Do you want to enhance your effectiveness as a leader and coach? Are you seeking ways to foster growth and achieve remarkable results? Jason and Steve explore the concepts of leverage and freedom and how they are the solution to help you attain the outcome you desire. In this episode, they unveil strategies and insights that will empower you to leverage your leadership and coaching skills, as well as your team’s, paving the way for increased effectiveness and unprecedented growth.
In this episode, Steve and Jason discuss:
- The Power of Leverage in Leadership and Freedom
- Extracting Efficiency and Liberty in Dynamic Leadership
- Transformative Potential of Leverage in Orchestrating Win-Win Scenarios
- Importance of Adaptive Work for Organizational Culture
- Personal Growth and Adaptive Skills
Key Takeaways:
- Discover the power of leverage in augmenting your leadership and securing personal freedom
- Uncover the significance of extracting efficiency and liberty within dynamic leadership
- Delve into the transformative potential of leverage in orchestrating win-win scenarios
- Explore tangible instances of using personal strengths as a leverage tool for freedom and progress
- Differentiate between the value of technical training and adaptive work for ongoing professional growth
“Coaching is about maximizing the utility of people's strengths and helping them leverage themselves to enjoy their own freedom. It's a win-win for everyone involved”
-Steve Scanlon
Connect with Steve and Jason:
- LinkedIn: Jason or Steve
- Website Rewire, Inc.: Transformed Thinking
- Email: grow@rewireinc.com
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Listen to the podcast here
Jason and Steve- Leverage and Freedom
Hello and welcome, everybody. Steve, I think our technology works again. Let me welcome everybody to LinkedIn Live, which is also the very first time that we've recorded a podcast episode via LinkedIn Live. So welcome to the podcast, welcome to LinkedIn Live. This is your host, Jason Abel, and Steve Scanlon. Steve, you can probably say hi.
Don't tell me what to do. Hello, everybody. Hello, everybody.
We've only got 30 minutes and from start to finish, and so we're going to roll. We've got this title that we came up with: Leverage and Freedom. Steve, I really want to get right into it. We've had some discussions with a lot of clients recently, and there has been some relief and there's been some results. And so, first of all, why are you and I here today talking about leverage and freedom? Would you just answer that question and maybe define those words for us?
Well, yeah. So, for those who don't know, Jason and I run Rewire together. We are the co-owners of this executive coaching and training and development company called Rewire. And we've been in the coaching game collectively, sometimes people do that for marketing, but it's between you and I, it's a lot of decades. So, we've been doing this for quite a while. And I think one of the things about coaching, especially because we coach so many leaders and executives and people who have roles of leadership, one thing that's unique about coaching, Jason, is - and I know if you're a coach out there, you know this, it’s almost like if you'll attune to it, there are themes to coaching. And so, I think what happens to you and I, we certainly protect all the confidentiality possible and necessary through what we've learned, and we don't break confidentiality, but sometimes we'll come together and go, hey, what are you hearing? Without mentioning names or anything like that. And it's just super interesting that sometimes you can detect themes to stuff. And so, this has been one of the themes. And so, you and I come together and go, well, when we hear a theme enough, we're like, well, why don't we address that? And so, we come together in a format like this, either through our podcast or through LinkedIn Live, and today it's both, which is kind of cool. But the themes that we've been hearing, and it isn't like people come in and say the same thing, right? So, we had to come together, and as we were discussing it, whoa, that's what this leader is saying, and that's what we're hearing in our coaching, we came up with these two concepts. One is leverage, and the other is freedom. And so, just really briefly, I think people understand what freedom generally means. I mean, this is what so many people look for in leadership and beyond, right? Yes, I think a lot of people think I want to be rich or whatever. Actually, the concept of freedom is core to the human being, but especially with leaders because, golly, right from the beginning, when we were hearing about the e-myth, right, like the entrepreneurial myth that these leaders would come in and they get so involved that all of a sudden, you're so engaged that you lack freedom. And so, it's really feasible that the people that we're coaching come back and come to us and go, you know, what I really want is a sense of freedom, not freedom from the business.
