or three times, by asking that question during the course of the conversation, then when it's time to propose a buying situation, they're more inclined to say, yes, it's powerful question.   The last of the three is put yourself in their position, okay. If somebody comes to you with an issue. What would you do if you were the person standing there explaining it to your boss what, it is? And did something happen to you or with you, around you? And your experience that could be of high value to that person at, this point in time. That may or may not be according to the general rules of the company, so those would be the three things. That I think are the greatest. Does that make sense? Steve Rush: It makes sense to me, Terry that is great advice and interestingly that in your last hack there, you know, we don't often spend time stepping into the shoes of other people. Are seeing it from other perspectives. Perspective, it is really, really important, isn't it? To understand how others think, feel and behave too. Terry Earthwind Nichols: Yes, you know, there is an old saying. I am Chickamauga Cherokee, Native American by blood. There is a great saying that they use, it has called a teaching and it is simply. You cannot give what you do not have. If you are not getting respect, that means you are not giving it. You got to give it first and then I'll come back to you, okay. Steve Rush: Yeah.   Terry Earthwind Nichols: And there is a story in the book there about my best custom clothing client came to me from a kid who washed my car in the parking garage of the building of then Pillsbury Corporate Headquarters. I go upstairs. I do my work with the top floor Executives, come down. I would always talk to the young kid. Pete was his name, and one time he said, he asked me. You always dress so well. I know you go up to the top floor and stuff like that. That is why I wash your car, but you know, you always dress so well, not like a regular corporate person. What do you do? Now there is two things, I could have done. I could have just said, nah, you know. I just sell stuff to them upstairs, you know, no big deal, but I respected the kid. He gave me a genuine question. He deserves a genuine answer. I gave him a full spill of what I do as a custom clothing salesman and he said, that's really cool. I bet my uncle could benefit from you make in suits, and I go, well, here. Here is my card. Sometime when you see your uncle, tell him about what I do, so about a week later, this is cool Steve. I get a call in the middle of the morning and there is this guy on the other side.   He says so you sell suits. I got your name from my nephew Pete. He was over having dinner last night, and he was telling me how good you look in your suits and stuff. How do you do that? And I said, well I come to offices and blah, blah, blah. And I gave him the same spill that I give to Pete before and he said. Well, I want to come and see. I have a tough time getting suits off the rack, almost impossible and I hate traveling to New York. We were in Minneapolis at the time. I hate traveling to New York all the time and spend a week or two there, to get my each season closed. I said, okay, so I will come out and this guy turned out to be my best customer. Highest pay sales customer of all of them and he came from Pete, the guy who washed my cars, so ladies and gentlemen, respect is everything. Steve Rush: Yeah. It is good to show, Isn't it? Everybody you speak to has a backstory and has also connections that can help you in your life and work, right? Terry Earthwind Nichols: Yeah, the guy was Executive Vice President at the time of one of the top banks in the world. Steve Rush: Awesome. Terry Earthwind Nichols: Right, so this guy was no little guy. Steve Rush: Exactly, yeah. So Terry, this part of the show also we call Hack to Attack, so this is where we maybe had something not work out as well in our past. Maybe something has gone a little awry or maybe even screwed up, but as a result of that experience, we've now used that in our life and our work as a positive outcome, what would be your Hack to Attack?   Terry Earthwind Nichols: I have messed up so many times. It is unbelievable, and I continue to, and I think that's part of the journey. Because you know, a journey is not a guided tour and neither is life. I mean, you either succeed in life or you learn, and when I am teaching vision strategy to my clients. I teach them that when they achieve something, they not only celebrate the achievement, but they take a minute and reflect on. What did they learn? Because just about any project you can come up with, things go wrong. That is just the way it works and what did you learn from it? And what can you take with you as you move forward? Steve Rush: What would have been your biggest learn in your career so far? Terry Earthwind Nichols: I learned it the hard way and that is, shut up and listen. When I was a young buck probably as late as my middle forties. I felt that I always had to have something to say rather than just be quiet and listen and respond, if there was something to actually say rather than respond, to respond. And that was a hard lesson, I got fired a few times because I would do that stuff, and now I make sure that my clients don't do that. Steve Rush: Yeah, It is important. Isn't it? That whatever happens, whatever goes wrong, that we absolutely use that as a lesson and we use it as a learning experience rather than we see it as a failure, right? Terry Earthwind Nichols: Yeah, and you know, there is very few failures or things that have gone wrong and lessons that I did not get a chance to use in a positive way later on in life. Steve Rush: Sure. Terry Earthwind Nichols: You know, you take it with you and you keep it handy. Steve Rush: The last thing we want to do is do a bit of time travel with you, so we effectually ask our guests at this time. To think about bumping into Terry when he was 21 and if you had a chance to Terry. To bump into 21-year-old self, what would be the advice you would give him? Terry Earthwind Nichols: Well, oh Lord, I am 67 years old and that 21, I love it. When I was 21, I had just re-enlisted for the first time in the Navy, and I got a little bit of re-enlistment money and I went out and I bought a brand new Volkswagen, super beetle. Now super beetle was a little bigger than a regular beetle of its time and it had air conditioning. I lived in Yuma Arizona was where I was at the time. It got very hot there, so some air conditioning in the car was kind of nice and I would tell myself, don't put the stickers on the car. Now there is the hack right there because I put some stickers on the paint of my car and it gets hot there, so the adhesive on the stickers kind of melted into the paint. So later when we heated him up with a blow dryer and pulled them off, it took the paint with it. Oh my God. Steve Rush: Oh dear.   Terry Earthwind Nichols: It costs me a paint job to sell my car, and so don't put the stickers on the car. Steve Rush: And it sounds to me that, that is still a really painful experience, when you look back on it. Terry Earthwind Nichols: I can see the paint pulled away on the bumpers of my car. The stickers were funny and you know. When you are young, you do things without really stopping to think it through and that was one of them. And that was one of them, so yeah, don't put those stickers on the car. Steve Rush: There is always a consequence, right? Terry Earthwind Nichols: Yeah. Steve Rush: There is always consequence behind every action? Terry Earthwind Nichols: Yes, there is. Steve Rush: Excellent stuff, so Terry, for those people that are listening today, who'd like to learn more about how profiling for profit can help them or more about the work that you do with the Evolutionary Healer. Where is the best place that they can find out more about your work? Terry Earthwind Nichols: I would say Google, here is why? I have a brand that is unique in the world, Terry Earthwind Nichols. Earthwind is my tribal name. I am Cherokee remember, and there is probably 20,000 Terry Nichols in North America alone, so to keep from having to remember all websites and all those kinds of things, Google me on ask Terry Earthwind Nicholas, and you get my YouTube channels, my various companies, all my social media sites, all of it right there for you. And even how to get a hold of me? Steve Rush: Excellent stuff, we will make sure also, that through your social media sites and a link to the book will be in our show notes, so folks can click in and find you through our site too. Terry Earthwind Nichols: Great. Steve Rush: So Terry, just from my perspective, it has been really fascinating listening to you and clearly being a lifetime watcher, hasn't stopped for you and I know that with a passion, this is something that you continually evolve and continue to teach. And it's been great listening to some of those stories with us today, so Terry, thanks for being on The Leadership Hacker Podcast. Terry Earthwind Nichols: It was great to be on here Steve. Thank you very much for inviting me. Steve Rush: Thank you, Terry.     Closing   Steve Rush: I genuinely want to say heartfelt thanks for taking time out of your day to listen in too. We do this in the service of helping others, and spreading the word of leadership. Without you listening in, there would be no show. So please subscribe now if you have not done so already. Share this podcast with your communities, network, and help us develop a community and a tribe of leadership hackers.   Finally, if you would like me to work with your senior team, your leadership community, keynote an event, or you would like to sponsor an episode. Please connect with us, by our social media. And you can do that by following and liking our pages on Twitter and Facebook our handler their @leadershiphacker. Instagram you can find us there @the_leadership_hacker and at YouTube, we are just Leadership Hacker, so that is me signing off. I am Steve Rush and I have been the leadership hacker    

