Stop Waiting for a Title: How to Influence Any Manager

Leadership is not a promotion, it is a practice you start where you are. In this episode, we break down John Maxwell’s five levels of leadership and connect them to David Graddy’s three phases of leadership growth, so listeners can see exactly how to move from “good employee” to “go-to leader” without waiting for permission. Expect spicy takes on bad managers, late leadership training, and why some “leaders” never grow past positional power, plus concrete steps to increase your influence in the next 30 days.

Speaker Bio

Imagine rising through the ranks of an aerospace giant like Boeing, not by waiting for a promotion, but by leading in the trenches, long before anyone handed you the title. 

That’s David Graddy. With 40 years mastering IT, retail, and leadership across industries, this John Maxwell Certified Trainer and author of Leading in the Trenches reveals the blueprint for anyone to build unstoppable influence.

No fancy degrees required — just empathy, communication, and adaptability to decode any manager, outshine your peers, and become the go-to leader your team needs. From Wichita’s front lines to tomorrow’s AI-powered workplaces, David proves: true leadership isn’t promoted. It’s chosen.

Speaker Links

https://amzn.to/4jGoCey

https://davidgraddy.com/

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Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction to the Show
• 1:05 Introduction to David
• 3:34 The Three Phases of Leadership Growth
• 7:07 Understanding John Maxwell's Five Levels of Leadership
• 18:55 Navigating Different Manager Types
• 29:01 Adapting Leadership Skills for the Future
• 35:06 Final Thoughts and Takeaways