Right. That's an important point. We're not talking about freedom to go sit on the beach somewhere. No. So specifically talk about the freedom that we're talking about today.
Well, yeah, wouldn't that be great if we had one definition for that? That's the unique thing about coaching is it comes in so many different flavors and feels and not everybody's saying the exact same thing, which is why it's incumbent upon you and I to come and kind of label it. And so, we labeled it this. And so, it might not mean exactly the same thing for everybody, but maybe the best way to define freedom is to define its antonym, what it means to be confined and not free to move, not free to maybe think, not free to grow because of the way that you feel. Confined by time, confined by limitations in what the world is doing. And so, it's not just certainly freedom from the business. We coach a lot of people that love what they do and still can feel confined because of just the way the circumstances are, the way the market is, and so that's why the long for freedom both in and outside of the business, if that makes sense.
And it does make sense. Yes, it's freedom inside and outside of the business. But oftentimes, I think you started to touch on this a little bit, and I want to scratch that a little deeper, is when founders or presidents or C suite people find themselves so involved in day to day coaching of other people training of other people, involved in projects, they don't have the freedom to make strategic decisions, to make more global, future oriented decisions for the company, which they may be best gifted at because they're involved in the day to day stuff. So, when they can have the freedom away from that, in order to be at the helm and direct the ship, so to speak, that's where really cool things can happen with the organization. Because when that is constricted, then we see that it stunts growth. When the leader or the leaders of an organization are involved in day-to-day coaching, project management, operations, well, then it just stunts that growth. So, it's freedom from those things in order to do what they do best. .png?width=340&height=260&name=Untitled%20design%20(16).png)
And you and I are kind of we're living models of that, right? I mean, you and I don't have the same giftings. And so, we are getting better at finding freedom and finding what it is that we do best even in our own business.
True. Yeah, true.
And I know we got a crank here, but that gives rise to the leverage piece.
Yes.
They're not that separated, so to speak. What we meant by leverage is in order to get that freedom, we recognized and what kept coming up in coaching, which is why we labeled it this, was that if we're going to get that, it's going to be because we leverage ourselves and our people.
Yes.
Or we use our people as a lever to get the freedom. And if that's done effectively, you're not just using people, you're actually finding where people fit best.
Yes.
Working with them, helping them understand, which is obviously what we do in coaching. Because when that's happening in an organization, I think leverage happens and all too often, and that's why I think we're coaching it a lot now, maybe people get to a place where gosh the leadership team, the C suite, the board of directors, it doesn't feel like we're leveraged that well, and it's inefficient, it's ineffective. It affects results. And so, I think coming back to this idea of the freedom that we can find inside and outside of our business through the leverages of people. How do we really leverage ourselves and our people in a way where we can get the maximum results?
One point of clarification there is the people. In other words, your team members, the people that, if you're watching this, you're likely the leader of an organization or a team. It's not leveraging i.e. using your people, it's actually also helping them to leverage themselves to enjoy their own freedom. So, it's a win win. In fact, it's a win win win, right? It's a win for the leader because of the leverage and freedom that we've talked about. It's a win for the team member, the person that you hired because they're good at X and finding their gifted zone and them leveraging their own gifts to enjoy freedom. And then the last win is, of course, for the organization. And I don't know, let's add on a fourth win for your clients, for the people that you serve.
Absolutely. Well, it's funny that both you and I, even as we use that word, leverage, we're so sensitive to this idea that it could come off like exploitative. Right? Like you're going to take advantage of somebody to get somewhere and clearly that's not who we are. That's not where we're going. That's not what we're seeing. That's not what we're coaching people to do. This is exactly what you said. It is absolutely a function of maximizing the utility as a result of finding and deploying people's strengths.
That's exactly right.
How about that?
Yeah. In fact, it's the opposite of whatever the negative use of that word might be.
We're just not good at doing that, right? We want to stay positive. You recently told me a really cool story, and I know you'll do a good job of protecting our clients, and we always do that. We mix names and sometimes genders and people and companies because we want to protect them. But you had a really cool something live. You got a sense of this live. Tell us what that was about.