Michael is the founder of Teamwork and Leadership, a speaking and training company with a mission of building extraordinary teams and helping leaders love their jobs more. He is a former Director of Learning, Performance and Quality at a Fortune 50 company. He is the author of the best-selling book – You Are the Team—6 Simple Ways Teammates Can Go from Good to Great and his new book "Do You Care to Lead" just hit bookshelves in February. His blog Teamwork and Leadership regularly ranks in the top 10 of leadership blogs and has a monthly following of over 30,000. He is an Inc. Top 100 Leadership Speaker. Michael received both his Bachelors of Science and Masters of Science degrees from Utah State University. Michael resides in Southern Utah with his wife, Terri. They have been married 30 years and have six sons.   In this podcast, Cindra and Michael discuss:   · His #1 Leadership Strategy · The 5 leadership stars · How SONIC can help you · His work with the Southern Utah Football team · How the best leaders and coaches develop a strong culture   HIGH PERFORMANCE MINDSET SHOWNOTES FOR THIS EPISODE: www.cindrakamphoff.com/MichaelG FB COMMUNITY FOR LIVE PODCAST INTERVIEWS: https://www.facebook.com/drcindrakamphoff/ FOLLOW CINDRA ON INSTAGRAM: https://www.instagram.com/cindrakamphoff/ FOLLOW CINDRA ON TWITTER: https://twitter.com/mentally_strong   Love the show? Rate and review the show for Cindra to mention you on the next episode: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/high-performance-mindset-learn-from-world-class-leaders/id1034819901   You can find Michael at: https://michaelgrogers.com/ and on social at: Instragram: https://www.instagram.com/michaelgrogers/ Linked in: https://www.linkedin.com/in/secondg/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/rogersgmichael

Michael G Rogers is the author of the bestselling teamwork book "You Are the Team" (over 20,000 sold), and has a new book, "Do You Care to Lead." He is also an Inc. Top 100 Leadership Speaker and our special guest on Do you CARE to Lead? You can learn from Michael that if you truly serve you unlock magical things with your team Care about your people and they will care about their work. How to take “Rocket” rides and not “Subway” rides with your team. Learn about the S.O.N.I.C. model and how applying it can truly propel your leadership impact. Find out Michael's top leadership hacks! Join our Leadership Hacker Tribe and connect with us: Twitter Instagram Facebook LinkedIn (Steve) LinkedIn (The Leadership Hacker) Music: " Upbeat Party " by Scott Holmes courtesy of the Free Music Archive FMA ----more---- TRANSCRIPT The Leadership Hacker Podcast: Episode 4 Michael G Rogers – Do You Care to lead?   [Start 00:00:00]   [Music Playing]   Introduction   Steve Rush: Some call me Steve, dad, husband or friend. Others might call me boss, coach or mentor. Today you can call me The Leadership Hacker.   Thanks for listening in. I really appreciate it. My job as the leadership hacker is to hack into the minds, experiences, habits and learning of great leaders, C-Suite executives, authors and development experts so that I can assist you developing your understanding and awareness of leadership. I am Steve Rush and I am your host today. I am the author of Leadership Cake. I am a transformation consultant and leadership coach. I cannot wait to start sharing all things leadership with you.   On today's show, we are joined by the founder of one of the best blog on leadership in the world, teamworkandleadership.com and best-selling author of two best-selling books. Michael G Rogers. We will get to talk to Michael shortly, but first it is The Leadership Hacker News.   The Leadership Hacker News   Steve Rush: It is life Jim, but not as we know it. Now that is a phrase Star Trek fans would know all too well. But it's something we can all now also associate with; given that, COVID-19 pandemic has swept the planet. Depending on your worldview, some would say the reaction to the Coronavirus is an overreaction, others may say the end of the world is near, and whenever your worldview the world and the businesses that we lead has changed forever. If ever there is a need for leadership, that time is now. Here is my top three hacks on how to lead through this crisis.   Number 1 - Stay steadfast and calm. I coined the phrase the “Leadership Barometer” and we all have one. This is where that metaphorical storm that we have to face in as leaders means others look to us to see how we're reacting so they can judge and how also to react in those situations. It is our responsibility to project a sense of calmness and surety, and that falls very much in the leadership space. Leaders who serve others can help their teams remain focus and productive even in the face of uncertainty. And as a leader, they will be watching you like a hawk to be true to yourself, to acknowledge their concerns and yours and help them assess the threats and emotions so you can guide them logically to effective solutions.   Number 2 - Communication. In times of crisis - communicate like you've never communicated before. Gossip and rumour will spread like wildfire in your workplace, especially in the absence of any official communication. As soon as you know stuff communicated promptly and factually and if you don't know, then say so because if you don't you will have a another virus in your business and it will be the communication virus on top of what you already have to deal with. As the myths and the legends, start to form and misinformation would disseminate through your business and things will be tough to deal with.   Number 3 - Keep the wheels turning. Do whatever it takes to engage your teams and keep them busy at this time. It is important to take advantage of technology like virtual meeting platforms like Zoom or WebEx or anything else that is a collaboration tool, that will help keep your people connected when they're less connected and isolated. Could also be a time to pivot your proposition and innovate and try new ways of thinking and new emerging technologies in crisis can also bring people together in adversity. So use this time well to forge deeper, more meaningful relationships with colleagues, friends and families. Perfect opportunity to learn about your leadership style and how you have dealt with the situation or not, as the case may be. One thing you do have to avoid, and that's doing nothing. It is now time for us to lead like never before, intentions is not enough. Action is what is required.   That is a leadership hacker news. If you have, any emerging stories or news articles that you think would be useful to share on the show. Please get in touch though our social media sites.     Start of Interview   Steve Rush: Our very special guest today is Michael G. Rogers. His first book, “You Are The Team”, sold over 20000 copies and his new book “Do You Care to Lead?” has just been published by Wiley. He is also an avid blogger. Michael, welcome to the show.   Michael: Yeah. Thank you, Steve. Glad to be here.   Steve Rush: So I will be useful for our guest to know, Michael that your career actually has been born as a very successful executive, having led some senior roles in Fortune 50 companies. You come from a place of experience rather than theory, too. Tell us a little about how you ended up here?   Michael: Yeah, sure, I started off in the learning. Well, actually, almost all my corporate career was in learning and performance, corporate training that area and I quickly moved it up into leadership positions there and took an interest in leadership. I had a particular leader that was a strong, strong mentor to me, still is actually. An inspiration behind the two books that I have written. He is the one that got me interested in doing leadership workshops and, you know, be a part of learning performance. I had that opportunity to do a little bit of that. And it really just got me super jazzed about leadership. I started reading a lot; I started speaking more and more. I started doing some development with teams on the side while I was working and started getting asked more and more to do deep dive kind of team development with senior leadership teams. I mean, it just was a lot of fun for me. I have been blogging for about 13, 14 years. I believe now. And that was kind of a strong catalyst behind the writing of the two books as well.   Steve Rush: So, Michael, what was it really sparked that interest and desire in you to want to lead and help others?   Michael: Yeah, I mean, that leader I had talked about, his name is David Ferris. He was just such a strong mentor to me and he was like the perfect model of leadership. Again, and so inspiring, and the way that he led me, the way that I watched him lead teams, people were fiercely loyal to this guy and they still love him even, you know, years later. Having the opportunity to have conversations with him about what made a great leader because of our relationship in terms of him mentoring me, it was really what sparked a lot of it for me. I decided to leave corporate about three years ago and do something else. I have always known I wanted to write a book, but it was not something was on my mind when I left corporate to try to do something else. I want to get it a different industry, do something around that. I started writing the first book and it came out really well. When I started promoting it, it started selling really well. I said, I will take this and do this full time. Go around, speak, and write. I love it. I am a passionate, passionate about team development, leadership and speaking and writing. I mean, I really, really, Steve, love what I do.   Steve Rush: Michael, in the time that we got to know and that's incredibly evident, passion and energy comes through rapidly and in the time that you start to write You Are The Team. What was it that cause you to have the team focus around leadership?   Michael: Yeah, so I had been doing some team development on the side. I had read Patrick Lencioni book, ‘The Five Dysfunctions of a Team”, and if any of your listeners out there have not read that book, to me it is the Bible on teamwork.   