LEADERSHIP From the Diamond to the Boardroom: Strategies for Becoming a Learn-it-All Leader in Business w/ Damon Lembi.

Unlock the secrets of superior leadership with Damon Lembi, the visionary CEO of Learnit, as he draws parallels between the grit of professional sports and the finesse of corporate command. In a game where resilience, preparation, and hard work are the cornerstones of victory, Damon brings his playbook from the baseball diamond to the boardroom, offering a three-step approach to cultivating a Learn-it-All Leader Mindset. Discover how to embrace feedback, overcome the imposter syndrome, and harness the power of coaching to elevate your leadership game.

Step up to the plate with us as we dissect the dynamics of a successful business team and why treating it like a sports team could be your winning strategy. From the agility needed to stay ahead in a fast-paced market to the wisdom of hiring for potential, we're covering all the bases. Journey through the innovative strategies that give companies like Southwest Airlines their competitive edge, and learn how humility, curiosity, and integrity are the hallmarks of outstanding self-leadership. With Damon's game-changing insights, this episode is a home run for aspiring MVPs in the arena of leadership.

Damon Lembi is the CEO of Learnit, a global leader in corporate training solutions that have upskilled more than 1.8 million professionals in the past twenty-seven years. After dedicating the initial 22 years of his life to the pursuit of becoming a Major League Baseball player, Damon pivoted in 1995 to help his father (Walt Lembi, Founder of Learnit) by investing his heart and soul in Learnit to help individuals gain the knowledge and confidence they need in attaining their professional goals through the value of education. Damon attributes Learnit's longevity and success to the ability to surround himself with "A" players and take advantage of learning and evolving through past mistakes.

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

And now taking care of business, your hosts Craig Mohen and Shye Gilad.

Craig Moen: 0:08

Welcome to Business Owner's Radio Episode 237. Joining Shye and I in the studio today is Damon Lembi, CEO of Learnit, a global leader in corporate training solutions and author of the new book, "The Learnit All Leader Mindset Traits and Tools. Learnit has upskilled more than 1.8 million professionals in the past 27 years. Damon has invested in building Learnit to help individuals gain the knowledge and confidence they need to attain their professional goals through the value of education.

Shye Gilad: 0:42

Good morning, Damon. Welcome to Business Owner's Radio.

Damon Lembi: 0:45

Great to be here, guys. Thanks for having me.

Shye Gilad: 0:47

Well, damon Craig and I are really excited to have you today. We've been checking out your book, the Learnit All Leader Mindset Traits and Tools. Tell us what inspired you to write this book.

Damon Lembi: 0:59

Really, three things inspired me to write it. Number one I've been leading a learning and development company close to three decades now and I've been able to see both from a small business running Learnit myself and behind the curtain, working with some of the biggest and best and all different size organizations, leaders at all levels, and see what makes great leaders great leaders and even what's inspired their team and maybe not so great leaders. That's one reason to share those stories. Number two I feel like I have a unique perspective in the sense that in my baseball days I played for three Hall of Fame college baseball coaches. I didn't really realize it at the time, but what I learned over those five years was really modeling and molding my leadership style for my future career.

Damon Lembi: 1:53

Finally, number three is I have two kids. I have a six-year-old and a two-year-old and I really want to number one give them an opportunity to learn a little bit more about their grandfather, walt Lemby, who really inspired a lot of this for me. And also I really want to make a difference and give back and help create and be a part of making better leaders for the generations to come. So that's really what inspired me to write my book.

Shye Gilad: 2:22

I love that story and it's so interesting. One of the things you mentioned was your experiences as an athlete and getting to learn from these great coaches, and I'm sure a lot of us have had experiences maybe on a much more amateur level and some of us maybe on a professional level of having coaches that inspired us. What are some things that you noticed about that? I mean, you had a great success, actually, as it became a professional baseball player for a while before you went directly into learning and leadership development. Give us some examples of what those experiences were like.

Damon Lembi: 2:54

So what I really learned and I think this is important for athletes out there is that your skills are transferable. When my baseball career ended at about 23, I wasn't sure that I had the skills to in the next phase of my career, but what I was able to figure out over time is that teamwork, discipline, competitiveness and, of course, resilience are all things that are transferable, and I've been able to carry on for the past 28 years.

Shye Gilad: 3:20

You know, I know from speaking with professional baseball. Coaches have told me that such a big part of getting rookies onboarded in their first years in the league is really just getting them to understand how to properly prepare for a game, literally almost like game day preparation, getting them to show up in the right mindset and ready to play. Have you experienced any routines like that, and how does that maybe relate to organizational leadership?