Yeah, we're so fortunate to be able to serve this organization. Obviously, no names or anything, but I will say this. It's a $3 billion plus global household manufacturing company. In fact, most people in the US have a product or more of this organization's, what they manufacture in our houses today.
And now you're going to get people guessing, we shouldn't do that.
Well, how many companies does that cover? It covers a lot. But my point is this is a growing, thriving, well known, and well led organization. Well, they reached out to us because one of the things that the people in HR recognized and the leaders recognized themselves is we've hired some really great people. In fact, we've hired some of the most talented people around the globe, but we still have a challenge. And the challenge that we're having, one of the challenges, and I think every organization deals with this at some level, is that these people have questions. These people have needs. Sometimes they need direction. Sometimes they found themselves in a leadership role and they're not exactly sure how to lead yet. So, they're answering these questions. They're coaching these people. They're training these people, which is wonderful. But what that does is the leaders, the directors of HR, of the different departments, they're involved in those day-to-day activities, which are very important and very useful, but it takes them away from maybe what those leaders are gifted at the most. And so, they reached out to us, and they said, okay, we have this problem. Help us solve it. And so, I remember when I first heard from them. Now it's been a couple of years ago, I'm thinking, oh yeah, we can absolutely do this because we have an opportunity to work in our gifted zone as coaches, and then it helps the team members out that need help in coaching and training, and then it helps these leaders out and directors of HR to then do what they do best. And here we are. I don't know. I said two years, probably a year and a half later, that exact thing is happening. In fact, I talked to the main sponsor yesterday and she said, oh yeah, it's happening in spades. n fact, we've got a whole other group of people that we need to have coach because the word is kind of getting out that this is working, and it's working for everyone. And so, I think about that, and I think about the manner in which the individuals that we're fortunate enough to coach at this organization and then our coaches that have been fitted specifically for them individually that are coaching them. And I'm like, yeah, this is a no brainer.
"We are leveraging our gifts and talents, leveraging the people that we're fortunate enough to coach, their gifts and talents and strengths and focusing them and developing them and collaborating and helping them get their own insights, which frees up some of the higher-level leaders in the company to then go do what they're most gifted at."
And then, oh, yeah, the people, the consumers that they serve, they're benefiting too, because the products that this company makes.
Jason, that's such a great story, and it's an unfolding story and an ongoing one for us, and we're super grateful for it. As I'm listening to you say that there's this cool body of work that we at Rewire have been folding into our coaching that really comes from a fairly rigorous scientific study. In fact, a series of studies by Robert Keegan and Lisa Leahy in the work that they've called Immunity to Change.
Hold, please.
Yeah, there it is. It's even a little raggedy. It looks like you might have read it once or twice. I'm on my fourth reading of it. Sometimes some of this academic stuff can I don't know, maybe I'm not the sharpest tool in the shed. That's probably true. As we've begun to fold, like, I really use that like a baker, right? Like we're putting that into our dough. This is really rich work, and one of the many things that they point out in this work is this concept, Jason, which I think is relevant here as you talk about how we're working with these people, that I think is even really cool for people to hear today on our podcast, on our live event, and that is the concept of adaptive changes and technical changes. And just in briefing, if you and I want to just kind of ping pong it just a little bit here.
No, this is an important point. I'm glad you're hitting on this.
Yeah. Because when I was listening to you, if I'm listening to it and maybe I'm not as familiar with coaching or whatever and this multinational, multibillion dollar company is hiring these people to do this work and leverage. Leverage what?
Right. Yeah.
What are we actually talking about? I think one of the reasons we're also doing this today is to help accentuate the fact that in business, there's room for all sorts of developmental practices. There are seasons when people and your HR people and our HR people will tell us this, where people just flat need training, right? Like, they need technical training. And again, we can't give too much away from this organization that we're serving right now about where they get technical training, but I don't think I'm giving too much away to say, look, there's a department of engineers out there, and that's a specific kind of technical training. And then there's technical training for sales and marketing. And then there's technical training. Like, yes, we need to know what to do. And that is a very specific thing that needs to be done in all jobs. You need technical training.