Steve Rush: Right!   Michael: At least in terms of teamwork and relationships, which, you know, that is what teams are. I mean, fundamentally, at their core, they are about relationships. He just does a phenomenal job at talking about relationships, but I decide to focus a little bit differently. The book You Are The Team is about relationships, but it's also about commitment and it's about stepping up and committing to the team. And so a lot of people ask me all, why you title it, You Are The Team. You know, Mike, there is no I in team.   I know that technically, there is no I but figuratively there is, and it always starts with you. Teams don't just magically come together because you create a team and you say, okay, go out and conquer. Teams have to first commit and connect and this book is based on six values of commitment and connection. I had not at the time seen any books out there that had focused just on teammates, the person. There is a lot of books have focused on leaders and how to lead teams, but nobody was focusing just on the teammate. There is an opportunity here. There is a little of a niche here and I really feel that teams are only as successful as every person's commitment on the team and their own success, towards the team. You know, great teams are made up of great teammates, so that was really the reason why I wrote the book.   Steve Rush: Michael, how would you define team? In my work, I find myself often speaking to leaders who are in a team in a board environment, but are also leading teams. How do you square that activity through the team that you serve verses the team that you lead?   Michael: Yeah, well, there is different types of teams, right? There is a lot of different types of teams. I mean, one of the exercise I do quite often is I ask people to talk about the greatest team that they have ever belonged to. That could be a family team. It could have been a team that, you report into, it is a team that reports to you, because even as a leader, you are still lead a team. You are still a teammate on that team to some degree. You know, there's volunteer teams, athletic teams, lots of different types of teams. To me, the definition of a team is a group of people that come together for a common cause that want to do something extraordinary together. That is how I would define team. I mean, that is like how I define leadership. I mean, to me, leadership is only leadership when people make a choice to follow you. If nobody wants to follow you then you fail to be a leader and a team fails to be a team, if they are not accomplishing extraordinary things. Every team has the potential to do that with the right ingredients.   Steve Rush: So what do you think it is then Michael? Create that connectivity that emotional closeness that brings teams together?   Michael: One of them and this is the same for leaders Steve is service. It is such a simple concept, we think about it and we talk about it, but we really never act upon it. I think there are so many opportunities around us. If we have this mind-set of putting others first to be selfless instead of being selfish, which I think a lot of us naturally that is just kind of how we are wired is to be more about us, but when we're more about them, when we're more about others, when we are putting other people first. We begin to serve others and I know of no faster way to create connection on teams than to have teams begin to serve each other. It is the same of leadership. I know of no other much…faster way to unlock your leadership than to serve the people that you lead. Not just doing your job, not just saying, hey, I have an open door policy. I am going to be with you once a month or whatever. I am talking about above and beyond. I am talking about really thinking and putting others first because it is completely magical on teams and it is completely magical and leadership as well. That is one big part in terms of connection. That is to me the fastest way you can create connection.   Steve Rush: Sure and that also builds trust, doesn't it?   Michael: Oh yeah for sure. Because a couple of things happen when you serve. First of all, it shows that you care and when people know you care, they're more likely to trust you. But when we spend time with people outside of what we normally do and service opportunities allows us to do that, many times we get to know people and the more you get to know people. Well, the more you trust the people, so, yeah, from both of those perspectives. You are absolutely right it does build trust. Trust that is part of the product of a connection, trust is built through action.   Steve Rush: So, Michael, if I am a team leader or a manager. I am struggling with consistent performance, so I have a big differential performance in my team. On the left hand side, I have my high performers on the right hand side over here. I have the people who are just taking up space and a bunch of people in the middle of the steady eddies. So how do you manage to pull that dichotomy together when coming to leading team performance?   Michael: Yes, I love that question, Steve. In my second book, Do You Care to Lead? I talk about five different classifications of employees and I call them all stars. They are all stars because I think all people have the potential to become great, but you as a leader, you need to act, and I think this is where a lot of leaders fail to act with their teams. You have got to either people moving people up, over or off, and the fourth option is never a choice, which is to do nothing.   Unfortunately, that is what a lot of leaders do. They just hope the problems will go away, but I really believe you should be spending ninety nine percent of your time or more on proactively nurturing people and trying to move them up. If you look at these five classifications of employees, I have what I call rock stars and we all know what the rock stars are. These are the folks that just get it done and then some. They are just amazing performers; we wish we had a whole team like them. They are innovative they are creative. They really are truly rock stars, and then you have your rising stars. Your rising stars are rock stars; they just don't have the experience yet and with the experience, they will become rock stars, but they are rock stars in what they do currently. They just don't have the experience yet, and then you have what you referred to steady eddies or I call study stars or middle stars. These are the folks that will meet expectations but not necessarily exceed expectations. Then you have your falling stars and we know who these people are. We wish they would just leave, and we kind of hope that at some point they will. We just fail to act to move them up, and again, leadership is a nurturing process.   And people on your team are watching you. They know who is moving up and who is not. You are going to have trust issues on your team if you are not proactively nurturing people. The fifth star is what I call deceiving stars. Deceiving stars are falling stars in rock star clothing. In other words, they are bringing the morale of your team down. Everybody on your team struggles with these people. They are the people that hoard information. They don't collaborate great, they take the credit for it for everything, but you as a leader, see them as a rock star. Until you do something with these folks, they will continue to drag some of the morale down. I have lots of stories I can share on that that particular area but your role as a leader and your team is watching you is to continually, again, you owe this to your team to, continually nurture it. I said, ninety nine percent or more, your time is spent on finding ways to move these people up. If you can't move them up, then you may have to make the difficult decisions to move them over or move them off. Moving over does not mean that you take your problem and give it to somebody else. You make sure that you find the right seat or the right bus for them to be on, and then of course, moving them office is really difficult. I mean, anytime you have to let somebody go fire somebody that is a hard thing. If you are doing it from a place of your heart, then it is the right thing for you. It is the right thing for that person, the right thing for the organization and your team.   Steve Rush: You are right, and as difficult as that might be. Your new book, Do You Care To Lead? We talked about earlier is now available across the globe. You've created some really practical approaches and focus on the philosophy of care and how transform performance and people, tell us a bit about that?   Michael: I will, and you know, I was thinking this morning it is interesting you asked that question because I was thinking this morning that really the two books are linked in terms of the word care. I really feel if teams will practice what I call my six Be's of being an effective teammate, they will care more about those on their team. Caring is an important characteristic on teams because as you talked about trust and connection, I mean, caring is a product of that as well. So it is, but yeah in the second book, Do You Care To Lead? I come from a place of putting more caring into leadership. If I ask any leader whether they care about their people, they are going to say, yeah, I definitely care about my people. I had a leader once that if somebody had asked him if he felt I cared about him, I am pretty sure he would have said yes, but the reality is I didn't feel that way. And there was a recent Gallup Survey done where four out of ten people strongly agreed with the statement that no one at work, including their supervisor, cared about them. That means six out of ten people don't feel cared about, which is a startling number if you think about it.   