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 you enhance your company’s growth. I’m your host, Dave Cain.
The year is just about over which means you’ll soon be reflecting on all the things you managed to accomplish over the last 12 months or maybe all the things that you weren’t able to accomplish. In any case, before you set out to tackle your goals for the year ahead, you want to listen to today’s episode for some excellent insight that will you achieve your leadership aspirations in the year ahead. On today’s episode, we’re bringing leadership expert and motivator, Jerry Esselstein back to the podcast to tell us just what we can do to set meaningful leadership goals for the year ahead. Welcome back to unsuitable, Jerry.
Jerry Esselstein: It’s a pleasure to be here.
Dave: It always is, isn’t it?
Jerry: It’s a pleasure. Do you mind if I call you Sugar?
Dave: You can. Today’s topic is leadership. I’ve known you for some time and I certainly can be confident that you’re going to say leaders study other leaders. Leaders read about leadership, constantly changing their leadership style. You study corporate leaders, military leaders, and presidents.
Jerry: That’s true. We’ll pretty much call it a wrap. We’re finished.
Dave: There you go. I do want to talk about some of the leadership qualities, because it’s on the minds of a lot of business owners. Let’s talk about the leadership style of our commander in chief, President Trump. He is definitely a leader. This is not about political issues, tax reform, healthcare reform. It’s simply about his leadership style that individuals are studying and paying attention to. What leadership, as you look at President Trump, what leadership qualities just jump out, and what leadership qualities do you like?
Jerry: I wish I would’ve had this question in advance, Sugar, but I’ll try and give it a shot. Leadership, a lot of power comes through the title. The question is does he have influence. You brought up healthcare, you brought up the possible tax change. You brought up a lot of things which have not gone over the finish line yet. My question back to you would be do you consider Trump a person of influence or do you consider him having power due to his title? My opinion is the jury’s still out and we will determine that over the next three years.
Dave: As we continue to study leadership. I think that’s a good comment, good segue into today’s topic, that in a lot of cases as you go through your leadership goals, the jury is still out until you complete the journey. Let’s talk about promoting leadership culture in a business in the year ahead. What areas do you see or that you can help our listeners or recommend to our listeners about things they can do, actions they can take to promote leadership in the coming year?
Jerry: The first thing is how self aware are you and how situationally aware are you in an ever changing environment? How adaptive are you in complementing your weaknesses and how skilled are you in taking advantage of your strengths? If we look at our innate traits, we look at our tendencies, we know where we’re good. We also know where we’re weak, where we have opportunities. A good leader maximizes their innate traits and they adapt to cover up or minimize the damage from their weaknesses. Are you a person of influence? A lot of people confuse leadership and management because in the course of business, am I leading or am I managing? The lines get fairly blurred. My answer to that is how inspirational are you? Do the people that report to you know what your expectations of them are? Do they know how to feel good about working with you and do you feel good about working with them?
When we look at those tendencies, when we look at understanding the role that pressure plays in the day to day, if they see me changing based on pressure, if they see me changing based on situations, I’m no longer predictable. I’m no longer a leader. They’re now reacting to whatever my behavior is. The more consistency I can put behind my behavior, the more their expectations of me are consistent, the more effective I will be as a leader. We have to leave all the psychological crud at the threshold when we walk into the business office. When we walk in there, we have to be inspirational, we have to be motivational, we have to be fun. We cannot set up a confusion in the minds of the people whereby they then filter, and that’s the key word, information to us based on fear of a reaction they may get, based on fear of how their boss, their leader might respond.
We have to be as welcoming to the bad news, we have to be as welcoming to the challenging news as we are to the good news. Fear of conflict, fear in the minds of every associate is the biggest constraint that a leader has to face because we all have fears. We’ve got fear of our job, we’ve got fear of-
Dave: The marketing department.
Jerry: We got fear of the marketing department. Thanks for helping me out there. This fear is inherent in all of us. The question is can we do anything to mitigate that fear as a leader and make people realize their potential, have fun in the environment, be inspired, and be motivational? I believe people are going to work somewhere between 60 and 120% of their potential. As a manager, as a leader, what are you going to get out of them? You going to get the 60? Are you going to get the 120? It takes the same amount of time. No one’s putting in more time to give you the 120. They’re just more inspired. They’re more tuned in. They’re motivated. They need leadership.
