Improve Your Social Intelligence - w/ Ryan Franklin

Ever wished you had a roadmap to guide you through challenging conversations and help you build better relationships? Well, our guest Ryan Franklin, author of "The Christian Leader Blueprint" is here to provide just that. We venture into the complexities of conversations that usually amplify stress - be it the holiday season, performance reviews, or budget planning. Ryan generously shares his wisdom drawn from a compelling journey, which has seen him guide leaders to their greatness. Learn from his insights about the importance of self-awareness, emotional management, and how an abundant life can be hindered by small, yet significant obstacles.

As we move forward, we delve into the profound concept of social intelligence, as we explore the four pillars of personal development. We focus on how to build more productive relationships, an art that often goes unnoticed. Borrowing from biblical perspectives, we learn how to manage our interactions with others, argue effectively, and navigate challenging conversations. We wrap up our conversation with Ryan's personal story and how his assessment and book, "The Christian Leader Blueprint", have been transformative tools. The balance between individual and shared rhythms comes to the fore as an invaluable insight for cultivating stronger relationships. Tune in and enrich your relationships with these game-changing perspectives!

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The Leadwell Podcast gives mission-driven leaders principled and practical advice to do just that, lead well.

In each episode, your host Jon Kidwell, interviews leaders with great stories, to share strategies that help leaders navigate complex, confusing, and often down-right challenging leadership, personal growth, business, and workplace culture situations.

Jon is a nonprofit executive turned coach, speaker, author, and CEO of a leadership development company. In working with nonprofits and businesses, big and small, he realized the unique challenges leaders face when they are committed to keeping the mission and people the top priority. Those leaders’ commitment to their principles and the people they lead, plus seeing the need for more leaders who strive to do the right thing, the right way, for the right reasons, is what inspired Jon to start a leadership development company dedicated to the success of mission-driven leaders and their organiza...

Transcript

Intro and Welcome

Speaker 1 0:00

Y'all, we are in the middle of holiday season. It's also performance review time, setting 2024 goals and figuring out those budgets. Every single one of those places has challenging conversations that can get derailed really quickly. Today, we have a special guest with us, Ryan Franklin, who is going to help us walk through how we can do this intelligently and have better relationships on the other side. Stay tuned and see what we have for you today. ["leadwell Podcasts"]. Welcome to the Leadwell Podcast, where we give mission-driven leaders principled and practical advice so they can do just that Lead. Well, I'm your host, John Kidwell, and I am so thrilled that you are back with us.

Speaker 1 0:59

This Tuesday we have a very special episode with a very special guest, and I do not want to delay. He is a fast friend and somebody who I am getting to know and enjoy and being able to work together with and do podcasts with and also just talk shop with. As you know, as a leader, we need that. So do those of us that help leaders. So let me tell you a little bit about Ryan Franklin.

Speaker 1 1:23

Ryan Franklin is our guest today and he is an assistant pastor at the Pentecostals of Alexandria. He is an executive coach to pastors and Christian leaders and Ryan. With more than 25 years of personal development and leadership experience in business and churches, he is dedicating to helping others achieve greatness as a leader, while they expand their influence and they change lives. Ryan has recently authored this book, the Christian Leader Blueprint, and I am about 90% of the way done, and it is absolutely remarkable and Ryan didn't know that I was gonna say this, but here's the thing. When I was in the middle of writing my book, I bought this book and I ended up connecting with Ryan. His assessment and this book re-grounded me in the rhythm that I needed to be able to continue to go and to succeed and to deliver this book. So that's why I'm so thrilled to have Ryan here with us. Ryan, welcome to the podcast.

Speaker 2 2:21

Hey, john, thank you so much for allowing me to be here with you today. It's an honor to be with you, and you know what that just makes my day to hear you actually say that that book helped you in the middle of a maybe a little bit stressful time. I know what writing a book feels like. It's a very stressful time and to say that that helped re-ground you is pretty encouraging to me, so thank you for telling me that.

Speaker 1 2:49

Well, thank you, friend. And as I teed up for everyone, that's really where you and I got to know everybody, each other. We'd engaged a little bit on social.

Ryan's Story

Speaker 1 2:57

We have connection through Concordia and through some mutual friends, but there when I reached out and you reciprocated and we were talking about the book and the assessment is where I finally got to talk with you and you with me and it has been a wonderful, fast and growing friendship. And here's the thing I don't actually know your story kind of, your story of origin and transformation and what led to this book, and neither does do the people listen into this. So we'd love to hear that, Ryan, if you're willing to share.

