Welcome to Hacking Your Leadership. I'm Chris 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 Thoughtful Thursday, I want to
talk about something that is near and dear to my heart when it comes to
leadership. And this is something that I've experienced many times in my career in
retail leadership, and that's this idea that all things that are a problem come
back to how are you training your people? How are you coaching your people?
How are you asking them to do things you know more correctly? If
the results aren't there, it's because you have to do this better or that
better. And sometimes that's true, sometimes that's absolutely true, but sometimes it's
not true. And sometimes these questions are being asked by people who haven't walked
in your shoes for a while or ever, and it's tough to have those
conversations with them when they can't necess really see eye to eye with you.
Have you had this happened to you before? Definitely, for sure. And
I think that this is good because it's a it's a smaller part of a
larger conversation. You know. Um I wrote about this a couple of weeks
back on our LinkedIn newsletter around just kind of the myth of training, coaching
and focus and again, does training help? Absolutely? Does development help?
Yes, absolute hundred percent. We're not saying that that's that's not the case
when it happens though many times, is that you're kind of doing the same
thing over and over again, or this belief that it's always training that we're
not talking a little bit deeper. It's like, well, who is training
and how are they training? And is the training effective? And then not
only is there a training done, but then what's the follow up and what's
the what's the process in which we're validating the training? And so much of
that falls into the effectiveness of leaders. And so I think that there's been
many, many times where I've been in conversations and dialogue and we always want
to kind of default to that like, oh, it's like it's it's it's
it's a training thing, or it's just like and it's like, well,
yes, and because how many times do we have to train the same people
on the thing we want them to do without finally saying it's not about the
training. Maybe it's about the execution of the strategy. Maybe there's other factors
that are here, and so I think it's it's just something that it's good
for us to for us to discuss, but also for leaders to constantly look
at because a lot of times the defaults for many strategies, for many organizations
is just simply that oh, they need more training, under the assumption that
they just don't have the training they need to do the work. And there
are other factors that I think can be a lot bigger in the impact of
them not getting the work done how it should be done right. Well,
So let's talk about some of those other factors here, because a lot of
it comes down to prioritization. And you know, we talk about this as
in our culture acronym. The l for culture is to lend air support.
So if you're a leader, your job is to kind of filter out the
noise and make sure that your team, that your people reporting up to you
don't have a list of seven thousand priorities. If everything is a priority,
nothing is a priority, right, That's how it works. There has to
be something that is a priority, a couple of things, but not everything
is a priority, and that can change, but it shouldn't change daily.
It could change quarterly, it could change annually. Like you're supposed to reevaluate
what your priorities are based on moving levers of a business if things are not
moving the way you want it to move. But if a priority is AB
and C on Monday and it's D, E and F on Tuesday, that
implies that what you said on Monday wasn't actually a priority, and you lose
credibility as a leader when it comes to naming off any priorities at all.
And so you have to really be clear on what the priorities are, and
you can't kind of be in it, like if you're being inundated by noise
from outside the system. You often will have competing business groups kind of telling
you what they believe their priorities are, and it's their top priority for sure,
because it's their business group. You as the leader then have to go
in and filter that and decide what is actually the priority. And there are
things you can do to figure out what is actually the priority. Look at
how people are rated on their annual reviews. Look at what constitutes someone getting
a raise or a promotion or not. You want to know where the priority
is. Look at what gets a person a promotion, don't It's what the
old added you ask a politician, don't tell me your priorities, show me
your budget, and I'll tell you what your priorities are. This is the
exact same thing. And so what I want to ask you, Lorenzo,
is have you ever run into a situation where you have to kind of push
back on someone who has um you know, who's trying to tell you this
is a priority and you have to kind of make it clear to them this
actually isn't a priority for you, not because it's not to them, but
because it just isn't to you. And so I don't want to ask you
that, but first I want to get up toward poet of our sponsors.
All right, Lorenzo, when did you have to kind of make sure that
someone who is telling you something that's really important to them it is a priority
to them, that it just isn't a priority to you without kind of hurting
that relationship and saying no, sorry, Bud, you know, go away
and come back later. You have to maintain that relationship. You have to
have a working relationship with them, but you, but you, you really
it's not a priority to you. It just isn't. Yeah. I think
a lot of it sometimes to your point earlier, is around negotiation, communication,
relationships, those types of things. And I can think of many times
when somebody has come to me to say, like, this is the thing,
this is the priority, this is what you know needs to be focused
on. And and because of the work that I do, and because of
the teams that I lead and the involvement and things that are going on,
I many times have had different perspectives and said, like, I'm not saying
it's not important, but when it comes to like what are we really trying
to solve for here or how does this align with the other things that we
have, I think in what I've learned over time is to just continue to
ask more questions to help to connect the dots on where does this land in
the in the kind of the you know, the list of all priorities,
because we have to be honest enough to say that there are many, and
then we have to be honest enough to say that some are more impertinent than
others for different types of reasons. And and again when you're when you have
teams where you have multiple leaders, you have complex businesses, you have different
uh you know, different work areas of responsibility, you have all this type
of stuff. There are going to be things that may be more of a
priority to this group or to this leader specifically versus that leader or that group
specifically. But then as the leader of leaders, you're kind of responsible for
it all. So I share that because I think that's where I have and
that's typically where I push back, because it happens constantly where I'm like,
Okay, walk me through that, walk me through that as a priority.
