Episode 10: At the Helm of Command and Collaboration: Mastering the Leadership Dance

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Have you ever stood at the crossroads of command and collaboration? Join us on Full Circle with Shawn as we navigate the intricate dance between the structured discipline of military leadership and the dynamic agility required in the corporate world. We delve into the essential qualities that transcend sectors: vision, integrity, resilience, and empathy. As we dissect the art of balance in leadership, from transparent communication to the discretion required to safeguard a team's morale, you'll learn how to maintain a steadfast commitment to your mission without losing the human touch.

This journey through the corridors of leadership doesn't stop at just philosophy; it takes a sharp turn into the practical world of remote engineering teams. We tackle the challenges of virtual collaboration head-on, discussing how to cultivate cohesion and steer your team through digital landscapes. You'll gain insights into varying leadership styles—from autocratic to transformational—and how to adapt your approach to the fluid dynamics of your team. Learn how to strike that perfect chord between meeting company objectives and nurturing your team's innovative spirit, all while keeping your company's vision in clear sight.

We round out our discussion with a compassionate look at the human element of leadership. Hear the inspiring story of a technician's rise to engineering success, illustrating that passion often trumps credentials. We'll unravel the common myths of leadership, emphasizing the importance of creating an environment ripe for honest communication and consistent action. Understand that leadership is not about knowing everything but about learning from missteps and being a beacon of resilience for your team. So, gear up for our next episode, where we'll continue to enrich your leadership playbook with even deeper insights.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Hello and welcome to Full Circle with Sean. I'm your host, sean, and today we're talking about leadership. Now, as a sergeant a previous sergeant in the US Army versus a business owner, and having teams of people. There are different aspects. Well, they might come together in a certain way and certain parts always blend together, but there are definitely differences. So, in military leadership, we have structure, very highly structured, with clear ranks and roles, and orders are expected to be followed without question, but this helps to maintain discipline and order. We have mission-focused leadership, so decisions and strategies are driven by mission objectives, with a strong emphasis on operational readiness, security and the achievement of specific tactical or strategic goals. And then you have the chain of command. Communication and decision making follow a very strict chain of command, and this ensures efficiency and clarity when you're executing your orders to maintain your operations, because operations are very, very complex. Then you have risk and sacrifice, so leadership often involves making decisions that can result in life or death outcomes, and this emphasizes the importance of courage, duty and sacrifice. And you have training and preparedness, so leaders are expected to continuously train and prepare their teams for a wide variety of scenarios, emphasizing discipline, physical fitness and tactical skills.

Speaker 1: 1:29

Now, when we look at business leadership, it requires flexibility and innovation, right? So business leaders often encourage innovation and adaptability because they want to adjust to strategies to meet the market demands and stay ahead of their competitors. Profit-oriented, so decisions are typically driven by profit and growth objectives. And collaborative and inclusive leadership in business often involves fostering a collaborative environment where feedback is encouraged A lot different than the military right. Customer-centric, so leaders prioritize customer satisfaction, adapting products and services to meet customer needs. And personal development there's a strong emphasis on professional development of employees. Now, if you look at a mix between those, rarely will your leaders in business have life or death outcomes, but it's not always the case, right? That's why we have OH&S and safety, because they very well could be, and a leader, no matter what the circumstances are, needs to consider all the aspects of everything that could happen. So that's a very high level of some of the differences between military and business and some of the things that a leader needs to look at.

Speaker 1: 2:44

Now what we really want to do is start with some core qualities of a leader, right? So like integrity, accountability, vision, stuff like that. So let's start with vision. A leader needs to have some vision, and I know what you're going to say to me, right? You're going to say well, I've had leaders that have almost none of this, and that's true. And when we get into more leadership styles, we'll find out that some leaders don't have any of that. Some leaders maybe shouldn't be leaders, but they are, they've worked their way there, or they've had the right opportunity, or mommy and daddy own the company. So you're going to have leaders of every different faucet of life, but we're more focused on ourselves. So what defines leadership to us and how can we reflect on ourselves to grow our leadership ability? And yeah, that's where we are.