Speaker 2 3:27

Absolutely Be glad to. I would say it'd be good for me to start here. For most of my life there was a scripture that sort of plagued my conscience John 10, 10,. The thief cometh not for to steal and to kill and to destroy. I've come that they might have life and they might have it more abundantly. You know, I had a really good life in the business world and then later on in the church world and ministry, but I can't really say that I had abundant life back then and honestly I didn't even really know what that looked like, definitely not with clarity. You know, the chaos of life would come and it would stir things within me and I would long for something more or something better. And it was hard for me to even admit that there was something better and something more because I felt like, as a Christian, that I should have already been there. But I was longing for something and I'm gonna give you a little backstory of my new book, the Christian Leader Blueprint.

Speaker 2 4:39

I've been heavily involved in ministry for over 25 years in a variety of roles. I was a bi-vocational assistant pastor many years ago I was a registered nurse, but I leaned more towards the business side of nursing. I was a center director of dialysis at GW Hospital in Washington DC and I was an assistant pastor bi-vocationally in a five-year new church in Northern Virginia and so I moved home to my current church in 2005. And I've been in full-time pastoral ministry here for the last almost 19 years and I've had a ton of ministry and business experiences in a large variety of environments. And so I tell you all that to just say that I know what hard work feels like and I know how hard that ministry and business leadership is, and there's been a lot of good things, a lot of good fruit that has been produced over the years in my life. But I also know what seasons of not producing good fruit looks like.

Speaker 2 5:52

And it's during those times that just little things in life would sort of get in the way, and they weren't always major things. Many times it was very small, subtle things. Yet it got in the way of me feeling what I kept reading in Scripture about abundant life, and it got in the way of people around me even feeling abundant life at times as they interacted with my moodiness or my detachment or other negative aspects of my personality and I felt deeply insecure at times. I felt that dreaded imposter syndrome at times. I felt like I wasn't good enough. And so guess what I would do? I would try to prove myself in unhealthy ways. I would do it with a crazy work life balance. I would pursue positions and titles that didn't even line up with who I really was, my true calling in life. It didn't, and a lot of that was because I didn't know my strengths and weaknesses even, and I've allowed my emotions at times to sort of get out of whack, and there was times where I even severely damaged relationships along the way along the journey.

Speaker 2 7:15

Because of these things, all of these things that I'm talking about in my life and there's no doubt in my mind that it has drastically decreased my effectiveness in ministry and in business and in life at various times in my life.

Speaker 2 7:33

It's less in my influence with people along the journey and in my earlier years, it frequently, frequently just drained my enjoyment of leadership and just doing life in general, to the point of wondering if, you know, was abundant life even possible? So, john, in 2016, I took on a new job and it was an overwhelming assistant pastor position at my church, at POA. I got promoted to the assistant pastor role. It's a large church, it's got a ton of moving parts in it and I was just handed this massive amount of responsibility and, with the enormous load and all of the dynamics that surrounded it, it was like no other challenge that I had ever faced before.

Speaker 2 8:27

It was way beyond even, you know, being a center director at GW hospital or being an assistant pastor at that church plant. It was just a massive amount of things and it wasn't long. In all of those week and those negative areas of my life that I talked about, I started oozing to the surface in ways that I had never expected and, john, I didn't know what to do with them. It wasn't long and I just started feeling those dreaded feelings of burnout and I imagine your listeners probably have never experienced burnout.

Speaker 1 9:06

No, no, nobody. Nobody feels that at all these days, especially those in serving professions right.

Speaker 2 9:14

It's exactly not for profit, it's ministries yeah. Exactly, and, john, you've never felt those either, have you?

Speaker 1 9:20

Not this one. No, ryan, not this week.

