Welcome to Hacking your Leadership. I'm Chris, I'm Lorenzo, and welcome to
this week's Thoughtful Thursday. Don't forget to follow us on YouTube at Hacking your
Leadership and leave us a review on iTunes. On this leful Thursday, I
want to stop by playing a clip that I saw on LinkedIn of a person
talking. This is Brian Fretwell. He's a keynote speaker and author and a
consultant, and he says something that was kind of profound and kind of stuck
out with me. So I want to play that real quick and then we
can discuss it. Sounds good, let's do it. So I just talked
to a leader who said his team is much more successful working together since they
switched from talking about goals to talking about impact. He said, whenever they
would talk about goals, he noticed that less than half of the group was
engaged in the conversation, and he started to worry that some of the people
didn't understand how important they were to the organization. So he began by asking
questions like who made your job easier this week? And whose job did you
make easier this week? Then he would change it up by asking who helped
you this week, or who did you help this week? Who motivated you
this week, who did you motivate? Who made you happy? And who
did you make happy? And initially people would only talk about who impacted them,
but over time they learned to look for opportunities to impact others. And
we're proud about making people happier or their job being easier, he said.
Talking about goals is important, but the more people understand own and take pride
in their impact, the more goals everyone has to celebrate. Okay, so
the first thing I think when I hear this is, you know, about
maybe three or four years ago, I started hearing something from people that was
a little bit of a change, and it was kind of rare at first,
but now it's really ubiquitous. And this is if I do something for
someone, whether it's big or small, someone who used to say thanks,
I appreciate it, and now they say thanks, I appreciate you. But
appreciating what somebody does and appreciating them they are very different things. And so
you know, if you're going to use one or the other, make sure
you mean whatever it is that you that you're saying. Don't overdo it.
Of course. But but what he says when it comes to impact versus goals,
it makes a lot of sense. Goals are are really impersonal, and
how you impact somebody or how you were impacted positively, that that's a really
big thing. I would I would go as far as to say that the
more positively you impact people you work alongside, and the more you can speak
to how positive they impact you, even though those aren't the necessary the goals
themselves, You're more likely to accomplish your goals if you have really great instances
of all of that, you know, throughout the week or throughout the month.
Yeah. Absolutely. I mean we talk a ton about just high performing
teams and teamwork and culture and that type of thing. And I think that
when there's a genuine appreciation for each other, you know, and again it's
a you can be appreciative of a task and you can thank somebody for doing
a thing for you. I think it to your point, if it's just
the words, if you say, I'm going to change my vernacular instead of
saying, man I appreciate it, I'm say man I appreciate you. Is
that real? Is that authentic? Is that it doesn't feel like it's it's
like it's genuine. Now it could be, but over time, the interactions
that we have, how we treat one another, when I show you my
appreciation not just by saying it, but by by by you know, providing
space for us to have dialogue, by supporting you on a decision, by
taking on something to help with something that you're working on. Like now all
of this sudden those words have real meaning to them and say, hey,
I know I appreciate you and and we have this this kind of like our
brain works and pulling up all the things that you know that we've done and
that that maybe they've done for us. So again, I like the idea
quite a bit. And I appreciate you, Chris. I appreciate the change
or the perspective here in regards to thinking about how do you do things and
say things that can have, uh, you know, a much larger impact
on the environments that we want to create a work, right, And I
don't want to you know, don't don't you misunderstand us here? This doesn't
take the place of goals, right, like, like you still have to
have goals, but but it is shortsighted to have goals that you just focus
on the goal itself. A lot of times they can be partmentalized. You
can have a goal that impacts one person, you talk about what what goal
you're trying to achieve. Whether or not I'm able to positively impact that goal
for you is another question. But you are definitely more likely to accomplish it
if you are working towards it with others working on your behalf to help you
accomplish those goals. And they're more likely to accomplish their goals if they know
that you're, you know, working on behalf of their goals as well.