Speaker 1: 3:39

So let's, as I said, let's start with vision. And what is vision? Right? As I said, let's start with vision. And what is vision? Right? So a vision is like the leader decides is there opportunity to expand their company? Is there new markets that they haven't looked at? What are the roadmaps for that? And then they need to be able to like it's not good enough just to have a vision, right, you have to be able to communicate this vision and you have to compel everyone around you to be motivated to meet that vision.

Speaker 1: 4:08

So the next item is integrity, right? So leaders really should have an honest and strong moral principle. And okay, let's jump off that again. I know what you're going to say. I know a lot of business owners. I know a lot of business leaders that are not honest or have strong moral principles. And what I always say to everybody that says you could go further if you just compromise in some things. And I say well, the question I have is well for me, I like to sleep at night, so I can't deal with that kind of stuff. But also, am I building a company that I want to last the test of time? I want it to be here when I'm gone, I want to be here when my kids grow up and I want to pass that on. Or am I for a really quick make some money, get out. Make some money, get out. And I don't understand how people actually live their life like that. So no, you should have integrity and there are plenty of business leaders that do, and they earn that trust and respect from team members and stakeholders and they're transparent about the company challenges and successes. Now there are limitations of how transparent you should be at times. I mean, you don't tell absolutely everybody when you're having a tough day in, say, the financials for the business. As long as you already know that you have backing, that you can get through that tough time, and it's your job as a leader to take that hit, take that stress and move on. But if you're not transparent and you're going to fall and you don't give your employees enough time to move on, then that's not good, that's not right. So we'll keep going.

Speaker 1: 5:53

Resilience if you've listened to my previous podcast I think it was two ago we talked about resilience after failures and the leader's job is to rally their team to learn from their mistakes, to make the adjustments and be persistent in their efforts to overcome those setbacks and move forward. And then you have empathy. So a leader takes their time to understand the personal and professional challenges faced by their team members. So you need to be able to offer support and flexibility and enhance the loyalty and team cohesion. But now everybody's going to say, oh, flexibility, oh, that means I can work at home whenever I want. Well, does that work in your situation? I mean, that's what you need to reflect on as a leader as well. Right?

Speaker 1: 6:42

So for my current company, we're engineer-based, we're hardware, software and collaborative, so as soon as somebody works from home, they're not part of that team. They don't understand what's going on with all the other team members. They can't reach over their shoulder and go, hey, joe, I'm having this problem. And Joe goes yeah, yeah, I had it last week. This is how you fix it. Now you're going to really expand those times when you work at home and we have tried all sorts of different things in different situations. Right, covid came and we tried to collaborate online a lot more, and it's really hard and you do slow down and you might not get the best result. Now, that doesn't work for everybody. There are certain jobs that are perfectly fine on doing online. So it is really what is your situation and how do you adjust for that? So, moving on, we're going to communication.

Speaker 1: 7:34

So a leader should have good communication skills, right, ensure all team members are kept informed about changes within the organization and the vision and provide clear expectations and feedback, while helping to prevent misunderstandings, and that's one of the biggest keys, right? So let's say you have a closed door meeting with someone and you're talking about something and they throw out a hypothetical. Well, what happens if the company goes under? What do we do If the company goes under and all somebody hears from the other room is the company goes under. So you got to be cautious about that thing. Um, very cautious, because I've had it happen. I've had, I've overheard this and somebody's out job hunting thinking that the world is falling apart. So you just got to be cautious about that stuff and make sure that you are clear with what's going on, what's expected in your company.

Speaker 1: 8:30

Accountability so a leader is accountable and should take responsibility for their outcomes and their decisions. And then they should also hold their team members accountable. And that's a big thing right there, because a lot of leaders try to be friends with everybody and I am friends with a lot of our employees but at the end of the day, it's, it's if you promise to do something, then you should take responsibility for that, and I should take responsibility If you fail. I still take responsibility for that Because, at the end of the day, the buck stops with me, right? Innovation? So the market's always shifting, right? So a leader needs to encourage their teams to pursue creative solutions and new ideas, while not going crazy. So you know a lot of over-engineering or over-fixing the problems. You know it's the KISS solution, right, keep it simple, stupid, and that's something that I've always followed as well. If you can keep it simple, you keep it simple, and clients like simple Adaptability.