Where leaders feel like people know they care about them. People don't feel, you know, the majority of people don't feel like they're being cared about. I go back to this leader that I had. You know, we would have regular one on ones. And I'm sure he thought by having those one on ones and by telling me that he was grooming me for his position and he was giving me some opportunity, it put me in a new senior kind of role to expose me to more of the business, to give me this opportunity. I am sure he thought from his perspective that he was showing he cared. To a small degree, it did, but here is the thing. He never spent time nurturing me. He did not develop me. He did not spend time helping me understand what his expectations are, what my new role was. Here is a resource. Here is your tools. These are all things that show that you care, let alone the fact that when we did meet, he never asked me about me. He never asked me about my family.   He never showed vulnerability himself. I would ask him, for example, about his family, but he would never ask me about mine. But when I asked about his family, he never opened up. He never opened up about mistakes that he had made or directions we had taken that we should have done differently. He did not feel real human to me, and so all of those types of things I talk about in the book around, you know, do you care to lead? Which is really about two questions. You know, first of all, do you want to lead? Because a lot of people are put in positions of leadership because they're just better technically or because they want to make their parents proud or their wife or their husband proud or power or more money or whatever it might be. But do you really want to lead people? Because if you don't want to lead people, it's going to be pretty difficult for you to care about people, and that really is the main question around the book is do you really, really, truly care about the people you lead? It makes an impact. It makes a difference on loyalty as well as results.   Steve Rush: Sure, in your book to help people come to grips with how to help people on that journey. You come up with five strategies serve, open up, nurture, inspire and commit. And I thought it be useful just to explore with our listeners a little bit about what lies behind each.   Michael: Well, absolutely. And this is what I call to Steve, my sonic approach leadership. It's an acronym that just fits really nicely, truly propels your leadership if you'll do these five things.   So Serve as I talked a little bit about that already. It is the quickest way to unlock your leadership, and there is lots of research that shows that when you serve others. There is scientific things that are happening. You know, there is these great chemicals in our body, neurochemicals in our body that are throwing a party when we serve others. In fact, when not only when we serve others, but when we just watch others serving others or when we anticipate service or we think about the service, these neurochemicals start to get released in our body, they feel really good. One of those neurochemicals is oxytocin, which is the same chemicals it is released when a mother is feeding her baby. It is a connection chemical, and that is why when I talk about service and connection, the quickest way for us to connect with others is to serve others. That is what is happening, and so and there's more I could go into around the magic and the science around it, because it starts with you as a leader and creating a culture of selfless service on your team and your organization starts with you as well. But it starts with you because of this connection chemical and the law of reciprocity in which people want to turn back and give back to you, and the law of multiplicity, which says that if one person is served. Not only do they want to reciprocate that service to you, but they also want to serve up to three to nine more people.   There is a great story in the book that I tell about a CEO and owner I think the business become fairly large. She had made the choice to create a service program and it changed everything. It changed how people feel. It changed the morale of the organization. It changed how their customers looked at them and the referrals they started getting. They started getting bigger and better referrals from customers and clients because of just the way that they treated their clients, which came all from just this idea that this leader had around creating a culture of service. It is just, truly absolutely magical in your leadership, so, yeah, that is the first one service.   Steve Rush: And that is amazing because it then becomes infectious. Not only are we triggering that neurotransmitter and those happy chemicals into a delightful space, but also becomes infectious for those people around us and it creates a self-perpetuation of that energy. We end up with a double bubble of winds.   Michael: Absolutely. Yeah, that is a double bubble. I like that. I should have put that in the book.   Steve Rush: When you talk about opening up as leaders. Is this about showing humility, some more of the human us?   Michael: Yes, being invulnerable and really the concept is something called psychological safety. It really is kind of a hot term right now. Vulnerability is a hot term right now in leadership. A lot of people realize now as a leader, it's important for you to come across as human. But a big reason why that's important to open up is so that you create the psychological safety. There was a graduate researcher by the name of Amy Edmondson. I think at Harvard University who had decided she want to study what made teams effective. She studied medical teams, and you would think that the medical teams that were most effective were the ones that have fewer errors. But she found out that it was actually the teams that made the most errors that were the most effective, and it wasn't that they made more errors. It is just that they acknowledged those errors more readily. As a result, she said this team had psychological safety. She is the one that coined it, psychological safety. People felt that they could talk openly about their mistakes. They could learn from their mistakes quicker because they were talking about those mistakes and acknowledging those mistakes. But people only acknowledge admit mistakes when they feel safe in doing so. A lot of people hide their mistakes, so creating psychological safety on teams is about creating an environment where people feel like they can raise their ideas, perspectives. They can disagree with people on the team. They feel like, again, they can humbly say, you know, I made a mistake. Or they can say this is a wrong direction that we are going or hey, you are better at this than I am. As a leader, that is your responsibility to build that on your teams, and I talk more extensively about that, in the book, how you do that.   But it definitely starts with you as a leader. You want to be vulnerable yourself. Sara Blakely is the founder of Spanx Company. She is a wildly successful female entrepreneur. A billion dollar company, and she talks about when she was growing up and this is so interesting, I love this. She said that when she was growing up, her father would ask them at the dinner table what they had failed at that day. And if nobody could come up with something that they had failed at, he would seem almost disappointed. He wanted them to talk about their failures because he knew it was the quickest way for them to become successful, and at her company Spanx, she created what she calls the whoops moment. Where they as a company talk about their mistakes openly as well and how they are learning from their mistakes. She shared hers as well; again, it starts with her. That is how the culture is created. You can't just say as a leader, I want everybody to be open. I want everybody to tell us when you make a mistake, but you are not willing to admit your own. That does not fly because you have not built the trust necessary. And there's some other things you need to put in place that, again, I talk about in the book, but that's a main one is for you personally to be more vulnerable.   Steve Rush: And leading by example is where it starts the whole psychological say because it easily be eroded if people in responsibility and leaders don't practice that safety themselves, right?   Michael: You are right.   Steve Rush: How do you describe nurture, Michael?   Michael: Nurture is the opportunity for you to realize that people are different, they have different needs, and you have to spend proactively time on moving people up, over and off, and the fourth option, as I said before, never an option, which is to do nothing.   Nurturing is about not being a cookie cutter manager as well. I had a director that reported to me one time who was an absolute cookie cutter manager. She loved performance management. Performance management, to me kind of has a bad connotation. I get it in theory, how it should work and I think it can work as long as you don't cookie, cut it. She was really good at getting people if they did A, B would happen, if they did B, C would happened. She did not take an account individual people; she was really good at firing people. She did that quite a bit more than any other leader I knew. We had a lot of conversations about this. Try to help her to think more about people personally. Is like if I took an avocado tree, for example, and planted that tree in the mounds of Utah and avocado tree would not do well, it would not thrive. It need to be in the climate and the soil of Southern California where I grew up. If I took an apple tree and we have apple trees in my backyard here, I took an apple tree and planted it in the desert of Southern California. It would not do very well there either it would not thrive. And that's because each tree needs different nurturing, different sunlight, different climates, different soil, different care and people do as well. I mean, if you think a tree is complex, think about people. We need to be spending actively, proactively time with people and developing them again, moving them up over or off, never exercising that fourth option, which is to do nothing. We have to proactively be nurturing people.   