Why is that a thing? I understand that we may be solving for scale
or solving for a reduction in this behavior. Um, and but where maybe
you're seeing that as a as a as a as a behavior that needs to
change. I'm saying that behavior shows up differently from me here. Let me
walk you through and then to ask the questions around, Okay, so like,
is this something that's more of a priority than this other thing? Because
sometimes people are not even aware of I'll give them the benefit of the doubt.
They're not aware that there are some other bigger priorities that are going on
sometimes because they're so hyper focused on the thing that they are trying to solve
for. They're not even thinking about the other things that are also going on
out there. So sometimes it is a matter of saying like, okay,
well hold on, I hear what you're saying. This is something that you
want me to focus on. Let me give you some other things right now
that I'm also being asked to focus on. And I would love to get
your perspective, like where does that fit right when it comes to this and
that and then the thing that you've got, where does that fit in your
mind? Because I want to understand the level of urgency that you're looking for
versus the things that I've got going on. So let's talk through this,
and I think in that type of conversation and then that type of engagement is
very helpful in us finding a place where we can kind of negotiate down to
like, what is this thing and maybe there's something in there that you just
need. I've seen that a lot of time. Sometimes we have people that
not only want to tell you what is important, but they want to tell
you how to do it. And I think that's where it's like, well,
look, look, if that's what you're telling me it is important if
I if I can get you that, if that's the thing that you want
solved, and that's the thing that you want to have positive growth in,
if I can get you that, then do you really care how I get
it done? And if the answers like, well, no, I don't
that okay, great like, then let me focus on getting you what you're
looking for, but let me do it the way that it makes more sense
for me in the context of the work that I'm doing with the team that
I have focused on, so that I can, as you said earlier,
like land air support, I can get rid of some of this extra noise
and stop changing things so quickly when it comes to behavioral expectations, right,
that should be the default if you're a leader, and you are if a
person is saying to you, I can get this done, you know ethically
and within the guidelines of what the organization is, does it really have to
be done the way you want it to be done. Oftentimes that that kind
of procedure, that way that they want it to be done is rooted in
a worst case scenario. It's it's it's the prescription to do for leaders who
don't have the ability to get it done. It's the it's the prescription.
It's it's like if you if you have no ability to get something done,
you got to start somewhere. Well, I don't know how to do it,
so you're going to tell me how to do it, and then I
can do it that way. That works. But if you are saying you're
telling you want this done, I know how to get this done. It's
not the way you want it done, but I can still get it done.
If that's a problem for you, that implies that you that you're kind
of um, your kind of devotion is not to the actual thing you're saying
it is, but whether it's to the process, and then it's a different
conversation. So if you want to talk about that, we can have that
conversation. But this kind of like a one size fits all doesn't really work.
It's it's good to have that procedure in place for people who don't have
the ability to do it. But if you, as a leader are saying
I can get this done, you should be allowed to at least make the
attempt. You should be allowed to say I can deliver on this um if
if it's a prior and if I can show you the movement in this area,
then leave me alone. You know, then I should be able to
say, you know, I did this the way I wanted to do it.
I think a lot of the reasons people have a problem with people pushing
back on that is because they don't want to feel like they weren't part of
the solution. That if if it's if they can get the delivery on the
number, but it wasn't the way they wanted it done, then then they
didn't have any influence over it getting done. They can't own that success at
all on their own. I wrote the process to get this done. Look,
they were able to get it done. It's like, no, you
just conveyed to them what the priority was. They got it done in a
way that's completely different than you. Now you feel kind of removed from that
conversation. That's really tough for a lot of people to do. But it's
all rooted an ego and and and so if you're having a conversation with somebody,
it's important to have the conversation in the context of what is this definition?
Are you? Are we? What's important? Is the result important?
Or is the how important? Let's come to an agreement on that first,
then we can have the conversation about how to move forward. Absolutely and well
that it brings us to the end of this episode. This is hacking leadership.
I'm Lorenzo and I'm Chris, and have a great day.