Transcript

1:53

David Grady, welcome to Productivity. Thank you, Santiago. Glad to be here. Glad to be a guest. David, 40 years in aerospace, Boeing, also retail, IT. What was the first moment you realized you were leading long before anyone gave you a title? That would go back to my retail days when I was working for uh Target as a matter of fact and the boss came to me and said you wanna... be a part of one of the other teams I was working on on the sales floor and they put me, I talked to him about moving around, doing something different and he came to me with an opportunity to work on the stocking crew, this is back in my college days, and it turned into... me giving him ideas and certain things that we could do better on the stocking crew and that led to me stepping into being assistant department manager of the stocking crew at that time. that was back in my 20s that was first real hey you have a title but I was In college they taught management at that time, talking 40 years ago. It was more management than leadership. Leadership was just coming on as a thing that you did. And so now you can get degrees in leadership and you can specialize in it. But back then it was all management. So that was my first step into what would be a leadership position. You are a certified in John Maxwell's framework, the very famous leadership coach, but you also built your own three phases of leadership growth. What gaps did you see in how people applied Maxwell's ideas that pushed you to create your own or I don't know if it's better said evolve the model? I don't think I changed John Maxwell. I don't think you can change him or what he has delivered. There's so much of it. I think very simplistically. And so when I started developing the way I did stuff, the way I work with people, the way I dealt with managers, it came to pass for me that there were three basic steps. when you grow into your leadership, first is you, if you wanted me to go into this now, the first step is to learn the job. And that's whether you're in leadership or not. The job is what you're getting paid for, so you have to be able to do that. And that's what's expected of you. And I call that learning to the job. The next step is to learn through the job, as I call it, and that's learning more outside of that. different functions, stepping up for more activities, more opportunities to where you can step into leadership roles before you get to the title. And then once you become that go-to person. that you've learned to be and everyone looks to you, you're the subject matter expert, you can solve the problems, you can do those type of things. Then you step into the next phase, which is you become the mentor. You work with the new people, the groups that are struggling and you're that person that mentors. And that sets you up for whatever that next step is to grow. It may be going into management, it may be going to a different organization and helping them and learning that. And so growth to me came down to those three steps. Learning to do it and then becoming the go-to person, learning through it, and then being the mentor and the teacher. Your book is called Leading in the Trenches. What do you mean with the trenches? Can you tell us a story where you experience this and it end up becoming the title of your book? Well, I use the term leading in the trenches, not so much tongue in cheek, but just as a symbol of you can lead before you actually have the title. And that leadership growth starts... when you're actually a member of the team. You're not a leader of the team. You may be an informal leader, but you don't have the title. But you're part of a team. You're in that group and you're working day in and day out with that team. And that's where the leading in the trenches is just the old, boy, we're all in this together and we're working and we're in the trenches and we're doing that day to day task, those day to day tasks. That's what leading in the trenches, where it came from. Because the book is based on leading before you have the title. And we all know when we worked in enough organizations, there are those people that are considered the leaders of the group. They're the eagles in the group that kind of lead, they have the influence, are the ones that can give their opinion and help the team move faster and move forward. But they don't have that actual title. For people that doesn't know about Maxwell, could you quickly walk us through the five levels of leadership and how each level is different to the other? Boy, I haven't read that book in a long time. He's got a book called The Five Levels of Leadership. The first level is, let's see how far I can go with this. The first level is positional leadership. You have the position and you give directions off of that and the group basically has to do what you tell them to do or ask them to do. all because of the position you have. The next one, you've gained respect, you've gained trust in them, trust from them and them and you. And so they will follow you more and step up and do more even if you don't have to. Even if you don't, it's not just telling them what to do. and the next two I'll kind of lump together when you become that experienced leader that's been around a long time you're looked to for for guidance on all the problems and when they need somebody to go and look at this situation or help these people with this trouble or whatever the opinion that they need or the direction that they need, they come to you because you've earned that respect. That's kind of lumping three and four. I cannot tell you what the names of those three ties are. And then the last level, the fifth level, is you develop the level of significance. You've driven that legacy of helping people, of being there, of knowledge, of experience, of being trustworthy. And that is your significance so that you're really looked upon as the guru. This is where John Maxwell comes in and he's been doing... leadership, either teaching it, motivating people to do it, or doing it himself for so many years, he's reached that significant level because he talks about in his book, um Intentional Living, he talks about going from success to significance. Success is being recognized as good. Significance is having that next step. he talks about your your career, your life, your leadership will be summed up in one sentence. And you get to pick now what that sentence is gonna be when you read significance. So that when they're passing by you and you're laid out there on your last day, what are they gonna say about you? What's that sentence gonna be? And so that's what the significance level gets to. Do you think there is a high degree of self-serving bias when following or looking at oneself across these five stages? What I mean is that, do you think leaders that are at level one, leading by title or leading by position? Do think there are many that think they are at level 4 or 3 or 4 or 5 and therefore they are not growing towards the other levels? I think the level one is almost geared to that kind of personal, um it's you, it's about you. And the going from, and I would call that the me leader, because you're in that position and so you're trying to control everything and you're trying to do all that and direct. Because that's how, that's... Probably