That's right.
I need technical training. The leverage that we give is not technical training. It can be from time to time, but mostly, and I really want to give credit to Robert Keegan and Lisa Leahy for this what we're trying to do, the leverage that we're offering that then they get to go out and leverage themselves is really what they call adaptive work. It's adaptive work. It's adaptive problems and challenges and adaptive solutions. And what they mean by that is technical stuff would be do this, do that, do this, do that. Here's the training. Like, hey, if you need to learn a new software, sit down, shut up, open up your computer, type in stuff and we're going to teach you this software that would be very technical.
Technical, yeah.
If you come into that teaching and you're the kind of person that's like, oh, I hate new software- why can't we use the old one? And your mindset might not be best towards the adoption of a new software, that's a different kind of training and leverage.
That's right.
And I just want to say, for the record, I don't know that one of them is good technical versus adaptive, but they're different.
Yep.
And truth be told, we're sort of an adaptive company, right. We don't hold ourselves out as technical trainers..png?width=340&height=260&name=Untitled%20design%20(17).png)
I think more than sort of we are specifically because we've seen over and over and over again, and I remember when I was a client of coaching myself years and years ago, heck, I have many coaches now, but when I first got involved in coaching, I remember thinking, I wouldn't have used these words then. I need technical coaching. How do I make more sales? How do I have the right conversation? How do I run a better meeting? And what I was helped with, and you actually helped me with this a lot is okay, well, let's take a couple of steps back and tell me about what your thought process is. Tell me why you're doing these things. And I didn't know it at the time, and I don't even know that you could have put these words to it at the time, you were helping me with adaptive skills, right? And those adaptive skills ended up making me the person that was more readily receiving and able to execute on some of the technical things. So, from a coaching standpoint, I'd love you to explain that a little bit more, but that's kind of the difference between adaptive skills and technical skills.
Well, I don't want to stray too far away from freedom and leverage because I don't know, next thing you know, we're in a cul de sac talking about adaptive and technical stuff. But I was reminded of that because when we talk about- you gave this wonderful example of this organization that we're working with and from what we've heard back from them is this huge sigh of relief specifically because of the adaptive work we're doing.
That's exactly right.
And that is a leverage that they knew they needed.
Yeah.
So, when organizations often come to us and go, man, we really want to work on culture. Well, let me tell you something, folks. Culture and the growth and development of a culture inside of an organization is largely an adaptive issue. Now, are there some technical things about how we communicate, how we set things? Sure, there are, but culture is an adaptive issue and so that's just one thing I'm learning from Dr. Keegan and Dr. Leahy, is if you try to solve adaptive issues with technical solutions, you're not going to get very far.
No dice.
Conversely, if you're going to try to solve technical solutions with adaptive problems, understanding that and perhaps deploying both well, that brings us back to freedom and leverage and that's why we were here today.
Yeah, that's exactly right. I'll just give some examples. The feedback that we've heard for ten years now but specifically with this organization, since we're bringing that up, is the feedback with the people that we're coaching. One, they seem to be more forward thinking. A term that people would be more familiar with would just be positive and future oriented towards oriented as opposed to maybe closed off or more, let's say, bountiful, more abundant mindset than scarcity mindset, more giving than taking. There's some of these intangible nuances that tend to go where the category of adaptive than say, the technical skills of what button do I push? Where and what's the next thing on the spreadsheet or whatever. I mean, I'd love for you to expand on that but that's some of the feedback that we've been getting so far.
Well, yeah, I think it's happened in this organization and many of the others that we work with. You're triggering me to go like a specific example of that. It's very common for people to come to us and go, wow, we want to grow revenue. We want to grow sales. That's not uncommon. Maybe you are on the call right now going, I'd love to grow revenue, I'd love to grow sales. So, you could think to yourself, that's it, I'm going to grow sales. I'm going to go out, I'm going to get a call report, I'm going to learn how to put a time block together. I'm going to write down a script. I'm going to do all these things. Those are technical things and for the record, they're good.