Speaker 2 9:23

Yeah, so I had felt these emotions years before, when I was working in the business world, and I had felt it many times along the journey of my tenure at the church. But this time is a little bit different. It was like intensity times 10. And it absolutely impacted the people around me, including the people I led, and it began eroding some of my closest relationships and, honestly, I didn't know what to do and I didn't know where to get help. And at one specific point, john, I can remember, I really just wanted to quit and run. The emotion just came on me at multiple times throughout that time. But I knew that that wasn't an option for me, and so I knew that something within me had to change. And I'll skip a lot of the details here, but I found myself searching for answers through prayer, through scripture, through godly men in my life. And I also went through a year of executive coaching, and it was very expensive. I had a sacrifice to do it. It was, you know, more money than I had ever spent per hour with a person. But at the end of that year of executive coaching it literally changed my life, and during that time I reconnected with what my God-given purpose was in life. I actually developed a personal vision for my life, moving forward, and I found a work-life balance that I had never had before and I saw myself in ways that I had never even realized that I could see myself. And all of a sudden, even my personal gifts and my strengths were being used in a much different and greater way and over time, I developed this ability to build into resource from important relationships like I had never done before in my life, and all of these things made all the difference in my effectiveness, in my enjoyment in ministry and in life, and it minimized the chaos internally and externally and I got unbelievable clarity and I worked to realign my actions with my purpose and ultimately, john, I started seeing productive fruit again in my work at the church and my home life and my kids, with my wife and my kids it drastically improved and I started seeing that abundant life that I saw in Scripture. Years before that. I started actually seeing abundant life in my life like I had never seen before. And again, I'm going to skip a lot of the details. I know this is a long story. Sorry about that, john, but this is a powerful story.

Speaker 2 12:38

I'm actually moving towards the book here, but I learned how to help people through executive coaching with the very same things that drastically improved my life, and I began helping to guide pastors and church leaders and Christian business leaders to sort of rise above those challenges that they were facing, to help them lead with renewed purpose, with authenticity, relational compassion, and every time I worked with a client I was seeing this similar success story, and so I'm kind of an analytical guy and I started seeing this pattern of producing this positive fruit, and so I dug deeper into studying the pattern and I literally graphed the characteristics and the data that I was seeing and I was like rassling with it for days and weeks at one period of time, and eventually the Christian leader blueprint model emerged. And in the world today we're so fast paced, everything is changing so much every day. Here we are at the end of November and 2023 is gone and many leaders are still finding themselves grappling with a sense of feeling stuck and they're overwhelmed by how complex leadership in this world is today and many don't know how to align their faith with their role as a leader. And, john, that's why I wrote this book. The Christian leader blueprint addresses, in my mind, addresses these desperate needs.

Speaker 2 14:24

It gives the reader a blueprint that helps them navigate through the complexities of leadership. It's a strong foundation of faith and scripture and through this powerful model of the Christian leader blueprint there's practical strategies. I give real life examples and insights. That sort of helps to equip leaders to overcome some of the same challenges that I had to overcome and just bring clarity in the middle of their chaos to embrace a leadership lifestyle that is effective and that's enjoyable and that's aligned with their God given purpose. And again, it's deeply rooted in Christian principles and values, and so the tagline of the Christian leader blueprint is a step by step guide to leadership transformation. So, john, I know I've done a ton of talking and hopefully you're okay with that.

Speaker 1 15:21

Oh, of course, Of course.

Speaker 2 15:23

Now, that's the story.

Building Productive Relationships Through Four Pillars

Speaker 1 15:24

That is a great story and one of personal transformation, that it's obvious reading the book how much it informed this book. So everybody should go and grab this. And, ryan, if you would just give us quickly the four dimensions of the Christian leader blueprint model, those big four buckets, if you will.

Speaker 2 15:47

Okay, sure, yeah, there's four pillars. I call them.

Speaker 2 15:51

Pillars that, and within the four pillars there's four topics for a leader to unpack, but the four big pillars are Establish a better rhythm of life. That's first and foremost. And that's a lot of times, john, that's where people see the most pain in their life. They, they feel the most pain. I should say their. Their life is sort of out of whack. Their work-life balance is crazy. Their vision, they really don't have a personal vision for their life. The routines are nowhere to be found.

Speaker 2 16:28

So that's where a lot of times and I know you probably see this in your own practice that's where a lot of times people will make the cause when they're trying to establish a better rhythm of life. But the second pillar is see yourself more clearly, which includes clarity of mind, emotional intelligence, motivation, leadership, derailers, things of that nature. And then the third pillar is leverage your strengths, which is calling and giftings, and leading others effectively, developing others. And then the final, the fourth and final pillar is build more productive relationships, and this is where everything sort of comes to a head. This is, this is when we establish a better rhythm of life. We can build more productive relationships, when we see ourselves more clearly and we're we've got clarity of mind and emotional intelligence and motivation, then we can build more productive relationships. When we're engaged in our calling it and our giftings and leading others well, we're developing others. Then again, john, we can build more productive relationships.

Speaker 2 17:35

So it's, it's most everything, and, and, and, if you'll notice, in the book I put the diagram, the, the model, in a Venn diagram, because they sort of overlap One feeds the other. There's not one that's more important than the other. They all feed each other and they all play off of each other. And so that's, that's the four pillars.