And so you know, not only does it kind of allow for relationships to
happen when they may not have happened, relationships that are based on that positive
impact are ones that are they're lasting. They're not just based on whatever the
business moment is or the business need is of the moment, you know,
saying that someone, it's like, you know, I've been an organizations where
recognition is a big thing, and so you know, you you know,
each day or each week, you know, you're you're sitting at a meeting
with people and and and you start out by saying, Hey, who do
you want to recognize it's like, well, sometimes you hear those things and
the recognition that is being called out, the undertone or kind of read between
the lines here is the person saying it wants to get recognition for giving recognition,
Right, you know what I'm talking about. So saying how somebody positively
impacted you is very different than trying to recognize them, because it is it
clearly isn't about trying to get recognition for giving recognition. It's truly giving it
for what it is is in service of what they did for you, how
they positively impacted your life and those It can be difficult, I think to
start a culture of that if you don't have it, but if you work
at it, I think it can happen. And so what I'll ask you,
Lorenzo, is I want to about a time when you were leading a
team and there were goals, but you knew for a fact that the goals
would be more likely to be achieved if people were focusing on how they could
positively impact each other versus just trying to accomplish those goals. So I want
I ask you that, but first I want to give up to word from
one of our sponsors. All Right, Lorenzo, one of you had to
do this. One of you had to kind of get your team to focus
more about how they were positively impacting each other because it was in spirit of
goals, but you knew that just focusing on the goals themselves wouldn't necessarily get
you the best outcomes. I think overall, the first thing that pops into
my mind is not an actual like like a business metric per se, because
I think that those there are things that tind of takes everybody to work together
to get them. But when I think about the goal specifically around like developing
leaders. When you lead teams and you have leaders of leaders where you're looking
to create some impact and consistency across the experience that leaders have when it comes
to their own development, and then you have kind of leaders that have to
be responsible for that. That's when I've found the time that those leaders understanding
the impact that they have on one another, having conversations and dialogue around things
like personality types, about what do they see as each other's strengths, what
are the things that they can help with one another as they are responsible for
developing these leaders. Because in spaces like retail and industries like that, you
know, you have leaders that have the job of maybe like having a direct
team or direct individuals that are responsible for working with and training and developing,
But then you have the day to day business that requires kind of all leaders
to work together in this space and be conscious of what is somebody else working
on or what's their goal that they're trying to achieve. And if you only
operate with an a silo and you only have the goal specific to that leader,
it becomes difficult because you miss out on a lot of opportunities and you
have people that need different things from different leaders. So I find myself really
spending more time with impact when the goal is something like development or leadership development,
where I really have to make sure that the leaders that are responsible for
this collectively, you know, understand the impact that each other has, both
both positively and potentially negatively, if there's gaps in their behaviors, if they're
not aligned, if they're not approaching this development the same kind of way from
a you know, from a documentation standpoint, like there's just a lot of
things in there where the goal is we want to develop people, but the
impact that we have with one another if it's a positive impact that we're doing
well together that will move the larger team collectively faster. If we have opportunities
amongst ourselves, it's going to slow everything down. Yeah, that's I think
got spot on. I think anytime you can impress upon people that they don't
exist in a vacuum and whatever their role is, any time that you can
you can show them that what they do every day has a larger and broader
impact, that it's not just their personal goals, which can be difficult sometimes
if you're in a team where where the individual goals of the people kind of
make up the collective goal and there's not a lot that is expected of each
person every day in spirit of helping each other out, it's more about what
can you do individually and then together we look at what the team did.
That's very different than how you can say what are your what are you doing
to pick up the slack where someone else isn't you know, maybe as good
as you are at something, and where are you asking for help or or
receiving help from somebody when they are better at something than you are, And
hopefully there's enough kind of give and take on the team where you have a
kind of a mix of skills and abilities and strategies that come into play here,
and everybody can help out each other, so it doesn't just feel like
there's one person kind of carrying every But if you can get that right,
if you can make people understand that what they do in terms of positively impacting
others sometimes matters more to the team outcomes than just what they do as an
individual contributor, that's when I think you get, you know, kind of
this team cohesion that is, I think really hard to get in a lot
of organizations unless you start out with something like this, like how are you
impacting others? Not how are you accomplishing goals? Absolutely, and with that
it brings us to the end of this episode. This is hacking your leadership.
I'm Lorenzo and I'm Chris, and have a great day.