what you did a lot before you got the job, were the go-getter, you're the one that drove everything. So you step into that first level position and you continue to do that. It's over time that you turn that to become a we leader, where you don't, you put the team first, you put the company first, you put everyone else in front and you invert that pyramid, that leadership pyramid that started, that has lead. one leader up top and everyone else down at the bottom of the pyramid. You turn that to where you're serving them. And I think that first position kind of, it drives out that kind of me attitude. And so it's the growth when you get from there and you grow and you start working with your team, developing people, putting them out there first, giving them opportunities. That's where you start growing the trust and growing your influence up to where you turn that to becoming a WE leader. phases of leadership learner, doer and mentor. You mentioned them before. How do you know when you are ready to cross to the next level or how can you benchmark? How can someone right now benchmark themselves against am I a learner? Am I a doer? Am I, am I already a mentor? Well two things I would give you one is when you start Know where you're starting from and have your And then begin with the old Stephen Covey line, begin with your end in mind, one of his seven habits. If you know where you're going or have an idea where you're going, then you can determine what the steps are to get there. That can help you know when you're moving through that. Number two is you set the parameters of the do, which is doing the job. Can you do it competently? Can you do it completely? Is it delivered on time? are there no errors, so there's no rework. So simple, simple do the job. And then the next step is, you put yourself out there, I can help. I've learned this, I'm confident, I'm consistently doing this correctly, so I can help people across the board that do the same thing or do similar things, and you step up. The requirements are, When you get to the second level, which is the doer, that's your doing to help, your doing to show, your doing to solve problems, your the go to person. And then when your putting the position of mentoring, start mentoring and training and teaching. That's when you're at the next level. And hopefully that leads you to what that next step is, which could be if you're in a path uh that's horizontal, your next path may be to step into a management position. Because at that time you wouldn't be in management. Or if you want to do, I'll give you an example of a finance group in a big corporation, usually have accounting, accounts payable, accounts receivable, have rates, you'll have overhead, you'll have estimating, you'll have financial planning. There are different groups within that uh organization. You may start out in program management and finance and then you want to learn overhead, then you want to learn accounting, then you want to do a horizontal growth because you want to ultimately be the head of finance. So learning those can help you do that and you become the go-to person and you show you can you can learn all those pieces. and become the go-to person and that gets you to your top end which would be the head of that department. Engineering, same way. You have weights engineering, you have stress, you have tests, you have design, you have all the engineering type of stuff. Learn to do multiples of those if you need to and then take that next step to be head of engineering. learning is horizontal and vertical. It can be either way or it can be ultimately the same. What is the biggest mistake ambitious professionals make on the learner phase? Wow, the biggest mistake. Trying to shortcut themselves to be able to do everything confidently. know too many people that have, they try to short, when I say shortcut, if what you do takes 10 things to do, you try to get it done in six. Because you can get there. But if you miss something and it comes back to bite you, they'll try to shortcut themselves too. And that's when a lot of this comes when office politics comes into play. have a person that really wants to move up and they don't want to do everything they need to do. I've seen this one several times in my career. But short-cutting the system, I think, is the one mistake or the one thing that people that struggle with that. Because ultimately, it will catch up with you. because something will be asked, something will be done, something will happen, and they'll figure out, well, you know, they missed that one piece that should have been done or should have been covered. Maybe it's they didn't do a uh review with management that they should have done, that they would have caught a problem, and it cost us down the line or something like that. That's just an example. short-cutting their way through is what they don't, or another one would be just not... consistently missing deadlines. Result is king in the business world. If you have a product, you put out a widget or a report to someone, or you deliver um a product or you have to have a service that you have to get done. If you can't deliver that on time and competently, you're not gonna go very far. and a lot of people just can't make a deadline. I worked for a program manager one time that schedule was king. No matter what happened, you did not miss a deadline. And I learned that from her. She drove us hard on that. you have to deliver the product on time, whatever it is. David, how can someone at the individual contributor level start leading without being accused of stepping on toes or trying to be the boss? The first thing you do is the job. Be competent in the job because your team is watching you and they will notice if you are late or don't do the job well. So the first thing to do is do the job. Second thing to do would be support them when they need help. If you can help somebody and help them be part of the team, that goes a long way to building trust amongst the team with the team members. And then third, volunteer for opportunities. Step up when something needs to be done, whether small or large. If someone needs help, step up and volunteer and help. If there's a new project and they need some people, step in. Maybe not as the leader of the project, but as a member of the project so that you can get that experience and then hopefully they'll allow and give you an opportunity to lead a project if you're wanting to do that. So those three things I think would be the three easiest things to do for someone to step up without stepping on toes. Can we speak about the, I'm sorry, but I think I'm gonna throw you another list. The six manager types. Can we go through them? I'm very curious to hear what are the six manager types and how would you in one sentence deal with each type? Okay, the six manager types. We'll start with the me leader. That's the person that everything drives around them. When they make a decision, it's... how it's gonna impact them. When something good happens to the team, it's how it impacts them. So they drive everything at that and the team is there to do the job and support them and to get them promoted and to get them visibility. So that's the me leader in a nutshell. So you gotta make me think here. ah There's the invisible