Steve Rush:  I love that tree metaphor. Thanks for sharing that, Michael. The I, when it comes to inspire. Leaders would with tell us, for sure. It is my responsibility to inspire and motivate my teams. Yet, some people really struggle with that. What do you think the reason is that they do?   Michael: I think many times it is because they forget about what I call the where, why and how. The where is where are you taking people? If I have you, Steve, in a rowboat in the middle of dense, heavy fog on a lake somewhere, and I'm telling you and the team to keep rowing, but you have no idea where you're going. But I just keep shouting, we got to keep rowing, guys. We got to keep rowing, you are saying where are we going? And you don't see land, You don't see any hint of where we're going. How long are you going to continue to roll? You know, you are eventually going to lose your motivation to row. In fact, maybe half of the team will row and half won't and you'll just keep going in circles. So letting people know clearly, where you are taking them is the difference between teams that kind of flounder and teams that are wildly successful.   They know where they are heading. Also important is to know the why. Why are we going there? If you are not clear on the why - people are going to have no desire to get up in the morning and try to go to the where, but if you can put that why in, it becomes more intrinsically motivating. People wake up and they want to come to work or they want to be a part of this team and succeed because you have been very clear on what that “why” is.   Then there is the “how”, and the how is you know, the strategic planning, the goal setting, all that other stuff. One of the things we often forget about in, goal setting or strategic planning is we do a really good job with an organization. We say, okay, here is our strategic plan. I like teams to consider how to create a strategy or having a strategic plan as well. I call these success lines so people have goals. As a leader, you are helping them because you are nurturing them, finding out what goals are best for them this year and having a success line. Being able to clearly demonstrate in your team's strategic plan and your goals and your individual goals, how they line up ultimately to the overall goal of the organization and success. What is the successful impact look like? And we have to talk more about that. The achievement of a goal itself, the completion of goal is not the achievement of a goal. The achievement of a goal is the successful completion of a goal and oftentimes we talk about the goal being completed, but we don't spend much time talking about what success look like for the goal.   Because that is really all to me. What we should be measuring, not just the fact we checked it off and so that where, why and how and I've got a number of other things I talk about in there, like celebration, recognition, rewards, upping your expectations of people. People will perform at the level that you expect and thanking people. I mean, these are telling stories. These are always you can inspire. But first and foremost, foundationally, the where, why and how you've got to be clear on that as a leader.   Steve Rush: It is a really neat principle of the whole “success lines”, I like that. It gives people the opportunity to visualize where they are going and how they going to get. Then, of course, for those people who are less visual. It gives them the context in that journey. So things that they have to do, the activities of all of the journey, and of course if we don't have that, they start making up their own stories and fill in their own versions of events. Right?   Michael: Right. Yeah, absolutely.   Steve Rush: The fifth one,  “C” for commit. How does that underpinning the other strategy?   Michael: So you as a leader have to be all in. I think what happens a lot of times with leadership is it's like the shoemaker. The shoemaker makes shoes for everybody else except himself. As a leader, I think oftentimes we are really good at giving others development opportunities, but we don't spend much time on our own. You I think, you know, it is important at the end of the book that I talk about your commitment to this process. Your IT listener's audience out there. Maybe you have heard this story others probably have not. It is like the story of the pig and the chicken. They were walking down Main Street one morning and the chicken and pig had noticed a brand new restaurant that it opened up that was serving breakfast. The chicken turned to the pig and said we ought to open up a restaurant someday that serves breakfast. The pig says that is a great idea. What shall we serve?   And the chicken says, ham and eggs, of course, the pig says, well, that's great, except you're just making a contribution, I am making a full commitment. I like to tell leaders that you have to be the ham and the ham and eggs. And I'm talking about the fact that you have to give your life for it, but you do have to sacrifice a lot, you have to be all in! As the story goes with Cortez, you have to burn the ships. Your people have to know you are all in your committed. You are moving forward. If you don't have the commitment to these things, it becomes like any other book, any other workshop, any other opportunity. It is just spray and pray. You know, a lot of times the books they spray what they have to say and pray that you retain it. But until you commit, until you apply the things that you've learned. It ultimately does not become anything of value. It is just another book. It is just another concept. It is just another workshop. You have to be fully committed. You have to be ham and eggs.   Steve Rush: That is neat, and Michael, I just wanted to say, I think you have definitely been the ham when it comes to helping people on their leadership journey. We come to the part of the show where I am going into your mind Michael, so that you can share your leadership ideas and tips with others. So, were would you like to start?   Michael: Yeah, so I will give you some specifics around three of the ones that I kind of talked about already. The first one by far, I mean, to me, the most important one is to care about your people and really is the basis of what we have talked about, right. Because if you care about your people, they are going to care about their work. They need to know you care, when people know you care. They tend to be more loyal to you. As a result, they are going to want to do anything that you desire of them to do to become phenomenal as an individual, as a team, as an organization. They are going to be willing to take what I call rocket rides with you, not subway rides. Subway riders, same place every single day. You can get from A to B, but you very rarely get from A to Z. Leaders who care about people take their people on rocket rides. They get to Z, they go to places they have never been. They are inspiring. They are not boring like subway rides. Just really, truly show that you care about people.   The second is to be open. People want leaders now more than ever that are human. We talked about this before, how openness leads to trust and creates, you know, lots of benefits to teams. But your ability to say, hey, you know what? Here is something that happened in my life that was difficult, that was challenging. Is a key to helping you feel like or people to feel like you are more human. Just sharing things and I'm not ask you to share your deepest, darkest secrets, although if it's appropriate, you can't have had leaders that have done that, that have had amazing results. I actually share one story in the book like that about a leader who talked about an alcoholic father and opened up about that, and everybody knew who this guy was. They knew who his father was but that openness did just create miracles on the team. Just be human, open up, and be vulnerable.   Then third is to nurture. And I've got a grid, if you go to doyoucaretolead.com, you can actually download a grid there that you can proactively classify people into those five star categories. That to me is a big hack; you have to be spending time proactively either moving people up over or off, and that tools a great tool. It is a great hack, I believe, anyways, for leaders to use.   Steve Rush: In the spirit of opening up Michael, this part this show is call Hack to Attack. This would be were something's not quite worked out as you planned or it went wrong but know you have used that learning as a useful activity and a useful tool for your work and your life. So what is your hack to attack?   Michael: My hack to attack and something that happened to me early on in my career, I won't give you a specific example, but I will demonstrate something that I learned from this in a way again, it goes back to caring, which is my number one hack.  A big failure that I had as a leader initially was that I was afraid of conflict. I did not want to have difficult conversations with people. I know a lot of your listeners can probably relate to that.   Those are some of the most difficult things we do, as a leader is to tell somebody that, you know, they need to improve or else, but I learned early on that courage is not the absence of fear, but it's caring about something more than what you fear. I learned this from an experience I had when my children were younger.   I have eight children. I know, that is a lot of children. One wife, we have been married 30-plus years, happily married 30-plus years. I have a lot of experiences I can draw on that family, and this is one of them. My four-year-old daughter at the time, my 2-year-old son, Kelly and Jeff, who were playing in our living room. We lived in a fairly small house at the time. So they weren't very far from us, but Jeff had fallen asleep on the couch, and Kelly, our 4 year old, had come in and a bit of a panic telling us that he had fallen asleep and she was really worried about the fact that he was in the dark, because they were afraid of the dark. We, you know, as parents just kind of brush her off a little bit, unfortunately. I will tell you two different lessons I learned from this, but we kind of brushed her off and told her it was okay. Don't worry about it, Kelly he is fine. You know, there is no such things as monsters, and she went on her way and she was just really obedient. She is still like that today; she is just a good kid. After a few minutes, my wife decided, go check on her, and she did. She rounded the corner. She saw Kelly lying over her brother, protecting him from the things that she feared most. She had these tears streaming down her eyes, and I learned a couple things from that.   