Let’s go back to the initial comment. We have a crisis in leadership, and the sad part is the visible things we see, be it the legislative branch, be it the DNC, the RNC, Congress, whether it be the House, whether it be the Senate, whether it be Hollywood through Weinstein or Kevin Spacey, we’re full of disappointment after disappointment after disappointment because people who have image, have title, have power just keep disappointing us and disappointing us and disappointing us. Working with young people, working with the NextGen program, working with individuals, my own children, working with those individuals, they long for someone to emulate. They long for someone to observe their behavior that they feel good about and we just keep getting disappointed, disappointed, disappointed, disappointed.
It puts more pressure on people like you, on me, and people sitting around this table. We cannot influence the world. We cannot influence the nation, but we can influence our little piece of it and have people say, “I have confidence in Jerry. I have confidence in Sugar.” You don’t mind if I call you Sugar, right? Okay. That confidence allows these people to say, “I enjoy my job. I enjoy coming to work. I like where I work. I respect the people I work with.” That consistency is missing. Social media, is it a pro or is it a con? It’s both. Social media constantly give us example after example after example of failed leadership.
If we look at all the 24 hour news channels, they give us example after example after example of failed leadership. Where in the hell are the examples of positive leadership, effective leadership, people who motivate? In the concept of cocooning, people are kind of, we can fulfill all our social needs through social media and iPhones and all that technology, but individuals are pulling in and saying, “I’m going to look to my neighborhood, my community, my employer. I’m not going to look outside of that because it’s disappointment after disappointment. I’m going to look inside and I want to find people that I admire.” It’s getting more and more difficult to do. Would you like to ask another question?
Dave: You had mentioned this failed leadership that is all around us. As leaders in our own business, how can we use that as a rallying cry to say, “That’s not happening in this place. I’m going to work really hard to set some leadership goals to make sure that doesn’t happen here and that doesn’t happen to me”? Do you have any advice or thoughts?
Jerry: Let’s look at the opportunity. The glass is half full. Because individuals see the chaos and lack of leadership hitting them from a global standpoint, all we have to do is look a little better by comparison. Hell, it’s easy. All we have to do is … There’s two ways to look at this. The current political environment is telling me what not to do. Social media’s telling me what not to do, so it makes it easier for me to decide what to do. If you have a strong core, if you have strong principles, if you believe you want to lead and motivate, if you got objectives and goals you want to do, all you have to do is talk about those, all you have to do is be visible, all you have to do is be vocal, and I believe people will rally around that. If you want to go dark and if you want to hide and if you want to give out tasks and assign things versus delegate responsibility, then you’re not going to develop people. You can challenge them.
To me, it’s easier to shine today as a leader and a motivator than it’s ever been because of all the idiots who, because of their title, has power, but they really don’t have the ability to influence.
Dave: You had opened your comments about leaders playing to their strengths and identifying their weaknesses. What would your recommendation be, as I said my leadership goals, or you said your leadership goals, where do you focus? Do you spend more time focused on goals to improve your strengths or do you try to attack those weaknesses and get better in that area?
Jerry: I am a huge fan of Caliper. Caliper Corporation out of Princeton, New Jersey. They test for 21 natural innate traits. Every single person … I’ve probably been involved in well over three, 400 of these tests, every individual who takes them, it helps in their awareness of where I’m naturally strong, I’m gifted, it’s part of my DNA, it’s part of my fingerprint, and here’s areas that I need to think about and then just thinking about that makes you 20% better. Awareness of where you’re strong and where you’re weak is 20% of the solution. I could even argue it’s 50% of the solution. Thinking about how open you are to discussion, how good you are at crucial conversation, whether you’re naturally assertive or whether you’re unassertive, whether you’re aggressive, prone to anger, or whether you can actually control the distance between stimulus and response. Situations can aggravate you every day. How do you handle that? How do you react to a situation? This is Stephen Covey back late ’80s. Control-
Dave: Doing a little name dropping, aren’t you?
Jerry: Doing some name dropping. What you have is I own the space between stimulus and response. I’m proud of the fact that you can’t get in my head. I’m proud of the fact that this crisis is not going to impact my ability to make the next shot, make the next move. I take pride in that. That comes through coaching, that comes through reading. You’re not at 22 and able to do that. You got to think about it. The blueprint, Caliper gives you a great blueprint to understand your strengths, your weaknesses, where you have opportunities, where there’s threats. Gives you awareness. The more self-aware you are, the more situationally aware you’ll become, the more you’ll understand the motives and the profile of the person across the table from you, the better you will be in communication with that person because you understand what they really want. Until you understand their motives, you can’t really negotiate. You cannot fix the problem until you understand where they’re coming from.