Speaker 1: 9:32

So, as things change, you need to be able to adapt. You need to adjust your strategies, your operations, you need to demonstrate flexibility, and all that while maintaining team morale. As you adapt, as you're flexible, the team morale can sometimes drop. Oh, we were going to finish this. Now you've moved us to this. Oh, you've just moved us again. Why? And again that goes all the way back to communication Decisiveness. So when confronted with, say, a critical decision or you're having a crisis, the leader needs to evaluate the options and make a decision and move the team forward. And that doesn't mean that the decision will always be right. It's the best guess. And then inspirational. You need to mentor and inspire your team to strive for excellence and a sense of purpose and enthusiasm and get them to buy into the shared goals Everybody wins right. So that's just some of the qualities that we would expect from a leader and some of the different aspects of that.

Speaker 1: 10:40

So let's move into more leadership styles. So there's quite a few leadership styles and I'm only going to cover, I think, maybe 10 of them, and whatever you choose or however you move forward with your leadership style, it will impact your team dynamics and what I always I believe is that leadership style is a mix. It's always a mix similar to project management, right, prints and all the different project management types or development agile, and there's just so many different things that you can do. But I don't really think one size fits all and I don't think, even when you find your mix, it works forever. I think that you need to adapt and do what works with the team that you have at the time and the work or the opportunities that you have at the time.

Speaker 1: 11:30

So we'll start with autocratic right, the style of individual control over all decisions with little input from team members. And you know they make choices on their own judgments and ideas and don't accept advice from their team. Great idea. Usually not In military. Sure, to a point, military does get you know. All of their leaders at different levels do come together and give their advice and everything, but at the end of the day, it is up to you know your colonel or general or whoever is deciding everything right.

Speaker 1: 12:08

Democratic, so often considered the most effective form. Democratic leaders offer guidance to group members and participate in the group by promoting a sense of collaboration and commitment. Guidance to group members and participate in the group by promoting a sense of collaboration and commitment. So this allows for really great input from team members and everybody decides what to do Not the greatest idea in everything, so you might have different levels right. So from the business side, you might go okay, I'm running this business, I need to make money in this business, so I have to do this, but how I do this is going to be decided by the teams that are actually working on it, and then I'll push that up in a quote and then I'll do it, but I have to do it. It's not up for debate whether we're doing this job. How we do it should be up to the team. So there you go.

Speaker 1: 12:55

Transformational. So transformational leaders inspire their teams with a shared vision right, and motivate and enhance group dynamics. They encourage innovation and creativity. So this is more for advocating for high levels of personal and group performance. Transactional leadership so this style is based on a system of rewards and punishments. Transactional leaders are very highly directive and action-oriented and their relationship with team members is described as a series of transactions. So do this, you get this. Do this poorly or don't do this, you lose this. It's almost like raising kids sometimes do this, you lose this, right, it's almost like raising kids, sometimes, right.

Speaker 1: 13:40

And then we have delegative leadership, which the leader offers little or no guidance to group members and leaves all the decision making up to group members, which I see more as like a community group right Servant leadership. In this model, the leader's main goal is to serve, and this is different to a normal business leadership where the business leader is trying to get their company to thrive, or organization Servant leaders are all about their employees or their group, right, which isn't a bad thing. And again, this is where I think you go with a mix, so charismatic leadership. So this is leaders that more just try to inspire enthusiasm in their teams and the energy in motivating others to move forward. Then you have situational leadership, which is just a leadership style of adapting the methods based on the situation. So leaders assess factors such as the type of tasks, the nature of the workforce and the situational factors before implementing their strategy and adapt from there. Then you have bureaucratic leadership, and that's, I guess, some of your bigger companies, and they follow the rules rigorously and ensure that their team members follow procedures precisely, and this is a very structured form of management with clear guidelines and protocols.