One is that, you know, people all of us have difficult moments. And it does matter if you're 4 year old or a 30 year old, 40 year old, 80 year old. I mean, we all have our own challenges. We all have those things that we fear, and so empathy is really important. That is important thing for all leaders, right.   But the second thing I learned, is what I quoted you before, is that courage is not the absence of fear. It is about caring about something more than what you fear. As a leader, what I learned as I continue to grow and develop my own leadership is that the more I cared about those that I lead, the less it became about me and the more it came about them and the more it became about them, the easier it was for me to do those difficult things. Still hard, but I was more willing to do it because just like Kelly, I cared more about them than I cared about the things that I feared.   Steve Rush: And it is a great story and is course, proof that parents can learn from their kids, too.   Michael: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I have learned a lot of lessons through my kids.   Steve Rush: And I am sure many more stories to tell. So finally, I would like to ask you Michael,  if you were able to do a bit of time travel, go back and bump into your 21-year-old self, what would be the one bit of advice you would give Michael at 21?   Michael: Yes, so what I would do it is I would definitely serve more. I would serve; I would be a lot more selfless. I would be less concerned about myself like I was at twenty-one than I was about others. I would be much more concerned with others and what they needed. I would be focused on being a servant. This is something that we are learning more and more about in the leadership world, how to be an effective servant. I think we are far from practicing on a regular basis, but my 21-year-old self-leadership position, instead of I would do less telling, I would do more serving. Definitely, that is what I would do.   Steve Rush: So, folks listening to this Michael who want to get a little bit more closer to the work you do at the moment. Where would you like to send them?   Michael: Thank you for asking, Steve. You can go to my website michaelgrogers.com. Michael G as in Gary, Glenn, Garth. rogers.com, michaelgrogers.com. You can also go to my blog. I have a lot of content out there because like I said; I have been blogging for 13/14 years, something like that. I have multiple interesting articles that might be of interest to your audience. That is teamworkandleadership.com and if you go to doyoucaretolead.com, I have some bonuses out there. If you get the book that, you might be interested in as well.   Steve Rush: Leadership Hackers love a bonus. Thanks for that, Michael it goes without saying you have been a true servant to us today. It has been delightful speaking with you. Super lessons and models for our listeners to take away with. Thanks for being on The Leadership Hacker Podcast.   Michael: Yeah. Thank you, Steve. I was happy to be here, and it has been a lot of fun.     Closing   Steve Rush: I genuinely want to say heartfelt thanks for taking time out of your day to listen in too. We do this in the service of helping others, and spreading the word of leadership. Without you listening in, there would be no show. So please subscribe now if you have not done so already. Share this podcast with your communities, network, and help us develop a community and a tribe of leadership hackers.   Finally, if you would like me to work with your senior team, your leadership community, keynote an event, or you would like to sponsor an episode. Please connect with us, by our social media. And you can do that by following and liking our pages on Twitter and Facebook our handle their @leadershiphacker. Instagram you can find us there @the_leadership_hacker and at YouTube, we are just Leadership Hacker, so that is me signing off. I am Steve Rush and I have been the leadership hacker.   [End 00:43:42] Care about your people and they will care about their work. Order Michael's new book, “Do You Care to Lead?” Click Here Also, order Michael's bestselling book, “You Are the Team” Click Here. Exclusive BONUSES when you order “Do You Care to Lead?” today! CLICK HERE http://www.michaelgrogers.com www.teamworkandleadership.com  

Welcome to the very first Leadership Hacker Podcast. This is the new Podcast for leadership ideas, leadership development and learning about leadership. To celebrate this episode we are giving away 10 signed first edition books and 10 e-copies too. Each show, we will interview best-selling leadership authors, C-suite executives and leadership development experts, so I can hack into their minds and help you learn more about leadership and leading others. Here's some of the topics and guest you can learn from: David Marquet – www.davidmarquet.com "Start your question with How?" Andy Brogan – www.easierinc.com "Followership vs. Fellowship" Byron Low – www.byronlow.com "Turn thoughts into tools" Tony Burkinshaw – www.tonyburkinshaw.co.uk "Vision is not just for Visuals" Govert Van Sandwijk – www.timetogrowglobal.com "Shut up, sit down and ask questions" Andrew Bryant – www.selfleadership.com "Self leadership and self mastery" Simon Tyler – www.simontyler.com "No hack like your hack" John Spence – www.johnspence.com "Be curious" Michelle Boxx - https://www.linkedin.com/in/michellemstansbury/ "How you team process internally" Michael G Rogers https://www.teamworkandleadership.com "Really care about your people" Avi Liran – http://www.deliveringdelight.com "Contribution, trust and influence" Steve Rush – That's me www.leadershipcake.com "The essential ingredients in Leadership - C.A.K.E.   If you haven't subscribed to the Leadership Hacker Podcast yet – please do so now, and you will not miss an episode of us hacking leadership tips, ideas insights and leadership hacks. Join our social media Tribe - follow us on: Linkedin (Steve) Linkedin - The Leadership Hacker Facebook Twitter Instagram YouTube Tumblr   Music: " Upbeat Party " by Scott Holmes courtesy of the Free Music Archive FMA   ----more----   TRANSCRIPT The Leadership Hacker Podcast Episode 1 with Various Guests – Hack Away [Start 00:00:00]   [Music Playing]   Introduction   Steve: Some call me Steve, Dad, husband, or friend. Others might call me boss, coach or mentor. Today you can call me The Leadership Hacker.   Thanks for listening in. I really appreciate it. My job as the leadership hacker is to hack into the minds, experiences, habits and learning of great leaders, C-Suite executives, authors, and development experts so that I can assist you, developing your understanding and awareness of leadership.   I'm Steve Rush and I'm your host today. I'm the author of Leadership Cake. I'm a transformation consultant and leadership coach. I can't wait to start sharing all things leadership with you.   Welcome to the very first Leadership Hacker podcast. I'm incredibly excited and I'm grateful for you tuning in. Today's show will give you a flavor of what you can expect from future shows, what kind of things you'll experience and how by subscribing now will mean that you won't miss any of our regular lineup of guests, their stories, their future hacks, and their great leadership insights. To celebrate our launch and as a special thank you for subscribing to the show, I'll be giving away 10 signed first edition copies of my book Leadership Cake along with 10 e-copies too. Stick around to the end of the show. Find out how you can win.   Picture the scene. I want you to imagine you're traveling to your favorite destination. You get stuck on your journey or you're delayed, maybe at the airport or train station, and you have got some time on your hands. Perhaps it's lunchtime for where you work, and the restless curious inner self says I want to learn, gather insights, tips and ideas about leadership and leading others. So, you reach for your device, and when you open where you normally download your podcast, you hit The Leadership Hacker and subscribe.   So by now you probably wondering how by subscribing to The Leadership Hacker podcast that will help me fill my time, right? Well, each show I will have a guest or guests join me and share what leadership means for them, how they've learned from others, and how they'll pass on their tips and experiences with you. We'll introduce you to how you can learn more about each guest and grow your knowledge base. Each show will look at the news and explore where leadership is present - or not, as the case may be - in global events, and understand the role that leadership has played in global decision making. As well we've also grow our community of leadership hackers over time, and as we do, we'll learn from each other.    Today's show is going to be a bit of a smorgasbord of future guests and friends of the show sharing their top hacks and tips to give you a snippet of what's to come. Today I'm going to explore with you the principles of leadership comfort, and if that supports growth and results or how in fact, it might hold a team back, but first, it's Leadership Hacker News.   