Yep, Yep.
I can tell you from my chair, having done this for a lot of years, that if we don't also explore some of the adaptive things there, for example, you talk about mindset and positivity, right? How many people do we know go to make sales calls and just have a deep sense of reluctance? I'm amazed at how many people have so much call reluctance who are in sales. It's not uncommon.
Sure, everyone has it to some degree. It's just how it engages itself, how it expresses itself.
But some people have it in a way where it's actually hindering their ability to do their work.
That's right.
But then if those people were to go and I just need five ways to get around that, actually, we need to explore what your mindset is, what your narrative is.
Yes.
"How do you speak about it, how do you think about it? That is adaptive work, and it could be some of the most fruitful work. But I think that's one of the things, as this organization comes to us, they need very little technical help for their leverage and their freedom. They need adaptive work, which is what we bring to the table."
And right now, it's really cool because they're leveraging us for what we do, like you said. And as a result of that, they're getting levered themselves in some really powerful ways.
Yeah, that's exactly right. We have five minutes left here, Steve, one of the things that I want to do is and I think I can put this up and people can hear us at the same time. If anything that we've talked about when it comes to leverage enjoying leverage yourself with your people and having your people be able to leverage themselves even more than they currently are in order for you or your people to enjoy more freedom, to do what you're best at, if any of that sounds enticing to you, you can put your phone up and grab this QR code. You can either do that, or you can email us at grow@rewireinc.com. We have all kinds of free tools on our website that will help you with this, and then we can also chat with you if you wanted to do the same thing as this global organization has done in the way of leveraging their people to be able to leverage themselves for everybody to enjoy more freedom.
And again, we don't ever put down any other coaching entities or organizations. I would just ask if you're into looking at that as a way to leverage, just maybe do a quick temperature check on what it is that you're looking for. If your folks, whether it's in leadership or whatever, need technical stuff, then find that modality.
Yeah, that's right.
Because we've even had our coaches come to us and go, yeah, if what they're looking for primarily is technical stuff, let's send them on their way to go find that. We're not good at that.
Yeah.
It's not our strength.
Right.
But if what we're saying about the leverage and freedom, you want to experience and you find God, that's an adaptive thing, then let's solve adaptive problems with adaptive modality. And when we do that, I think we can experience some phenomenal leverage.
Yeah, no question, Steve. As we close here, because I think LinkedIn is going to shut us down. There's, like, pressure to do that.
Right? I know. Tick Tock. Done.
What types of either last thoughts or insights that you have in, I don't know, let's call it 60 seconds or less and then we'll shut it down.
Oh, gosh. Even as we were speaking today and I wrote down some notes over here, even as we were speaking today, I still notice that I have some growth to do in the way of technical and adaptive. From time to time, the technical way seems a lot easier. Just do this, just do this. And sometimes that word just, hey, there's a whole thing that you and I can do on a whole thing. Just say know, just do it. Like Nike says, that just thing points to an adaptive thing, and sometimes I can hear myself say that. And so, one last parting thought is I think what we were talking about in terms of leverage and freedom for the leadership is not fantastic. On a very personal level, I just think it's a great question to ask: am I exploring adaptive problems and therefore need adaptive solutions, or is my problem technical and I need some technical solutions? And that's one that I need to continue to ask myself.
Yeah, no question. As I engage our conversation today and as I gauge our coaches, just that idea of leverage and freedom, I know an insight that I'm having is I'm just getting excited again about being able to be a part of that movement, of helping people with their own leverage and their own freedom. And in a weird way, that gives us leverage to do even more of it and to enjoy freedom of working in our gifted zone. So, I don't know, those are a couple of our insights, but since this is I know it's on LinkedIn live right now, but we're recording an episode of the Insight interviews as we end all of our podcast episodes with okay, those are our insights. But really what's important are what insights did you get from this conversation?
That's right, Steve.
We did it, brother. Be cool. And we're under the gun because we're not sure if we go much further. LinkedIn just I think they're going to cut us off.
Click and we're like, done.
All right, until next time, guys. Have a great day. Thank you.
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