Speaker 1: 14:58

And, as I said before, I really think that the right leadership style is a mix. It's a mix of everything, really, and even different leadership styles with different people. And let's take a look at that for a second. You will have people on your team that need to have a heart-to-heart sometimes and understand a bigger picture, to be motivated and to have buy-in. Where you will have different people on your team who, if they get the bigger picture, get overwhelmed or, if they see too many things happening and too many moving pieces, will get overwhelmed. Or if they see too many things happening and too many moving pieces, will get overwhelmed and will demotivate them. You will have people on your team that you have to stick into a little bit and say that's not good enough, man, and that motivates them. Where you'll have some people that would destroy them and you have to say you know, you, you're so much better than that. You know, let's, let's talk about how we can improve that and that that will motivate them. So it's, it's not just about leadership in each individual overall how you move forward in business or it is about each person too, and getting to know your team and how to manage that team effectively.

Speaker 1: 16:23

Because we're all people, right, we all have our home life, we all have our preconceptions, we all have our histories and, yeah, so, if you listen to some of the previous episodes, I go through some of that, but this is where it starts to come together and to understand what other people are going through. I mean, I think a really good analogy I learned back in the day from one of my mentors was points in the bank. So somebody is working with you, or you're mentoring someone or teaching someone or whatever, right? So you have somebody that's been with you for a while. They've done good.

Speaker 1: 17:02

Sure, everybody has their good and bad days, but all of a sudden, they have a really bad day, and it could be attitude, it could be they just had a really bad day and you just sit back and you go, wow, this sucks, because this is somebody that I either relied on or I had a lot more faith in this person, a lot more respect than how they're they're acting today. Well, let's look at it. You know they've been with us for a while. They they've been doing good, they have. I mean, if, obviously, if I have the mentality that this isn't something that I would expect from them, then they've earned that, so they have points in the bank. So let's take it back and let them have a bad day and maybe we sit down with them. Maybe we just let it go and sit down with them later and try to get to the bottom of it, because you don't know, I mean they could have had a really horrible day at home. They could have so many different aspects that you don't understand. I mean they could have had a really horrible day at home. They could have so many different aspects that you don't understand.

Speaker 1: 18:00

People are people and they have life outside of work and so, um, now, difference is if somebody just started with you and they're having bad day on, bad day on bad day attitude and stuff like that, and that's where it comes with. You know, hire fast, fire fast, right, or hire slow, fire fast. I tend to hire faster because after a couple of interviews you know. You know if you want to bring that person on and give them a chance or not. You know if you want to bring that person on and give them a chance or not, but if they don't work out in the first month, then let them go. That doesn't mean that they don't work out, because they can't pick up the skill set that fast, because some things we do are quite advanced. So I don't judge them on that. I do judge on how hard that they're working to achieve those skills, how hard they're bringing themselves up.

Speaker 1: 18:49

We had to go to an interview that I had and this technician and we just needed a technician to fix our printers. So we have all these 3D printers and it's taking the engineers time a lot to maintain them. And so we brought in a bunch of technicians and this guy said I dream about this. Oh yeah, I dream about this stuff, I dream about building this stuff and like, literally, I, I have dreams about it and I do this in my spare time and and I work on all this stuff in my spare time and right there it tells you that the passion equals the job and and he's actually an engineer with us now, so he's worked his way up to engineer. So amazing, amazing aptitude, whenitude when we hired him and passion to do that. So they don't always have to have a bachelor's, master's, phd.

Speaker 1: 19:41

It depends on where you run a company as well. Maybe you need somebody to come in with a PhD because you need to move that fast. So, yeah, I guess with those kind of leadership styles, it really depends on your situation, your objectives and the people that you're surrounded with, especially your employees or the group that you've chosen to lead your employees. Now, what's funny is a lot of people think that leaders always have all the answers, right, and leadership is about giving all the orders, and it's not. And leaders definitely don't always have all of the answers, and it's yeah, and it's not about BSing that either. Like somebody comes and says something, you just throw out an answer, because what you're going to do is you're going to ruin your reputation, you're going to lose your respect because you're BSing your way. So you just say, look, I'll look into that and I'll come back to you. But then you actually look into it, you do your own research or you talk to the people that are mentors for you and you come back to them. You don't leave it hanging. And it isn't about just barking orders everywhere, right? I mean, that's not good. You don't want to just be barking orders at people.