The Leadership Hacker News Everywhere you turn in the news at the moment, you'll bump into a story about Covid-19, or commonly known as Coronavirus. The question we need to ask is, does leadership or has leadership played a part, in either its spread or containment? Just like with a national or international crisis like coronavirus, when disaster happens, it's not about the disaster, but how you respond and you react to it. Some say the World Health Organization was too slow from December to February, in giving clarity and direction and insight as to how to contain the virus, whereas others look to the leadership of China to over trade on goodwill and to damp down its severity, both of which can play an important part in how people respond to a situation. So if you think this is a leadership hack that we need to hack into, send us your insights. Comment on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube, and let's get the debate going.   Let's go to our first hack of the show. It's retired US Navy captain and best-selling author of Turn the Ship Around and Leadership is Language, David Marquet.   David: Steve, my top leadership hack. Start your question with how. How sure are you? Not, are you sure?    Steve: Thanks David. What a neat idea, and a great way to find out better data. Are you sure? Yes, or no? Bad data? How sure are you? This means that someone's got respond with a level of certainty or assurance, which gives you as a leader an opportunity to ask more questions. So, let's go to our next hack.   Andy: This is Andy Brogan from Easier Inc. My hack for leaders is to stop thinking of leadership as on a continuum with followership. Leadership isn't about creating followership; it's about creating fellowship, and in that regard, leaders can come from anywhere. It's not a role. It's an activity. Perhaps, more correctly, it's two activities. The first one is the act of leadership, being about ensuring that what really matters really matters here. And the second one being that of leadership is about growing fellowship, and that means that what really matters here has to include what really matters to each other.   Steve: Great words, Andy. I really love that whole principle of fellowship. It's about creating an environment where there is an absolute connectivity with the people who you lead and the people who you work with, and the whole principle of fellowship versus followership I think most people can really resonate with. Superb stuff!   So up next, we have coaching catalyst and leadership expert, Byron Lowe. What's your leadership hack, Byron?    Byron: Hi, Steve. My number one leadership hack is turning thoughts into tools. I believe anyone can learn how to turn their most useful thoughts into tools that can help them grow, solve problems, live the life they want, and experience meaningful and fulfilling work, and it all begins with our thoughts.       Steve: Thanks Byron. What a really interesting philosophy, and we all have our faults, and we all have the ability to influence others, but do we genuinely think of our thoughts as being tools in our kitbag as leaders? So we're going to have one more leadership hack and then we're going to turn our thoughts to think about how we deal with comfort, and whether it helps us or holds us back, but first is over to Tony Burkinshaw, Harley Street cognitive hypnotherapist with his leadership hack.    Tony:  Hi Steve, it's Tony Burkinshaw. When sharing visions, I think vision is a really important part of leadership, but in terms of vision, making sure that each member of your team, the team you're leading, can share that vision. Not everybody does visual equally well so the name ‘vision' is a bit of a misnomer. So be prepared to share your vision in a variety of different ways, to make sure that each member of your team is fully on board with it, and can absorb it in their own preferential way.   Steve: It's a great call, Tony. So, we all see the world, feel the world and experience the world in different ways, and vision by default appeals to those people who have a vision or a seeing experience of the world in the way they represent the world, and therefore we need to be thoughtful of those people who are more auditory or more kinesthetic, and need that feeling and sense. So in describing a vision, make sure that you've described it visually, auditory, and with some feeling too.    So, I want to tell you a little bit of the story as to why comfort could be a problem in us achieving great performance. Just think back on your last 24 hours. You woke up and I suspect you followed many routines - took your coffee, went to the same train station, or airport, took the same route if you're driving. When you get to work, you find there is a little routine or pattern of behaviors that you do throughout the day, most of which might be unconscious, but we've created this bubble. The bubble is there in our life and our work too, and it's a bubble of routine and comfort. We are creatures of comfort and creatures of habit.    However, when we're looking to achieve high performance, holding us back is the enemy called comfort. Why is that such a problem, I hear you cry? Well, feeling good and feeling assured is right, but comfort creates habits and habits don't look for opportunities, unless we create new habits that force us into new behaviors. Perfect example - I'm not a broadcaster, but I am today. So the start of this Leadership Hacker podcast for me is me moving outside of my comfort zone and trying new things and testing new ways so that I can help others broaden their awareness of what leadership is.   I want to share a story with you about one of my childhood heroes. As a young boy growing up, I was a big racing fan. There was a Formula One World Champion at the time called Mario Andretti, and year on year he managed to find new track records, and new ways of driving, and engineers and spectators alike were really spellbound by the way he used to control his car, and I remember as a young child watching him being interviewed, and in one particular interview he was asked, so Mario, how is it that you find new ways of doing things behind the wheel of a car? And his response was, when I find myself being too much in control and feeling too comfortable, I know I'm not pushing myself hard enough.    And we can all look around our towns and our cities, and when we look back 5 years and 10 years ago, there were stores on the corner that are no longer there, that were vibrant businesses that were no longer there. And when we transfer that to sports teams who are sometimes top of the leagues and top of their games and then don't sustain it, when you dig deep, what you find is complacency and comfort. Only way to change new things and find new ways of working is to get hold of your discomfort. And being really clear about what it is you want to achieve and how you're going to do that.     What's most important is doing nothing creates more comfort and more satisfaction, and we need to find a way as leaders to help our team move away from what they know to be true and comfortable and to help them explore new, exciting and alluring ways of working, and in doing so you could find great performance. So, let's hear from one of our other friends of the show. Who's up next with their leadership hack?       Govert: So… Govert van Sandwijk here, and I've got the following leadership hack and this goes for leaders on all levels so it doesn't matter whether you're a team leader, a frontline manager, or the Chief Executive Officer. You find yourself in front of your team during a team meeting. You start to think, hey, why is my team so passive? And actually, you're a little bit irritated.    As soon as you as a leader start to have those feelings, then basically, you have to check your own behavior. Sit down, shut up, ask a question which will for sure activate the team. So again, the leadership hack is when you start to feel, hey, my team is too passive. Why are they not being more participative in the meeting? Why are they not saying anything else? Check your own behavior. Shut up, sit down, ask a question, and let them become active.   Steve: Thanks for that hack, Govert. What this tells us guys is we are all human, and we will all have a natural neurological response, and what Govert's sharing is that strategy for dealing with that moment where that chimp inside us, or the amygdala in our limbic system has triggered a neurological threat response in us, take some time out, ask a question. It allows us to regain our cognitive awareness of how we can respond and respond in the right way. So let's go to another leadership hack. Who's up next? Andrew: Hi.. This is Andrew Bryant, Author of Self Leadership, how to become a more successful effective and efficient leader from the inside out; and of course my top leadership hack is to practice self-leadership which I define as, “the practice of intentionally influencing your thinking, feeling and actions towards your objectives. You see, self-leadership contains self-mastery, that ability to move yourself towards your vision, and alignment with your values. You see, when you practice self-leadership and personal mastery, you become an influencer and a more effective leader, so this is my top leadership hack from Andrew Bryant – the self-leadership coach.   Thank you Andrew. He's right isn't he, the reason why you are listening to this Podcast today is part self-mastery which we can also define as life long learning. The more we learn, the better leader we become, the better leader we become,  the more we have to give and offer others.   Now out next guest has become renowned for creating simplicity   Simon: Hello, Steve. This is Simon Tyler, coach, facilitator and author, author of The Attitude Book, Keep it Simple Book, The Impact Book, The Simple Way, and I'm here today to talk to you about my hack you've asked me to come up with. There's no hack like your hack.    There's something about the whole world of all these wonderful ideas that come at us that we pick them all up or drawn to them, we think we want to do something about them. But in truth, the ones that we need are really appropriate and curtailed and personal just to us. So, I say again, there's no hack like your hack. But if I was to land on one thing, Steve, it would be awareness. Anything you can do to wake up your awareness, to heighten what you know about you and notice about you, the better it will be for you. And as you go through any exercise to heighten your awareness, it's not about what you do with it. Simply the awareness can be enough. First, pause more often. That means in your speech, in your day, in your working week, even if it's just for a minute, or an hour every few days. It's just those gaps and in those gaps is that moment when you can slow stuff down, and will start to notice stuff around you and about you. And I look forward to helping you and any of the people that listen to this podcast heighten their awareness.    