Speaker 1 17:57

Awesome. Thank you, ryan and y'all. I have asked Ryan to specifically dive into to build more productive relationships, even though, as you can see, we could go into any single one of those. They're topics that we often talk about on the on the show but we just got off of Thanksgiving and it either went really well or it was really awful and socially awkward and you got into some spits and fits that you didn't want to get into with your family.

Social Intelligence

Speaker 1 18:26

Or you're turning around and looking at work and you have performance reviews that you need to deliver. You got to get together with your team and set out 2024 goals, which sometimes looking, looks at the gaps or the gains that we didn't get this year and getting that budget across the finish line. And oh yeah, by the way, not just work, we want to make sure that we're doing well in life, and Christmas is coming, which means we get to have all of those conversations again, and so Ryan has a subsection inside of build more productive relationship, that is, improve your social intelligence, and that, to me, just stuck out. One because I've read it super recently I told you on about 90% of the way through but two because of the season that we're in. So, ryan, you outline social intelligence and just for all of us here, what is that and why is it so important?

Speaker 2 19:19

Well, do you want the biblical perspective or you just want the business? Let's do both. Definition.

Speaker 2 19:27

Yeah, no let's do both. All right Sounds good. So Colossians four, five through six says walk in wisdom toward them that are without redeeming the time. Let your speech be all way with grace, season with salt that you may know how you ought to answer every man. So you know, there's a lot of scripture on social intelligence actually Jesus with the woman at the well, which we could talk about at some point if we wanted to. But in essence we want to be seasons with season with salt, we want to have grace and we want to know how to answer men, and so that's that's sort of the biblical purpose of this. But just a practical definition of social intelligence is your capacity to understand and manage your interactions with the feelings, thoughts and behaviors of others. Your capacity to understand and manage your interactions with feelings, thoughts and behaviors of others.

Speaker 1 20:39

So the saying that we attract more with honey than vinegar, like all of that, is true. It's biblical. We need a little bit of the honey, we need a little bit of the salt, right? Just, we want to be able to speak truth. And intelligence is the understanding, so that we can manage ourselves and engage well. And you say that when we increase our social intelligence, we will have a greater understanding of people. And we operate out of this studying people actively listening, managing our body language, staying curious and studying the social environment.

Speaker 1 21:13

Right, what's going on right now? How did this play out in the past? All of those things. We are going to be ready, and still, you have a section in the book about how to argue. Well, and I'm not trying to say that we're arguing around poor performance reviews or goals. We want that to be a win-win, a mutual commitment. We want that to be so clear that it's not something that we argue about later. And if we're being honest around the dinner table, it's not that we want to argue, but we may want to discuss the things that we don't always see eye to eye on, right. And so, if we're paying attention to these five things, how do we transition it into how do we argue? Or maybe even just enter those challenging conversations.

Speaker 2 22:04

Well, yeah, and this is where sort of the rubber meets the road, because you know me and you, john, jump on a zoom call, have a good conversation. There's no argument there, I mean, if you know. However, if I have a team member that I'm having to depend on, that I'm having to work with day in, day out, that I need to have a good relationship with them. There's a lot at stake there, and so social intelligence kind of meets. This is where the rubber meets the road and truly determines if we're going to have productive relationships or not, and so I would say the first thing that we need to really key into when we're considering this, arguing well, is to know that we're dealing with real people, with real relationships. These are real people who are going to go home at night, who are, you know, facing insecurities themselves, who are just trying to juggle life and work through the emotions within them, you know, have a good relationship with their spouse or their kids, or you know it's. This is real people, and we have to remember that. The second thing I would say is is that we don't always have to win. This is a big one for me.

Speaker 2 23:38

I, as a guy who was low in compassion. At one point I feel like that I've I've educated myself and practiced enough that I've raised my level of compassion for people, but still at my core that's. That's quite challenging, but I would. I used to be known as a person who was good at good at handling conflict, and notice, I said handling conflict, like I would be the one that would go in and clean up a mess and it would be organized and we'd have a process in place and things would be better in structure. As we walked, as when I walked away, but relationally, a lot of times people would feel empty and discouraged and ready to quit, even because I didn't, I didn't key in to what was really going on in the situation with the person, and I thought in my mind, with my competitive nature, that I had to win, and my win was this ministry is going to be an order when I, or this, what ministry or business, whatever was going to be an order whenever I walked away from it. And so I had to understand that, ryan, you don't always have to win. We want to win for the team, we want to win for the organization. We don't have to. You don't have to win as a person to for it to be a success overall.