Speaker 1: 21:02

In my experience, and then there's a lot of emotional and psychological challenges to be a leader and I guess they're not completely talked about in society. So everybody, I go to LinkedIn oh it's so great, company's done this. Oh yeah, had this massive networking event and it was amazing. And then they go back to their hotel room or, you know, go home and they're like, yeah, it sucks being alone sometimes because some of the stuff you need to hold and the emotional up and downs can be exhausting. But it is how you overcome those challenges and it is about finding your mentors or who do you talk to. But just so you know, you are going to go through a lot of it yourself and this is where it goes with educating yourself that you're not the only one going through this stuff and a failure is going to be a failure and it's not the end of the world.

Speaker 1: 22:05

And go back and listen to resilience. I guess I don't need to go over that again. Know, go back and listen to resilience, I don't. I guess I don't need to go over that again. I will expand a lot of these, these, these different things that I'm talking about in future episodes as we we go through things, but right now I'm just working on the fundamental building blocks of what we will be talking about in further episodes.

Speaker 1: 22:27

And there is one thing that I really want to just touch on as well, and that's when we make the wrong decision, and that is about reflecting. I mean, what do they say? Hindsight 2020, right, you can go back after the fact and look back and go oh, I should have made a little bit of a different decision there, and that's great. I'm super glad that you figured that out and remember that and add that to the weight in what you're doing later. But it will happen again, and it's how we learn and it shouldn't let's clarify that it shouldn't happen again for the same thing, right? Because if it happens again for the same thing, then you did not learn anything and you did not reflect on what you did. And if it's, you know it's different than sometimes things go time reflection that now you realize where you should fix it in the future and then from then on, you only have the one time in very specific things.

Speaker 1: 23:42

So, because this episode is getting a bit long, so to just go over some advice for aspiring leaders is sure you know, go to that networking event where they talk about leadership and watch those YouTube videos where they talk about leadership and watch those TED Talks and really take in what they're saying, but also think about it, and think about it to a point where not everything they say will work for you and there'll be really, really good information in there. But you got to learn how to filter that information. It's kind of like Google searching, right, when Google first came out and people were searching and they would get absolute junk because they didn't know how to search yet. And then they started to understand how to filter out the junk with their searches. So as you learn more and more, you'll start to understand what is popular, what is getting them hits, what is getting them the ability to talk on things like TED Talk, and what is practical and what you should be taking from that.

Speaker 1: 24:47

And then, as your leadership abilities progress, or you start leading teams, or maybe you are leading teams and you start refining those skills and honing in those skills and learning I mean, people management alone is very difficult and very stressful and the more you can learn of this stuff and it will really help you out. But you need to learn. It's a journey, right. I mean we can go over all the ins and outs of it forever, but it is a journey and it is your journey, just like it was my journey, and my whole point of these talks that we have is to go over some of the things that I've learned and, as I said, this is the foundational stuff I'm doing right now, but then we're gonna, in later episodes we are going to go over, you know, could be current events and how we reflect on that, or it could be something that's happened, um, or we could just make stuff up and have some different thought experiments of what would we do in different situations, or or how does that, how would that affect my thought process and and what I'm doing? So, yeah, and and I do I do encourage people to submit their their questions, um, about, about the podcast, so any anything that we talk about, topics that you guys want to want to know more about, and, um, yeah, so on the next episode, we will be talking about mentors, from how mentorship has shaped who I am and my personal development, and also what you can do to find good mentors, how to weed out people who are mentors but shouldn't be mentors.

Speaker 1: 26:23

So there's a lot of ins and outs that I really want to discuss with you and let's jump into that next week. So thanks again for joining me on Full Circle with Sean, and I look forward to chatting next time.