All that glues together. If you think about it, it’s the old Hawthorne theory. Name dropping back in the ’50s. The more you put a light on it, the more you talk about it, the better it gets. I got a lot of experience in ethics. We talked about that before. The more you put a light on it, the more you talk about it, the better it gets. Everything goes bad when it goes dark. Everything goes haywire when it goes dark. Keep a light on it, stay visible, be bold, be vocal.
Dave: As you travel across the country consulting with various types of business, one of things I’ve heard you say time and time again, that Caliper seems to be maybe a starting point for any business to try to put their leadership goals together, because that gives you an inventory of your team.
Jerry: I’ve had tremendous success with Caliper. There are others. There’s Hogan’s Assessment. There’s predictive index. There are many ways to align and fit the strengths and weaknesses individuals bring to the company. I’m not here pushing one tool, but the concept of the tools is how does everyone fit together? The better the fit, the better the program. The better the fit, the more success we’ll have. Leaders understanding where the talent of their key people, their key influencers, understanding those strengths and weaknesses on the part of the leader is half of it. You can’t motivate someone if you don’t understand what makes them tick.
Dave: As technology continues to change around us on a daily basis, can I draw a comparison, a parallel to leadership skills that those need to continue to change each and every day, each and every year? It’s no longer old school. Old school techniques work.
Jerry: I’m going to push back and tell you I think that in how you stage that, management has to tweak and evolve every year based on technology. We can go back to the military model of the ’40s. We can go back to the industrial revolution. We can go back to whether we’re baby boomers or millennials. The management, the psyche of that management has to tweak. The fundamentals of leadership are unchanged. Again, that’s that blurred line between am I your manager, am I your leader? Leadership comes down to being able to influence the people around you. Leadership is culture. Getting people to buy into a vision, getting people to buy into how you think, you influence how they think. That is unchanged.
Dave: As we talked in the opening about leaders study other leaders and leadership styles, do you have a couple favorite leaders that you like, that you really look that inspire you? Past or present?
Jerry: Past or present. I will tell you, and it’s probably a bad week to say this, but Urban Meyer, his book, Above the Line, I think is a tremendous read. I read it reluctantly at first. Now I’ve reread it two or three times. He obviously has a way of motivating young people. When we look at Stephen Covey’s book, 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, I have used that as my Bible over 50 times to make sure I stay within my rails of what I want to accomplish. There’s a leadership, I call it a leadership management book, but I think every executive of a company that wants to grow has to read the book, Necessary Endings. The author’s last name is Cloud. It’s an incredible read. It’s a great read.
Those things give you perspective and how you keep you, as quote, “a leader,” an owner, how you keep that perspective, you need help to do that. You can’t do it by yourself. Looking at something of Above the Line or 7 Habits of Highly Effective People or Necessary Endings, those are all readings that just help you keep that perspective.
Dave: In the few minutes we have left, we have time for maybe one more comment or question. I want to go back to something you said, and I’ve heard you say it time and time again. That’s be aware of your power to influence others. Can you expand on that comment? As I go forward into 2018, what does that mean as I set my goals?
Jerry: I’ll take this approach. Individuals who truly have leadership skills, who read leadership books, who have a conviction about their principles that they want to convey to those individuals, I will tell them the old 80/20 rule. It’s 80% how people observe your behavior, and it’s 20% what you say. You can’t have a conflict between what you say and your behavior. You got to walk your talk. All those old cliches. Leaders are being observed all the time. It’s that observation that really can get loyalty to your following that says, “I can work with that individual. I want to be a part of his or her team. I want to be here.” It’s a combination of, “If I’m not here, I might not have anybody nearly that good. I want to hang in there.” The silent part of what you do becomes absolutely far more important than what you say.
Dave: Great. Our guest today has been Jerry Esselstein from Jerry Esselstein Consulting. Jerry, fantastic presentation the last few minutes. Very passionate about leadership.
Jerry: Not the first few minutes? Just the last few minutes?
Dave: The whole thing.
Jerry: Sugar, you got it.
Dave: Thanks again for joining us on unsuitable today. To our listeners, if you want to get ahold of Jerry, call our office, drop me an email. We’ll put in touch. This guy can help your organization out with leadership skills and seminars and setting goals. It’s money well spent. We’d love to hear what goals you’re putting together to lead your team into the year ahead. Send your goals over to podcast@reacpa.com and we will share some of the best ones with our followers on social media. Don’t forget to check out Rea’s YouTube channel where you will find videos of our weekly podcasts. Of course, don’t forget to subscribe to unsuitable on iTunes. Until next time, I’m Dave Cain encouraging you to loosen up your tie and think outside the box.
Disclaimer: The views express on unsuitable on Rea Radio are our own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Rea and associates. The podcast is for more 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.