leader. that leader is someone who's just not there. And I've had several of these. They like to do manager things, leader things. They like to be on phone calls and in meetings. But when they are available for their team, funny thing about all of these is I've seen them all succeed in one level or another and a lot of the success is because of the team they have. The team covers a lot of them, a lot of what's going on. So that's the invisible, they're just not there. And that puts no information, no direction, no help out there for the team to have access to. And unless you're gonna just track them down. The next is Captain Chaos is what I call it. And I've had managers that they love to keep turmoil going within the group, running ends against the middle, tell one person one thing and one person another. And it keeps the team in a constant state of flux and chaos where they're the only one that knows what's going on. That's how they keep control. is if they know what's going on, everyone's got to come back to them for clarification and work. And so that's three. Fourth is the micromanager. That's the person that uh is so detail-oriented because he or she can't let a problem happen. They can't relinquish any control to let a problem happen to... because it's going to impact them. And we've all worked for a control freak or a micromanager, whatever you want to call them. So that's number four. Number five is the self-preservation list. This is an interesting one because it's a combination of those four, especially the me leader, and you're turning into the next one I'll talk about. The self-preservation list wants the team to succeed. They train the team up to get to the level where they can do the job really well and work as a team. But they don't want anybody to grow past that because that would push them past what the leader could possibly possibly do and that may make the leader look bad. It's a territorial position. They don't want anybody to bump them off their territory that they have got that position they have. So there are self preservations. They make decisions. Yes, they'll give recognition. Yes, they'll help those people grow, but only to a point because they don't want anybody to pass them in the pecking order or in the tier. And the last one is the we leader. And this is the one that I like, that I tried it. do if I can and that's the one that puts the group first. It basically inverse the pyramid as I said talked about a few minutes ago. You have that leader will make sure recognition gets to who does the job. and make sure they will get the opportunities to show themselves to management or to outside organizations. It will give them the opportunities by delegation to do different things. And they'll make sure that they have all the training not only that they need but that they want. an example, if someone comes and says, I would really like to start really looking to be a leader and to be possibly making management. What would that take? And that leader works with them. to do that and what they would like to do. Because I was taught by one of my managers that I was in the succession plan for, the goal of a manager is to, and this is, I don't know who said this actually, but she used to tell me the goal of a manager is to work themselves out of a job. And by that she meant bring somebody up that can take your place so that they can move on up the chain. And so those are the six managers. Now you talk about how do you handle them. It comes in two forms. It comes in the process of understanding them and then the process of how you, how I've learned if you're a part of a team, how what things, a few things that I did to make sure that you can successfully work with them. Because some managers are hard to work for. We all know that. And if anybody's been in... in a career long enough, you'll hit managers of all types. And so, for example, to understand the manager, it's very simple. You watch them. Watch what they do. Watch how they act. Watch how they interact with the team and with other people. Get a feel for are they hot-headed or are they... easy going, are they straightforward, do they kid around, what type of person are they, how do they handle themselves, get to know them a little bit from watching them. Then you listen to them, how do they talk, what do they say, do they just give direction, do they ask questions, do they do those type of things, are they hot headed, are they real easy in their delivery, get used to, because all of these things help you prepare to uh interact with them. Then the fourth thing, the fourth piece of that is ask questions. You want to learn about them, ask questions and interact with them. To get a feel for when I walk in their office, they're expecting this from me and this is the type of question I should do or this is the way I should approach something. You learn that by watching and listening and understanding and talking to them. And then fourth, if you want to learn about a leader, find someone who you trust and who will give an honest opinion that work for them and ask them what did you do to make yourself successful with that leader especially if it's a difficult leader because those are the hardest kind. Now on the flip side of that I give you a couple of things that I used to do just to make sure I was always you have to connect with your leader. Even the ones that are never there, you got to find a way to connect with them. And by connecting, staying in front of them, letting them know what you're doing and what's going on. It may be a one-on-one every two weeks. may be weekly meetings with the team, which we had to force a manager to do one time because we could not get the attention of that manager and it was causing problems. So we forced a group meeting to say here's what we're doing what we just got done here's what's being done and here's what's coming up in the next 30 60 90 days so you have those type of things so you have to connect with them I was a proponent of writing everything down and and when they would say something I would write it down put it in an email and send it to them I want to make sure and say I want to make sure I got this right so I'm going moving in the right direction and make sure they say yep that's it these a lot of managers they'll give one direction and say they didn't do it and then give another direction to somebody else. So you pin things like that down. So there's things like that that I used to do to give me, to make me in better position to work with that manager. And once you understand what they do, And then you kind of do these mechanical things over here to stay in touch, to stay connected, to make sure you have the information you need to do the job. Once you're doing all of that, you can work with about, I learned to work with about any kind of manager. But I'll caveat this with one thing. There are some situations where managers, it's going to be a big struggle. It may be personality, it may be expectations, it may be whatever. And there's no way to work with that manager. so it's time, then one of you guys has to go and it's usually you have to make the decision as the person on the team to make that step. People come to a company because the name on the door and they leave because of a person, usually a