Speaker 2 25:13

And then I also learned in the midst of that that I needed to approach situations with a true desire to understand what the other person is filling and thinking. You know, this individual has given their life let's, let's say it was to a particular ministry. They're a leader of a ministry and as an assistant pastor I'm overseeing that ministry. I have to understand that this person has given their life to this niche ministry, probably because of pain or things they've gone through in their past that has enabled them to to minister to people in that area of ministry. And I and it would behoove me to really move into that conversation, in that situation, with a true desire to understand what that person is filling and thinking in this moment sort of an empathy, a compassion that I didn't have earlier in my in my life.

Speaker 2 26:18

And then the fourth thing I would say to for good conversations, hard conversations, is to listen to the person and tune into the emotion that you're seeing. Are they angry? Tune into that anger. Why are they angry? Are they feeling sadness? Are they stressed and full of anxiety? Are they really happy? And they just don't see the issues that I'm seeing. What emotion are they seeing. So I want to tune into that and then, especially if it's a negative emotion, I want to label the emotion that I'm seeing. That's number five. I want to label the emotion that I'm seeing and restate what I'm hearing to the person. So you know, john, it seems like you're really challenged in this area. I'm hearing some deep frustration about how this is being handled. Tell me more about that.

Speaker 1 27:35

Yeah, and let us talk a little bit and immediately my shoulders started to go down and I was ready to share and I was like I don't know what I'm challenged about, but I'm going to answer you.

Speaker 1 27:45

That's exactly how it started to go right, but because of all of the building blocks that you just walked us through and being able to summarize and reframe it back to me, my shoulders went down and I was ready to engage. Like I said, I was going to make up a challenge just so that you had something to go off of, because I felt so engaged with it.

Speaker 2 28:08

Definitely. And then the last part of that is don't push your own agenda. We're so as leaders in authority. A lot of times we want to push our own agenda and I do my best to push against my own desire to push my agenda, because I truly want to know why this individual is challenged with me. Why are they struggling? Why is this a hard conversation? Why are they struggling here? And I want to stay open to possibly even change in my mind.

Speaker 2 28:49

Now here's the deal Even if I do move forward with my agenda because I'm the leader in authority and sometimes that has to happen and even if I do move forward with my agenda because I've slowed the conversation down and I've tuned into what that individual is feeling, they're going to be a lot more likely to move forward and be okay with the decision that I made. Now there's times where they're not and we have to move forward with the agenda and they're not, and you know, of course we want to continue to try to work through that. But most of the time, 95% of the time, when you slow down, you listen to the person, listen to their concern. Even if you don't follow what they really want, they're going to feel heard connected with in a way that can resolve the conflict in an easy and positive way.

Book Info - The Christian Leader Blueprint

Speaker 1 29:52

That's such a good word, ryan, and so often, especially this time of the year, we get even busier. But if you want to improve your social intelligence, ryan just gave you a framework and a guide to be able to do that. Starting with what to pay attention as you are engaging with people all the way through, going into challenging circumstances in a way where you can connect even deeper with people and give them what they need to be able to feel heard and valued and where, together, you all are going to come to the best resolution possible. And I'm telling you, if you want to learn more, you need to get Ryan's book. It is out and available. Ryan, can you tell us where we can get your book and learn more about you?

Speaker 2 30:41

Well, the book is available at any major place Amazon, Barnes, Noble, anywhere you buy books. It's available on paperback, hardback, Kindle and also audio book. It is available on any form that you would like. It purposely did that because I wanted people to be able to engage in it in any way that they would like. But if you just want to go check it out and see the premise of it, I've got a page on my website, ryanfranklinorg. I've also got some free things there. I've got a free short guide of the Christian leader blueprint that an individual can download and sort of see the model for themselves and get a brief explanation of the model before they purchase the book, and I've also got a free self-assessment. That is a pretty robust self-assessment that will rate an individual on the Christian leader blueprint model and I would encourage anybody to go and take advantage of that.

Outro and Thank You

Speaker 1 31:51

As would I. That assessment is the thing that drew Ryan and I initially together and helped me reground my own rhythm as I was going through some book transition, being up in Michigan and continuously working on the business. So make sure you check out that assessment and get Ryan's book. Ryan, thank you so much for being here today. Thank you for walking us through your model, for sharing your story and for guiding us how we can have better, healthier, more productive relationships.

Speaker 2 32:21

Thank you, John. Thank you so much for having me.

Speaker 1 32:24

All right, y'all Until next week. Be well lead on, and God bless.