Damon Lembi: 3:48

That's a great question and one of the things I like to say is that in baseball and sometimes even leadership in baseball it's 90% mental, 10% physical. It's getting yourself prepared and ready to go and step out onto the field and play. And in leadership it can also come down to especially new leaders, but different leaders at all levels. Sometimes you have self-doubt or you have an inner critic and you have to deal with imposter syndrome and work your way through that. So that was something I learned early on and I kind of created a three-step approach to get yourself in the right set as a leader.

Damon Lembi: 4:24

Step number one is really to work hard and whether it's in sports or in leadership, there's no substitute for hard work. I'm not saying you need to work 10 to 14 hours a day, but you want to put in consistent hard work. Number two is focus. It's easy to procrastinate and do busy work where you need to really address what you're concerned about or have doubt about and do deliberate practice towards that. And then step three once you put in the work and you've prepared, then it's game time, whether it's a big sales presentation, whether it's an all-hands meeting for your team or a keynote speech, put aside everything that you've been working on and just kind of learn and let go Give yourself some credit and just have fun with it, and even if you fall on your face, there's still great learning opportunities that you can use moving forward.

Shye Gilad: 5:16

Yeah that's a great concept and I'm curious about some of the tools. So I know in sports what's so great, of course, is being able to use video for coaching is so powerful. Right, teams always go back and watch video of their performance. You can see videos of yourself and understand little things that you're doing with your technique. That could be improved. How are companies using video now? Are there ways that we can use video or other kinds of tools to really assess our performance? Because, as you said right, to overcome that imposter syndrome, you need to make the investment in doing the work. You need to show up prepared but at the end of the day you really kind of need to execute, and without debrief. How do we get better at that deliberate practice that you mentioned? Because we really need that kind of critical feedback.

Damon Lembi: 6:02

You need that critical feedback and you need to be open to that feedback. You can't put up a wall and be defensive. I would say about four or five years ago. We've got about 14 people on our sales team and in the past, if I wanted to coach and work with our team members, I would have to attend every meeting. Today, we use this AI conversational software.

Damon Lembi: 6:25

There's two big ones out there. We use Chorus. There's also a software called Gong and shy. It's an absolute game changer. It's like watching baseball film so you can come in. I could play back a customer meeting and we even have our sales meetings where we watch it together and we create a psychologically safe space and we give constructive feedback and tips on. Hey, this could have been an opportunity to ask this question. What else were you considering at this point? And tools like that, and even how they've advanced further with the AI now, where it could even help you write the follow-up emails or find blind spots and questions that you didn't ask, have been a game changer. So that's a lot like watching sports and video of swinging your bat or whatever it is you're doing.

Shye Gilad: 7:09

That is so cool that you're using technology to actually create those same kinds of games. I love that. Damon, I am curious. I do want to go back a little bit too, because you mentioned your father and the founder of LearnIt. Could you give us a little history on the company itself and what inspired your dad to first start the company and then you'd?

Damon Lembi: 7:29

It was a lot like a lot of great entrepreneurs. You know, he just went out to solve his own challenge. My dad and my grandfather, frank, we were just real estate companies in San Francisco and he wanted to digitize his portfolio. So he went and took a class and he thought it was boring and stale and so he called up the CFO from our savings loan that we had in the 80s and he's like there's got to be a better way to do this. I want to have short, quick classes with exciting instructors and making the content engaging. And that's really where LearnIt got started.

Damon Lembi: 8:03

Back in June of 95. My baseball career was ending and I just started off as the receptionist Because, again, like I said, I didn't know if my skills were transferable. Started off as a receptionist because I wanted to prove that I belonged there. It wasn't just my dad sticking me at the CEO level, but over about seven years I kind of worked my way up and I think I was able to be empathetic at each level, from instructors to sales. I've participated in that so I could put myself in other shoes and that's really helped me as a leader over the years.

Craig Moen: 8:32

Damon, jumping on this baseball theme a little bit again the element of your treating employees as a team rather than a family. I've worked with a lot of family businesses and others, of course, but it's fascinating. There are two different environments ecosystems, if you will, and I was curious what's your perceptions and what's your experiences been? And the team element to it.

