Leveraging Leadership
Are you ready to up your leadership game? Tune in to Leveraging Leadership, where Chiefs of Staff, executives, and business professionals find the tools, strategies, and insights they need to excel. Hosted by Emily Sander, a C-suite executive turned leadership coach, this podcast delivers practical and tactical takeaways every week.
Whether you're tackling tough conversations, fine-tuning your KPIs, or mastering delegation, this show offers new perspectives and actionable advice to help you feel confident and thrive in your role.
Each Monday, enjoy interviews with leaders from diverse fields—primarily business, but also from military, politics, and higher education. Every Wednesday, catch a solo episode where Emily shares concise, actionable insights on a specific topic you can apply immediately.
If you appreciate relatable, informal conversations that pack a punch with no fluff, you’re in the right place. While especially valuable for Chiefs of Staff and their Principals, the insights are useful for any leader aiming to grow.
Don’t miss your chance to advance as a leader.
Leveraging Leadership
Influence Outcomes with the Feel, Think, Do Framework
Emily shares a simple but powerful communication tip: ask yourself what you want your audience to feel, think, and do. She gives examples for board meetings, all hands meetings, and hiring key people. Keep it simple and specific, like getting feedback, approving budgets, or signing an offer.
Links Mentioned:
Free Resources:
- Strategic Planning Checklist
- Chief of Staff Skills Assessment Checklist
- A Day in the Life of a Chief of Staff
- Chief of Staff Toolkit
Get in touch with Emily:
- Connect on LinkedIn
- Follow on YouTube
- Learn more about coaching
- Sign up for the newsletter
- Clarity Call with Emily
Who Am I?
If we haven’t yet before - Hi👋 I’m Emily, Chief of Staff turned Executive Leadership Coach. After a thrilling ride up the corporate ladder, I’m focusing on what I love - working with people to realize their professional and personal goals. Through my videos here on this channel, books, podcast guest spots, and newsletter, I share new ideas and practical and tactical tools to help you be more productive and build the career and life you want.
Time Stamps:
00:50 Step-by-Step Guide: Feel, Think, Do
01:13 Example 1: Board Meeting
01:50 Example 2: All Hands Meeting
03:12 Example 3: Closing a Key Hire
04:13 Ensuring Audience Connection
Welcome back to Leveraging Leadership, where we unpack the art of business leadership. I'm your host, Emily Sander, Chief of Staff turned Executive Leadership Coach. I This show is all about finding your points of greatest influence and leveraging them to better serve those around you.
emily-sander_1_12-05-2024_110023:In this episode, I want to share a communication tip with you. It's very quick. I've used it for years and I've talked about it with team members and colleagues and coaching clients, and it works in almost any setting. So one on ones, team meetings, all hands meetings, board meetings, press interviews, uh, sales demos, et cetera, et cetera. Here's how it works. The thing you want to do before you go into one of these events, one of these conversations or meetings. Is ask yourself, what do I want this person or this group to feel, think, and do? By the end, what do I want them to feel, think and do? And then you can be thoughtful and reverse engineer your conversation or your presentation or agenda to lead them through what you want them to feel, think, and do. All right, let's go through three examples here. The first example is a board meeting. Let's say you're a founder or you're a CEO and you're walking into a board meeting with your team and you want your board members to feel reassured. You want them to feel reassured that the leadership team is being thoughtful and making data driven decisions. So, all throughout that meeting and certainly by the end, you want them to feel reassured. following that, you want them to think, this strategy makes sense to me. This strategy is sound, and I understand the rationale behind why they're doing what they're doing. following that the action step you want them to do is to endorse your strategy is to green light the next step or approve the budget. The second example here is an all hands meeting. So an all company meeting. Let's say you're the CEO and you're standing up there in front of your whole company. You want your team members to feel heard and valued. That's how you want them to feel heard and valued. following that you want them to think this company is moving in the right direction. Like I feel good about the direction this company is moving. We're making a lot of progress. I can see it. And, and I play an important role in that. And by the end, you want them to go do something. So maybe you've outlined a new customer support process. So this touches every single team, a new customer support process or approach, and you want feedback on that. So. Every single team here, every single team member, you're going to be touching this process and interacting with this process in different ways, but I want feedback on how it's working for you and your team and also our customers. And you might direct them toward go fill out this, uh, Google form, go fill out this survey, or keep an eye out for the pulse surveys that HR is going to send you, or, Hey, we're going to have some. Roundtable discussions on how this is working every other Friday. So keep an eye out for that on your calendar. So here's what you go do with the feedback that you've collected and that you're collecting in your day to day on the new customer support process. All right. Third example. let's say you're trying to close a key strategic hire and you've found the person who is going to take your company to the next level. You have found the COO, the CFO, the product person, the brand ambassador, whatever that's going to. Bust open the doors to your next level. All right. Okay. So that's the setup you're going in there. you want them to feel excited about the company. You want them to feel connected to the team and to the vision. You want them to think. Oh my gosh, this is a perfect fit for my next step in my career. This aligns with my skillset. This aligns with what I want to be doing. These are the people I want to do it with. That's what you want them to be thinking. Quick sidebar here, important though, you also want them to feel confident that they're not being oversold. So they know the full picture. They're going in eyes wide open and they still feel connected and they still feel that excited. All right. So that's the feel and think. The do is easy. You want them to sign the offer. So you want them to accept the offer letter and sign and start as quickly as possible. All right. So those are three examples for you. A few notes on in person. On all of these examples or any example, any scenario you go through for any of this to work, you have to know your audience, right? You have to know who you're talking to. So you can tailor the feel, think, do to whomever you're speaking with. Second one here is Keep it simple. So go through this process, be thoughtful, think through it, but don't overwhelm them with, I want you to feel this and I want you to think this. And I want you to do these 47 things. No one can keep track of that. So keep it simple, especially at the end. Keep the action item simple, straightforward, clear, crisp. So in our examples, approve the budget, give feedback and sign the offer letter. Boom, done. That's the action I want you to take. All right. So before your next meeting or your presentation or a conversation, ask yourself, what do I want them to feel? What do I want them to think? And what do I want them to do? And I will catch you next week on leveraging leadership.
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