Dave Cain: Welcome to unsuitable on Rea Radio, the award-winning financial services and business advisory podcast that challenges your old school business practices and their traditional business suit culture. Our guests are industry professionals and experts who will challenge you to think beyond the suit and tie, while offering you meaningful modern solutions to help enhance your company’s growth and leadership strategies. I’m your host, Dave Cain. Last week, Maureen Metcalf, CEO of Metcalf and Associates was here to talk to us about innovative leadership and why it’s absolutely necessary to become an innovative leader at the risk of becoming obsolete. Today, we’re thrilled to have Maureen back. Thanks for joining us again. We really enjoyed last week’s episode, and we re-upped your contract.
Maureen Metcalf: Thank you. I’m delighted to be here.
Dave: How about that? We’re going to jump right into this leadership discussion. But first of all, before we do that we have to dive into a little bit of personal question if you don’t mind. Obviously, you were a guru leadership trainer. What kind of music do you listen to?
Maureen: Rock and roll.
Dave: Rock and roll. Okay. And you got favorite artist in there?
Maureen:The Toll.
Dave: The Toll. The Toll, are they still around?
Maureen: Well, some of their people are still around. They’re not dead.
Dave: Yeah.
Maureen: But the band doesn’t still perform, but maybe they will.
Dave: Yes.
Maureen: By special request.
Dave: Didn’t they travel once with The Ramones? Was that that band?
Maureen: And I love The Ramones.
Dave:Oh, me too. They were far better than that other group, The Toll.
Maureen: The Toll?
Dave: So now we know what leaders listen to. Let’s jump into, last week you talked to us about the seven competencies of leadership. And if you can just list them one through seven as a reminder for our listeners, and then I want to pick off a couple of these and dive a little bit deeper, so go ahead. Start with one.
Maureen: I’m going to say these are both behavioral and mindset competencies, so I can tell by someone’s behavior, and you can mimic it. But then there is also how I think about it. So let me use the first one, professionally humble, and we can all think of politicians who’ve violated this. They say the right thing in public, and then their mic’s on, and they say completely the wrong thing.
Dave: That hasn’t been happening lately. Has it?
Maureen: Only since there’ve open mics.
Dave: Sorry. I wasn’t allowed to interrupt you.
Maureen: Well, the reason I say that is, it’s good to mimic until you get there. But it’s even better to be there, so having the right mindset matters, so professionally humble, unwavering commitment to right action, 360 degree thinker, intellectually versatile, highly authentic and reflective, able to inspire followership, and innately collaborative.
Dave: Okay. Great. Thanks for reminding us of those competencies. Are those competencies listed on your website? Can we jump on your website, and can you give us your website address real quick?
Maureen:Sure. Thank you. It’s www.metcalf, M-E-T-C-A-L-F, www.metcalf-associates.com. They are published in a book, Leadership 2050, Critical Challenges, Key Contexts, and Emerging Trends. The chapter first talks about emerging trends, so co-written by Susan Cannon, a futurist, and Mike Morrow-Fox, who was the leader in developing the competencies. And so it’s on the blog, and the address is metcalf-associates/leader-2050-competency-model. Or just go to blog and type in Leadership 2050.
Dave: Just go to website and there’s a lot of stuff on there. I’d run through all the awards you’ve won, but we’d be here for another hour and a half listing those. So listeners, check out the website and you’ll see a lot of information, a lot of free stuff as well.
Maureen: Lot of free stuff.
Dave: But I want to talk about, I want to pick off a couple of the competencies. One if number six, I think, on your list was inspire. And leaders need to inspire. And what are some of the programs and things that you can do to a leader to help them inspire the crew?
Maureen: First is, evaluate if you are inspiring, so kind of a 360 assessment, whether you do a formal one or an informal one. If you ask the question, people tell you the answer in many cases. Or they’ll tell somebody that thinks they won’t tell you. So are you inspirational? And so here’s some of the characteristics. First, has the special ability to connect with people at all levels of the organization to create a shared vision. That means I have to understand where we’re going. I have to be able to diffuse conflict without sidestepping it. One of the tools that I think is highly useful is to use humor to put people at ease. You are brilliant at that.
Dave: Well, thank you. You’re trying to get another invite back to the show. Aren’t you?
Maureen: Yeah. I want to be … .
Dave: You like the paycheck.
Maureen: Yeah. That’s it. Has to be able to relate to a broad range of people and truly be able to connect with them. Most people can walk around, say hello, remember your name. Right? But there’s a difference between that and truly getting where you are and treating you like you’re a special person. We’re busy, and often leaders just don’t take the time to do that. And if I don’t understand the range of people working for my organization and what motivates them, then I am likely to lose their trust.