Steve: And awareness is a real key attribute for great leaders, isn't it? The perception of a situation or effect of being able to adjust our style, so that we can be the best we can be. And to our next hack, we go to friend of the show, John Spence.    John: Hey, Steve, this is John Spence. And my leadership hack is to be curious, to ask thoughtful questions, focused questions, and then be an intense listener. If you hire great people, which you should be, then you want to take every opportunity you can to get their feedback, best ideas, suggestions, to get their help, which will help you grow your business and become an even better leader. So that's my leadership hack. Steve.   Steve: That's a great message, John. Thank you, and for me curious is about wanting to learn, wanting to learn more about my people, wanting to learn more about my clients, my environment, my community, and actually just learning about me too on that, where curiosity can stimulate things in me to ask questions about my capabilities and can I do and can't I do, and what's causing me to think that way. So great message. So, let's get to our next hack.    I want to introduce Michelle Boxx, CEO at Boxxbury Business, Speaker, Columnist, and all-around business advocate, Hi, Michelle.   Michelle: Hey, Steve, this is Michelle Box, the blonde fixer. My leadership hack would be to get aware of how your team processes, whether it be internally or externally. It's not that the quiet person in the room doesn't have anything to offer. They just need a few minutes in the meeting to process internally before they speak up. Creating that space within a meeting allows everyone to be heard and the best ideas to come forward.   Steve: And that's great, and in my experience, the best ideas are ones that just take a little bit of nuancing and a little bit of thinking. And if you have people in your team who are sound in their ideas, they're being thoughtful, they're being introspective, it's our job as leaders too to make sure that we're involving them, and being thoughtful. Keep an eye out for the body language, the nonverbal cues. The book tells us people have something to say and it's important that we help them say it. So, I'm now going to introduce you to a future guest and friend of the show, Michael G. Rogers. Welcome to the show, Michael.   Michael: If I was to provide one leadership hack, it would be to really care about your people. And the reason why is because when you care about your people, they will care about their work.  There was a Gallup survey done, where people were asked whether their supervisor or anyone else at work cared about them. Only four out of ten strongly agree with that statement. That means six out of ten people don't feel cared about or at least had the perception of not feeling cared about at work. We have to bridge that gap. Perception of reality are not the same thing here. If I ask the leader whether they care about their people, I'm sure every one of them would say they would, but that's not how employees feel. So we have to get to a point where we can demonstrate that and employees can feel that because again, care about your people and they will care about their work.   Steve: Such a simple message, Michael, but I wonder how many of us as leaders take the conscious time out to evaluate how we're caring about people, and ultimately caring about people helps create trust. The more trust you have, the more honest and more candid conversations you have, and the more of those conversations you have, the easier is to cut through complexity and drive great results too.    Okay, we're going to go to our final hack for today's show. I'm going to take you to Chief Delighting Officer, Avi Liran.   Avi: My name is Avi Liran, and my leadership hack tip is actually starting with a question. What is the one thing, one action, one verb, one mind-state way of life, that if you do that one thing - unconditionally, consistently, continuously - it will be the quickest way for you to earn trust, gain influence, be accepted and feel a sense of belonging, even if you're very new, and feel happy together with the people around you? Well, the answer is very simple. It's contribution, and the difference between contribution and giving is contribution adds value that the other people need, so go, contribute and make a better world for yourself and others.   Steve: Avi, thank you for giving us that delightful message around contribution. I think it's incumbent on us all as leaders to really create value when we contribute to others. So hey, it would be unfair of me to leave you today without me passing on my contribution of my lifelong leadership and dedication to learning about leaders and leadership. And I find that there are four essential ingredients in leading others. not the only ingredients, but they are essential ones.   All great leaders I've ever worked with, and for, have been great communicators. They learned to adapt their communication style. I call them communication adapters. They're able to flex in an instant how they can change their tone, their pitch and pace, so that they can build rapport, affinity and still be relevant. I find that all great leaders are authentic. They just demonstrate who they really are and what they're really about. They don't mimic, they don't copy, they are just who they are, and knowledgeable but not overly knowledgeable, about the business they're running. Too many leaders spend so much time immersing themselves into the detail of the complexity of their business, it gives them no room for asking crazy questions.   And the most important ingredient that I find in leaders that binds people together - empathy! Empathy and understanding about what people do, how they do it, their motivations and their reasons, creates the real context and cohesiveness in helping others lead too. Communication. Authenticity. Knowledge, and Empathy.   So at the beginning of the show, I said to stick around to find out how you can get a copy of my book, The Leadership Cake. We're giving away 10 signed first edition copies and 10 e-copies, and here's how to do it.     First things first, you need to subscribe to our podcast. That's number one. Number two, we've got a number of different mediums and social media channels such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Tumblr, YouTube, etc. Go ahead and subscribe or like two of those, and in your social media channels just say ‘today I listened to the Leadership Hacker podcast today, and the key thing that I learned was…. whatever that was.    So just to remind you three things - subscribe, join our social media tribe, and in there share, I listened to the leadership hacker podcast today, and I learned this. We'll take a straw poll from all the people that do so, and we'll announce the winners and post those books out first-class around the world, next week.   So, we're coming to the end of our very first ever leadership hacker podcast. I just wanted to say a massive thank you to the guests that appeared on today's show. You'll be in for some more of those as the weeks and months progress.   I generally want to say a heartfelt thanks for taking time out of your day to listening too. We do this in the service of helping others and spreading the word of leadership. Without you listening in, there would be no show. So please subscribe now if you haven't done so already. Share this podcast with your communities and network, and help us develop a community and a tribe of leadership hackers.   And finally, if you'd like me to work with your senior team, your leadership community, keynote an event or you would like to sponsor an episode, please connect with us on social media, and you can do that by following and liking our pages on Twitter or Facebook. Our handle there is at @leadershiphacker. Instagram, you can find us there at the_leadership_hacker, and on YouTube, we're just Leadership Hacker.   So that's me signing off.     I'm Steve Rush, and I have been The Leadership Hacker.     Music: " Upbeat Party " by Scott Holmes courtesy of the Free Music Archive FMA  

Frank Agin, founder and president of AmSpirit Business Connections and host of Networking Rx, talks with Michael G. Rogers (@rogersgmichael), author of You Are The Team. Together they talk about how serving others is the first and best step towards building a great team, whether it's a formal or informal one. For more information on AmSpirit Business Connections and its franchise opportunity program, contact Frank Agin at frankagin@amspirit.com or visit http://www.amspirit.com/franchise.php.

Teams cannot achieve results without teamwork, and we found an expert to talk about teamwork. Join us as special guest Michael G. Rogers, author of the bestselling business book, You Are the Team—6 Simple Ways Teammates Can Go from Good to Great.Michael Roger’s is a 2014 Inc. magazine Top 100 Leadership Speaker who is working on his second book, Heart Based Leadership, and his blog Teamwork and Leadership regularly ranks in the top 10 of leadership blogs and has a monthly following of more than 30,000 people. He is at MichaelGRogers.com.In Part 1 of our two-part interview Serious Soft Skills Podcast Cohost Bob Graham speaks to Mike Rogers about a host of topics related to teamwork, including:SelfishnessLack of trust in teamsVulnerabilityPeer-to-peer accountabilityHow sports works better than business at teamworkCreating a visionTo obtain Michael Roger’s book or to read his blog posts, visit MichaelGRogers.com.Next weekPart 2 of our interview on teamwork with Michael Rogers. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.