Damon Lembi: 8:59

Right. So team versus family, it doesn't mean you can't build great strong relationships with your employees. You absolutely can. But I think as a business owner or as a leader, greg, it's your responsibility to assemble the best team possible to put that on the field. And when you're starting off and maybe you have an operations manager where you're at about a million dollars in revenue maybe they're a good fit for your organization there, but it doesn't mean that they're gonna be a long-term best fit. And, as difficult as it is, leaders need to make bold, tough decisions and sometimes that means helping people transition out of the organization. On the other hand, you can't ever stop inviting Aunt Sue to your Thanksgiving party, right? So your family's family. I really try to run, learn it and work with our customers to understand that. Run it as a team, put the best team possible on the field, be transparent and work with your employees.

Damon Lembi: 10:00

And sometimes and this has happened for us a bunch of times over the years employees have hit their ceiling, greg, with us. It was time for them to move on, and sometimes people are just afraid to get out of their comfort zone. We had one individual who is a phenomenal, our lead instructor, and he was just on autopilot and I sat him down one day and I said, jim, you've been with us for 16 years. It's really time for you to move on. And he said, hey, d, you know, I just don't know what it's like out there. It's been so many years since I've been, you know, out in the job market and we worked together. He got a job at, I think, okta and he's crushing it now and he was thankful for me partnering with him to help move on in his career.

Craig Moen: 10:41

It's amazing what can be done for team members over the course in which they're with your company and as business owners and business leaders. There's been a lot of changes over the years with the business environment and I was wondering, from your perspective, dealing with the volume you've dealt with as far as companies around the world, what have you seen in the last 10 years from the standpoint of the changes within the business environment for the business owners and specifically post-COVID, have you noticed any slight changes or trends?

Damon Lembi: 11:14

Absolutely. First of all, we've been around through multiple recessions the dot-com bust, making it through that, the great recession and then, of course, covid. So there's constant change. I think in the last 10 years there's been constant change. What I like to work with our customers on, and also our team, is to understand that the shelf life of your skills used to be about five years. Now, with AI and everything, those skills can be as short as six months. So one of the most important skills out there is learning, agility, your ability to continue to learn, and also and I really don't like this term, but the soft skills are so critical these days as leaders and individual contributors, that sure, there's always the technology and the tech skills out there, but as we move forward and continue to work more people plus machine you really need to keep honing in on adaptability, creativity, self-awareness. Those are the skills, I think, that are going to lead us into the future generations of workforce.

Craig Moen: 12:18

And following forward with that, the learning and professional development continuum. I remember a president of a major computer company that I worked for having conversation with him at a social event and I asked him how do I get ahead? And he says learn everything. And that really set the pace for everything going forward for me. And I wonder this seems to be very similar for your organization.

Damon Lembi: 12:44

Well, I would say, like my book is called to learn it all later. It's important to learn as much as you can, but I think, as Shay said earlier, you also need to execute. You can't just keep going from learning to learning to learning and learning, by the way, is not easy, it's hard. It's not like using an algae to jump on a treadmill you run for 45 minutes and you're in shape With learning. You can't just do a 45 minute keynote and think everybody's ramped up on critical thinking and self-awareness. It's a prolonged process where you need to give them space to be able to learn and help them continue both, I think in real time, whether it's mentoring or whatever, and going through classes and coaching, but it's a process moving forward.

Craig Moen: 13:27

Speaking of processes, I noticed that you are an advocate of hiring processes that include focusing on their potential over their experience. What's been your experience about this?

Damon Lembi: 13:39

Well, I've told this story. You've probably heard this, but maybe your audience has. I've told this story probably a thousand times. You can't always hire for a potential over experience, but when you can, that's one of the ways and I'll get back to this in a second. That's one of the ways learned it's been able to compete talent-wise in the Bay Area.

Damon Lembi: 13:58

The story I'm referring to is Herb Keller at Southwest. When Southwest was just getting started and they were on the verge of bankruptcy, herb went into his executive team and he said we're going to have to be the no-frills airline and we're also going to have to lower our prices to so-and-so. Somebody on this executive team said Herb, that's impossible. That means that we're going to have to do these turnaround times much quicker than the industry standard of 14 minutes. And Herb's like that's exactly what we're going to do.

Damon Lembi: 14:31

And the executive said well then we need to go out and hire the most senior people from Delta, eastern Airlines, continental. And Herb's like we're going to do the exact opposite. We're going to hire smart, eager individuals who have no experience and we're going to train them up and we're going to tell them they got to get this done in 12 minutes. And the great part about the story is that's where they came up with the 10-minute turn, and so my whole thing about this is that for LearnIt as a small business, in order for us to compete against Salesforce, against Stripe, google and the San Francisco Bay Area, especially pre-COVID, is that we had to turn LearnIt into a training ground where we get these super talented individuals with a lot of potential and invest in them, give them the tools they need and also give them the space to try things, to fail to keep learning and developing, and that's been kind of our secret sauce is recruiting, hiring and retaining top talent over the years.