Dave: I had listened to on one of your podcasts, information that you sent to me, that one of the leaders, one of the executives that you were working with had mentioned that they spent a lot of time on Facebook. And I found that rather odd, and then as you dove into that discussion, they were using it to just find out more information about their employees so they could talk to them. Where did they go on vacation? Or maybe there was a family event. And I thought that was a pretty cool thing. And that was part of inspiring the workforce, showing you care.
Maureen: It also presents some challenges if people are posting completely inappropriate stuff on Facebook. So for anyone who’s posting on Facebook, unclad photos, how much you hate your boss.
Dave: Be careful.
Maureen: That is not helpful.
Dave: Yeah. Well, you know, there’s an interesting use of Facebook and you have a good point. Just be careful because some executives, some leaders are using that to find out in a very positive way what their team is doing. They want to be connected like you said. That’s one way to connect especially when you have a generational workforce that’s across the board. What are some other things that you see or don’t see as far as inspiration in a leadership position?
Maureen: I have to be trustworthy. I have to do what I say. And tying to authentic and reflective, none of us are going to get it right all the time. I have to own my mistakes. And again, there’s an ability to own and not look like dope because if we want to inspire people, we have to look like we know what we’re doing. But there’s a balance between that big ego, I’ve always got it right, and I’m darn good, and I’m continually learning. We’re facing challenges we haven’t seen, and we’re all learning through the process.
Dave: In last week’s episode, you talked about one of the leadership strategies you use would be to do an assessment. And as you go in and do this assessment, let’s talk about that for a minute, is if you and I are talking, and I take the assessment. Will you be able to gauge from the questions in the assessment my level of inspiration and whether that’s a blind spot for me?
Maureen: There are a range of assessments. If I did a 360, so 360 being people from various parts of the organization evaluate me, I could tell people who work for you, your peers, your boss, and a group of others, which could be clients or colleagues. If they evaluate you, I can often find where you have blind spots. And it can be different with different groups. You may have a group of peers who just think you walk on water. But with your boss, you have a different set of expectations of that person, and you may be a little less compassionate because they’re supposed to be running the place. And so we see a broad range. Some people are fabulous with their direct reports, and other people are just mean. Right? They’re nasty to people who work for them.
Dave: Let’s get rid of them. Even though talent is hard to find, we don’t … Life’s too short.
Maureen: Toss them out of here.
Dave: We don’t need mean people. Do we? Let’s switch to collaboration, a lot of ground to cover here. What are you seeing with your clients? Let’s start with the lack of collaboration. Give us a couple examples or stories where collaboration just isn’t happening.
Maureen: Often, it’s people working in silos. I think I’ve mentioned it before, but this idea that I feel like I’m supposed to have the answer. So if I reach out and ask people, it means I’m somehow not good enough, and/or I don’t want to deal with those people who are going to disagree with me. It’s a whole lot easier, often either I don’t want to deal with different points of view or I’m just too busy. You’ve got to get stuff done. All of us are feeling like our hair’s on fire all the time now, or most of us do. So this quest to just, I’ve got to get it off my to do list so I can get the next thing done. And collaboration takes time, and when I have to deal with different points of view forces me to look at things differently. And I have to have the interpersonal skills to say, “Thank you for sharing that, but I see it differently.” Now how do we create a solution that integrates these multiple points of view, especially when I don’t want to? It’s easier to do it my way.
Dave: Sure.
Maureen: Especially when I own the company.
Dave: What if we’re having a discussion, we’re having a collaboration discussion, and I’m asking your opinion, your advice on some things, and ultimately I don’t follow that? I just don’t think that’s the right avenue, right direction. How should I respond back to you?
Maureen: I’ll say personally, earlier in my career, I didn’t ask for input because I didn’t want to deal with it. I didn’t want to deal with the fact that people were going to disagree. And then I have to figure out how to do exactly what you’re saying. Now when I ask for input, right up front I’m saying, “I’m asking people with a lot of different points of view. I’m going to do my best to synthesize them. And none of us is going to get exactly what we ask for.” One is clarifying up front and circling back with people after. This is what I recommended and this is why, so it’s a beautiful learning opportunity. But I also can’t ask everyone in the world for feedback because I don’t integrate all of it and I can’t go back to all of them, so I am really selective about who I ask. I have to know why I’m having the conversation, especially if it’s a deep conversation, not just a surface in the hallway. Hey, what do you think? I picked you for this reason. This is what I want to understand. And this is what I’ll do to follow up with you.
Dave: Do you ever see in an organization where, yes, we’re going to collaborate? I’m going to ask this group over here to collaborate on this issues. Let’s call it a minor issue. However, I don’t think I’m going to ask you collaborate on the major issues.
Maureen: Yeah.
Dave: Because those just are …
Maureen: Window dressing.