manager. So once you do, not everybody can work with everybody. It's just part of life. But I always try to work with, over my 40, now 47 year career, I've worked directly for 38 managers. Which, I don't know if that's a lot or not, and if you add all the other managers, assistant managers, co-managers, department leads, and all those people, it's probably triple that. And every time one sits in front of you that's brand new that you've never seen, got to get your grade. They have to grade on you, get a grade on you, and I beat on you, and same with them. And so that's what I did. I started asking questions and watching and started working these things. And I did this with everybody. And I was pretty successful doing that with most of the managers I worked for. I only had to walk away from two in my career. So I didn't think that was too bad. David, as AI automates more of the technical tasks, what leadership skills become non-negotiable for staying relevant and productive in the next decade? That is an interesting question because I'm just now starting to really use AI in any way, or form and learn about it. So, and what I've read, it's some people say it's great, some people say it's not, it's gonna be the death of everything and it's gonna be something that we can use for a lot of different things. So that's hard. For me, don't think it will, it puts a slant on it, it'll change. It won't change what we do as leaders, it'll change how we do I mean, over the last five years, you've had, or the last five, six years you've had COVID. the country was shut down during that. It came back and when it came back everyone was virtual. So now you have that, you have AI, you have the generations that are now, there's five generations in the workforce. So you have that impacting everything. So there's so many things including AI that are impacting the entire landscape of humanity, much less just leadership and business. It'll change how you deliver products, how products are developed. It'll change... the results that you give and maybe how fast you can give them depending on what they are. I don't think we've come to the point where AI is so trusted that you can... bank on everything that you get out of it to be truthful and right. That's been proven by lawyers that have used AI to benchmark law cases and they pulled the right and it didn't pull stuff that was information from law that was actually law and from a case. So you have to really watch yourself and we have to do our due diligence with that. So I don't think, I don't think communication, delegation, problem solving, planning, know, all the things that we do as leaders I don't think they'll go away. I think they will change in how we do it. The question is do companies secretly prefer obedient executors over true leaders? Because true leaders question the status quo and eventually they slow down short-term productivity. Companies like true leaders over true executors in some situations and vice versa. Your true executors are the ones that... The people that get things done usually stay in those positions because they don't want to lose that person getting that thing done. And leaders don't necessarily fall into that category of executors. They are good at dealing with people, the politics, and this is what I've seen. The politics, and they will move through that system. I always make the joke, the... great works are usually rewarded with more work, not with promotion. And so it's kind of that. you find someone who can execute, who can get things done, who's that go-to person, they run the risk of not putting themselves in a position to be promoted. And so, it's the people that can move along and play, I hate to say this, play the game, boy, that sounds horrible. But they seem to be able to step around those because those people will be pigeonholed because they don't want to lose the team, the leadership doesn't want to lose that person because of what they can drive. Let's some, a few rapid fire questions. Okay Number one, one popular leadership rule you think people should ignore immediately. They have to wait to have the position of leader to learn and do leadership things. I think it's important to learn. That's why I wrote the book Leading in the Trenches. I'm a proponent of learning ahead of getting to whatever you're gonna do if you can. And leadership is something you can do. You can learn skills that you need ahead. One small daily habit that makes the biggest difference in your own leadership effectiveness. Reading. I read something every day and I read my Bible every day. I'm reading through the New Testament right now. I started this year again and I'm just reading a chapter a day and I do that every evening before I go to bed and I read part of a book whatever I'm reading. Right now I'm reading a book from a friend of mine called Facing the Mountain. And it's a really good book on working through struggles, working through the things that are going to come at you. If you had to ban one phrase used by bad managers forever, what would it be? all you gotta do I hated that phrase when I worked in retail because they'd say all you gotta do is take this freight truck and put it in these eight feet of counter so I used to not like that and I've had managers but that's just that's more of a funny one than but I used to I used to not like that phrase but that would be it all you gotta do it's never as simple as they think it is And I've been guilty of that too when I led, was, hey, you can do this, and it's never that simple. David, let's wrap up this with some advice for our audience. If someone is listening who feels that they are just an employee, but they want to start leading, what is the first small or big concrete action they should take before tomorrow? First action is be the best employee you can be. Get the job you were hired to do done. Get it done and make it the best that you can make it. That will show your integrity and your work ethic. It will show that you can learn skills and take actions that you're supposed to. And it's just... It's the best first step. Once you do that, then you have the credibility to take the next step to try something else, to learn something else, to do something else. And leadership will notice that and hopefully give you those opportunities. But that would be the first thing I would do is always do what you're supposed to be doing and do it well and do it on time. David, your book, Leading in the Trenches is available in major retailers and e-retailers, Amazon for example. How can people get in touch with you to learn more about you and to work with you? They can contact me through my website davidgrady.com. They can send me a direct email and the address is lead. They can also connect with me on LinkedIn. Those are the three main places they can be. They can use. David, I want to thank you for this insightful conversation. There is one thing I'm taking away, but there are many nuggets in this conversation, but there is one I'm taking away that you don't need permission to lead. You can lead even if you're not titled as a manager, a director, or a vice president, and that anyone can do it. David Grady, thank you so much for being with us today. San Diego, thank you for having me. This was great. I enjoyed this tremendously.