Shye Gilad: 15:34

You mentioned, damon as far as your company and learning and development and some of those very significant competitors you have, what do you do that you think is unique, that sets you apart from some of these competitors?

Damon Lembi: 15:47

What I think we do that's unique, that sets us apart from our competitors, is we try to be the practical training company you know, the one that you come to us, and we don't have a specific science base. We look at all the different ways of the outcomes and goals that our customers have and we try to find the easiest, simplest solutions to help them, to partner with them, to hit the goals that they need. And I think we also have a high touch of customer experience in working with our customers. It also doesn't hurt that we've worked for the past 28 years and we have experience in everything from retail pharmaceuticals, professional sports that maybe we won't share who it is we've worked with, but we pretty much know what the challenges that these different organizations have and we can be proactive in helping them understand that they have similar challenges, to help them guide them in the future.

Craig Moen: 16:40

Damon, looking at this from a business owner's standpoint of investing in their people and investing in oneself to continue process improvement. One of the terms I've read is that the personal model of integrity, and then that sort of flies back to another term called trust tax. Can you talk more about that?

Damon Lembi: 17:00

You know, guys, you go into every relationship, whether it's personal, whether it's professional, and you have two choices.

Damon Lembi: 17:07

You can go in, you can be cynical and it'd be skeptical that maybe people don't have the best intentions and want to micromanage.

Damon Lembi: 17:15

Let's say, from a work perspective, you want to micromanage them. The other way to look at things is that you want to be able to trust people and believe that they have the best of intentions and give them the opportunity to go out, try things and do their best. And every once in a while you're going to get burned. So you know, somebody might do something I mean, maybe they don't even do it on purpose but I believe that it's better to go into relationships thinking the best and not being naive, but, you know, thinking the best of people and giving them the opportunity than being skeptical. It's so difficult, I think, to have this negative energy going in and thinking that you know either play in the victim role or whatever, and I look at it like, okay, out of 100 people, maybe you get burned five or 10 times. Learn from those lessons and that's just the tax you have to pay and it's kind of worked out for the best for me and people we've helped coach.

Craig Moen: 18:11

So, damon, based on your experiences out there, what have you evolved your thoughts regarding what makes great leadership for our business owners?

Damon Lembi: 18:21

Great question. I believe the key traits to being a great leader and, first of all, my definition of a leader it doesn't mean you need to be managing 100 people, or even 50 people or five. It all starts with self-leadership you know being accountable and doing what's right. But the key traits really, I believe, are humility. You don't have to be the smartest person in the room. Surround yourself with super sharp people and give them the opportunity to challenge you. I think curiosity it's all about curiosity, asking great questions and really listening. I think integrity I mentioned a minute ago you got to do the right thing as a leader. You're always on stage. Your team is looking at you to see how you act and respond. And then, finally, I'd like to say courage, and what I mean by courage is stepping out of your comfort zone. I think great leaders aren't afraid to make bold decisions or try things and fail, and I just think that that's really important.

Shye Gilad: 19:21

Well, Damon, it's been a pleasure talking with you. Thank you for giving us so much time today.

Damon Lembi: 19:26

Thanks for having me. I really enjoyed it.

Shye Gilad: 19:28

Is there anything else you'd like to leave with our listeners?

Damon Lembi: 19:31

Yes, so our website is learnit. com. So reach out to me on LinkedIn @ DamonLembi, and what I will do is I will send you a code to free classes for yourself or if you have high performers or other individuals on your team who you think can benefit from free classes. I look forward to hearing from you.

Craig Moen: 19:55

Our guest today has been Damon Lembi. You can learn more about Damon and his company, as well as find links to his website, linkedin and offer All on our website at businessownersradiocom.

Speaker 1: 20:08

Thank you for joining us on Business Owners Radio. We hope you enjoy today's show. As always, you can read more about each episode, along with links and offers, in the show notes on our website, businessownersradiocom. We want to hear your feedback. Please leave comments on this show or suggestions for upcoming episodes. Tell your fellow business owners about the show and, of course, you would love the stars and comments on iTunes. Till next time, keep taking care of business.