Dave: … That’s right. We’re just going to handle that in the board room or whatever. But you guys can handle collaboration on the dress code. I’m not sure I want your input on developing a new product.
Maureen: And again, here’s where it’s a complex issue. Having been on a board looking at strategic direction, there are some things that are the board’s job, so we’ll get input. But our job is to set the direction. And so we did a community, a lot of open space kind of conversations, and we learned a lot from the community. And then we went in the board room. We came up with a strategic plan. We did send it out for comment, but we also had to turn it around because there was a really big thing happening with this organization. So it’s often an imperfect process, and we didn’t go back to each of those community stakeholders and say what we did. Again, we’re always balancing how much input can we get given the time we have and given what we have to deliver, and given the expense.
Dave: Sure. These seven competencies that we talked about, is there one that as you go into an organization … Obviously you assess. You do the 360s. But is there one that you just have to have? It’s a must. There’s no negotiation. This is a competency you must have.
Maureen: One that strikes me as highly authentic and reflective, so if I’m not able to reflect, I’m not learning. And if I’m not learning, I’m not innovating myself. So I think this idea of curiosity and reflection and authenticity, I’m differently authentic with different people. There are people who we know who are just jerks. You really don’t want them to be completely authentic, so there’s some balance.
Dave: An authentic jerk. Right?
Maureen: And then they’re like, “Well, but you told me to be authentic.” Yeah, but not that much. So with everything, there’s a balance. We want people to be authentic and caring and gracious and reflect. What am I learning about myself as I go into a meeting? When I’m driving out of here, I’m going to think about what I said, and there’s probably something I’m going to wish I had not said. And I’ll continue to get better. If we’re not doing that, we’re going to eventually fall short.
Dave: I know the answer to this question. I’m always good at asking questions I already know the answer to. Where profits, the rush for profits, the race for profits, is at an all time high. Can you tell when you go into an organization if leadership is lacking, profits are lacking? Even though you don’t see the numbers, with your experience, can you just tell?
Maureen: I would say, sometimes profits are fine. But if leadership’s lacking, then it’s a lagging indicator. Right?
Dave: Sure.
Maureen: Think leading lagging indicators, if my … I’m not sure I used that right. If I go in and see really sloppy leadership, even if they’re profitable now, if they continue to behave that way. Let’s use Enron as an example. They did too much and they were greedy. If you looked at their leadership team, an expert probably could have said, “Had they done it differently, they’d still be in business.” Our utility industry would be very different and potentially better. We were moving toward having trading floors and some things that would’ve helped a lot of people if structured properly. But if you look at the leadership team, and they may have been … I don’t know them. And I’m not an expert on that case. I happened to be working in the utility industry at the time, and there is a rush for profits.
Dave: And you know. As experience, you know. You can tell.
Maureen: Yeah.
Dave: And innovative leadership, I would say, leads to sustainable profits and success.
Maureen: It’s just conscious capitalism, that whole move toward triple bottom line. If folks are doing that, then they are able to sustain it versus the one and done kind of behavior.
Dave: Okay. As we wind down the podcast, give our listeners two things to do in the next 30 days to become a better leader.
Maureen: I’d say, go on the website, www.metcalf-associates.com. And take the free online innovative leadership assessment. It is at the bottom of every page except the blogs. And on the blogs, it’s on the right hand side, so free, I will not track you down. And read the blog post on the Leadership 2050 competencies.
Dave: Two things to get started. And of course, if our listeners want to get ahold of you or engage, they can call Rea & Associates or they can jump on your website and get ahold of you.
Maureen: There’s a contact us button, and Google me. Seems like I’m everywhere.
Dave: You’re all over the United States. Where’s the next travel spot? Where’s you headed, anyplace good?
Maureen: I’ve just gotten back from a lot of travel. I’m looking forward to being home for a couple of weeks.
Dave: Put your feet up and catch your breath.
Maureen: I’m not sure I’m putting my feet up, but I’m working from home.
Dave: There you go. Maureen, I want to thank you for taking time out of your busy schedule to join us on unsuitable once again. The topic of innovative leadership is certainly one that needs to be talked about time and time again. And a big thank you to our listeners for tuning in to this week’s podcast. I hope you will take advantage of Maureen’s free advice on her website to become the innovative leader your company deserves. If you enjoyed today’s episode, let us know. Like it, comment, or share it. And don’t forget to check out videos of our podcast on YouTube. Until next time, I’m Dave Cain encouraging you to loosen up your tie and think outside the box.
Disclaimer: The views expressed on unsuitable on Rea Radio are our own, and do not necessarily reflect the views of Rea & Associates. The podcast is for informational and educational purposes only and is not intended to replace the professional advice you would receive elsewhere. Consult with a trusted advisor about your unique situation so they can expertly guide you to the best solution for your specific circumstance.